[Xmca-l] Synoptic Gospel

[David Kellogg]

I have been reading Andy's article for the CHARR group, but I have also
been working on a new volume of the pedology, and, finally, retranslating
Vygotsky's unfinished "Teaching on the Emotions". What all these texts have
in common is that they require you to think about units of analysis as
simultaneously timeless and time-embedded: on the one hand, the life of
Christ ordered by chronologic time and on the other, the "synoptic" Gospels
which order the various events of the life of Christ in many different ways
according to their anagogic value.

These two complementary perspectives, the chronological and the synoptic,
are ever present in Halliday: an expression like "the living of life" is
not redundant because the first nominal is  implicitly chronological
process and the second implicitly synoptic product. They are less obviously
marked in Vygotsky, but they are there. In one chapter he excoriates
Busemann for mixing up the Crisis at Three with the Crisis at Seven, but in
the next chapter he offers three possible "units" of analysis. They are the
same ones Andy cites:


a. word value in in the explanation of the relation between thinking and
speech,


b. age periods in the study of psycho-physiological development, and
finally,


c.* perezhivanie*, or переживание,  in the study of the child’s
relationship with the environment.


I think you can see that ALL of these not only CAN but MUST be viewed
chronologically, else we cannot say how word value develops, how an age
period progresses (let alone how one differs from another) or how the
personality goes from functioning to dysfunctional to functioning on some
higher level. But at the same time, you can also see how it's teleological
to talk about the word value, or the age period, or the perezhivanie in the
moment before the word value, age period, or perezhivanie has even started
to exist. So the process itself is always chronological, but the process of
analysis itself has to be synoptic.


Mozart, they say, composed synoptically: with a single piece of music in
his head that he could scroll over, back and forth; Beethoven, on the other
hand, is all about getting from commencement to cataclysm, in more or less
that order.  When I was at art school, we would hire the same model for
painting and for sculpture. We painters would do the model as a text: every
narrative painting and even every portrait has to have a beginning, a
middle, and an endpoint and the painter's eye directs the brush to direct
the viewer's eye to follow it. But the sculptors,infuriatingly,had no
starting point, no middle point, and no endpoint at all: it was just a
matter of more or less finishing at every point. The models would complain
that dozed off when the painters sat there reading them over, but they
would complain that they got dizzy when the sculptors were circumambulating
the studio all the time.


David Kellogg

Sangmyung University

New Article: Ruqaiya Hasan, in memoriam: A manual and a manifesto.
Outlines, Spring 2020
https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://tidsskrift.dk/outlines/article/view/116238__;!!Mih3wA!Xj2079oBIkc0uAuoCRaKX47Lnon3UBmjEm2JYY1ehkhi6rns2Sn661_1Rv1Jdtm_kdJzmA$ 
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!Xj2079oBIkc0uAuoCRaKX47Lnon3UBmjEm2JYY1ehkhi6rns2Sn661_1Rv1JdtlHIYe3Rw$ 
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