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RE: Re: [xmca] The Study of Procrastination and the Procrastination of Study



Dear Mike and Huw:

 

Yes, I think that Huw's right: Shakespeare, and Vygotsky, see procrastination is a very powerful moral force as well as an aesthetic one (Vygotsky believes that esthetics and ethics are differentiated from a common concept, roughly emotion reflected upon in tranquility).

 

Procrastination allows Hamlet the time to reflect on whether the ghost is really his father (Elizabethans were either skeptical about ghosts entirely--as Horatio and Hamlet, fresh from their rationalistic studies in Wittenberg, are initially--or they believed that they were devices of the devil intended to entrap their souls into sinful acts which would bring about their damnation and therefore augment demonic suzerainty over man). Procrastination creates a very primitive form of Luria's "lie detector" (the "Mousetrap" play within a play). And procrastination is above all the device which allows Shakespeare to create the world's first entirely psychological horror story.

 

From it, I think Vygotsky creates more than just Psychology of Art, which I see as a rushed, and therefore flawed, attempt to link the fable, the short story, and the tragedy using the argument of "form subduing content" that was popular among the formalists but which really went directly against Vygotsky's materialism (and in the end, in all three genres, what we have is really reflection and emotion short-circuiting each other rather than one dominating the other).

 

I thnk that Veresov is right when he says that the model of human verbal thinking presented in Chapter Seven of Thinking and Speech, with the separate stage planes of feeling, thinking, inner speech and external speech, is essentially dramaturgical: Vygotsky's 'planes" are planes of Shakespeare's stage, and Shakespeare's Hamlet is essentially a presentation of mind.

 

When I was trying to subscribe to xmca from my old work address, I tried to send something on language and higher functioning, Mike. It wasn't based on my work, though; it was based on the work of a Chinese artist (a friend of a friend) who was in town with an exhibition of text and photographs on sex work in China.

 

There was something very ASIAN about it, the whole idea of combining TEXT and PICTURES, not at all like Cezanne or the impressionists or Merleau-Ponty. On one wall, there was a set of pornographic 'art' photographs (composed according to certain iconic images, such as planting the flag on Iwo Jima, or Manet's "Dejeuner sur l'herbe". On the facing wall was a set of hundreds of huge portraits of the sex workers faces done in very sharp contrast, with every discoloration and even every pimple suggesting violence or bad make up. (It made me think of the last page and a half of Vygotsky's Hamlet essay, where he suddenly takes what appears to be a digression into portraiture that actually explains the whole essay!)

 

On the other two walls of the gallery were texts: one letters home to the sex workers' home villages, sending money and providing an account of their lives in Shanghai. The other an English account of a single working day with four different clients and half a dozen sex acts (mostly written from a man's point of view though!) I asked Xu Yong, the artist, why the writings of the young sex worker in the exhibit read so much like they were written by a man (they were quite pornographic and included details about the sexual experience that only a man would know, and in addition there was an awful lot of dialogue, all of it by the man and none of it by the woman).

 

Xu Yong insisted that it had been written by the woman, but he admitted that it was translated by a man and that he had edited it very heavily (and in particular that he had taken out all the non-pornographic parts!)  I asked him why he had censored this poor woman's attempt to explain why she was doing what she was doing. He said he thought it was irrelevant (irrelevant to what?)

 

I think, actually, Xu Yong, and also my friend Shu Yang, has a very western suspicion of all forms of text and verbal meaning. They are Chinese artists, they see meaning as connected ineluctably to ideology (which of course it is) and for that reason they try to reject it (which of course they cannot).

 

The result is a terrible weakness in their art, or at least in their theory of art. Much of it, predictably, is about the human body. But at bottom they do not really believe that a human body is any different from that of an animal. And in the end the result is a really non-verbal--even anti-verbal--attitude towards gesture. The result is Leontiev ("A gesture is nothing else than a movement separated from its result, i.e. not applied to the object at which it is aimed") but not at all Vygotsky ("A gesture is a sign").

 

Hamlet is full of gestures, and movements that are separated from their results. But to say that they are nothing more than that, to say that they are not signs, is to ignore at least two walls of the exhibition. 

