[Xmca-l] Re: The Idea of the Idea

Thu Sep 3 14:08:47 PDT 2020

Vygotsky uses 'perezhivanie' in many different places. Some writers have
tried to explain this by saying that he uses it in an everyday sense
(equivalent to 'experience') in his early writings but he uses it in a more
scientific, technical sense (as a unit of analysis for the development of
consciousness or the growth of the personality) in later writings. I am
perfectly willing to accept that, and of course the Russian word does have
that dual meaning.

But Vygotsky ALSO uses 'perezhivanie' in two different sense in writings
from the same period (e.g. the pedological writings). In the chapter on
infancy, the nursling is undergoing a 'perezhivanie' because there is both
the sensation of drinking milk and the feeling of satiety that follows on.
And of course there is the famous triple example from the Problem of the
Environment (a violent alcoholic mother creates three different
perezhivanie in her children of different ages). So it seems that (like
other units of analysis, e.g. word meaning in the analysis of the relation
of thinking to speech) perezhivanie does develop.

This CAN make it hard to use as a unit of analysis, if we imagine that a
unit of analysis is simply a measuring device. If the unit of analysis
itself is changing, comparisons become extremely difficult; it is as if you
are trying to measure the height of the child in heads or forearm
lenths instead of feet or inches. But a unit of analysis is NOT a measuring
device; it is precisely a unique structure, specific to a particular age.
The elements within it may be stable (or may appear so, when we regard them
synoptically). But the relationship between them must change.

If we consider 'perezhivanie" as the idea of the idea of an experience, it
is much clearer how this relationship can change (and also how the ideas
can appear to remain the same). It is also clear, to return to Greg's
comment, that for the nursing infant linearity and temporality may be much
more important in a perezhivanie, while for Greg in the shower or walking
the dog it is much less so. The problem is that, as Andy points out, stock
market speculators who only use the idea of the ideas that other
speculators have are at the point where the idea of the idea no longer has
any relationship at all to making things and doing things for people. At
this point, people who make things and do things for other people have a
choice. They can let Wall Street burn down their homes, or they can burn
Wall Street down. .

David Kellogg
Sangmyung University

New article in Mind, Culture, and Activity:
Realizations: non-causal but real relationships in and between Halliday,
Hasan, and Vygotsky

Some free e-prints today available at:
https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/Y8YHS3SRW42VXPTVY2Z6/full?target=10.1080*10749039.2020.1806329__;Lw!!Mih3wA!VII56gaMwsLrj0DoQwZYfwj3AalJqZJuw2NANw9SqwmRRYZIl8KUkthtH1Cj_4jFQjiF3g$ 

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!VII56gaMwsLrj0DoQwZYfwj3AalJqZJuw2NANw9SqwmRRYZIl8KUkthtH1Cj_4jlkqTNTw$ 

On Thu, Sep 3, 2020 at 9:48 PM Greg Mcverry <jgregmcverry@gmail.com> wrote:

> The break between "Wall Street and Main Street" where traditional economic
> outputs became poor indicators for stock performance really began after the
> 2008 economic crisis. The people in the USA getting extended unemployment
> don't own stocks they don't have 401ks.
>
> For the first time private liquid savings is increasing among the middle
> class and poor in the USA (that was before the 600 weekly checks got cut
> off).
>
> Still glad to see a chicken and egg discussion around whether an idea must
> exist before the idea of the idea exists....can it be simultaneous?
>
> In my personal experience even attaching linearity to ideas is
> problematic. I do my best writing in the shower or when I walk my
> dog.....never when I am trying to come up with ideas.
>
> On Thu, Sep 3, 2020 at 12:45 AM Andy Blunden <andyb@marxists.org> wrote:
>
>> As I see it, the governments are pumping vast amounts of cash into the
>> economy to stimulate the economy. Governments, being what they are, give a
>> bit of it to poor people who will actually spend it, but most of it goes to
>> wealthy people via tax cuts and corporations supposedly so they'll spend
>> the money hiring people. But because of the pandemic people don't have much
>> to spend discretionary money on and there is absolutely no prospects for
>> productive investments while businesses are going over the cliff like
>> lemmings. So what do you do with the money? You invest it in the Stock
>> Market, which is not paying dividends, but it can still absorb the money
>> with wealthy people buying and selling paper to each other. The result is
>> that the total amount of money in the economy increases but all of it in
>> the hands of the wealthy, while the cash in the hands of the poor is going
>> down. The result is declining real economic activity (making things and
>> doing things for other people) and massively increased inequality, because
>> even though the stocks don't generate new wealth, they can still be
>> converted into the same money you use in the Supermarket.
>>
>> andy
>> ------------------------------
>> *Andy Blunden*
>> Hegel for Social Movements
>> <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://brill.com/view/title/54574__;!!Mih3wA!XRbYrYRrIZ1UhRKXtLKsmhreiCptJ8yy703Vu0VRPnE3HlElcDm2ORo6LhbAel9OO0qL-A$>
>> Home Page
>> <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/index.htm__;!!Mih3wA!XRbYrYRrIZ1UhRKXtLKsmhreiCptJ8yy703Vu0VRPnE3HlElcDm2ORo6LhbAel_qPzx9FA$>
>> On 3/09/2020 10:25 am, HENRY SHONERD wrote:
>>
>> David,
>> Go to your browser, type in “The stock market is not the economy”.
>> Henry
>>
>> On Sep 2, 2020, at 5:01 PM, David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Spinoza says that the mnd is the body's idea of itself. But the way he
>> says it is a little weird: he says that the idea of the mind has the same
>> relationship to the mind as the mind has to the body. So the idea of the
>> mind is the idea of the idea of the body of itself.
>>
>> As told Anthony, I think that Spinoza's "idea of the idea" is pretty
>> important for Vygotsky. Just to take an example, when Vygotsky argues (in
>> Chapter Six of T&S and also in his lecture on School Age, which I am
>> currently translating for Volume Two of the Pedological Works) that the
>> reason why the child's other functions have become intellectualized but
>> intellect as such remains unintellectual is that before you can have the
>> idea of the idea, you need to have the idea.
>>
>> Scientific concepts, higher aesthetic concepts, ethical thinking,
>> Darwin's tree, the hierarchy of genus and family and species, the powers of
>> ten in mathematics--all of these depend on the idea of the idea.. My own
>> PhD supervisor, David Butt, points out that every clause ever produced can
>> be given a unique and precise "semantic address" (that is, we can
>> exhaustively describe it in terms of unique, once-occurent choices at the
>> phoneme, word, group, phrase, and clause level). Because each higher rank
>> is entirely and only composed of elements from lower ranks, we can describe
>> the higher rank as an idea of the idea (a notion of a notion, a concept of
>> a concept).
>>
>> Yanis Varoufakis argues that sometime in late August, in both the UK and
>> the USA, capitalism made an important and terrifying transition. Although
>> BOTH economies are now in Covid-induced recessions, BOTH are experiencing
>> major stock market expansions. This is because, Varoufakis argues, in both
>> countries there are enough speculators who believe that there are enough
>> speculators who believe that stock prices will increase at least in the
>> short term, despite the dismal prospects for shareholders in the long term.
>> The idea of the idea has become more powerful than the idea itself.
>>
>> (As usual, we are at the cutting edge here in Seoul: our  real estate
>> market has depended entirely on this idea of the idea for years!)
>>
>> David Kellogg
>> Sangmyung University
>>
>> New article in Mind, Culture, and Activity:
>> Realizations: non-causal but real relationships in and between Halliday,
>> Hasan, and Vygotsky
>>
>> Some free e-prints today available at:
>>
>> https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/Y8YHS3SRW42VXPTVY2Z6/full?target=10.1080*10749039.2020.1806329__;Lw!!Mih3wA!VII56gaMwsLrj0DoQwZYfwj3AalJqZJuw2NANw9SqwmRRYZIl8KUkthtH1Cj_4jFQjiF3g$ 
>> <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/Y8YHS3SRW42VXPTVY2Z6/full?target=10.1080*10749039.2020.1806329__;Lw!!Mih3wA!SRiw8QGioBGwdR67oxWjWvvziYnUdmMNTwZzxYNpjkvhAxGygLOjYitcV25uLPKGy16y6w$>
>>
>> New Translation with Nikolai Veresov: L.S. Vygotsky's Pedological Works
>> Volume One: Foundations of Pedology"
>> https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9789811505270__;!!Mih3wA!VII56gaMwsLrj0DoQwZYfwj3AalJqZJuw2NANw9SqwmRRYZIl8KUkthtH1Cj_4jlkqTNTw$ 
>> <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9789811505270__;!!Mih3wA!SRiw8QGioBGwdR67oxWjWvvziYnUdmMNTwZzxYNpjkvhAxGygLOjYitcV25uLPKISZZUHA$>
>>
>>
>>
>
> --
> J. Gregory McVerry, PhD
> Assistant Professor
> Southern Connecticut State University
> twitter: jgmac1106
>
>
>
>
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