I was interested in the connection of Stanislavsky and Vygotsky regarding
an emphasis on the bodily aspects of communication. There is an interesting
broadening of perspective that takes place when we critique the very
narrowly 'cognitive' and 'informational' models of communication that
'sanitize' it, either technocratically or in earlier eras stripping it of
its bodily, emotional, and moral dimensions.
To Stanislavsky, and Barthes (whom I mentioned before), one could add on
the dramatistic side Artaud and Kenneth Burke.
I think it's useful both to examine why our dominant current notions about
communication -- and learning -- have tried to make both these concepts
purely informational in the narrowest sense (one could make the same
inquiry about the concept of information). Why are value orientations
neglected in theories of meaning? why does anyone imagine it is possible
for speech or communication to NOT have always some emotional tone, some
value agenda or priorities, some bodily-feeling in production and response?
How did these concepts come to be divorced from embodiment in the first
place? How could emotionality and physicality in language and human
communication ever have been excluded from scientific inquiries into these
phenomena? How was meaning separated from feeling, and propositional
content from evaluative stance? How did we ever come to imagine that we
wanted human sciences that had no humanity?
No matter what happens to the more extreme versions of postmodernism, I
think these issues are the enduring critique of intellectual modernism.
Modernism is not just at fault for its gullibility over master narratives,
its naive willingness to imagine that there are single explanations for
matters of meaning, feeling, behavior, and sociality ... it is more deeply
at fault for creating an entire intellectual apparatus ... formal logic,
quantitative research paradigms, information-processing models of
cognition, value-free systems of propositions ... that is immediately seen
to be unbalanced and defective (in the precise sense of missing something
necessary) when we ask these critical questions.
Maybe it's not modernism as a whole ... Vygotsky and Bakhtin and
Stanislavsky and Burke are certainly modernists, too. It is the gradual
tendency in modernism for the sanitized, perhaps I should say the
'sterilized' paradigms of inquiry to dominate over the humanized ones. In
Vygotsky and Bakhtin's day, and perhaps more in Russia then than say in
Germany or England, there may have been a better balance. Vygotsky took
inspiration from art, Bakhtin from literature; they sought to build a human
science that counts for us today equally as part of the humanities and part
of the social sciences ... but the social sciences have striven to make
themselves more and more like the sciences of the inanimate ... Piaget sat
more comfortably in the West than Vygotsky until very recently. Piaget was
trumped by Chomskyan neo-cartesianism and information-theoretic cognitive
psychology. Even the early more balanced vision of a cognitive science
synthesis (e.g. Bruner's) evolved predictably and apparently inexorably
toward the dead-end of mind as computation in wetware. Just as linguistics
evolved from its rich beginnings (Malinowski, Sapir, ....) into what was
ultimately an account of how natural languages resembled mathematical
systems in their structural complexity. All these degenerations made the
dominant human sciences less and less able to say anything about how people
really feel, about values, moral relationships, social justice, meaningful
social interaction, ...... and so about education, learning, social
organization, politics.
Now comes the reaction. The about-face. Hicks' project with Bakhtin is to
take us another step forwards (NOW it's forwards!) toward theories of
communication, consciousness, learning, sociality that restore the moral,
the physical; fusing meaning and feeling (as processes) back together.
Bakhtin is probably not enough; Hicks has recourse to feminist theory and
other alternatives (represented in the MCA paper by her use of Seyla
Benhabib). Perhaps it is time to pay more attention to the Vygotsky who
reads least like what we think of as a "scientific" view today (the work on
art, on Freud). It is certainly time to re-address issues of moral
answerability in our own discourse.
JAY.
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JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
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