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Today's Topics:
1. FW: POSITION ANNOUNCEMENT: ASSISTANT DIRECTOR, OSL
(Peter Smagorinsky)
2. Polanyi's "Magic of Marxism" (Huw Lloyd)
3. Fw: [historicalmaterialism] Marx and Philosophy Review of
Books: new reviews online (Bruce Robinson)
4. Imaginary Friends (David Kellogg)
5. Re: Imaginary Friends (Helen Grimmett)
6. Re: Living metaphor and conventionalized language (David Kellogg)
7. Re: Imaginary Friends (Robert Lake)
8. Re: Living metaphor and conventionalized language (Martin Packer)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Message: 1
Date: Thu, 11 Aug 2011 19:16:39 +0000
From: Peter Smagorinsky <smago@uga.edu>
Subject: [xmca] FW: POSITION ANNOUNCEMENT: ASSISTANT DIRECTOR, OSL
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Message-ID:
<D978F610641CB249AE42B883A3CC3B7F19D45FA7@SN2PRD0202MB127.namprd02.prod.outlook.com
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
**POSITION ANNOUNCEMENT**
ASSISTANT DIRECTOR
OFFICE OF SERVICE-LEARNING
THE UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA
The Office of Service-Learning (OSL) at the University of Georgia
invites applications for the position of Assistant Director. This
position is critical member of the OSL’s senior leadership team
and will provide campus-wide leadership to advance UGA’s
curricular and community engagement efforts throughout the teaching,
research, and service missions of the University. The successful
candidate will also have a unique opportunity to provide the
creative leadership necessary for expanding the role and scope of
the office's mission and programming through implementation of a new
strategic plan. This 12-month academic professional, non-tenure
track faculty position reports to the Director.
The Assistant Director oversees a diverse portfolio of work
including the following: supporting faculty development for service-
learning course development and engaged scholarship; developing
programs that support student engagement in public service and
academic service-learning; assessing service-learning’s impact;
and cultivation of community-university partnerships. Specific
responsibilitiesinclude administering the Public Service & Outreach
Student Scholars program (a strategic initiative of the Office of
the Vice President for Public Service and Outreach); providing
leadership for service-learning course tracking, course assessment,
and program evaluation efforts; supporting anddeveloping faculty
development programs; developing partnerships for the OSL’s
community engagement hubs; and representing the OSL in a variety of
university, community, and professional settings. The Assistant
Director may also assist with fundraising, including researching and
identifying f
unding sources, and writing and submitting grant proposals. This
individual may also teach undergraduate service-learning courses
related to their research credentials, and may be expected to
develop and teach a graduate course on service-learning pedagogy and
engaged research.
Minimum Qualifications
· PhD or equivalent terminal degree.
· 3-5 years progressively responsible administrative or
program development experience in higher education.
· Demonstrated knowledge of service-learning theory and
practice.
· Strong written and verbal communication skills for a wide
variety of audiences.
· Ability to collaborate with diverse constituencies, work
independently, utilize social media, and manage multiple projects.
Preferred Qualifications
· Previous experience administering or coordinating service-
learning programs, experience administering faculty development and
support programs, or administering student leadership programs.
· University classroom teaching experience.
· Understanding of community engagement trends in higher
education.
· Demonstrated experience with assessment and evaluation of
service-learning and community engagement programs and familiarity
with survey research methods and analysis.
· Demonstrated potential to engage in scholarly work on
service-learning and community-based research.
· Familiarity with the goals and importance of public service
and outreach in a land grant setting.
The Office of Service-Learning is jointly supported by the Office of
the Vice President for Instruction and the Office of the Vice
President for Public Service and Outreach and is responsible for the
support and expansion of academic service-learning and community
engagement efforts at UGA. For more information, please visit www.servicelearning.uga.edu
<http://www.servicelearning.uga.edu/>.
The University of Georgia, a land- and sea-grant university, is the
largest and most comprehensive educational institution in Georgia,
which enrolls 35,000 students, and is located in Athens,
approximately 65 miles northeast of Atlanta. The University of
Georgia was recognized in 2010 as a Carnegie Community Engaged
institution and is ranked among the top 20 public universities in
U.S. News & World Report’s 2011 edition of America’s Best
Colleges. Additional information about the University of Georgia is
available at www.uga.edu<http://www.uga.edu/>.
Application Instructions
Applications materials should include a cover letter of interest
outlining relevant experience and qualifications, current curriculum
vitae, and the name and contact information for three references.
Applications received by September 1, 2011 will be assured full
consideration.
Email submissions with attachments are preferred. Please send to: osl@uga.edu
<mailto:osl@uga.edu>
In lieu of email submissions, written application materials may be
directed to:
Dr. Shannon O.Wilder, Director
ATTN: Search Committee, Assistant Director
Office of Service-Learning
University of Georgia
1242 1Ž2 S. Lumpkin St.
Athens, Georgia 30602
Questions may be addressed to Dr. Shannon Wilder, 706-542-0535
(phone) or swilder@uga.edu<mailto:swilder@uga.edu> (email)
The University of Georgia is an Equal Opportunity, Affirmative
Action Institution
------------------------------
Message: 2
Date: Thu, 11 Aug 2011 23:28:51 +0100
From: Huw Lloyd <huw.softdesigns@gmail.com>
Subject: [xmca] Polanyi's "Magic of Marxism"
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Message-ID:
<CAG1MBOF_=EZ-KsmBk+1nKcP005vfNh4cCDPuH6riuoKgJ5u6wA@mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
I'm revisiting a section of Polyani's "Personal Knowledge", p227,
subtitled
the "The Magic of Marxism", in which he describes the contradictory
Marxist
fervour for anti-idealism and the shielding of this fervour as a
'science'.
I have noted references to Polyani in archived posts and wondered what
others thought about this.
I was thinking about this in relation to Luria's "Cognitive
Development" and
Ratner's preface to "Macro Cultural Psychology", in which the
scientific
recognition of the social formation of mind might (would?) then lead
to
extensive social changes, such as the unveiling of 'education as
content'
rather than environment.
Here are a few ruminative questions:
+ Is it possible to have a long standing interest in something without
having a fervour for it? Whitehead's 'Religion of science' comes to
mind
(Science and the Modern World).
+ If valid, to what degree does this fervour pollute the science.
Is this
(simply?) a case of discriminating between authentic science and the
political wielding of 'science'?
+ Can we justify this fervour beyond a personal utopian belief,
founded, for
instance, on a understanding of what is wrong currently? Are there
benefits
to such an outlook, such as the avoidance of dogma?
Huw
------------------------------
Message: 3
Date: Fri, 12 Aug 2011 00:17:38 +0100
From: "Bruce Robinson" <bruce@brucerob.eu>
Subject: [xmca] Fw: [historicalmaterialism] Marx and Philosophy Review
of Books: new reviews online
To: "xmca list" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Message-ID: <91EA2C653A194A1A9C21A91310D6F4D9@BRUCEROBINSOPC>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="Windows-1252"
The first review of Andy's edition of Ilyenkov may be of interest to
xmcaers.
