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Re: [xmca] bodies, artifacts and the ghost in Hamlet



Just a couple corrections regarding my own views on these points.

I don't really accept a sea-change distinction between high and low in matters of art, feelings, or physics. I wrote a separate post about some of this.

To the extent that I do find it heuristically useful to pay attention to some of the differences between what we call high and low in these cases, as with "higher mental functions" so with all these others, I also think it important to subvert the distinctions so as to keep from being misled by our own reifications, not to mention our own cultural value systems.

And my unpublished work on emotions makes a fundamental set of distinctions among primarily bodily feelings (like pain or nausea), classic externally targeted emotions (like fear or anger), and what I reserve the term "affects" for, which correspond very closely to the "higher" emotions (a feeling of nobility, a sense of expectation, etc.) These are not, however, neat classifiers. There are bodily felt components in all, there are often external objects for the higher as well as the classic ("animal" emotions, though this attribution is mostly ideological, I think), and most feelings likely have some "higher" variations, with perhaps physiological common grounds, but quite different cultural meanings mediating the nuance of the feeling.

JAY.

PS. So what do all the people who think Hamlet is NOT boring have in common?


Jay Lemke
Professor (Adjunct, 2009-2010)
Educational Studies
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, MI 48109
www.umich.edu/~jaylemke

Visiting Scholar
Laboratory for Comparative Human Communication
University of California -- San Diego
La Jolla, CA
USA 92093






On Dec 7, 2009, at 5:25 PM, David Kellogg wrote:

Jay makes the point--on the other line, the one with an unwieldy title about the sense in which the sensory is not artefactual--that high and low art (and high and low emotion) are dichotomous.

However useful a dichotomy may be (and they are almost always more useful than crude monotomies), one of the most useful functions they have is self-immolation, that is, the ability to differentiate a simple high-low distinction into a distribution of distinctions, ad infinitium. It seems to me that this is how Hegel would have essence emerge from being, and idea from object.

So I think to say the body is monotomously artefactual is pretty useless; it really is like saying that artefacts consist of objects like bodies and chairs. I also think that the sense in which it is culturally artefactual is highly limited: gesture is a communicative use of the body but open-heart surgery is not. The flesh is not well designed for social communication; that we have so exapted it is man's cunning and not nature's.

I agree with Stokoe that the first languages were probably signed and not spoken, but I also think that there is a good reason why the mainstream of linguistic development was spoken rather than signed. This development belies the idea that the body as a skin-bound individual object is an effective artefact for social communication. Only in the bourgeois era is it even a convincing metaphor for the self!

Now what does all this have to do with emotion? Actually, everything! I agree with Andy that "The Teaching Concerning the Emotions" is more approach than method, more a clearing of the desk and a clearing of the throat than a finished piece of work (and this is why I always wonder at references you occasionally see to a book on the emotions that Vygotsky is supposed to have completed and even published, e.g. in the account we were given of the Complete Works of LSV!)

But if we look at Vygotsky's early essays on Esthetic Education and Ethical Education (in Educational Psychology) and especially at this work Psychology of Art, and Creativity and Imagination in the Adolescent, we can get a pretty good idea of what might have followed.

Vygotsky sees cognitive development as a socially mediated fusion between two separate lines of development: phonological development and practical intelligence (that is, he sees cognitive development as a function of verbal thinking). This turning point is what divides the higher and lower psychological functions.

He must have had something similar in mind for emotional development, since he believed so strongly in the complex unity of cognition and affect. That's why it strikes me as odd that Jay, who MUST accept that there is a distinction between, say, naive physics and theoretical physics, cannot really accept an analogous distinction between lower emotions and higher ones.

Of course the distinction is not a dichotomous one, or not simply a dichotomous one: within the dichotomy of high and low there are other dichotomies. But one aspect of differentiation is the purification of tendancies that were previously interpenetrated, the untangling of threads that had previously seemed braided into a single skein.

Within a few years of Kyd's "Spanish Tragedy", which featured a ghost, a dithering revenger, and a play within a play, we have "Hamlet", which inspired LSV's Ph.D. thesis work. Kyd, and not Shakespeare, is the playwright who invented the extended soliloquy, which proved that characters have consciousnessess.