 

David Kellogg

Hankuk University of Foreign Studies

 

subsequent demonic coeither did not believe in ghosts, as Horatio , and Shakespeare does see procrastination as a powerful moral force, allowing

 

 

--------- 원본 메일 ---------
보낸사람: mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>
받는사람 : "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
날짜: 2012년 7월 12일 목요일, 11시 08분 46초 +0900
제목: Re: [xmca] The Study of Procrastination and the Procrastination ofStudy
Ah, delighted to see you re-appear, David. When there was all that xmca
chit chat about development of higher psycn
functions using language I was hoping you would be pointing us to examples
from your work, which I believe there
are plenty of.

Gotta bail, but not before welcoming you back.
mike

On Wed, Jul 11, 2012 at 6:24 PM, kellogg <kellogg59@hanmail.net> wrote:

> First of all, belated thanks to Mike and Huw for their concern about my
> cyber-health. At Huw's suggestion, I junked the yahoo account (they must
> have the WORST news on the internet, and the biggest bevy of bigots
> commenting on it) and resubscribed.
>
>
>
> It took me a while! Partly it was thanks to a ferocious spam filter at
> uni, but mostly it was because I have been reading...well...actually...you
> see...to tell you the truth...it's all about the psychology of
> procrastination.
>
>
>
> Procrastination is something I have always meant to write about but never
> quite gotten around to. It seems to me that a good deal of Vygotsky's
> method, both for studying the development of higher psychological functions
> and for studying literature, has to do with the artificial generation and
> observation of procrastination and its role in making actions deliberate
> and ultimately moral (and also in robbing them of any actual utility and
> significance).
>
>
>
> For example: In Act Three, Hamlet makes a bloodthirsty speech:
>
>
>
> ….Now could I drink hot blood
>
> And do such bitter business as the day
>
> Would quake to look on.
>
>
>
> He then happens upon the king at prayers. Hamlet draws his sword. Hamlet
> raises his hand. And Hamlet does not strike, because to kill the king at
> prayers would send him to heaven.
>
>
>
> Now, many critics—including Vygotsky (1971: 171) have considered this
> reason frivolous. More religious (and less anachronistic) critics, have
> been offended by Hamlet’s belief that a human being can decide whether
> another human is to be damned or saved, simply by killing at the right
> instant. (The truly religious believe that evil humans simply cannot repent
> at the last moment, and this is in fact the solution that Mozart shows us
> in his opera *Don Giovanni, *and it sometimes seems to me that our
> debates over assisted suicide and the over the moment of conception show a
> similar obsession with the moral significance of precise timing.)
>
>
>
> No, there is no contradiction here. As the Ghost says, one of the horrors
> of the king’s death is that he died without confession (“unhouseled,
> disappointed, unaneled”), and it’s for this precise reason that he is now
> tortured in purgatory by day, and only allowed to communicate with his son
> at night:
>
>
>
> Doomed for a certain term to walk the night
>
> And for the day confined to fast in fires
>
> Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature
>
> Are burnt and purged away. But that I am forbid
>
> To tell the secrets of my prison house,
>
> I could a tale unfold whose lightest word
>
> Would harrow up thy soul, freeze they young blook,
>
> Make they two eyes like stars start from their spheres
>
> And each particular hair to stand an end
>
> Like quills upon the fretful porpentine
>
> But this eternal blazon must not be
>
> To ears of flesh and blood!
>
> (1.5.10~21)
>
>
>
> Blasphemously or not, Hamlet believes that the king’s brother has sent his
> father to purgatory by simply murdering him without a confession and
> without the last rites.
>
>
>
> Hamlet, who is no theologian but an ordinary moralist like the rest of us,
> cannot imagine that justice would be served by sending his evil uncle to
> heaven while his father is still being purged in hell. It is no wonder that
> Hamlet finds it so hard to carry out the ghost’s instructions even when the
> means, the leisure, and the opportunity are all given.
>
>
>
> I sometimes feel that way about xmca, particularly when I contemplate the
> enormous amount of reading required to participate intelligently. But one
> thing we learn from Vygotsky is that intelligence, like procrastination, is
> sometimes a consequence and not a cause....
>
>
>
> David Kellogg
>
> Hankuk University of Foreign Studies
>
>
>
>
> <kellogg59@hanmail.net>
> __________________________________________
> _____
> xmca mailing list
> xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
> http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
>
>
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