Bruce Robinson
----- Original Message -----
From: Sébastien Budgen
To: historicalmaterialism
Sent: Tuesday, August 02, 2011 4:53 PM
Subject: [historicalmaterialism] Marx and Philosophy Review of
Books: new reviews online
New reviews just published online in the Marx and Philosophy Review
of Books
· Levant on Ilyenkov’s The Ideal in Human Activity
· Sutton on Badiou on Wagner
· Ainley on Marx and Education
· Marshall on Löwy on Combined and Uneven Development
· Arfken on Critical Companion to Contemporary Marxism
· Carelton on Hobsbawm’s How to Change the World
New comments and discussion
New list of books for review
all at www.marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviewofbooks/
To receive notification of comments and of new reviews when they
appear, join the Marx and Philosophy Society email list: http://lists.topica.com/lists/mpslist
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Professor Sean Sayers,
Editor, Marx and Philosophy Review of Books
School of European Culture and Languages
University of Kent, Canterbury CT2 7NF, UK
Tel +44 1227-827513; Fax +44 1227-823641
http://www.marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviewofbooks/
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------------------------------
Message: 4
Date: Thu, 11 Aug 2011 19:26:24 -0700 (PDT)
From: David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>
Subject: [xmca] Imaginary Friends
To: Culture ActivityeXtended Mind <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Message-ID:
<1313115984.11432.YahooMailClassic@web110308.mail.gq1.yahoo.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
Gadzooks, TWO of my favorite hobby horses in one posting: Julian
Jaynes and imaginary friends. I don't want to fall between two
hobby horses; I get wobbly at the knees writing about even one of them
Â
I used to think of imaginary friends as what Vygotsky referred to
as a transitional neoformation: something that appears around age
7 or 8 and lasts until the the child is able to attach roles (which
are functional versions of imaginary friends) to actual people
(around twelve or thirteen).
Â
Vygotsky describes it like this:
Â
"Neoformations such as self love and self-evaulation remain, but the
symptoms of the crisis (affectation, posing) are transitional. In
the crisis at age seven, because of the fact that a differentiation
of the internal and external develops and intellectual experience
first appears, a sharp conflict of experiences also devleops. The
child who does not know which candy to choose--the bigger or the
sweeter--finds himself in a state of internal conflict even as he
vacillates. The internal conflict (contradiction of experiences and
selection of his own experiences) becomes possible only at this
time." (The Crisis at Seven, in "The Essential Vygotsky", p. 494).
Â
I still think that some imaginary friends are like this: something
that comes out of the same differentiation between internal and
external that gives rise to role play. Like me, the child hesitates
between two hobby horses: imaginary friends and real ones.
Â
The imaginary friend then "volatilizes" into abstract rule play and
conceptual thinking (particularly the concept of "me" "myself" and
"I"). Just as the child learns to rise to the concrete, by abstract
away the rule from the role in instances of game play, the child
learns to attach the ideal figure to the behavior of actual people.
This is particularly true of imaginary friends connected with
adolescent diary keeping (e.g. Anne Frank's imaginary friend
"Kitty").
Â
My wife's imaginary friend (also associated with keeping a diary),
for example, was called "Yi Lin" or "One Forest". As an adolescent
she later changed her name (which is the Chinese equivalent of "Jane
Smith") into "Spring Thunder", and although she insists that she did
this for political reasons ("Spring Thunder" has a certain Cultural
Revolution ring to it in Chinese) it seems to me that it is more of
a continuation of the naturalistic imagery we see in "One Forest".
Â
But I read a book recently ("Imaginary Companions and the Children
Who Create Them", by Marjorie Taylor, OUP 1999) which suggests that
imaginary companions often appear MUCH earlier than I thought they
did (as early as three or four years of age).
Â
So it seems to me that they are not just reifications of imaginary
play or ideal reconstructions of real people; they might be
connected to the child's (very early) discovery of things like
television, fiction, and the child's attempt to reproduce them in
diaries (as WRITTEN self-directed speech).
Â
("One Forest"Â is also a homophone of a name of a popular magazine
in China which publishes translations from abroad.)
Â
David Kellogg
Â
Â
--- On Thu, 8/11/11, Rod Parker-Rees <R.Parker-Rees@plymouth.ac.uk>
wrote:
From: Rod Parker-Rees <R.Parker-Rees@plymouth.ac.uk>
Subject: RE: [xmca] Living metaphor and conventionalized language
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Date: Thursday, August 11, 2011, 2:19 AM
Hi David,
I hope you won't mind if I reply to just one little corner of your
very eloquent message (I have not been able to keep pace with recent
discussions).
I am particularly interested in very early communication which, I
think, has much more of the 'meaty sensuousness' about it - not yet
pared and polished to the clear austerity of a sign system. It
occurred to me that 'internalised' verbal thought 'usually' involves
a considerable degree of paring and polishing - we perhaps learn to
think with concepts rather than simply to 'relive' relational
experiences in all their meaty sensuousness. I wondered, then,
whether the fairly widespread incidence of 'imaginary friends' might
be understood, at least to some extent, in terms of an early
reluctance to forego the relational richness of interpersonal
communication as this comes to be 'internalised'. The feeling of
relating to another person is importantly different from the feeling
of 'having a thought' and may, at many levels, feel more satisfying.
This could lead on to echoes of Julian Jayne's argument about the
relative recency of our 'ability' to recognise
thoughts as internal 'products' of our own minds (how much our minds
are indeed our own is the question here!) but also into dangerous
territory where our preferred imaginary friend is omnipotent.
Being 'in' relation with another person is an altogether richer,
more complicated and sensually elaborate experience even than
remembering or thinking about being with someone and I think a lot
of the yearning of poetry relates to this sense of the gates of
perception being clouded by knowledge - once you have tasted the
forbidden fruit there is no going back (or at least no easy going
back - some people devote their lives to contemplation, meditation,
prayer and other ways of trying to still the distracting ruckus of
'roof-brain chatter'.
All the best,
Rod
________________________________________
From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu] On
Behalf Of David Kellogg [vaughndogblack@yahoo.com]
Sent: 10 August 2011 16:27
To: Culture ActivityeXtended Mind
Subject: Re: [xmca] Living metaphor and conventionalized language
Did I use the word "system"? I suppose I did. What I really mean is
what Halliday calls "meaning potential", the way that a traffic
light can potentially be red or yellow or green. It is what we might
call leaving things that we could say unsaid.
I guess I think of a system as being just a set of options, you
know, like a traffic light, or a dictionary entry or the system of
tense or negation. It's the semiotic resources that Mommy and Daddy
provide you with, the set of metaphors that have already been made
with the language, what Vygotsky calls signification.
One of the key unresolved problems in CHAT (which you can see, for
example, in the way Ratner disagrees with Wertsch, and even in the
early disagreements between Vygotsky and Leontiev over "activity"
and "semiosis") is how culture gets "in": is it "internalized" or is
it "appropriated"? Is it somehow co-constructed, by the individual
on the one hand and the society on the other?
Of course, BOTH "internalization" and "appropriation" are metaphors.
I don't flee from the "internalization" metaphor the way that Martin
does, partly because I think of it as referring not to a body but as
to a nation, a country, a city, a community, a family...or some
particle thereof. In this sense (a sense which I suppose is better
captured by "interiorization" than by "internalization", just as
"reflection" is better captured by "refraction") there is no
duality; when you move from one nation to another you do not change
worlds, nor do you change nations when you move from one city to
another.
But I do have a problem--I think that we can't just get culture into
the picture by referring to cultural artefacts like signs and tools.
The map is not the territory, and human relations are not, in
essence, about signs and tools; they are about flesh and blood other
people. It is here that I think distinguishing between meaning
potential in a cultural artefact and the actual meaning making that
goes on between flesh and blood persons is important, not least
because BOTH of them develop and develop each other in a way that's
not really explicable by just looking at the artefacts themselves.
Consider, for example, the dictionary as a cultural artefact. You
know, in the eighteenth century, dictionaries were a little like
Bartlett's today. They did contain definitions for the really thick-
skulled (there was a newly literate middle class that had to have
everything spelled out) but the definitions were sometimes rather
whimsical (e.g. "pensioner: a man whose flattery is repaid with
insolence") and the main thing people read them for was the learned
quotations and snappy put-downs that were provided as examples
(hence Johnson's dictionary and of course the "Devil's Dictionary"
of Ambrose Bierce).
So the function of a dictionary was not to systematize the language
but rather to provide resources for sense. It was to make you sound
witty and creative and original in the chocolate houses. I suppose
it must have been rather annoying that dictionaries were so widely
read, because it meant that many people in your chocolate house
would know the joke before you told it, or, heaven forfend, try to
tell the same joke themselves.But of course dictionaries WERE widely
read, and they became guides to meaning potential rather than a set
of instances of actual wit.
In the late twentieth century, though, the pendulum began to swing
the other way, because CoBuild and other dictionaries began to
inspect computer corpora of actual uses, and they discovered (for
example) that it is much more common to say, metaphorically, that
you "run a business" than concretely, that you run a hundred yards
on your own two feet. To me, though, all that means is that the new
systemic "meaning potential" has to start with running a business,
and that what I did this morning for exercise was a kind of
metaphorical extension of running a business to my muscles and
achilles tendons.
There is a good poem about the relationship between meaning
potential and actual meaning by Cecil Day-Lewis. It's metaphorical,
of course! He begins by defining a sign for us, and pointing out
that a tree is a sign too (because it stands for itself, or if you
want to be physiological about it, it produces an image on our
retina which is interpreted by our brains as a tree.) But it's a
sign without a system, without much unrealized meaning potential.
This tree outside my window here,
Naked, umbrageous, fresh or sere,
Has neither chance nor will to be
Anything but a linden tree,
Even if its branches grew to span
The continent; for nature’s plan
Insists that infinite extension
Shall create no new dimension.
From the first snuggling of the seed
In earth, a branchy form’s decreed.
You have to admit the Creator was original. He was certainly
forceful in his creativity. But rather limited, when you look at it;
in His later career He kept repeating Himself with only minor
variations, and most of what was new was not very good. Human
creativity is a different matter!.
Unwritten poems loom as if
They’d cover the whole of earthly life.
But each one, growing, learns to trim its
Impulse and meaning to the limits
Roughed out by me, then modified
In its own truth’s expanding light.
A poem, settling to its form,
Finds there’s no jailer, but a norm
Of conduct, and a fitting sphere
Which stops it wandering everywhere.
Human creativity, unlike nature, is an embarrassment of riches; we
need rhyme (which you notice Day-Lewis adheres to quite rigorously)
and meter to keep us honest. As Adorno says, the bourgeoisie would
like life to be austere and art voluptuous, but we would really be
much better off with things the other way around: life full of
actual meaning, and art full of things left unsaid.
Now here Day-Lewis notes that there is a third thing--and it is the
thing that Bakhtin wrote almost exclusively about, something that is
neither system of meaning nor instance of meaning making, something
that is neither signification nor purely individual sense: it is
human relationships in all their complex, meaty sensuousness.
Are interpersonal relations more like intra-personal relations or
are they more like societal relations? Are they more intra-
psychological or more trans-psychological? Are more things to be
left said or unsaid? Half said?
Are these going to be austere or voluptuous? Will they depend on
potential or upon realization?
As for you, my love, it’s harder,
Though neither prisoner nor warder,
Not to desire you both: for love
Illudes us we can lightly move
Into a new dimension, where
The bounds of being disappear
And we make one impassioned cell.
So wanting to be all in all
Each for each, a man and a woman
Defy the limits of what’s human.
Voluptuous then, and almost intrapersonal--but this is a romantic,
young person's view. Day-Lewis wrote this late in life, after many
years of what we would have to call development. Human development
is not like natural development; it means creating more potential
rather than simply realizing it (and thus leaving less unsaid).
But when we cease to play explorers
And become settlers, clear before us
Lies the next need – to re-define
The boundary between yours and mine;
Else, one stays prisoner, one goes free.
Each to his own identity
Grown back, shall prove our love’s expression
Purer for this limitation.
Love’s essence, like a poem’s, shall spring
From the not saying everything.
David Kellogg
--- On Wed, 8/10/11, Larry Purss <lpscholar2@gmail.com> wrote:
From: Larry Purss <lpscholar2@gmail.com>
Subject: [xmca] Living metaphor and conventionalized language
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Date: Wednesday, August 10, 2011, 10:59 AM
Hi David Ke
Your response to Nickolai mentioned the constant movement of living
metaphor
and language as a conventionalized SYSTEM. This seems to me to be
one more
example of this living GENERATIVE movement of consciousness.
Larry
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------------------------------
Message: 5
Date: Fri, 12 Aug 2011 13:04:51 +1000
From: Helen Grimmett <helen.grimmett@monash.edu>
Subject: Re: [xmca] Imaginary Friends
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Message-ID:
<CAGzL+FJ0Y1fY0R6AvqWbE-YpZL9dFNf+eDrTP+eo012v1-B8vA@mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252
Hi David,
I can attest to the fact that imaginary friends do appear as early
as three.
When my daughter was 3 we travelled around Australia in a motorhome,
apparently accompanied by an extra imaginary girl (whose name
escapes me), a
pair of imaginary twins called Hog and Sock (not sure what gender!)
and a
fluffy white imaginary dog called Maddi. I'm sure there were people
right
across the country scratching their heads as we had to wait while
Hog and
Sock had a turn on the swings before we could get back in the truck,
and a
very confused waitress in Darwin who got snapped at by a 3 year old
when she
tried to take all the extra (empty) chairs away from our table to
give us
more space! I sometimes wonder if this was a coping mechanism Natalie
developed to deal with the fact that we were in a new place every
couple of
days and life was suddenly quite unpredictable, although I think
these extra
friends had appeared even before we left on the trip. I am sure it
helped
her gain some measure of control over her (and our) life. If it wasn't
inconveniencing anyone we were happy to pander to the imaginary
friends, but
fortunately she was realistic enough to realise that the needs of real
humans came first (i.e. if someone else was waiting for the swing or
needed
the empty chairs). When you are living in a confined space for 3
months you
do whatever it takes to keep everyone happy!
cheers,
Helen
On 12 August 2011 12:26, David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>
wrote:
Gadzooks, TWO of my favorite hobby horses in one posting: Julian
Jaynes and
imaginary friends. I don't want to fall between two hobby horses; I
get
wobbly at the knees writing about even one of them
I used to think of imaginary friends as what Vygotsky referred to
as a
transitional neoformation: something that appears around age 7 or 8
and
lasts until the the child is able to attach roles (which are
functional
versions of imaginary friends) to actual people (around twelve or
thirteen).
Vygotsky describes it like this:
"Neoformations such as self love and self-evaulation remain, but the
symptoms of the crisis (affectation, posing) are transitional. In
the crisis
at age seven, because of the fact that a differentiation of the
internal and
external develops and intellectual experience first appears, a sharp
conflict of experiences also devleops. The child who does not know
which
candy to choose--the bigger or the sweeter--finds himself in a
state of
internal conflict even as he vacillates. The internal conflict
(contradiction of experiences and selection of his own experiences)
becomes
possible only at this time." (The Crisis at Seven, in "The Essential
Vygotsky", p. 494).
I still think that some imaginary friends are like this: something
that
comes out of the same differentiation between internal and external
that
gives rise to role play. Like me, the child hesitates between two
hobby
horses: imaginary friends and real ones.
The imaginary friend then "volatilizes" into abstract rule play and
conceptual thinking (particularly the concept of "me" "myself" and
"I").
Just as the child learns to rise to the concrete, by abstract away
the rule
from the role in instances of game play, the child learns to attach
the ideal figure to the behavior of actual people. This is
particularly true
of imaginary friends connected with adolescent diary keeping (e.g.
Anne
Frank's imaginary friend "Kitty").
My wife's imaginary friend (also associated with keeping a diary),
for
example, was called "Yi Lin" or "One Forest". As an adolescent she
later
changed her name (which is the Chinese equivalent of "Jane Smith")
into
"Spring Thunder", and although she insists that she did this for
political
reasons ("Spring Thunder" has a certain Cultural Revolution ring to
it in
Chinese) it seems to me that it is more of a continuation of the
naturalistic imagery we see in "One Forest".
But I read a book recently ("Imaginary Companions and the Children
Who
Create Them", by Marjorie Taylor, OUP 1999) which suggests that
imaginary
companions often appear MUCH earlier than I thought they did (as
early as
three or four years of age).
So it seems to me that they are not just reifications of imaginary
play or
ideal reconstructions of real people; they might be connected to
the child's
(very early) discovery of things like television, fiction, and the
child's
attempt to reproduce them in diaries (as WRITTEN self-directed
speech).
("One Forest" is also a homophone of a name of a popular magazine
in China
which publishes translations from abroad.)
David Kellogg
--- On Thu, 8/11/11, Rod Parker-Rees <R.Parker-Rees@plymouth.ac.uk>
wrote:
From: Rod Parker-Rees <R.Parker-Rees@plymouth.ac.uk>
Subject: RE: [xmca] Living metaphor and conventionalized language
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Date: Thursday, August 11, 2011, 2:19 AM
Hi David,
I hope you won't mind if I reply to just one little corner of your
very
eloquent message (I have not been able to keep pace with recent
discussions).
I am particularly interested in very early communication which, I
think,
has much more of the 'meaty sensuousness' about it - not yet pared
and
polished to the clear austerity of a sign system. It occurred to me
that
'internalised' verbal thought 'usually' involves a considerable
degree of
paring and polishing - we perhaps learn to think with concepts
rather than
simply to 'relive' relational experiences in all their meaty
sensuousness. I
wondered, then, whether the fairly widespread incidence of 'imaginary
friends' might be understood, at least to some extent, in terms of
an early
reluctance to forego the relational richness of interpersonal
communication
as this comes to be 'internalised'. The feeling of relating to
another
person is importantly different from the feeling of 'having a
thought' and
may, at many levels, feel more satisfying. This could lead on to
echoes of
Julian Jayne's argument about the relative recency of our 'ability'
to
recognise
thoughts as internal 'products' of our own minds (how much our
minds are
indeed our own is the question here!) but also into dangerous
territory
where our preferred imaginary friend is omnipotent.
Being 'in' relation with another person is an altogether richer, more
complicated and sensually elaborate experience even than
remembering or
thinking about being with someone and I think a lot of the yearning
of
poetry relates to this sense of the gates of perception being
clouded by
knowledge - once you have tasted the forbidden fruit there is no
going back
(or at least no easy going back - some people devote their lives to
contemplation, meditation, prayer and other ways of trying to still
the
distracting ruckus of 'roof-brain chatter'.
All the best,
Rod
________________________________________
From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu] On
Behalf
Of David Kellogg [vaughndogblack@yahoo.com]
Sent: 10 August 2011 16:27
To: Culture ActivityeXtended Mind
Subject: Re: [xmca] Living metaphor and conventionalized language
Did I use the word "system"? I suppose I did. What I really mean is
what
Halliday calls "meaning potential", the way that a traffic light can
potentially be red or yellow or green. It is what we might call
leaving
things that we could say unsaid.
I guess I think of a system as being just a set of options, you
know, like
a traffic light, or a dictionary entry or the system of tense or
negation.
It's the semiotic resources that Mommy and Daddy provide you with,
the set
of metaphors that have already been made with the language, what
Vygotsky
calls signification.
One of the key unresolved problems in CHAT (which you can see, for
example,
in the way Ratner disagrees with Wertsch, and even in the early
disagreements between Vygotsky and Leontiev over "activity" and
"semiosis")
is how culture gets "in": is it "internalized" or is it
"appropriated"? Is
it somehow co-constructed, by the individual on the one hand and
the society
on the other?
Of course, BOTH "internalization" and "appropriation" are
metaphors. I
don't flee from the "internalization" metaphor the way that Martin
does,
partly because I think of it as referring not to a body but as to a
nation,
a country, a city, a community, a family...or some particle
thereof. In this
sense (a sense which I suppose is better captured by
"interiorization" than
by "internalization", just as "reflection" is better captured by
"refraction") there is no duality; when you move from one nation to
another
you do not change worlds, nor do you change nations when you move
from one
city to another.
But I do have a problem--I think that we can't just get culture
into the
picture by referring to cultural artefacts like signs and tools.
The map is
not the territory, and human relations are not, in essence, about
signs and
tools; they are about flesh and blood other people. It is here that
I think
distinguishing between meaning potential in a cultural artefact and
the
actual meaning making that goes on between flesh and blood persons is
important, not least because BOTH of them develop and develop each
other in
a way that's not really explicable by just looking at the artefacts
themselves.
Consider, for example, the dictionary as a cultural artefact. You
know, in
the eighteenth century, dictionaries were a little like Bartlett's
today.
They did contain definitions for the really thick-skulled (there
was a newly
literate middle class that had to have everything spelled out) but
the
definitions were sometimes rather whimsical (e.g. "pensioner: a man
whose
flattery is repaid with insolence") and the main thing people read
them for
was the learned quotations and snappy put-downs that were provided as
examples (hence Johnson's dictionary and of course the "Devil's
Dictionary"
of Ambrose Bierce).
So the function of a dictionary was not to systematize the language
but
rather to provide resources for sense. It was to make you sound
witty and
creative and original in the chocolate houses. I suppose it must
have been
rather annoying that dictionaries were so widely read, because it
meant that
many people in your chocolate house would know the joke before you
told it,
or, heaven forfend, try to tell the same joke themselves.But of
course
dictionaries WERE widely read, and they became guides to meaning
potential
rather than a set of instances of actual wit.
In the late twentieth century, though, the pendulum began to swing
the
other way, because CoBuild and other dictionaries began to inspect
computer
corpora of actual uses, and they discovered (for example) that it
is much
more common to say, metaphorically, that you "run a business" than
concretely, that you run a hundred yards on your own two feet. To me,
though, all that means is that the new systemic "meaning potential"
has to
start with running a business, and that what I did this morning for
exercise
was a kind of metaphorical extension of running a business to my
muscles and
achilles tendons.
There is a good poem about the relationship between meaning
potential and
actual meaning by Cecil Day-Lewis. It's metaphorical, of course! He
begins
by defining a sign for us, and pointing out that a tree is a sign too
(because it stands for itself, or if you want to be physiological
about it,
it produces an image on our retina which is interpreted by our
brains as a
tree.) But it's a sign without a system, without much unrealized
meaning
potential.
This tree outside my window here,
Naked, umbrageous, fresh or sere,
Has neither chance nor will to be
Anything but a linden tree,
Even if its branches grew to span
The continent; for nature’s plan
Insists that infinite extension
Shall create no new dimension.
From the first snuggling of the seed
In earth, a branchy form’s decreed.
You have to admit the Creator was original. He was certainly
forceful in
his creativity. But rather limited, when you look at it; in His
later career
He kept repeating Himself with only minor variations, and most of
what was
new was not very good. Human creativity is a different matter!.
Unwritten poems loom as if
They’d cover the whole of earthly life.
But each one, growing, learns to trim its
Impulse and meaning to the limits
Roughed out by me, then modified
In its own truth’s expanding light.
A poem, settling to its form,
Finds there’s no jailer, but a norm
Of conduct, and a fitting sphere
Which stops it wandering everywhere.
Human creativity, unlike nature, is an embarrassment of riches; we
need
rhyme (which you notice Day-Lewis adheres to quite rigorously) and
meter to
keep us honest. As Adorno says, the bourgeoisie would like life to be
austere and art voluptuous, but we would really be much better off
with
things the other way around: life full of actual meaning, and art
full of
things left unsaid.
Now here Day-Lewis notes that there is a third thing--and it is the
thing
that Bakhtin wrote almost exclusively about, something that is
neither
system of meaning nor instance of meaning making, something that is
neither
signification nor purely individual sense: it is human
relationships in all
their complex, meaty sensuousness.
