[Xmca-l] Love's In Need of Lean on Me

[David Kellogg]

Anthony:

Wertsch believes that governments have very limited power to create
narratives: they can only "produce" narratives that people will "consume",
never mind that this production and consumption involves neither fixed nor
variable capital and exchanges neither use nor exchange value, and he feels
no need whatsoever to offer us a theory (beyond "my side bias", which is
nothing but a Piagetian egocentrism that dare not speak its name) about why
one culture should prefer this narrative and another should prefer that
one. An example he gives is that the US Communist Party never in its
history, which is now over a century long, was able to produce a narrative
that American workers wanted to consume.

Except that whole generations of terror, state and private, were
manifestly required to bring about this happy result: race riots,
night-riding, lynching, and massacres. Even then HUAC and McCarthy were
required to consolidate it.  Ethel Rosenberg was practically burnt at the
stake; Paul Robeson practically driven to suicide. .And still you have
weird little kids like me, born the child of a Manhattan Project scientist,
who dares to believe all the things that so surprise and shock Wertsch:
that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was an unconscionable war
crime whose only real purpose was to scare the USSR away from China and
Korea (where a huge proportion of the population had to be murdered less
they "consume" the Communist "narrative"). I believed these things not
because of a narrative template, but simply because they fit perfectly with
facts I grew up knowing. Now that I live here I know these things are true
and undeniable, the way that Auschwitz and Birkenau cannot be denied.

I think that Wertsch's powers of decentration fail him right at the crucial
moment: his very notion of narrative as a basis of human culture is
ethocentric, because it is based on the language variables that Han
Hui-jeong and I called SELF: Subjects, Expectancy of nominal bias,
Linearity of sentences along SVO lines, and the Focalizing voice that
passes judgement at the end of the story. These are not properties of
culture, as Wertsch seems to think, they are merely properties of the
English language. Similarly, "narrative" is simply an individual
realization of a particular autobiographical genre, quite different to and
alien from the way that most people on this planet experience the episodes
of their lives. And even genre is, despite the work of J.R. Martin, not an
over-arching category which all discourse semantics must realize: genre is
a rather fusty and fixed category of something much larger we can call
meaning potential. It is much easier to explain my own beliefs and even the
productions of Korean children as mash-ups of a growing repertoire of
genres, similar to repertoires of music: classical, folk, K-pop and R&B.

(Did you catch Stevie Wonder's mash-up of "Lean on Me" and "Love's in Need
of Love Today"?  https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vgfBJhlEEo__;!!Mih3wA!WwA-tBJOSIPWHffI6l01V56XDACw7rS9pUwfERwHIq5y7LHof50x9gnwjNDy2ONah0WO6Q$  Is it
narrative or repertoire?)

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://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10749039.2020.1745847__;!!Mih3wA!WwA-tBJOSIPWHffI6l01V56XDACw7rS9pUwfERwHIq5y7LHof50x9gnwjNDy2OM01OQ3Yg$ 

Some free e-prints available at:

https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/QBBGIZNKAHPMM4ZVCWVX/full?target=10.1080*10749039.2020.1745847__;Lw!!Mih3wA!WwA-tBJOSIPWHffI6l01V56XDACw7rS9pUwfERwHIq5y7LHof50x9gnwjNDy2OMB9VtfUA$ 

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

 https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9789811505270__;!!Mih3wA!WwA-tBJOSIPWHffI6l01V56XDACw7rS9pUwfERwHIq5y7LHof50x9gnwjNDy2OOF0N3D8g$ 
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