[Xmca-l] Re: Thirdness and its various versions

[mike cole]

I am working backwards here, but I have been thinking a lot about what I
was conceiving
in my own way as a form of thirdness that I think links to what is being
said here. Straighten me
out if I am wrong. (I promised to get out of here shortly, but its
interesting!).

We have a friend, now in her 60's, who is a college classmate of my wife
and a life long friend
of our family. She has been in ill health for sometime and looks a good
deal older than her years.
Balance is an issue for her.

When I first saw her the other day after many years I noticed that she was
carrying a large staff.
I laughted, and my first words  were "You look just like Gandalf! and gave
her a big hug."

Over tea she discussed that by carrying the staff instead of a cane, she
lost the invisibility created by
old age and she became a perons to others. People constantly started up
conversations with her and, being a skilled
conversationalist interested in people, it made her feel like a whole
person.

Seems interesting to me. Is it a kind of thirdness? A sign or (?) a tool?
Seems like cognition and social emotions are somehow involved as well.

mike

mike

On Sat, Jan 17, 2015 at 1:03 PM, Larry Purss <lpscholar2@gmail.com> wrote:

> Miguel, Rod,
>
> I am moving our conversation to a new thread to honour the other thread
> exploring "laws" of history and writing systems. I see these topics as
> overlapping but notions of "thirdness" that contrast with "twoness"
> [Jessica's doer and done to, or giver and given two, or knower and learner,
> etc.]
> Rod I must acknowledge when I read Jessica using the term "baby watcher's I
> was thinking of your work and posts. Jessica's work is one stream in
> intersubjective notions of thirdness. Lacan privileges language in his
> notion of thirdness. There is also the work of Stolorow Atwood, and Donna
> Orange, [intersubjective psychodynamics] who do not imagine
> "intersubjectivity" as a developmental achievement as bothDaniel Stern and
> Jessica Benjamine understand thirdness.
> In Jessica's words:
> "I see such engagement in reciprocal recognition of the other as growing
> naturally out of the experience of being recognized by the other, as a
> crucial component of attachment responses that require mutual regulation
> and attunement, and therefore, as ultimately a pleasure and not a chore"
>
> Miguel you mentioned our Western bias to privilege "seeing" and other
> cultures may privilege hearing and sound and rhythmicity.  My bias is to
> suggest when these various modes [seeing and rhythmicity] are felt to be in
> sync then they mutually constitute thirdness. However, when there are
> inevitable (mis)understandings and ruptures on the way to understanding we
> may have a tendency to fall back on seeing and reasoning as our primary
> mode and to discount the rhymicity of the ear and felt experience.
> Jessica's work engages with Hegel and the notion of the "struggle for
> recognition" as an aspect of creating "twoness" and "thirdness" Her project
> is to critique notions of complimentarity "twoness" as a model for
> expressing this struggle for recognition.
> She would suggest the way through this complimentary struggle for
> recognition is through a developmental trajectory of intersubjective
> development of thirdness.
>
> Miguel, I would like to follow your lead that through privileging sight
> [seeing and reasoning] that we are biased to come to "know" the other as
> "object" As you say "the subject-object relation as this analytic kernel is
> one "type" of knowing the other. You are asking if there are alternative
> subject-subject relations that are not mediated by objects? This may be
> another "mode" and a distinct kind of "seeing" [with the mind's eye?].
>
> Miguel when you say you speak from personal experience as a father, and
> this is a spiritual space of connection, it gestures to another dimension,
> another quality of thirdness as embodied enactments/performances.  I would
> like to offer that Enrique Dussel's "ethical hermeneutics" can offer
> validation for Jessica and Daniel Stern's embodied hearing the other
> [rhythmically] into voice.  I would emphasize your notion of "intersecting"
> multiple truths. I would also offer the term "transversal" [across verses]
> truths as multiple and plural and "palpable"
>
> Rod, I concur with your reflections that there are other forms of learning
> [especially social learning] which do not emphasize concept-y ways of
> thinking. I want to also acknowledge the centrality of concept-y ways of
> seeing and reasoning but as you emphasize the children were able to join in
> WELL before they were able to understand conceptually or be able to explain
> what was being enacted. This does not refute that the "world" or "context"
> in which the children are joining in is symbolically formed and
> historically situated.
> What Daniel Stern, Jessica Benjamin, V. Reddy, Winnicott, Trevarten,
> Fonagy, Gergely and other "baby watchers" are indicating is the centrality
> of "gestures" [meaningful performances or enactments as also profoundly
> implicated in the formation of our contexts and worlds. Worlds of
> experience are "palpable lived experiences" and this does have a
> phenomenological quality, a hermeneutical quality, and a cultural
> historical quality.  Worlds are also deeply concept-y and institutionalized
> and places of doer and done to. The question is how do we ethically and
> morally respond to these palpable conditions?
>
> "Thirdness" in its multiple versions may offer possible new
> understandings to guide us symbolically AND  rhythmically co-creatively
> inventing AND discovering [both/and]  "third spaces" AS potentially
> liberating contexts.
>
> Sanders understands palpable rhythmic resonance as one of two basic
> "principles" of all human interaction. Jessica's project is to underline
> this aspect of rhythmic resonance as primal in understanding the notion of
> "recognition".
>  As the way through and beyond complimentary "twoness" of doer and done to
> or giver and given toperson must experience a palpable "witnessing" within
> thirdness.
> THIS is an intersubjective way of understanding thirdness
>



-- 
It is the dilemma of psychology to deal with a natural science as an object
that creates history. Ernst Boesch.