What a difference a few years make! Kyd's play is a snuff movie: the play within a play is there to make people wonder and hope that they are watching real people really kill each other, bite out their tongues, and nail each other's heads to the floor. It's the kind of thing people flock to see at the Multiplex today.

Shakespeare's is the opposite. We have poor Hamlet, fresh returned from his undergraduate studies at the University of Wittenberg, confronted with a ghost. Instead of a ranting soliloquy to the tune of "Now could I drink hot blood!" the young rationalist embarks on an extended meditation which more or less addresses Vygotsky's question about the difference between being afraid of a bear and being afraid of a ghost.

Do ghosts really exist? And if they do exist, do they always tell the truth? If you kill a man at prayers, will he go to heaven? And if you kill a man in revenge, do not you go to hell? How do I know I am not mad? Isn't justice better served by legal, social, rational means than by impulsive action?

The play within a play is now not a subterfuge to make the audience dream of Rome's gladiators; it is a psychological trial, designed to provide concrete evidence for action. Something is ripening in the state of Denmark; it is the maturation of higher, reflective, rational emotion.

I see some of the same thing in this data, that we were talking about last night. The kids have just done a science experiment, and they are trying to formulate the results, which is that water is a better thermal battery than sand.

The problem is that they can't talk abstractly about temperature; they are still, at least initially, enmeshed with the "up" and "down" of the thermometer. The use of the teacher's body does not, initially, help them free their thinking.

T: And one more thing. Sand gets...(teacher gestures with her hands)
S : Down.
Ss : Down
T : Down?
S : Cold
S : Low
S ; Colder.
T : Right. Who can make the sentence? Who can make the sentence?
(some kids raise their hands. Teacher nods to one)
T : Yes.
S : Sand gets warm faster cold water. (sic)
T: Seongmun?
Seongmun: Sand gets cold faster than water.



David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education


--- On Mon, 12/7/09, Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net> wrote:


From: Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net>
Subject: Re: [xmca] bodies and artifacts
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Date: Monday, December 7, 2009, 4:27 AM


... sorry. To further explain my point ...

So I found that in such instances one can say "... an artefact *or* the human body ..." And that works fine. But why all the time say "artefact or the body"? The body *is* an artefact.

That was my reasoning.
Andy

Mabel Encinas wrote:
Ok. You have a point. Then, lets start thinking from an embodied approach :) Let's accept that the body is an artifact. What is then the difference between a chair and the body. Both are yes, "products of human art", as you express it. However, only in the process (practice) there seem to be a difference. Both are material and ideal (the body is not separated from the mind; the chair, this one here that I feel is made of cloth and a cushioned material, plastic, metal, and involves the ideal that a designer and workers in a factory transformed so people could seat on). What is the difference?
  Mabel







Date: Mon, 7 Dec 2009 22:53:40 +1100
From: ablunden@mira.net
To: liliamabel@hotmail.com
Subject: Re: [xmca] bodies and artifacts

Well, the body is the body is the body. The reason the question arises for me is when we make generalisations in which things like person, artefact, consciousness, concept, action, and so on, figure, where does the body fit in? My response was that even though it is obviously unique in many ways, it falls into the same category as artefacts.

My questions to you are: what harm is done? why is anything ignored? And, what is the body if it is not a material product of human art, used by human beings?

Andy

Mabel Encinas wrote:
Is this way being fruitful? That is why I do not like to consider the body as an artifact. Did not cognitive pscyhology do that? (Bruner, Acts of Meaning). Then intentions and all the teleological aspects are so much ignored...



Mabel









Date: Mon, 7 Dec 2009 20:21:09 +1100
From: ablunden@mira.net
To: liliamabel@hotmail.com
Subject: Re: [xmca] bodies and artifacts

Sure. But the body has been constructed like a living
machine - the various artefacts that you use (especially but
not only language and images) are "internalized" in some
way. So one (external) artefact is replaced by another
(internal) artefact. Yes?

Andy

Mabel Encinas wrote:
However, sometimes practices do not involve other artefact
than the body (some practices are directed to the body), and that was
why I was talking about the limit of thinking about the body as
artefact... is that a limit? That is why I mentioned the body as "the
raw material". I was thinking for example practices linked to
meditation
and the like, for example, among many others.
Mabel
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