Re: Fw: Starting Ch4 (resent)

From: Vera John-Steiner (vygotsky@unm.edu)
Date: Wed May 09 2001 - 10:41:09 PDT


Bill,
I very much liked your questions; they have been haunting me for many years.
In a chapter that we are just starting --my collaborator Seana Moran and
I-- we will be exploring answers from a
Vygotskian point of view. In the meantiome, I strongly recommand Chapter 11
in Vygotsky's Psychology of Art. It is a very early work, but it has some
promising seeds. Back to final papers,
Vera
-----Original Message-----
From: Bill Barowy <wbarowy@mail.lesley.edu>
To: xmca@weber.ucsd.edu <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>; xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
<xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Date: Tuesday, May 08, 2001 5:55 PM
Subject: Re: Fw: Starting Ch4 (resent)

>At 03:05 PM 5/8/01 -0700, Paul H.Dillon wrote:
>>At this point YE turns to the transpersonal experience. The artist who
>experiences himself as someone subordinated to "something outside himself
>[that] has taken charge and is now settling everything that happens". YE
>summarily explains this as follows: "The phenomenon is due to the
>anticipation of the essentially collective and societal, teritary character
>embedded within a work of art under creation." But isn't this what we were
>supposed to be theorizing? How can it appear here as the basis for
>explanation? If we are to push the explanation onto the collective and
>societal, what impells the movement toward novelty: some societal TELOS?
>
>
>I wonder if it is the nature of reciprocal relationship, here seen between
>collective and individual development, that makes explanation seem
>circular, as in the cause-and-effect feedback cycles that one encounters in
>cybernetics.
>
>Nevertheless, the point about activity theory accounting for *surprises*,
>not necessarily how they are taken up, or ignored and buried as
>contradictions, but how the surprises and accidents emerge in the first
>place, is a good question. Where in a tension are the seeds for innovation?
> What were the trajectories of people and things that lead to a
>particularly creative moment?
>
>bb
>
>



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