[Xmca-l] Language in the Time of Covid 19

[David Kellogg]

In Korea we have a delightful kind of miniature waffe filled with sweet red
beans called a 붕어빵 (literally, "carp bread"); and in Korean we have a
rather sardonic saying, "붕어빵에는 붕어가 없다" (not too literally, "there just
ain't no carp in a carp bread").

One could go all post-modern on this point and talk about Baudrillard and
simulacra and how chicken testicles are not McNuggets, but one would break
the one screen rule: I really just want a colorful way to frame the
argument that there ain't no instruction in self-instruction, at least not
in the good old Vygotskyan sense of обучение (obuchenie,
teaching-and-learning, as Mike has insisted that it should be translated).
Self-instruction is not instruction--because the whole point of обучение is
a higher form of interdependency we call development; it's not just the
viral replication of behavior in a form independent from the original.

Three other points of language in the time of Covid 19 seem worth keeping
in mind as we try to scale up some of the "moments" of XMCA, even to the
level of the Latour website (it seems to me that responding on the Website
he designed is probably more scalable than having our own Google Doc, which
is why I didn't contribute to the Google Doc, Helena....)

a) There is no "social" in "social distancing". The distancing we are after
is really a mechanical, physiological, medical distance and not a social
one at all: on the contrary, mechanical distancing is a very high form of
social solidarity, and as such it comes at a price. One of the bereaved
wives on the BBC put this beautifully (through her tears). "I am alone. I
am not lonely, because I have many people talking to me on-line. I am less
lonely than ever. But I am far more alone. No one can give me a hug."

b) There is no "coronavirus" in Covid 19. Just as HIV is not the same thing
as AIDS, the specific type of coronavirus SARS-Co2-19 is not the same thing
as the illness which killed Lucien Seve. This seems trivial, except that
eventually we will have to get it through thick skulls, our own and those
of our conspecifics, that there are many different coronaviruses and most
of them are harmless. But more importantly we need to understand that many
people are going to be dying of things that are only indirectly related to
the virus and which are directly related to real social conditions

(You can skip this part, Helena: it's an exemplificatory aside....I just
heard Dr. John Campbell, whose views I respect less and less, argue that
one reason why black people suffer disproportionately from Covid 19 has
something to do with dark skin and a lack of Vitamin D. This is rather like
the Chinese who claimed that the reason the disease strikes men harder than
women must have something to do with the X chromosome rather than, say, the
simple social fact that in China 50% of men smoke and only 5% of women do.
Or the catastrophic belief of the US administration that the disease could
be halted by a physical travel ban back when the process of community
spread was already well underway.)

c) Many units of social practice are neither scalable nor transitional,
e.g. on-line classes and  the practice of mooing from your balcony instead
of singing in support of the National Health Service (as they do in the
dairy town of Belpy in England), But language is both. As Ruqaiya Hasan
liked to say, the reason why language solves so many of our problems is
that language itself is the source of many of our problems, needs, desires,
hopes, dreams, drives. But that's just another way of saying that you don't
experience a perizhivanie as problematic until you also experience, in the
dark and just beyond your fingertips but still exquisitely and
very palbably there, some means for its solution.

David Kellogg
Sangmyung University

Book Review: 'Fees, Beets, and Music: A critical perusal of *Critical
Pedagogy and Marx, Vygotsky and Freire: Phenomenal forms and  educational
action research'  in Mind Culture and Activity*

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10749039.2020.1745847

Some free e-prints available at:

https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/QBBGIZNKAHPMM4ZVCWVX/full?target=10.1080/10749039.2020.1745847

New Translation with Nikolai Veresov: "L.S. Vygotsky's Pedological Works
Volume One: Foundations of Pedology"

 https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9789811505270
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.ucsd.edu/pipermail/xmca-l/attachments/20200414/84dda0f5/attachment.html