[Xmca-l] Re: Rogers day

Tue Aug 7 14:38:13 PDT 2018

Hi Charles,

I have to thank you for posting your article, "Anxiety in Action."

I just read it quickly and would like to go over it again, but I can say it provoked many thoughts and questions for me.

One gnawing assumption, which I am not clear is actually an assumption widely held, is that Vygotskian theory holds that all humans are competent and cooperative in social interaction (This list being a perfect example of what that is not! 😊 When we see more women and POC participating upon the list, and even novices and newcomers feeling welcome to participate, I don't think this will be caused of a list-wide motivation to prove the impression that Vygotskian theory might give off, that being competence and cooperation in social interaction!)

I made this mistake of idealizing the theory this way when doing an interview of Edwin Hutchins for a paper in Vera's class (It was about scientific creativity and he was a dream subject for my paper!) He in no uncertain terms said that cooperation (and even good will) are not what we can (or should) expect in interaction and learning (of course he was speaking about distributed cognition specifically, but his approach is informed by Vygotsky, among other theorists, which concerns sociality of human thought, among other things). Learning includes conflict which is the other side of cooperation, but also that individuals can do the right thing while the society does the wrong thing (he pointed to the 2008 financial meltdown as a case in point), meaning that individuals can think they are cooperating when the system arising from that cooperation does not.

So much for singing Kumbayah around the campfire!

Also this made me consider is how it is that we adults assume we are finished products (or maybe just finished, in the sense we are done for!) once our biological development has matured to our prime, and that children are these fragile blank slates mirroring and combining and internalizing those reflections from our societies (I don't think Vygotsky thought that) developing at the speed of light into adults who we hope will be significantly competent and cooperative.

But this is an illusion isn't it? We are unfinished persons until that time in which our lives are actually over. We will never be authorities, even if we think we are (As my grandmother would say, "The audacity of some people's bombacity!" – a malaprop in itself)!

And yet, while living our lives, we seem to have a self-insight of continuity that we are somehow stable in ourselves and this stability is good, it provides us authority and competence (and other existential trinkets). If we don't feel that way, we want to. Why? Given the flux of human experience in all societies and throughout history, inter-personally or any other mode of relating (to environment, to nature, to animals, to art, etc), it is curious how we possess this feeling that there is a stable continuity within. How is that possible?

I suggest that that stability-of-self is not something to attribute to anything that changes, but perhaps mis-identifying this reference point of stability to a changing aspect of self is what causes our existential anxieties.

Here we get to a point where some people might say we are (as-if) walking on hot coals with regard to a changing self, that this stability (that we seek) is an illusion itself like the way the flicker of the film frame provides the illusion of continuity despite movement in the frame (and it feels urgent because we are walking on hot coals of life and living, after all). Others have different ideas about where the self belongs, which I suggest has nothing to do with mind and body development, but that mind and body development reveal in a reflective manner that stability. Some mind-body complexes reflect better than others (and at different points in time, since we are moody creatures), and this might even echo the concept of "arete" (excellence) of the Ancient Greeks.

So yes, we hope to have well-developed minds and bodies in the social and cultural historical environments that we populate, and we hope they will be cooperative and we will be competent to meet the circumstances at hand.

You also raised the point in the paper that we sometimes orient our study of the mind from the standpoint of pathology and I admit that I've always had a hard time with that habit as well. I wonder if an orientation to anxiety might also fall into that same habit. I'm not sure, just thinking out loud.

Where I was getting to with my post, I think, though I may not have realized my question clearly at the time, is how we do not consider positive regard as a necessary component of healthy development. That instead development just happens no matter what. I don't know that that worldview or stance ("it just happens") is motivated from anxiety or conflict avoidance. Though I agree that anxiety does warp any person and no one is free from the dynamics of anxiety.

What I might say is that the strength of development (occurring in tandem with plenty of positive regard) allows us to withstand anxiety producing events we may encounter. But if anxiety overwhelms us beyond what we can understand (developmentally or cognitively or existentially) pathology ensues after a prolonged period of suffering through it. I just don't think anxiety should be seen as an ingredient of development, but as a symptom of developmental "weakness". When we feel strong (and are strong) in ourselves, we don't feel anxious. When we are not up to the task, we can still perform our best when we are relaxed and unencumbered by anxiety (which I suppose is what we call confidence, not necessarily competence). Consequently, it seems to me that it is the absence of anxiety that allows us to develop.

If we remove the anxiety, then what is left?

Kind regards,

Annalisa
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