Are interpersonal relations more like intra-personal relations or
are they
more like societal relations? Are they more intra-psychological or
more
trans-psychological? Are more things to be left said or unsaid?
Half said?
Are these going to be austere or voluptuous? Will they depend on
potential
or upon realization?
As for you, my love, it’s harder,
Though neither prisoner nor warder,
Not to desire you both: for love
Illudes us we can lightly move
Into a new dimension, where
The bounds of being disappear
And we make one impassioned cell.
So wanting to be all in all
Each for each, a man and a woman
Defy the limits of what’s human.
Voluptuous then, and almost intrapersonal--but this is a romantic,
young
person's view. Day-Lewis wrote this late in life, after many years
of what
we would have to call development. Human development is not like
natural
development; it means creating more potential rather than simply
realizing
it (and thus leaving less unsaid).
But when we cease to play explorers
And become settlers, clear before us
Lies the next need – to re-define
The boundary between yours and mine;
Else, one stays prisoner, one goes free.
Each to his own identity
Grown back, shall prove our love’s expression
Purer for this limitation.
Love’s essence, like a poem’s, shall spring
From the not saying everything.
David Kellogg
--- On Wed, 8/10/11, Larry Purss <lpscholar2@gmail.com> wrote:
From: Larry Purss <lpscholar2@gmail.com>
Subject: [xmca] Living metaphor and conventionalized language
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Date: Wednesday, August 10, 2011, 10:59 AM
Hi David Ke
Your response to Nickolai mentioned the constant movement of living
metaphor
and language as a conventionalized SYSTEM. This seems to me to be
one more
example of this living GENERATIVE movement of consciousness.
Larry
__________________________________________
_____
xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
__________________________________________
_____
xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
__________________________________________
_____
xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
__________________________________________
_____
xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
--
Helen Grimmett
PhD Student, Teaching Associate
Faculty of Education
Monash University, Peninsula Campus
------------------------------
Message: 6
Date: Thu, 11 Aug 2011 20:54:03 -0700 (PDT)
From: David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: [xmca] Living metaphor and conventionalized language
To: Culture ActivityeXtended Mind <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Message-ID:
<1313121243.6209.YahooMailClassic@web110315.mail.gq1.yahoo.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
Dear Rob:
Â
Thanks for the kind words, and above all for the Wallace Stevens,
neither fragment of which I knew, but whose rather self-defeatingÂ
sentiments I am very fond of (for reasons that actually do have
something to do with the reasons that I will probably never be able
to unload any of this stuff in the Journal of Aesthetic Education or
any other peer-reviewed journal).
Â
I like to think of Stevens as the greatest insurance agent who
every wrote poetry about it. Insurance companies make money by
betting with you that you are wrong when you wake up in the night
and imagine that something absolutely catastrophic is going to
happen to you in the morning.
Â
But what happens when an insurance company issues a fire policy on
its own headquarters? In both fragments you cite, Stevens picks up
where Blake leaves off:
Â
Mock on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau;
Mock on, mock on; 'tis all in vain!
You throw the sand against the wind,
And the wind blows it back again.
And every sand becomes a gem
Reflected in the beams divine;
Blown back they blind the mocking eye,
But still in Israel's paths they shine.
The Atoms of Democritus
And Newton's Particles of Light
Are sands upon the Red Sea shore,
Where Israel's tents do shine so bright.Â
Blake would never bother to take out life insurance on Israel's
paths and tents; he believes in their eternal life, and he looks
forward, gleefully, to collecting on Voltaire and Rousseau.
Â
I think Stevens is not so sure. When we read "Anecdote of a Jar" or
"The Idea of Order" we can see that he believes that any human
artefact imposes reasons and a kind of order in the place of chaotic
nature.
Â
The way a Tibetan woman dresses, as she walks "korla" around the
Jokhang Temple in Lhasa, imposes a clockwork regularity on the whole
of existence. Vygotsky? Oh, I think there is no question about it.
He would have bet with Voltaire and Rousseau against Israel's
paths and tents (probably wearing a square hat or some kind of
phylacteries).
Â
There is a good defense of Vygotsky's rationalism in Bakhurst's
article "Vygotsky's Demons" (in the Cambridge Companion), and I
agree with it. The only really rationalist demon that Bakhurst
refuses to defend is the one that troubles Mike from time to time,
the idea that cultures must be said to be different, and that some
of them must be said to be more developed than others.
Â
Actually, even this seems defensible to me, but we have to face the
fact that "we" will probably belong to the senescent, post-
development others rather than to the most developed. Take, for
example, the crudest possible quantitative measure of aÂ
"developed" society, namely the average life expectancy it offers to
its newborn children. In China, the average life expectancy in Tibet
(at least in the rural areas) is in the thirties and forties, while
the rest of the country has easily twice that.
Â
Life expectancy fell when Russia re-established capitalism, and of
course it is falling in the USA, and it seems to me this too
suggests something about their changing level of social and
cultural development. So on the one hand, development is real,
substantial, and it does apply not just to individual lives but also
to those of cultures and societies. And on other, unlike individual
development, it can really never said to be over and therefore there
can't be any absolute sense in which any race has won the race.
Â
I think Stevens would have felt the contradiction between those two
statements, but Vygotsky would have been able to explain it. Wearing
a sombrero!
Â
David Kellogg
Â
--- On Thu, 8/11/11, Robert Lake <boblake@georgiasouthern.edu> wrote:
From: Robert Lake <boblake@georgiasouthern.edu>
Subject: Re: [xmca] Living metaphor and conventionalized language
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Date: Thursday, August 11, 2011, 7:04 AM
David Kellogg,
Thank-you for this wonderful posting.
From what I have been reading of your work
for over a year now, writing like this
represents your best work.
I recommend you submit something to the
*Journal of Aesthetic Education.*
Thanks for the poetry and your commentary.
I have never read anything by Cecil Day-Lewis and now I must have
more.
Here are the last two stanzas -from Wallace Stevens........
*Six Significant Landscapes*
I include the first one for the sheer beauty of metaphor and the
last one
just for fun.
Robert Lake
Not all the knives of the lamp-posts,
Nor the chisels of the long streets,
Nor the mallets of the domes
And high towers,
Can carve
What one star can carve,
Shining through the grape-leaves.
Rationalists, wearing square hats,
Think, in square rooms,
Looking at the floor,
Looking at the ceiling.
They confine themselves
To right-angled triangles.
If they tried rhomboids,
Cones, waving lines, ellipses --
As, for example, the ellipse of the half-moon --
Rationalists would wear sombreros.
On Thu, Aug 11, 2011 at 12:27 AM, David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com
wrote:
Did I use the word "system"? I suppose I did. What I really mean is
what
Halliday calls "meaning potential", the way that a traffic light can
potentially be red or yellow or green. It is what we might call
leaving
things that we could say unsaid.
I guess I think of a system as being just a set of options, you
know, like
a traffic light, or a dictionary entry or the system of tense or
negation.
It's the semiotic resources that Mommy and Daddy provide you with,
the set
of metaphors that have already been made with the language, what
Vygotsky
calls signification.
One of the key unresolved problems in CHAT (which you can see, for
example,
in the way Ratner disagrees with Wertsch, and even in the early
disagreements between Vygotsky and Leontiev over "activity" and
"semiosis")
is how culture gets "in": is it "internalized" or is it
"appropriated"? Is
it somehow co-constructed, by the individual on the one hand and
the society
on the other?
Of course, BOTH "internalization" and "appropriation" are
metaphors. I
don't flee from the "internalization" metaphor the way that Martin
does,
partly because I think of it as referring not to a body but as to a
nation,
a country, a city, a community, a family...or some particle
thereof. In this
sense (a sense which I suppose is better captured by
"interiorization" than
by "internalization", just as "reflection" is better captured by
"refraction") there is no duality; when you move from one nation to
another
you do not change worlds, nor do you change nations when you move
from one
city to another.
But I do have a problem--I think that we can't just get culture
into the
picture by referring to cultural artefacts like signs and tools.
The map is
not the territory, and human relations are not, in essence, about
signs and
tools; they are about flesh and blood other people. It is here that
I think
distinguishing between meaning potential in a cultural artefact and
the
actual meaning making that goes on between flesh and blood persons is
important, not least because BOTH of them develop and develop each
other in
a way that's not really explicable by just looking at the artefacts
themselves.
Consider, for example, the dictionary as a cultural artefact. You
know, in
the eighteenth century, dictionaries were a little like Bartlett's
today.
They did contain definitions for the really thick-skulled (there
was a newly
literate middle class that had to have everything spelled out) but
the
definitions were sometimes rather whimsical (e.g. "pensioner: a man
whose
flattery is repaid with insolence") and the main thing people read
them for
was the learned quotations and snappy put-downs that were provided as
examples (hence Johnson's dictionary and of course the "Devil's
Dictionary"
of Ambrose Bierce).
So the function of a dictionary was not to systematize the language
but
rather to provide resources for sense. It was to make you sound
witty and
creative and original in the chocolate houses. I suppose it must
have been
rather annoying that dictionaries were so widely read, because it
meant that
many people in your chocolate house would know the joke before you
told it,
or, heaven forfend, try to tell the same joke themselves.But of
course
dictionaries WERE widely read, and they became guides to meaning
potential
rather than a set of instances of actual wit.
In the late twentieth century, though, the pendulum began to swing
the
other way, because CoBuild and other dictionaries began to inspect
computer
corpora of actual uses, and they discovered (for example) that it
is much
more common to say, metaphorically, that you "run a business" than
concretely, that you run a hundred yards on your own two feet. To me,
though, all that means is that the new systemic "meaning potential"
has to
start with running a business, and that what I did this morning for
exercise
was a kind of metaphorical extension of running a business to my
muscles and
achilles tendons.
There is a good poem about the relationship between meaning
potential and
actual meaning by Cecil Day-Lewis. It's metaphorical, of course! He
begins
by defining a sign for us, and pointing out that a tree is a sign too
(because it stands for itself, or if you want to be physiological
about it,
it produces an image on our retina which is interpreted by our
brains as a
tree.) But it's a sign without a system, without much unrealized
meaning
potential.
This tree outside my window here,
Naked, umbrageous, fresh or sere,
Has neither chance nor will to be
Anything but a linden tree,
Even if its branches grew to span
The continent; for nature’s plan
Insists that infinite extension
Shall create no new dimension.
From the first snuggling of the seed
In earth, a branchy form’s decreed.
You have to admit the Creator was original. He was certainly
forceful in
his creativity. But rather limited, when you look at it; in His
later career
He kept repeating Himself with only minor variations, and most of
what was
new was not very good. Human creativity is a different matter!.
Unwritten poems loom as if
They’d cover the whole of earthly life.
But each one, growing, learns to trim its
Impulse and meaning to the limits
Roughed out by me, then modified
In its own truth’s expanding light.
A poem, settling to its form,
Finds there’s no jailer, but a norm
Of conduct, and a fitting sphere
Which stops it wandering everywhere.
Human creativity, unlike nature, is an embarrassment of riches; we
need
rhyme (which you notice Day-Lewis adheres to quite rigorously) and
meter to
keep us honest. As Adorno says, the bourgeoisie would like life to be
austere and art voluptuous, but we would really be much better off
with
things the other way around: life full of actual meaning, and art
full of
things left unsaid.
Now here Day-Lewis notes that there is a third thing--and it is the
thing
that Bakhtin wrote almost exclusively about, something that is
neither
system of meaning nor instance of meaning making, something that is
neither
signification nor purely individual sense: it is human
relationships in all
their complex, meaty sensuousness.
Are interpersonal relations more like intra-personal relations or
are they
more like societal relations? Are they more intra-psychological or
more
trans-psychological? Are more things to be left said or unsaid?
Half said?
Are these going to be austere or voluptuous? Will they depend on
potential
or upon realization?
As for you, my love, it’s harder,
Though neither prisoner nor warder,
Not to desire you both: for love
Illudes us we can lightly move
Into a new dimension, where
The bounds of being disappear
And we make one impassioned cell.
So wanting to be all in all
Each for each, a man and a woman
Defy the limits of what’s human.
Voluptuous then, and almost intrapersonal--but this is a romantic,
young
person's view. Day-Lewis wrote this late in life, after many years
of what
we would have to call development. Human development is not like
natural
development; it means creating more potential rather than simply
realizing
it (and thus leaving less unsaid).
 But when we cease to play explorers
And become settlers, clear before us
Lies the next need – to re-define
The boundary between yours and mine;
Else, one stays prisoner, one goes free.
Each to his own identity
Grown back, shall prove our love’s expression
Purer for this limitation.
Love’s essence, like a poem’s, shall spring
From the not saying everything.
David Kellogg
--- On Wed, 8/10/11, Larry Purss <lpscholar2@gmail.com> wrote:
From: Larry Purss <lpscholar2@gmail.com>
Subject: [xmca] Living metaphor and conventionalized language
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Date: Wednesday, August 10, 2011, 10:59 AM
Hi David Ke
Your response to Nickolai mentioned the constant movement of living
metaphor
and language as a conventionalized SYSTEM. This seems to me to be
one more
example of this living GENERATIVE movement of consciousness.
Larry
__________________________________________
_____
xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
__________________________________________
_____
xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
--
*Robert Lake Ed.D.
*Assistant Professor
Social Foundations of Education
Dept. of Curriculum, Foundations, and Reading
Georgia Southern University
P. O. Box 8144
Phone: (912) 478-5125
Fax: (912) 478-5382
Statesboro, GAÂ 30460
*Democracy must be born anew in every generation, and education is its
midwife.*
*-*John Dewey.
__________________________________________
_____
xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
------------------------------
Message: 7
Date: Fri, 12 Aug 2011 09:13:49 -0400
From: Robert Lake <boblake@georgiasouthern.edu>
Subject: Re: [xmca] Imaginary Friends
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>,
helen.grimmett@monash.edu, vaughndogblack@yahoo.com
Message-ID:
<CAGivucn1v0YnQmS21M4+TBiz2Oifo4qU8Ab_QFv2pqFQA+vFCg@mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Dear Helen, David, Larry and all,
I appreciated the postings about imaginary friends. A few weeks ago,
I wrote
this for
a section of* Vygotsky on Education Primer* for Peter Lang
Publishers, which
should be out in March of 2012.
In it I cite Laura Berk and add a story from a friend (cited with
permission).*
*
Berk shares another powerful example of private speech at work (or
should I
say at play) which can be seen in the form of children creating
imaginary
playmates. Berk sees this as much more than self entertainment for
bored
children. “Dialogues with make-believe partners may serve a
special coping
function, offering a safe context in which to practice social skills
with
nonthreatening “playmates†before transferring them to the
real world of
peer playâ€(2004. p.96). Some parents and teachers have bought
into the idea
that such activities should be restricted or stopped altogether.
One story comes from two sisters who shared an imaginary playmate
named
Speedy Harbor. These two girls were often cared for by their aunt
since the
parent’s work involved quite a bit of travel. The aunt decided
that the
girls were spending too much time with the imaginary playmate so one
day she
told the girls that Speedy Harbor had died. Needless to say they
were really
upset by this news so they decided to have a funeral for Speedy
Harbor by
placing him in a shoebox and burying him. Years later one of the
sisters
told this story to her classmates in an undergraduate psychology
class and
of course the professor was horrified.
