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

Thu Apr 23 14:15:16 PDT 2020

You can lean on me, Anthony. I was, as you guessed, being pretty critical
of the video you sent around: I think Wertsch hasn't even got his Hayden
White right (Hayden White was drawing on a study of medieval literature and
he argued that the narrative is not so much memory as moral iinstruction).
But most of the moral instruction (not entertainment) I intended is there
in the tune, which is from the recent "Home Alone" concert which Lady Gaga
curated over Zoom.

As you probably heard, Stevie Wonder is mashing up a song from the late
great Bill Withers that goes like this:

You just call on me, Brother, when you need a hand
We all need somebody to lean on
I just might have a problem that you'll understand
We all need somebody to lean on

Interestingly, a lot of people can't follow that switch. Even my wife
argues that it makes the idea of mutuality transactional--the song says
that you can lean on me if and only if I can then lean on you, which makes
it a covert form of exchange. So there are some versions that switch the
pronouns and sing "You just might have a problem that I'll understand"
which makes it coherent narrative, but entirely unidirectional.

But there's a real moral message which makes it a Hayden White type
narrative. It's not just about mutuality. It's about this:

Good morn or evening friends
Here's your friendly announcer
I have serious news to pass on to every-body
What I'm about to say
Could mean the world's disaster
Could change your joy and laughter to tears and pain

It's that
Love's in need of love today
Don't delay
Send yours in right away
Hate's goin' round
Breaking many hearts
Stop it please
Before it's gone too far

The force of evil plans
To make you its possession
And it will if we let it
Destroy everybody
We all must take
Precautionary measures
If love and peace you treasure
Then you'll hear me when I say

Love's in need of love today
love's in need of love today
Don't delay don't delay
Send yours in right away

See what I mean? It's not really a narrative. It's not even two narratives
spliced together. It's repertoire: the kind of thing a great musician
carries around in his or her head. But that head carries that repertoire
not just because it leans on ten thousand hours of gruelling practice (pace
Malcolm Gladwell). That repertoire is a subset of meaning potential
winnowed (not "produced") by a thousand years of turbulent history (which
is what Hayden White REALLY said), That's what we are seeing now.

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!SO4kUoEeU_FR5aPViymlPNA0pwker2y0TwRxTsCASYxLLKB4bIsIF2okDfLtTcDjV92fpQ$ 

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!SO4kUoEeU_FR5aPViymlPNA0pwker2y0TwRxTsCASYxLLKB4bIsIF2okDfLtTcA7Hdqguw$ 

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!SO4kUoEeU_FR5aPViymlPNA0pwker2y0TwRxTsCASYxLLKB4bIsIF2okDfLtTcDdQp814g$ 

On Fri, Apr 24, 2020 at 3:25 AM Anthony Barra <anthonymbarra@gmail.com>
wrote:

> 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!SO4kUoEeU_FR5aPViymlPNA0pwker2y0TwRxTsCASYxLLKB4bIsIF2okDfLtTcDRhC5TIw$ 
>> [youtube.com]
>> <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vgfBJhlEEo__;!!Mih3wA!WwA-tBJOSIPWHffI6l01V56XDACw7rS9pUwfERwHIq5y7LHof50x9gnwjNDy2ONah0WO6Q$> Is
>> it narrative or repertoire?)
>>
>> David Kellogg
>> Sangmyung University
>>
>> Book Review: 'Fees, Beets, and Music: A critical perusal of *Critical
>> Pedagogy and Marx, Vygotsky and Freire: Phenomenal forms and  educational
>> action research'  in Mind Culture and Activity*
>>
>> https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10749039.2020.1745847__;!!Mih3wA!SO4kUoEeU_FR5aPViymlPNA0pwker2y0TwRxTsCASYxLLKB4bIsIF2okDfLtTcDjV92fpQ$ 
>> [tandfonline.com]
>> <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10749039.2020.1745847__;!!Mih3wA!WwA-tBJOSIPWHffI6l01V56XDACw7rS9pUwfERwHIq5y7LHof50x9gnwjNDy2OM01OQ3Yg$>
>>
>> Some free e-prints available at:
>>
>> https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/QBBGIZNKAHPMM4ZVCWVX/full?target=10.1080*10749039.2020.1745847__;Lw!!Mih3wA!SO4kUoEeU_FR5aPViymlPNA0pwker2y0TwRxTsCASYxLLKB4bIsIF2okDfLtTcA7Hdqguw$ 
>> [tandfonline.com]
>> <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/QBBGIZNKAHPMM4ZVCWVX/full?target=10.1080*10749039.2020.1745847__;Lw!!Mih3wA!WwA-tBJOSIPWHffI6l01V56XDACw7rS9pUwfERwHIq5y7LHof50x9gnwjNDy2OMB9VtfUA$>
>>
>> New Translation with Nikolai Veresov: "L.S. Vygotsky's Pedological Works
>> Volume One: Foundations of Pedology"
>>
>>  https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9789811505270__;!!Mih3wA!SO4kUoEeU_FR5aPViymlPNA0pwker2y0TwRxTsCASYxLLKB4bIsIF2okDfLtTcDdQp814g$  [springer.com]
>> <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9789811505270__;!!Mih3wA!WwA-tBJOSIPWHffI6l01V56XDACw7rS9pUwfERwHIq5y7LHof50x9gnwjNDy2OOF0N3D8g$>
>>
>>
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