[Xmca-l] Science and Passion

[David Kellogg]

Andy has written a very interesting response paper to Anna Stetsenko's
recent article "Hope, political imagination, and agency in Marxism and
beyond" in which he argues that Marx differentiated the  "flagrantly
partisan" stance of his youth into a dispassionate science and a committed
technology. Anna is arguing for more or less the opposite: as academics we
need to abandon the idea that that emotion is separable from science, along
with the notion that theory is separable from appliability.

Here in Korea it is the annual harvest festival, and our little group (now
not so little) is using the stay-at-home-this-holiday order to try to turn
Vygotsky's "Teaching About the Emotions" into a kind of comic book. The
idea is to use Dutch paintings from the Golden Age with thought balloons
and speech bubbles to illustrate Vygotsky's text, to situate it into a
popular genre here in Korea (the "Why?" science comic books) and above all
to try to complement the argument Vygotsky is making about the role of
emotion in the formation of interests, and hence concepts, with some of
the passion and quietude of Rembrandt and Vermeer.

So Lange argues that the whole of enculturation, if not education, nothing
but toilet training: "The rod trains a child not to cry from disappointment
as a result of emotional vasomotor spasm in the same way it trains him not
to wet himself as a result of involuntary reflex functions."  (Vol 6, 1999:
152, though the translation is somewhat off). Lange then argues that
"history" has condemned "wild peoples" to extinction because of their
inability to emotionally toilet-train themselves. Vygotsky manages to
suppress his own rage; he deadpans that the racist implications of this
view are shared not by Lange's physiologist co-thinkers but rather by their
arch-enemy Kant and the cognitivist accounts of emotion. It's not just that
philosophy makes for strange bedfellows, it's also the case that its
repudiation breaks up once stable marriage vows. Without emotions, humans
never would bother with science. But without the rod of science, the
passions lead us straight back into racist bedwetting.

David Kellogg
Sangmyung University

New article in WORD, journal of the International Linguistic
Association (Volume
66, 2020 - Issue 3)
The problem of articulate animals in Korean child conversation: A
Hallidayan analysis, a Vygotskyan interpretation, and a Hasanian critique
David Kellogg & Seon-mi Song
Pages 149-165 | Published online: 18 Sep 2020

Some free e-prints available at:

https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/HAHXXJCARIGMTDBWYS9S/full?target=10.1080*00437956.2020.1793498__;Lw!!Mih3wA!SMt-quuzIId0EBtbemt5aLiOWQJLEaFjT7gstOKC79XNAignbGG4ljFbbYHg24X9z0TfCA$ 
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