RE: [xmca] Lindqvist on Leontiev on Play - collision between making sense and made sense

[Rod Parker-Rees <R.Parker-Rees@plymouth.ac.uk>]

David, 

I don't think I am all that optimistic about the ways in which technology is still transforming the relationship between 'individuals' and their cultural ecology. I am interested in the ways in which communication at a distance depends on a sophisticated internalisation of 'primary' aspects of communication - I have never met you but I have a set of assumptions about how you are likely to respond to things I type. What makes me less optimistic is the feeling that 'remote' communication might be eating into the time which people have available for the more intimate, face to face and body to body forms of communication (I mean picking up on cues about feelings which are expressed in vocal tension, gesture, gaze direction etc.). If we see communication more and more in terms of a trading in symbols rather than a sharing of sense (co-creation of common meanings with all the tangles of emotional and corporeal connotations) then I see a risk of social dis-integration. On the other hand, I can see myself as an old chimpanzee grumbling that the newfangled use of speech means that people don't do as much fur grooming and nit-picking as they used to - and I can see in my own children that the massive increase in symbol-trading has not turned them into social isolates, they still manage to get on fine with friends when they do meet up and they seem to enjoy meeting up every bit as much as I do.

I came across a lovely analogy on the 'Edge' website recently - http://www.edge.org/q2010/q10_2.html  George Dyson writes about the difference between Aleut kayak building (gather pieces of driftwood, bone etc, tie it all together to make a frame and then stretch skins over it to make a boat) and Tlingit dugout canoes (take a tree trunk and remove as much as you can until a boat is left). Dyson argues that we used to take an Aleutian approach to information, assembling arguments from scarce and hard won pieces of information but that we may now need to focus more on digging arguments out of the mass of information available to us. We have to chop out the spam, the reality TV etc. to make something useful, elegant and pleasing from the mass of stuff at our disposal.

Stories for children is a whole other thing! Written, published, sold and bought by adults, even though the stories may be already well within the common domain, they tell us more about adults' anxieties about childhood than about what children are interested in. All the arguments about 'age appropriate material' seem to miss the crucial fact that when an adult shares a book with a child the book is a tool to support, frame and pattern interaction, not a chest of meanings to be delivered from the page to the child's mind! The scary bits of fairy tales (child-killing, eating of people, cutting stomachs open etc.) provide opportunities for a child to experience horrific situations while safely cuddled up with an adult who can offer reassurance and safety - if any possibility of upset is edited out (I remember versions of 'Little Red Riding Hood' in which she jumps onto a wardrobe rather than being eaten by the wolf) children will not have the opportunity to enjoy the experience of contemplating danger from a safe vantage point.

I have just been teaching a group using Merlin Donald and Steven Mithen's arguments about the importance of mimesis as a kind of 'missing link' between prelinguistic and later ways of making sense of the world and I think Donald's sections on 'mythic culture' have a lot to say about how information has a very different status for oral cultures (if the stories are not retold, the accumulated knowledge of the group is lost) and for literate ones. For children the structure and patterning of stories seem to be at least as important as the details of their content - surprise is fun but knowing what to expect is comforting.

Apologies for a rambling response.

Rod


-----Original Message-----
From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu] On Behalf Of David Kellogg
Sent: 02 February 2010 22:37
To: Culture ActivityeXtended Mind
Subject: RE: [xmca] Lindqvist on Leontiev on Play - collision between making sense and made sense

Rod (not "Rees", Mike!):
 
Thanks for your note. One of my grads is using your work in her work--she's interested in the extraordinary difference we've discovered between the creativity of language (in this case, the GRAMMATICAL creativity of SECOND language) in primary intersubjectivity (which as we all know is the leading edge of first language development) and secondary intersubjectivity (which appears, in some important ways, to lead in second language development). She's trying to operationalize alot of what you said about creativity in your recent article (which you kindly posted for us here) by using Tomasello's neat distinction between fixed expressions, item-based "combinations", and what she calls abstract creative constructions. 
 
I'm afraid I'm not as optimistic as you are about the ability of new technological means to make a big difference in the way we think. Perhaps this is true of technological means of production, both because the actual increase in production impacts people's lives in the short run and, in the long run, the DECREASE in SURPLUS value produced leads inexorably to a fall in the rate of profit. Both of these are material constraints on the way we think.
 
 
It seems to me that the issue you raise, when you talk about how the ability to store track changes, is not a difference in production, but rather a way in which the very distinction between text and discourse (which I have made such hay out of) is starting to disappear, and with it the distinction between sense and meaning (which Vygotsky, in his day, also made hay with). If the visible trace of a discourse is infinitely malleable, unfinalizeable, then it is no longer the trace of a discourse; it's the discourse itself. There is ONLY outside text, and no actual text.
 
You suggest that this might lead to making literature more porous to children's responses; we might actually get a child literature instead of a children's lit, that is, something that is written as well as read by kids the way that, say, Russian literature is written by Russians but read by the whole world. 
 
But you also admit, and it seems to me that this more likely, that this child literature might get lost in the flood of adult drivel, exactly the way that child motives, child aims, child goals for play are completely ignored in Leontiev (or, to take a more immediate example, the way that e-mail has been strangled by spam, television throttled by 'reality TV', the cinema devestated by the 'blockbuster', etc.)  
 
