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

Tue Apr 14 14:04:02 PDT 2020

Thanks, Bowen!

I love the chop. It's a female, of course--because it's carved in instead
of carved out--very appropriate for kibitzing....

Election in South Korea today! I have to go vote before the asymptomatic
positives are allowed to vote in the evening. Hey--it's a whole lot better
than what they had in Wisconsin....

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

On Tue, Apr 14, 2020 at 10:19 PM Tom Richardson <
tom.richardson3@googlemail.com> wrote:

> David Kellogg's latest 'clarification' is a real source of light and
> uplift to me, reducing the every bit of distance between us (all), apart
> from the social - David, you feel very close.
> I trust that this message does not break any xmca rules about personal
> comment.
> Tom Richardson (kibitzer) Middlesbrough UK
>         BoWen
>
>
> On Tue, 14 Apr 2020 at 03:11, David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> 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
>>
>>
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