Hi Mike--
Thanks for your reply and elaboration on culture-history dialectics. It
reminds me Soussure's (spelling? French linguist) how introduced synchronic
(aka cultural, interactionist, dialogic, direct, multifacet, fragmented,
horizontal) and diachronic (aka historical, mediated, directional, vertical)
aspects of development of language. From this point of view, of course,
culture and dialectices "mutually constitute each other" and, thus, this
relationship between culture and history is dialectic.
Currently, I'm more interested how dialogue can "appropriate" history rather
than how dialectics can appropriate culture. Let me expalin why I'm more
interested in dialogue than in dialectics.
Historically (!), many mainstream theories of history are very monologic,
reductionist, and comphrehensive (I'd say totalitarist). Here is my
caricature of them (you have to choose only one on the list :-): everything
(in history) is nation building/struggle, everything is partiotism,
everything is class struggle, everything is racism, everything is struggle
between good and evil, everything is gender, everything is politics,
averything is sex, everything is economy, everything is gender, and so on.
In my view, dialectics is the smartest way to do Grand Comprehensive
Narrative about history but it does not escape to be monologic and
reductionist to one conciousness and one practice that this conciosness
concerns most at the time of conceptualizing. As Tony Whitson poitns out,
tomato is a fruit for biologist (within a dialectically contsructed
biological system) but a vegetable for a cook (within a culturally
negotiated practice). As Bakhtin characterized dialectics, it is a process
of errasing boundaries between dialogic conciousnesses, projecting it in one
systemic dimension, and squeezing it in one voice -- you can hear a
(fossilized) dialogue in struggle of dialectical contradictions. Again,
dialectics is propbably the smastest monologue that has been invented so far
and as monologue it should be respected and used... But it is still a
monologue.
I'm looking for Dialogic Theory of History which has to be fragmented,
multi-voiced and collective (one person can't present it),
non-comprehensive, situated, non-reductionist... I'm not sure that it can
even be a theory or what media it can exist. Any ideas?
What do you think?
Eugene
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Mike Cole [mailto:mcole@weber.ucsd.edu]
> Sent: Saturday, April 07, 2001 4:21 PM
> To: xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
> Subject: horizontal/vertical//diaologue/dialectic
>
>
>
> Eugene wrote:
>
> I do not think that 'dialectic negation' is an appropriate term
> here because
> in my view "American" focus on diversity and "Russian" focus on historical
> progress are not in dialect but rather in dialogic relations. I'd be very
> interested if you or somebody would try to reveal a dialectic relation in
> that.
>
> I have been talking a little with Yrjo about the horizontal/vertical
> "dimensions of development" issue which Don questioned and Yrjo says he
> has written more about. A relevant text here is the 1983 LCHC article
> on culutre and development in Handbook of Child Psychology which
> I have been
> meaning to scan and post..... but......
>
> anyway, I think that there might actually be a dialectic relation betwen
> the horizontal and veritical dimensions that Yrjo emphasises which would
> help to answer Don's questions about how the horizontal dimension could
> be considered developmental owing to lack of necessary sequence. New
> cognitive insights (development?) are initially context specific and, I
> think, remain at best incompletely and heterogeneously realized across
> life events (even those events where they are presumably relevant). When
> two or more such contexts are brought into interaction with each other,
> through boundary crossing, shifts in social relations of other kinds,
> emergence of new tools, etc., the possibility arises for them to be
> subsumed within a single system of understandin which is more inclusive
> and perhaps for an entirely new system of undestanding to emerge. Hence,
> in principle at least, the horizontal/vertical dichotomy when put together
> with the learning/development dichotomy, might create conditions for a
> dialectic relationship.
>
> I think Zaporozhets had something to sayon this matter, but have
> not found the
> ref.
> mike
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