[Xmca-l] Re: Synoptic Gospel

Sun Aug 9 00:43:23 PDT 2020

I certainly didn't intend to bring in the kitchen sink, Annalisa. For the
most part, our models were clothed and male: the few times we had nude
female models I couldn't bring myself to paint more than their mortified
faces. And, yes, I did have to bring Christ in; I always worry when we try
to understand terms like "syncretism" or "synoptic" without understanding
whence they come: my own parents named me David without realizing that I
was born on Saint David's Day.

So Vygotsky is developing his critique of James and Lange into a critique
of functionalism. Because James and Lange are functionalists, they take
from Spinoza ONLY the idea that passions will increase or decrease your
power to act. This is consistent with their emphasis on fear and rage, on
lower emotions generally: these seem to be whole body sensations that come
out of nowhere and seem to cover our whole being at once. But it's
completely inconsistent with understanding the structure of a higher
emotion because it simply treats the feeling as a black box
of undifferentiable visceral or vasomotor sensations. One cannot tell the
difference between emotion and edible cannibis; one cannot distinguish or
disarticulate an intellectual curiosity, a chaste love, or the numbed
feeling my sister puts into her dancing now that she has MS; one can
neither part nor parse feelings without the temporality that composed them.

Does this critique make Vygotsky a structuralist? I think it would--if we
left time out of the equation. But I think that the whole notion of
'perezhivanie' is born precisely out of bringing time back in--it's the
experience but ALSO the after thought, the moment of reflection on the
experience achieved (in the French sense of acheve/). Intellectual
curiosity is astonishment PLUS thinking about it afterwards, chaste love is
attraction PLUS social distancing on second thought, and my sister's
"danciness" is a combination of numbness, pain and ecstasy but also my own
toe-curling response ex post facto. And that, Andy, is the problem I have
with Hegel's Philosophy of History. How can there be any development at all
without time? Isn't Spirit an afterthought?

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!V1D_yy1lRRo2e2tYuyDgfBxh9bpuyWHVz51kBp_ODMwozzjNX4ove_dGUIt3t4VywuAreA$ 
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!V1D_yy1lRRo2e2tYuyDgfBxh9bpuyWHVz51kBp_ODMwozzjNX4ove_dGUIt3t4WlZoZqmQ$ 

On Fri, Aug 7, 2020 at 10:42 AM Annalisa Aguilar <annalisa@unm.edu> wrote:

> Hello,
>
> Of course if David is going to bring in the kitchen sink, christ and the
> nude I've got to be seeing what comes of this thread.
>
> Hopefully no one gets crucified in time! 🙂
>
> I am wondering if it is *time* or *change* that is embedded?
>
> Chronology is more a linkage of "this event happens before that," and then
> "this one happened after that," it can be linear, but also multi-threaded.
> Sort of like a Rube Goldberg contraption. (See:
> https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.rubegoldberg.com/__;!!Mih3wA!V1D_yy1lRRo2e2tYuyDgfBxh9bpuyWHVz51kBp_ODMwozzjNX4ove_dGUIt3t4WHt36Law$ 
> <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.rubegoldberg.com/__;!!Mih3wA!RUYhim3dX3nAgYj-o-Vn-2ppCV16cud4hwN94Je3pBDuDFclU2s0tkDnuEsZs3FQ1fKf3g$>
> to invent a better mousetrap to water a plant!)
>
> On the other hand, change is the difference between one state and the
> next. Would time be the span of change as it transforms from one state to
> the next?
>
> What I recall of Piaget is that he considered development to be very
> stair-stepped: one plateau for a period until the next change abruptly
> lifted to the next step which then plateaus and so on.
>
> Is it fair to say that Vygotsky argued this way to measure cannot work
> given the complexity of variables at work, not just in the individual, but
> also in the environment.  Does that mean that time starts to become
> un-measurable, because each individual is going to have a different way to
> mark time, å la zoped?
>
> The environment is not time-dependent, unless we are going to start
> marking time like astrologers and divide the globe into longitudes and
> latitudes to determine the force of energy (and change) for each globe's
> section. How do we mark time in the environment compared to time for the
> individual?
>
> Just seems very wacky enough to make my head hurt.
>
> Where is the reference point? you know, by which one measures the change
> one is seeking to measure?
>
> Kind regards,
>
> Annalisa
>
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
> *From:* xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu <xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu>
> on behalf of David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com>
> *Sent:* Wednesday, August 5, 2020 9:59 PM
> *To:* eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity <xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu>
> *Subject:* [Xmca-l] Re: Synoptic Gospel
>
>
> *  [EXTERNAL]*
> Oh, I think "category error" is another name for Hallidayan
> complementarity, Mike.
>
> Let me put it another way. Another name for the synoptic understanding of
> a crisis is "contradiction". Or, if you prefer, another name for the
> dynamic understanding of contradiction is "crisis".
>
> (Is that two other ways, or is a pair of ways?)
>
> 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!V1D_yy1lRRo2e2tYuyDgfBxh9bpuyWHVz51kBp_ODMwozzjNX4ove_dGUIt3t4VywuAreA$ 
> <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://tidsskrift.dk/outlines/article/view/116238__;!!Mih3wA!WyXxttLrB9FkaVlQnHN9A-lwTXyuPcjUoZ8OUhrmf3F9HCyxvuDh-i5A0ee74vClLe8-yg$>
> New Translation with Nikolai Veresov: *L.S. Vygotsky's Pedological Works* *
> Volume One: Foundations of Pedology*"
>  https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9789811505270__;!!Mih3wA!V1D_yy1lRRo2e2tYuyDgfBxh9bpuyWHVz51kBp_ODMwozzjNX4ove_dGUIt3t4WlZoZqmQ$ 
>
> <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9789811505270__;!!Mih3wA!WyXxttLrB9FkaVlQnHN9A-lwTXyuPcjUoZ8OUhrmf3F9HCyxvuDh-i5A0ee74vDENgCs7Q$>
>
>
> On Thu, Aug 6, 2020 at 12:28 PM mike cole <mcole@ucsd.edu> wrote:
>
> So time needs to be part of a unity for studying cultural/historical
> processes, David?
> Or am I making a category error?
>
> mike
>
> On Wed, Aug 5, 2020 at 7:26 PM David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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!V1D_yy1lRRo2e2tYuyDgfBxh9bpuyWHVz51kBp_ODMwozzjNX4ove_dGUIt3t4VywuAreA$ 
> <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://tidsskrift.dk/outlines/article/view/116238__;!!Mih3wA!Xj2079oBIkc0uAuoCRaKX47Lnon3UBmjEm2JYY1ehkhi6rns2Sn661_1Rv1Jdtm_kdJzmA$>
> New Translation with Nikolai Veresov: *L.S. Vygotsky's Pedological Works* *
> Volume One: Foundations of Pedology*"
>  https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9789811505270__;!!Mih3wA!V1D_yy1lRRo2e2tYuyDgfBxh9bpuyWHVz51kBp_ODMwozzjNX4ove_dGUIt3t4WlZoZqmQ$ 
>
> <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9789811505270__;!!Mih3wA!Xj2079oBIkc0uAuoCRaKX47Lnon3UBmjEm2JYY1ehkhi6rns2Sn661_1Rv1JdtlHIYe3Rw$>
>
>
>
> --
>
> I[image: Angelus Novus]
> <https://urldefense.com/v3/__http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angelus_Novus__;!!Mih3wA!Qius1oGsgiq2UA0kbUZyTjShVIB7BW9A3yU5dyRaH6U_I5nrsaFYbr5M9YEfyW0AX_rpAA$>The
> Angel's View of History
>
> It is only in a social context that subjectivism and objectivism,
> spiritualism and materialism, activity and passivity cease to be
> antinonmes, and thus cease to exist as such antinomies. The resolution of
> the theoretical contradictions is possible only through practical means,
> only through the practical energy of humans. (Marx, 1844).
>
> ---------------------------------------------
> Cultural Praxis Website: https://urldefense.com/v3/__http://culturalpraxis.net__;!!Mih3wA!V1D_yy1lRRo2e2tYuyDgfBxh9bpuyWHVz51kBp_ODMwozzjNX4ove_dGUIt3t4VP49i3dw$ 
> <https://urldefense.com/v3/__http://culturalpraxis.net__;!!Mih3wA!Qius1oGsgiq2UA0kbUZyTjShVIB7BW9A3yU5dyRaH6U_I5nrsaFYbr5M9YEfyW3LROkyyA$>
> Re-generating CHAT Website: re-generatingchat.com
> <https://urldefense.com/v3/__http://re-generatingchat.com__;!!Mih3wA!Qius1oGsgiq2UA0kbUZyTjShVIB7BW9A3yU5dyRaH6U_I5nrsaFYbr5M9YEfyW0-nzcvgw$>
> Archival resources website: lchc.ucsd.edu.
> Narrative history of LCHC:  lchcautobio.ucsd.edu.
>
>
>
>
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