Spellbound

From: Mike Cole (mcole@weber.ucsd.edu)
Date: Sun Jul 27 2003 - 13:18:43 PDT


Well, yes, this discussion is really getting fascinating, but before
I throw my dsl out the window I wanted to comment that seeing the
film, "Spellbound" should be of interest to almost anyone on this list.

Multivocality, chronotopes, etc are there. But there, too, in a giant
way are issues of thought and language in context over time scales.

One thought that came back again and again, watching a young person
standing at a microphone, seeking to spell correctly some very obscure
word, was our one-and-always question of relation of individual to
environment and thinking as transcation. The rules allow the child
to ask some questions, and some used these rules in strategically
and varied ways. But there came a point where no more questions could
be asked. The audience held its breadth (each member, in some sense,
engaging in the same "internal" search as the child/performer) and
after some time..... maybe 30 sec in some case, which seems an eternity
in a turn to talk (and time time to think!)... the individual child
must organized her/himself to utter a string of names of phonemes called
"spelling a word."

What sort of actions/thoughts/transactions/incipient externalizations
were occuring, I kept wondering. How did scrunching up your lips, or
closing your eyes and "looking at the ceiling" with eyes close
enter into the process? (Some movements were easier to interpret--
"spelling out the word" on one's hand).

LSV via Faust via Goethe, in words one encounters too, in Bakhtin (p. 285
of S&T):

    "In the beginning was the deed. The formation of the word occurs
nearer the end that the beginning of development. The word is the end
that crowns the deed."

logging off
mike



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