According to Berk, “25-45 percent of 3-7 year olds have at least
one
imaginary friend, and many more than one†(ibid, p.97). Other
estimates are
higher. For example Taylor, Carlson, Maring, Gerow,& Charley (2004)
reported
that “Overall, 65% of children up to the age of 7 had imaginary
companions
at some point during their livesâ€(p.1,abstract). Further
research is needed
in this area but as of this moment in 2011, it is clear that imaginary
friends for the most part play a positive role in social processes of
development and language internalization.
Have a great weekend and tell your imaginary friends I said hi!
Robert Lake
* *
* *
*Berk, L.(1992). Children’s private speech:An overview of theory
and the
status of research. In R.M. Diaz & L. Berk (Eds.), Private speech:
From
social interaction to self-regulation. Hillsdale, NJ : Lawrence
Erlbaum
Associates.*
* *
* *
* *
*Berk, L. (2004). Awakening Children's Minds: How Parents and
Teachers Can
Make a Difference. Cary, NC. Oxford University Press. *
* *
On Thu, Aug 11, 2011 at 11:04 PM, Helen Grimmett
<helen.grimmett@monash.edu>wrote:
Hi David,
I can attest to the fact that imaginary friends do appear as early as
three.
When my daughter was 3 we travelled around Australia in a motorhome,
apparently accompanied by an extra imaginary girl (whose name
escapes me),
a
pair of imaginary twins called Hog and Sock (not sure what gender!)
and a
fluffy white imaginary dog called Maddi. I'm sure there were people
right
across the country scratching their heads as we had to wait while
Hog and
Sock had a turn on the swings before we could get back in the
truck, and a
very confused waitress in Darwin who got snapped at by a 3 year old
when
she
tried to take all the extra (empty) chairs away from our table to
give us
more space! I sometimes wonder if this was a coping mechanism Natalie
developed to deal with the fact that we were in a new place every
couple of
days and life was suddenly quite unpredictable, although I think
these
extra
friends had appeared even before we left on the trip. I am sure it
helped
her gain some measure of control over her (and our) life. If it
wasn't
inconveniencing anyone we were happy to pander to the imaginary
friends,
but
fortunately she was realistic enough to realise that the needs of
real
humans came first (i.e. if someone else was waiting for the swing
or needed
the empty chairs). When you are living in a confined space for 3
months you
do whatever it takes to keep everyone happy!
cheers,
Helen
On 12 August 2011 12:26, David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>
wrote:
Gadzooks, TWO of my favorite hobby horses in one posting: Julian
Jaynes
and
imaginary friends. I don't want to fall between two hobby horses;
I get
wobbly at the knees writing about even one of them
I used to think of imaginary friends as what Vygotsky referred to
as a
transitional neoformation: something that appears around age 7 or
8 and
lasts until the the child is able to attach roles (which are
functional
versions of imaginary friends) to actual people (around twelve or
thirteen).
Vygotsky describes it like this:
"Neoformations such as self love and self-evaulation remain, but the
symptoms of the crisis (affectation, posing) are transitional. In
the
crisis
at age seven, because of the fact that a differentiation of the
internal
and
external develops and intellectual experience first appears, a sharp
conflict of experiences also devleops. The child who does not know
which
candy to choose--the bigger or the sweeter--finds himself in a
state of
internal conflict even as he vacillates. The internal conflict
(contradiction of experiences and selection of his own experiences)
becomes
possible only at this time." (The Crisis at Seven, in "The Essential
Vygotsky", p. 494).
I still think that some imaginary friends are like this: something
that
comes out of the same differentiation between internal and
external that
gives rise to role play. Like me, the child hesitates between two
hobby
horses: imaginary friends and real ones.
The imaginary friend then "volatilizes" into abstract rule play and
conceptual thinking (particularly the concept of "me" "myself" and
"I").
Just as the child learns to rise to the concrete, by abstract away
the
rule
from the role in instances of game play, the child learns to attach
the ideal figure to the behavior of actual people. This is
particularly
true
of imaginary friends connected with adolescent diary keeping (e.g.
Anne
Frank's imaginary friend "Kitty").
My wife's imaginary friend (also associated with keeping a diary),
for
example, was called "Yi Lin" or "One Forest". As an adolescent she
later
changed her name (which is the Chinese equivalent of "Jane Smith")
into
"Spring Thunder", and although she insists that she did this for
political
reasons ("Spring Thunder" has a certain Cultural Revolution ring
to it in
Chinese) it seems to me that it is more of a continuation of the
naturalistic imagery we see in "One Forest".
But I read a book recently ("Imaginary Companions and the Children
Who
Create Them", by Marjorie Taylor, OUP 1999) which suggests that
imaginary
companions often appear MUCH earlier than I thought they did (as
early as
three or four years of age).
So it seems to me that they are not just reifications of imaginary
play
or
ideal reconstructions of real people; they might be connected to the
child's
(very early) discovery of things like television, fiction, and the
child's
attempt to reproduce them in diaries (as WRITTEN self-directed
speech).
("One Forest" is also a homophone of a name of a popular magazine in
China
which publishes translations from abroad.)
David Kellogg
--- On Thu, 8/11/11, Rod Parker-Rees <R.Parker-Rees@plymouth.ac.uk>
wrote:
From: Rod Parker-Rees <R.Parker-Rees@plymouth.ac.uk>
Subject: RE: [xmca] Living metaphor and conventionalized language
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Date: Thursday, August 11, 2011, 2:19 AM
Hi David,
I hope you won't mind if I reply to just one little corner of your
very
eloquent message (I have not been able to keep pace with recent
discussions).
I am particularly interested in very early communication which, I
think,
has much more of the 'meaty sensuousness' about it - not yet pared
and
polished to the clear austerity of a sign system. It occurred to
me that
'internalised' verbal thought 'usually' involves a considerable
degree of
paring and polishing - we perhaps learn to think with concepts
rather
than
simply to 'relive' relational experiences in all their meaty
sensuousness. I
wondered, then, whether the fairly widespread incidence of
'imaginary
friends' might be understood, at least to some extent, in terms of
an
early
reluctance to forego the relational richness of interpersonal
communication
as this comes to be 'internalised'. The feeling of relating to
another
person is importantly different from the feeling of 'having a
thought'
and
may, at many levels, feel more satisfying. This could lead on to
echoes
of
Julian Jayne's argument about the relative recency of our
'ability' to
recognise
thoughts as internal 'products' of our own minds (how much our
minds are
indeed our own is the question here!) but also into dangerous
territory
where our preferred imaginary friend is omnipotent.
Being 'in' relation with another person is an altogether richer,
more
complicated and sensually elaborate experience even than
remembering or
thinking about being with someone and I think a lot of the
yearning of
poetry relates to this sense of the gates of perception being
clouded by
knowledge - once you have tasted the forbidden fruit there is no
going
back
(or at least no easy going back - some people devote their lives to
contemplation, meditation, prayer and other ways of trying to
still the
distracting ruckus of 'roof-brain chatter'.
All the best,
Rod
________________________________________
From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu] On
Behalf
Of David Kellogg [vaughndogblack@yahoo.com]
Sent: 10 August 2011 16:27
To: Culture ActivityeXtended Mind
Subject: Re: [xmca] Living metaphor and conventionalized language
Did I use the word "system"? I suppose I did. What I really mean
is what
Halliday calls "meaning potential", the way that a traffic light can
potentially be red or yellow or green. It is what we might call
leaving
things that we could say unsaid.
I guess I think of a system as being just a set of options, you
know,
like
a traffic light, or a dictionary entry or the system of tense or
negation.
It's the semiotic resources that Mommy and Daddy provide you with,
the
set
of metaphors that have already been made with the language, what
Vygotsky
calls signification.
One of the key unresolved problems in CHAT (which you can see, for
example,
in the way Ratner disagrees with Wertsch, and even in the early
disagreements between Vygotsky and Leontiev over "activity" and
"semiosis")
is how culture gets "in": is it "internalized" or is it
"appropriated"?
