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

[Peter Smagorinsky]

Mike's points echo Vygotsky's perspective in his neglected volume on Defectology: "roundabout" means of mediation enable those without commonplace evolutionary attributes (e.g., sight) to become full participants in society's cultural stream, and thus avoid or diminish experiencing feelings of deficiency, which is the "secondary disability" of perceived lower self-value. 

-----Original Message-----
From: xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu] On Behalf Of mike cole
Sent: Saturday, January 17, 2015 8:16 PM
To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: Thirdness and its various versions

Sounds right to me, Henry. Every organism is part of a larger, massively heterogeneous flow of life. The music of language is one of its central characteristics of language, one which is recreated, importantly, in ASL. So we have to think multi-modally.

I just read something in the New Yorker (Jan 12) by Jonathan Bell, a man with Bell's Palsy. About smiling. Very well worth attention of xmca-ers if anyone can get it. "Give me a smile."

I am thinking about the development of smiling in early infancy and its cultural/developmental significance. (See the 2013 article in MCA for backgroun).  There is a lot of interesting material to think about in the article, but the line that lept off the page was "Most people can voluntarily lift the corners of the mouth, but authentic joy lives in the eyes. It requires contractions of the ... sphincter muscle which .....
makes the eyes sparkle."

For sighted people maybe, but the blind achieve the same end through other modal means and ditto the Deaf.

mike

On Sat, Jan 17, 2015 at 4:08 PM, HENRY SHONERD <hshonerd@gmail.com> wrote:

> Mike,
> I thought just occurred to me about third spaces and the saccades you 
> talk about in your article, “Minding the Gap: Imagination, Creativity 
> and Human Cognition.” Suppose those saccades are looking for signs of 
> rhythmicity at a basic cognitive level like Hutto is talking about. 
> This is followed at a slower pace by scaffolded cognition, which is 
> what we are conscious of, at the level where we can talk our way 
> towards dehumanizing the dialog. Music and dance would be more 
> effective for working socially at a more basic level. Just wondering.
> Henry
>
> > On Jan 17, 2015, at 2:49 PM, mike cole <mcole@ucsd.edu> wrote:
> >
> > 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.
>
>
>


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