RE: [xmca] Layers versus stages

[David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>]

Rod--
 
Very true. My own private model of a mind is neither stage nor layer. It's not a construction site or a heap of sand, and it's not exactly substitutional nor precisely sublative. My own private model of a mind is a semiotic object, or rather a semiotic process that leaves a number of traces apparently one on top of the other though in reality side by side. My own private model of a mind is a palimpsest. 
 
It's a text that has been written and overwritten and over-overwritten so that some of the old text is visible and in some cases the earlier text can be reconstructed while in other cases it is lost. So too the child's mature language, and the language making mind too, is based on the signifying function overwrites the indicative language based on concrete reference, which in turn overwrites ostension. 
 
There are (at least) two problems with this model. The first is that it assumes that foot is the footprint. A real dialogue by real people is really NOT a text; it's a discourse. A text is an interlacing double trail of footprints on a wet beach. The footprints obscure each other, and the waves wash one, and then the other, and finally both of them away. 
 
But while they last we see the footprints and we can follow them; we can imagine the walkers, and can see them running and wading and splashing. We can even catch up to them and take them by the hand. Yet the disembodied, imprinted, fleeting meanings we find in text are never quite the embodied, ephemeral, corporeal sense we find in discourse itself; the process of reconstruing the process from the product is never quite the same as the process of producing it in the first place.
 
The second problem is that it assumes that the dance remains even when the dancer stops dancing. 
 
David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education

--- On Sat, 6/19/10, Rod Parker-Rees <R.Parker-Rees@plymouth.ac.uk> wrote:


From: Rod Parker-Rees <R.Parker-Rees@plymouth.ac.uk>
Subject: RE: [xmca] Layers versus stages
To: "lchcmike@gmail.com" <lchcmike@gmail.com>, "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Date: Saturday, June 19, 2010, 1:22 AM


I have never been happy with the construction site model of development which buries the foundations and sees all development in terms of 'upward' expansion, stage on stage. I prefer to think of development more in terms of heaping - as sand forms a heap, getting higher but also spreading at the base as our 'primary' or foundational capabilities continue to affect and  be affected by our later experiences (not just rumbling and festering in the basement!). One problem with the heap analogy is that the sand is arriving from above and gravity ensures that the only movement is down but then every model has to have its limitations!

All the best,

Rod
________________________________________
From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu] On Behalf Of mike cole [lchcmike@gmail.com]
Sent: 18 June 2010 22:15
To: eXtended Mind, Culture,Activity
Subject: [xmca] Layers versus stages

Larry and others interested in attending to early infancy as part of a
discussion about development --

Attached are a few pages early from Dan Stern's book to which Larry has
pointed us. I am curious about people's thought on the "layers vs. stages"
antinomy/contrast. A couple of questions:

1. Layering appears on the surface at least to deny any process of
sublation. Is this a reasonable interpretation?

2. Layering is specifically associated with the interpersonal sphere and
ideas about the primacy of sociality from the get go and seems contrasted
with the (non-human) object sphere; sort of like
relations and modes of production. So maybe the social sphere is layered and
the object sphere undergoes stage-like transformations?

But, the two are co-constituitive in human life, so would this mean that
ontogenetic change would have features of each?

What think you?
mike
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