[Xmca-l] Re: The House of Government

[David Kellogg]

In Chapter 21, Yuri Slezkine's 'House of Government' includes some
wonderful data from the diaries of children, including maps of the
courtyards they played in, accounts of the games they played, and long
selections from their diaries, which include remarkable literary
experiments (e.g. trying to write down verbatim in the diaries
conversations they had about planning the diary entries withe their
friends).

There is also this:

"After 1932 and especially after 1934, the 'leftist excesses and 'harmful
experiments' left over from the previous age were systematically removed in
favor of massively reinforced and transparently hierarchical educational
institutions charged with the organized transfer of a well-defined body of
knowledge to individually graded 'schoolchildren'. At the centre of the new
system, which closely followed the old imperial one, were standard
curricula, stable textbooks, structured lessons, and professionally trained
teachers--assisted, in a subordinate capacity, by parents. Exams, abolished
after the revolution, came back as 'testing trials', and later as 'exams':
class preceptors, responsible for good conduct, morals and teacher-parent
relations) came back as 'groupleaders', and later 'class mentors'.
'Pedology' a branch of child psychology commmitted to ntelligence testing
and present in most Moscow schools in teh form of special labs, was banned
in 1936 on the initiative of Boris Volin, recentrly transferred from the
central censorship office to the Central Commmittee's school department)
for 'abandoing the study of a particular living child', preaching the
concept of 'the fatal dependence of a child's development on biological and
social factors' and spreading the most harmful and ridiculsous nonsnese
about hte impending disappearance of the family." (The House of Government,
p. 657).

Unfortunately, this is followed by in Chapter 23, by a long and completely
ahistorical account of the practice of scapegoating, including a long
account of Janet Reno's participation in a supposed "witch trial" against
sexual predation in preschools in Florida. The author compares this to,
inter alia, the practice of necklacing in South Africa, ethnic cleansing in
Yugoslavia, and the anaBaptist movement during the reformation.
Christianity runs like a red thread through all of this: it is sometimes
hard to tell if the author is more exercised by Communism or by
Christianity, or even if he can tell the difference.

Here's a problem that never seems to occur to the author, though. In China
I lived in a whole series of buildings that were physically quite similar
to the HOuse of Government, some of which were actually built by Soviet
architects, and my wife grew up playing games in couryards, keeping
diaries, writing down conversations...during the Cultural Revolution, which
included many aspects of the Great Purges (her father was on one side and
her grandfather on the other). But there is nothing Christian at all about
China--Christians are a miniscule (though growing) part of the population.
Could it be that the real reasons for the phenomena that interest the
author simply have material roots in poverty, revolution, isolation,
corruption?

Nah...it's gotta be about the theory of practice of human sacrifice in
Christianity.

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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