Re: [xmca] Intravolutions and Revaluations

[David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>]

Mike has protested, and quite rightly, about my subject lines. The jokes are not that funny, and the threads become too sinuous. So I am reverting to "intravolution", but I want to add an additional problem that is related to hyphenation rather than neologism. 
 
I want to complain about how Vygotsky uses to the word "znachenie" to refer to a subordinate concept of meaning which includes "sense" and a subordinate concept of meaning which excludes it. I will call this problem the "revaluation" of "znachenie".
 
Last time, Mike said he preferred "involution" to "intravolution" because "intravolution" suggests a completed process. I argued that "intravolution" has a clear neological antonym in "extravolution" and an even better one in "inter-volution", which fits this context exactly, because Vygotsky is trying to describe how (some) functions become intra-mental after an inter-mental and extra-mental existence.  
 
There's another problem. "Involution" is already taken, specifically in the first part of Chapter Four, where Vygotsky uses it to describe the pathological reverse of evolution: instead of speciation, we have a convergent evolution. 
 
Дальше мы попытаемся установить, что в процессах разложения, инволюции и патологического изменения отношение между мышлением и речью не является постоянным для всех случаев нарушения, задержки, обратного развития, патологического изменения интеллекта или речи, но принимает всякий раз специфическую форму, характерную именно для данного типа патологического процесса, для данной картины нарушений и задержек. 
 
"Further on we will attempt to establish that in the processes of decomposition, involution and pathologic change the relation between thinking and speech is not constant for all cases of disturbance, delay, reverse development, or pathologic change in intellect or speech, but assumes every time the specific form and precise characteristics of this type of pathologic process, this whole picture of disturbance and delay."
 
(I had a heartbreaking example of this the other night: my mother-in-law, who is multi-dialectal in Chinese, has suffered a stroke, and now finds it very hard to speak in any dialect other than her first one, Shaanxinese, which makes it very hard for me to understand her.)  

 
Now, in English, we do have a device where we can reverse speciation in the lexicon. We can take words that have a separate lexical existence and mash them together with hyphens, like this:
 
               REVOLVEMENT
            /                         /
INTRA-REVOLVEMENT  INTER-REVOLVEMENT
 
And that brings me to the problem of revaluating "znachenie" and "smysl" in the light of Capital. 
 
In Chapter Seven, Vygotsky says that "smysl" is BIGGER than "znachenie"; "znachenie" is only the most stable, most self-identical, most fixed form of "smysl". This is psychologically correct. It is historically correct. 
 
Usage is a late-emerging interloper, a knighted, enthroned, institutionalized form of popular use. Language as a concrete psychological reality is "smysl", and not "znachenie". 
 
Historically, dictionaries didn't even appear in most languages until the Eighteenth Century, and "znachenie" is largely a product of WRITING and TEXT, not SPEAKING and DISCOURSE.
 
So it should REALLY be this:
 
         SMYSL-VALUE
         /                 /
SMYSL-SENSE   ZNACHENIE-MEANING
 
But it isn't. The problem is that "meaning" is a very general term in Russian, just as it is in English. So Vygotsky uses "znachenie" as the superordinate concept, because in most people's minds, "znachenie" is the most general term. So what we really have is this:
 
          ZNACHENIE-VALUE
           /                      /
SMYSL-SENSE      ZNACHENIE-MEANING
 
Which is terrible, because it suggests the exact opposite of the truth. "Sense" appears as an interloper, and "znachenie" as the original value. What we want is exactly the opposite.
 
A very valued member of our team once pointed out that the key to the whole problem is Marx's distinction between USE value and EXCHANGE value. The USE value of words is their older pragmatic function in concrete language, and the EXCHANGE value is something that arises in relatively modern times, above thanks to the production and exchange of texts. 
 
 So the most THEORETICALLY accurate way would be to hyphenate, and use "meaning" with everything, like this:
 
           MEANING-VALUE
             /                  /
MEANING-SENSE    MEANING-SIGNIFICATION
 
Alternatively, we could do away with the meaningless word "meaning" and instead substitute the word "value".
 
                 VALUE
               /        /
SENSE-VALUE  SIGNIFICATION-VALUE
 
David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education



_______________________________________________
xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca