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

[Anthony Barra]

Thank you. In this post, David provides value for me by including a video I
might enjoy, and even greater value to the group by writing three
paragraphs they will understand.

I will reread a few times and try to take what I can from them.

Thanks again ~
Anthony



On Thu, Apr 23, 2020 at 7:41 AM David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com> wrote:

> 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!VmB6KgQmSDNIszSxdUc3dNvZH2KjqeYJpcgjFW37Towd5WVXpbb_urKQXxJAX854B5HhkA$  [youtube.com]
> <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vgfBJhlEEo__;!!Mih3wA!WwA-tBJOSIPWHffI6l01V56XDACw7rS9pUwfERwHIq5y7LHof50x9gnwjNDy2ONah0WO6Q$> Is
> it narrative or repertoire?)
>
> David Kellogg
> Sangmyung University
>
> Book Review: 'Fees, Beets, and Music: A critical perusal of *Critical
> Pedagogy and Marx, Vygotsky and Freire: Phenomenal forms and  educational
> action research'  in Mind Culture and Activity*
>
> https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10749039.2020.1745847__;!!Mih3wA!VmB6KgQmSDNIszSxdUc3dNvZH2KjqeYJpcgjFW37Towd5WVXpbb_urKQXxJAX85tcCYUXA$ 
> [tandfonline.com]
> <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10749039.2020.1745847__;!!Mih3wA!WwA-tBJOSIPWHffI6l01V56XDACw7rS9pUwfERwHIq5y7LHof50x9gnwjNDy2OM01OQ3Yg$>
>
> Some free e-prints available at:
>
> https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/QBBGIZNKAHPMM4ZVCWVX/full?target=10.1080*10749039.2020.1745847__;Lw!!Mih3wA!VmB6KgQmSDNIszSxdUc3dNvZH2KjqeYJpcgjFW37Towd5WVXpbb_urKQXxJAX86qTPGjiQ$ 
> [tandfonline.com]
> <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/QBBGIZNKAHPMM4ZVCWVX/full?target=10.1080*10749039.2020.1745847__;Lw!!Mih3wA!WwA-tBJOSIPWHffI6l01V56XDACw7rS9pUwfERwHIq5y7LHof50x9gnwjNDy2OMB9VtfUA$>
>
> New Translation with Nikolai Veresov: "L.S. Vygotsky's Pedological Works
> Volume One: Foundations of Pedology"
>
>  https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9789811505270__;!!Mih3wA!VmB6KgQmSDNIszSxdUc3dNvZH2KjqeYJpcgjFW37Towd5WVXpbb_urKQXxJAX84xj8LQww$  [springer.com]
> <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9789811505270__;!!Mih3wA!WwA-tBJOSIPWHffI6l01V56XDACw7rS9pUwfERwHIq5y7LHof50x9gnwjNDy2OOF0N3D8g$>
>
>
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