Re: [xmca] Textual Life After Discoursal Death

From: Mike Cole <lchcmike who-is-at gmail.com>
Date: Mon Dec 10 2007 - 19:45:56 PST

David K, Paul, et al--

We all know this is a slippery medium so we have to be extra careful about
interpretations. My former colleague, David Bakhurst, uses a method where he
gives a "strict" and a "forgiving"
interpretation (not his words, probably, just how I code them without
checking back). Then he interrogates the gaps between them.

So, I like David's comment when he writes: Perhaps that is why XMCA exists,
so we can frantically help each other plug the gaps with both thumbs while
above our heads the tide of unread literature relentlessly overwhelms the
dike.

Yep, that is really my own view of things. Each of us SO finite, So limited.
We cannot hope to be the individual total geniuses who grok the
extraordinarily complex issues we wrestle with, each
for her/his own venture though trying to understand life.

At the same time, it is important that we respond to each other in serious,
but respectful (estimado) ways, humbly understanding the limits of our own
understandings. then, just maybe,
someone can make a meal of our halfbaked ideas.

Humanly stained in my own way in So Cal.
mike

On Dec 10, 2007 6:28 PM, David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com> wrote:

> Paul:
>
> Well, I make no apology for being interested in educational psychology;
> it's my job, and sociology is not. I suppose as a consequence there are
> books missing from my night table and sociological gaps in my reading list.
> But I imagine they are mirrored by gaps in your own. Perhaps that is why
> XMCA exists, so we can frantically help each other plug the gaps with both
> thumbs while above our heads the tide of unread literature relentlessly
> overwhelms the dike.
>
> But in fact I have read Weber (though not since I was an undergraduate)
> and of course I've read Bernstein and Bourdieu in industrial quantities.
> Perhaps what I need is probably not to read more, but rather to understand
> Vygotsky as Vygotsky understood Vygotsky. Right now it seems to me that,
> having read Weber AND Bernstein AND Bourdieu, if Marx and Lenin were good
> enough sociologists for LSV, then they are good enough for me.
>
> The business about the individual minds of the dead is not some cute
> little eccentricity on my part. It follows naturally from your own
> insistence (and Bateson's, although he is not so dogmatic) that the
> artifacts that we create are parts of our minds. Whether they continue to be
> parts of our minds after our deaths seems to me to be a non-trivial
> question. I am willing to take your ridicule of the idea as an admission
> that your initial insistence was over-stated, as I think it was.
>
> For my part, I don't think it is completely ridiculous. As it happens,
> I've also read Derrida, and I was not using "trace" the way he uses it. In
> Grammatologie, Derrida is trying to argue that writing is antecedent to
> spoken language, and he does this through an ultra-Saussurean rhetorical
> move, by claiming that spoken words "mean" by contrast with their absences,
> same as a written trace "means" by contrast with an unwritten one. I am not
> a Saussurean.
>
> My own use of trace is based on the idea that a discourse is a process
> and a text is a product, or a "trace" of that process. A text means not by
> virtue of a structuralist comparison of traces with non-traces, but rather
> by allowing the reader/hearer to reconstruct the discourse and re-imagine
> the context that created it. As the minds that created the texts die out and
> are replaced by living minds, the re-imagination of this context becomes
> less re- and more pure imagination. For Sir Walter Scott, the historical
> novel "Waverley, or 'Tis Sixty Years Since" was almost pure history, and he
> preferred his second title to the first, but for us it is almost pure novel,
> and today hardly anybody even knows the second title.
>
> David Kellogg
> Seoul National University of Education
>
>
>
> ---------------------------------
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Received on Mon Dec 10 19:47 PST 2007

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