To me, that's just why Lindqvist's critique of Leontiev is so important. Here is a man around whom the entire world changed, touched, or at least brushed, by the greatest genius in child psychology of the twentieth century, a man who then looked both ways and produced a "theory" of play that is essentially no different from what Piaget comes up with in "Play, Imitation, and Dreams": play is essentiallly assimilative and only labor has accomodational potential. For Piaget, that is almost synonymous with creative potential. But then why create, if the result is the same old drivel?
 
I have on my desk a version of "Goldilocks" by James Marshall, which, I am reliably informed by the cover, won the Caldecott medal, was  a 'pick of the lists' for American Bookseller, and an ALA notable book. We are told that it is an offbeat and inventive retelling of the story tht will "enchant readers young and old" (a nice tip, that; they are going to aim at two audiences, the paying and the non-paying. I wonder who will get priority?)
 
Now, the original story of the Three Bears, by Robert Southey, is not about Goldilocks at all; it's really about three bears  (all male; it's not a family) who resist the intruder, a rude, mannerless old crone, who is collared by the local bailiff for vagrancy. Like most tales of its time (1838) it's a pretty vicious anti-working class diatribe (the Lake Poets, including Southey, were what we would call neo-Cons today). But the Marshall version is not at all "off beat" and it's nowhere near as inventive or appealing as the original, of which it is apparently unaware. The funniest it gets is when baby bear tastes the porridge and says "I'm dying" at which Mama Bear suggests "That's quite enough. Let's go for a walk." 
 
Part of the problem is precisely this unawareness, this loss of track changes. Of course, we all know that it is perfectly possible to understand the original of something through the parody. Many of us have read Don Quixote without reading Amadis de Gaul, and more of us know Goldilocks as a heroine than as a villain. 
 
But parody is always a very BACKWARD looking understanding; in many ways like the replacement of sense with meaning of which you speak (meaning SUBSUMES sense, but in so doing a lot of the vigor and liveliness and directness of sense is lost). And when the original is entirely lost sight of, the child has sacrificed sense and gained no meaning in return; we have somehow managed to produce disenchantment without having any enchantment in the first place.
 
David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education

--- On Tue, 2/2/10, Rod Parker-Rees <R.Parker-Rees@plymouth.ac.uk> wrote:


From: Rod Parker-Rees <R.Parker-Rees@plymouth.ac.uk>
Subject: RE: [xmca] Lindqvist on Leontiev on Play - collision between making sense and made sense
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Date: Tuesday, February 2, 2010, 3:36 AM


I have always been struck by Vygotsky's reference (in 'The development of higher mental functions') to the collision between the creative meaning making of children and the created meanings available to them in the culture in which they swim:

"The very essence of cultural development is in the collision of mature cultural forms of behaviour with the primitive forms that characterise the child's behaviour." (not sure about the translation here).

For me it is the active making of sense which each new generation contributes which keeps the 'made sense' of culture alive and responsive to changing circumstances. There is also an argument that the made culture feeds back into the process in that oral cultures tend to be much more conservative, keen to maintain and preserve their lore, than literate cultures which can rely on books to 'keep track' of changes and allow us to go back if we find that changes don't work out too well. New technologies which allow massive amounts of information to be stored, including endless versions with all their 'track changes' annotations and commentaries should make us more open to the sparks struck by collisions with children's 'outsider' perspective but I wonder whether they might also tend to exclude these 'naïve' contributions, much as literacy tends to shut out the preliterate and the illiterate.

All the best,

Rod

-----Original Message-----
From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu] On Behalf Of David Kellogg
Sent: 02 February 2010 05:24
To: xmca
Subject: [xmca] Lindqvist on Leontiev on Play

Or rather, Monica Nilsson on the magnificent Gunilla Lindvist on Leontiev on play, writing in one of the papers in the current issue of MCA:
 
"Lindqvist is critical of how Vygotsky's successors came to interpret his theory of play. Vygotsky emphasized teh dialectics expressed through the relation between the adult world and the child's world and also between the will and the emotion. She writes that Leontiev sees no tension between the adult world and the child's world and that play, for him, is about a child's inability to acquire adult roles. When a child can't perform adult actions he instead creates a fictitious situation. This situation, Lindqvist writes, is, for Leontiev, the most significant sign of play. Thus play is the sign of the child's inferiority, and hence play is in fact an infantile activity because, as Lindqvist states, from this perspective, the child will gradually grow into the adult world and play is diected toward the future. Moreover, she claims that the implication is a stress on reproduction (of adult roles) at the expense of creativity. Therefore, she attempts to
reinterpret Vygotsky's play theory, based on his original thoughts in The Psychology of Art, and his inquires (sic) into creativity and imagination. According to Lindqvist, Vygotsky's idesas give rise to a creative pedagogical approach instead of an instrumental one. This is because Vygotsky shows how children interpret and perform their experiences by creating new meaning and how emotions characterize their interpretations, that is, how emotion and thought unit in the process of knowledge construction." (p. 16).
 
Kozulin remarks (on p. 25 of HIS magnificent book, Psychological Tools, on how Leontiev's emphasis on practical activity instead of semiotic tools led him into a kind of "Piagtian program of exploring the internalization of sensorimotor actions". 
 
But it really took Gunilla Lindqvist to point out the terrible consequences that a neo-Piagetian program like Leontiev's might have for children at precisely the age that Piaget called "sensorimotor". 
 
David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education 


      
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