Is
it somehow co-constructed, by the individual on the one hand and the
society
on the other?
Of course, BOTH "internalization" and "appropriation" are
metaphors. I
don't flee from the "internalization" metaphor the way that Martin
does,
partly because I think of it as referring not to a body but as to a
nation,
a country, a city, a community, a family...or some particle
thereof. In
this
sense (a sense which I suppose is better captured by
"interiorization"
than
by "internalization", just as "reflection" is better captured by
"refraction") there is no duality; when you move from one nation to
another
you do not change worlds, nor do you change nations when you move
from
one
city to another.
But I do have a problem--I think that we can't just get culture
into the
picture by referring to cultural artefacts like signs and tools.
The map
is
not the territory, and human relations are not, in essence, about
signs
and
tools; they are about flesh and blood other people. It is here
that I
think
distinguishing between meaning potential in a cultural artefact
and the
actual meaning making that goes on between flesh and blood persons
is
important, not least because BOTH of them develop and develop each
other
in
a way that's not really explicable by just looking at the artefacts
themselves.
Consider, for example, the dictionary as a cultural artefact. You
know,
in
the eighteenth century, dictionaries were a little like Bartlett's
today.
They did contain definitions for the really thick-skulled (there
was a
newly
literate middle class that had to have everything spelled out) but
the
definitions were sometimes rather whimsical (e.g. "pensioner: a
man whose
flattery is repaid with insolence") and the main thing people read
them
for
was the learned quotations and snappy put-downs that were provided
as
examples (hence Johnson's dictionary and of course the "Devil's
Dictionary"
of Ambrose Bierce).
So the function of a dictionary was not to systematize the
language but
rather to provide resources for sense. It was to make you sound
witty and
creative and original in the chocolate houses. I suppose it must
have
been
rather annoying that dictionaries were so widely read, because it
meant
that
many people in your chocolate house would know the joke before you
told
it,
or, heaven forfend, try to tell the same joke themselves.But of
course
dictionaries WERE widely read, and they became guides to meaning
potential
rather than a set of instances of actual wit.
In the late twentieth century, though, the pendulum began to swing
the
other way, because CoBuild and other dictionaries began to inspect
computer
corpora of actual uses, and they discovered (for example) that it
is much
more common to say, metaphorically, that you "run a business" than
concretely, that you run a hundred yards on your own two feet. To
me,
though, all that means is that the new systemic "meaning
potential" has
to
start with running a business, and that what I did this morning for
exercise
was a kind of metaphorical extension of running a business to my
muscles
and
achilles tendons.
There is a good poem about the relationship between meaning
potential and
actual meaning by Cecil Day-Lewis. It's metaphorical, of course! He
begins
by defining a sign for us, and pointing out that a tree is a sign
too
(because it stands for itself, or if you want to be physiological
about
it,
it produces an image on our retina which is interpreted by our
brains as
a
tree.) But it's a sign without a system, without much unrealized
meaning
potential.
This tree outside my window here,
Naked, umbrageous, fresh or sere,
Has neither chance nor will to be
Anything but a linden tree,
Even if its branches grew to span
The continent; for nature’s plan
Insists that infinite extension
Shall create no new dimension.
From the first snuggling of the seed
In earth, a branchy form’s decreed.
You have to admit the Creator was original. He was certainly
forceful in
his creativity. But rather limited, when you look at it; in His
later
career
He kept repeating Himself with only minor variations, and most of
what
was
new was not very good. Human creativity is a different matter!.
Unwritten poems loom as if
They’d cover the whole of earthly life.
But each one, growing, learns to trim its
Impulse and meaning to the limits
Roughed out by me, then modified
In its own truth’s expanding light.
A poem, settling to its form,
Finds there’s no jailer, but a norm
Of conduct, and a fitting sphere
Which stops it wandering everywhere.
Human creativity, unlike nature, is an embarrassment of riches; we
need
rhyme (which you notice Day-Lewis adheres to quite rigorously) and
meter
to
keep us honest. As Adorno says, the bourgeoisie would like life to
be
austere and art voluptuous, but we would really be much better off
with
things the other way around: life full of actual meaning, and art
full of
things left unsaid.
Now here Day-Lewis notes that there is a third thing--and it is
the thing
that Bakhtin wrote almost exclusively about, something that is
neither
system of meaning nor instance of meaning making, something that is
neither
signification nor purely individual sense: it is human
relationships in
all
their complex, meaty sensuousness.
Are interpersonal relations more like intra-personal relations or
are
they
more like societal relations? Are they more intra-psychological or
more
trans-psychological? Are more things to be left said or unsaid? Half
said?
Are these going to be austere or voluptuous? Will they depend on
potential
or upon realization?
As for you, my love, it’s harder,
Though neither prisoner nor warder,
Not to desire you both: for love
Illudes us we can lightly move
Into a new dimension, where
The bounds of being disappear
And we make one impassioned cell.
So wanting to be all in all
Each for each, a man and a woman
Defy the limits of what’s human.
Voluptuous then, and almost intrapersonal--but this is a romantic,
young
person's view. Day-Lewis wrote this late in life, after many years
of
what
we would have to call development. Human development is not like
natural
development; it means creating more potential rather than simply
realizing
it (and thus leaving less unsaid).
But when we cease to play explorers
And become settlers, clear before us
Lies the next need – to re-define
The boundary between yours and mine;
Else, one stays prisoner, one goes free.
Each to his own identity
Grown back, shall prove our love’s expression
Purer for this limitation.
Love’s essence, like a poem’s, shall spring
From the not saying everything.
David Kellogg
--- On Wed, 8/10/11, Larry Purss <lpscholar2@gmail.com> wrote:
From: Larry Purss <lpscholar2@gmail.com>
Subject: [xmca] Living metaphor and conventionalized language
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Date: Wednesday, August 10, 2011, 10:59 AM
Hi David Ke
Your response to Nickolai mentioned the constant movement of living
metaphor
and language as a conventionalized SYSTEM. This seems to me to be
one
more
example of this living GENERATIVE movement of consciousness.
Larry
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--
Helen Grimmett
PhD Student, Teaching Associate
Faculty of Education
Monash University, Peninsula Campus
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*Assistant Professor
Social Foundations of Education
Dept. of Curriculum, Foundations, and Reading
Georgia Southern University
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------------------------------
Message: 8
Date: Fri, 12 Aug 2011 14:08:04 -0400
From: Martin Packer <packer@duq.edu>
Subject: Re: [xmca] Living metaphor and conventionalized language
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Message-ID: <66D2727E-5C2E-47E3-81ED-C39EE66C20AF@duq.edu>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252
Larry, David...
I don't like the word "internalization" because I can't see that
anything internal is involved! As LSV put it:
“Consciousness does not occur as a specific category, as a specific
mode of being. It proves to be a very complex structure of behaviour”
David Bakhurst describes well the 'radical realism' those guys were
developing:
"Thought is conceived not as a barrier or interface between the self
and the world beyond the mind, but as the means by which the
individual enters into immediate cognitive contact with the material
world. Thought, the mode of activity of the socially defined
subject, reaches right out to reality itself" (1991, p. 261)
If the "inner" is out there in the "outer," we've got the metaphors
wrong, IMHO.
Martin
On Aug 11, 2011, at 12:27 AM, David Kellogg wrote:
Of course, BOTH "internalization" and "appropriation" are
metaphors. I don't flee from the "internalization" metaphor the way
that Martin does, partly because I think of it as referring not to
a body but as to a nation, a country, a city, a community, a
family...or some particle thereof. In this sense (a sense which I
suppose is better captured by "interiorization" than by
"internalization", just as "reflection" is better captured by
"refraction") there is no duality; when you move from one nation to
another you do not change worlds, nor do you change nations when
you move from one city to another.
------------------------------
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End of xmca Digest, Vol 75, Issue 12
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