[Xmca-l] Re: The House of Government

[David Kellogg]

Oh, I am very interested, Mike--and I wouldn't have said you inflicted the
book on me; it is a challenge on all kinds of levels. I meant "conceit" in
the seventeenth-century sense--a bit of wit, like John Donne's poem about
the flea (which I am trying to figure out how to use to teach sex
education).

But taking the House of Government as the eponymous main character has a
lot of disadvantages. For one thing, the main character shows up pretty
late (p. 318). For another, there isn't  an obvious connection with the
eschatological theme. Yes, the building, filling and gradual emptying of a
house is a little like the creation, population and destruction of a world.
Having sex is also a little like being bitten by a flea, but it is not easy
to teach that to young people.

I think the biggest disadvantage of trying to cram the whole of the Russian
Revolution into one building is the very artificial barriers to context. If
we know just a bit of world history, we know that the "great
disappointment" refers not to the Second Coming (as the author claims) but
very concretely to contemporaneous news: the failure of the German
Revolution in 1923 and the failure of the Chinese Revolution in 1927. The
former meant that Russia had to go ahead and develop its own ersatz
industry; the latter that agriculture had to resume forced requisitions of
grain in order to feed the cities.

On p. 310 we get just a glimpse of the Left Opposition critique that would
make real sense of what is happening. Tania Miagkova, who has adhered to
the Left Opposition, has been forced to leave her husband, who is in charge
of Ukrainian econmic planning and sent into exile in Kazakhstan. She learns
Kazakh and camel riding, writes passionate love letters to her faraway
husband, and begs him to visit her and bring her a copy of the new
five-year-plan. He does--and she is crushed, and immediately capitulates.
But why?

Because from the five-year plan she sees that Stalin has stolen the
critique of the opposition and is using it to crush Bukharin. She can now
rejoin the party. But her husband probably knows enough about what is
happening in the Ukraine so that she knows that she is joining a party bent
on Holdomor.

Instead of explaining this much needed context, the author at last
introduces the long awaited House of Government, telling us it combined
primus stoves with parquet floors despite the obvious fire hazard. But even
the abolition and sudden reinstatement of the primus stove and the parquet
floors is connected to Stalin's sudden zig to the left and zag to the right
(and so, by the way, is the abolition of the complex system of education
and Vygotsky's sudden introduction of instruction based on concepts in
Chapter Six of Thinking and Speech. The ZPD is, in many ways, Vygotsky's
response to the Five Year Plan, just as rejoining the party was that of
Tania Miagkova...)





David Kellogg
Sangmyung University

New Article:
Han Hee Jeung & David Kellogg (2019): A story without SELF: Vygotsky’s
pedology, Bruner’s constructivism and Halliday’s construalism in
understanding narratives by
Korean children, Language and Education, DOI: 10.1080/09500782.2019.1582663
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09500782.2019.1582663

Some e-prints available at:
https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/KHRxrQ4n45t9N2ZHZhQK/full?target=10.1080/09500782.2019.1582663



On Wed, Jun 12, 2019 at 9:16 AM mike cole <mcole@ucsd.edu> wrote:

> Hi  All --
>
> If anyone remains interested in reading "the house of government," let me
> know. Maybe a summer
> reading project. David could be correct that it is a trivial conceit.
>
> Great to see that Anna and Eugene's work resonates.
> Mike
> PS- Some may be interested in this interview with Vladimir Lubovsky who
> was a key player in the Institute of Defectology that sheltered Luria in
> the mid-1950's.  David's note brought it to mind.
>  http://luria.ucsd.edu/AudioVideo/index.html
>
>
>
> On Mon, Jun 10, 2019 at 1:12 AM Andy Blunden <andyb@marxists.org> wrote:
>
>> Die = feminine gender, nominative or accusative case
>>
>> Der = feminine gender, genitive case (or dative)
>> ------------------------------
>> Andy Blunden
>> http://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/index.htm
>> On 10/06/2019 5:58 pm, David Kellogg wrote:
>>
>> (I'm changing the name of this thread, both to reflect the content and
>> because I don't think that Wolff-Michael's comment on the gender of "Frage"
>> in German is picky at all.)
>>
>> I think that "The House of Government" is not really an instance of
>> ethnography of speech; that is only what in the seventeenth century was
>> called a "conceit"--an instance of wit that involves unlikely
>> juxtaposition, like fleabites and romantic love.
>>
>> It's really a sustained argument about two propositions that the author
>> finds utterly contradictory: that the future is somehow in some way already
>> programmed and that its realization is still somehow in some way contingent
>> on your participation. Both propositions seem very poorly framed to me, but
>> I do recognize that frame of mind that likes to frame historical problems
>> in these inexplicable, inextricable muddles (for example: my sister has
>> just sent me an urgent link urging me to give up chocolate in order to
>> struggle against child labor in the Ivory Coast--not, mind you, in order to
>> lower the price of chocolate!)
>>
>> Early on, the author points out how some authors tried their best to
>> write revolutionary epics but could not resist the lure of irony. This was
>> actually two paths, and not one. For the early generation of artists
>> (Mayakovsky, Babel), what was involved was adherance to the revolutionary
>> camp, a sudden consciousness of the religious element of that zeal, and
>> then a very different moment of "campiness", a reflective moment we might
>> almost call revolutionary perezhivanie. As if through a looking glass, the
>> later generation of artists (Shokolov, Ostrovsky) took the opposite path: a
>> certain aloofness from the events of the revolution, a sudden interest in
>> intensive realism, in "permeating art with life", and as a result the kind
>> of cynicism that became very explicit and very profitable (and which is
>> quite typical of Chinese art today).
>>
>> Something of the sort could also be said about psychology: there was a
>> first generation for whom the revolution was the moment when humans could
>> exercise rational free will over everything from economics to child
>> development, and there was a later generation which proceeded the other way
>> around, working on lie detectors and programmed learning that would allow
>> us to plan the human. Perhaps the real dividing line in generations is not
>> when you are born but rather when and how you died. I think of Vygotsky
>> (and Trotsky) as belonging to the first generation, while Luria (and
>> Leontiev) belonged to the second.
>>
>> (Wolff-Michael: I am still wondering about "der Frage", but let me
>> guess--In *Endlösung der Judenfrage,*"der" actually doesn't mean the
>> masculine article, but a preposition + article combination like "de la" in
>> French.)
>>
>> David Kellogg
>> Sangmyung University
>>
>> New Article:
>> Han Hee Jeung & David Kellogg (2019): A story without SELF: Vygotsky’s
>> pedology, Bruner’s constructivism and Halliday’s construalism in
>> understanding narratives by
>> Korean children, Language and Education, DOI:
>> 10.1080/09500782.2019.1582663
>> To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09500782.2019.1582663
>>
>> Some e-prints available at:
>>
>> https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/KHRxrQ4n45t9N2ZHZhQK/full?target=10.1080/09500782.2019.1582663
>>
>>
>
> --
> We become ourselves through others -L.S.Vygotsky
>
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