[Xmca-l] Re: Perezhivanie and Organic

[lpscholar2@gmail.com]

Another scholar of ‘performance studies’ is Richard Schechner who posits a continuum for ‘performance’ that spans 5 categories: play, games, sports, theatre, ritual. 
Play is ‘free’  where ritual is ‘strictly’ programmed or designed, while games, sports and theatre MEDIATE between these extremes as more play-like or more ritual-like. 
This continuum is basically an elaboration of how performances are variations on ‘ritual’ as an encompassing category.

This allows Schechner to extend the values of ritual into creation of symbolic reality that pervades the analysis of other performance genres: play, games, sports, ritual.

Shechner explains performance studies in the preface to his book [Performance Studies: An Introduction]:

Performance studies – as a practice, a theory, an academic discipline – is dynamic, UNFINISHABLE.  Whatever it is, it wasn’t exactly that before and it won’t be exactly that again. 

One dominant metaphor by which performance studies has been figured is ‘the unmapped terrain’. 
This metaphor figures uncertainty,  ambiguity, navigating the incomprehensible, the ungraspable, the unsaying at the heart of the certain, the graspable, the comprehensible, the saying.

This unmapped terrain may be ‘’exhilarating’ for those scholars and persons who relish “not knowing” that is hard to pin down. So too is the study of ‘performance’ exhilarating and privileges open-ended questions.

The potential to illuminate, instruct, an inspire, is enhanced not diminished by this ever present ‘uncertainty’. Don’t try to fix performance studies down is its central value and if you do the symbolic realm will become a mere idol. 

By insisting that performance studies cannot be fixed or defined, performance studies is situated as a NEGATIVE discipline trafficking in ‘denials’ and the unsaying of speech.

This gives a flavour of the way performance studies is posited in apophatic terms of the unmapped terrain in the fashion of Schechner’s explorations of the continuum of ritual, play, games, sports, theatre.

Beth and Monica exploring playworlds and perezhivanie can be put in dialogue with Schechner.

I was channelling Claire Chambers above who is deeply engaged with this performance thematic playing out through historical epochs and becoming secularized in modern  performance studies.


Sent from Mail for Windows 10

From: Edward Wall
Sent: February 4, 2017 4:10 PM
To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: Perezhivanie and Organic

David

     Yes, that was the difference I was noting. Vygotsky in the passages I was reading seems to using ‘organic’ as denoting something ‘natural,' while Stanislavsky seemed to using it s somewhat more holistic fashion.

Ed

> On Feb 2, 2017, at  3:01 PM, David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> The Russian word that Vygotsky uses for "organic" is the same as the word
> we use, and I assume that the same thing is true of the word that
> Stanislavsky used. It is "organic" transliterated into Cyrillic, rather
> than translated into Russian.
> 
> What really makes this problem new-thread-worthy is that the meaning of the
> word "organic" at the end of the nineteenth century is not the same as the
> word meaning that we use in several important ways.
> 
> Take, for example, the crudest possible way: semantic prosody, or the "good
> vibes" of some words (e.g. "organic food") vs. the "bad vibes" of others
> (e.g. "artificial flavor"). The nineteenth century began with a romantic
> movement towards nature and towards holism ("Gestaltism"), against dogmatic
> rationalism and atomism. So "organicism" had a semantic prosody that
> involved not only naturalism (which it still does) but also a form of
> proto-structuralism. Organic structure involved a complex whole with parts
> that are interdependent like organs and not independent like ball bearings.
> 
> Today, this semantic prosody falls on deaf ears. If anything, it's the
> other way around: we know all about cells, and we know that they are
> independant and dispensible in large numbers (you slough off millions every
> day). But mechanical parts are precisely engineered to fit each other, and
> for the want of one, the whole machine comes to a grinding halt.
> 
> Nevertheless, we can still see this older meaning of organicism in
> Toennies' distinction between Gemeinschaft (community, mechanical
> solidarity) and Gesellschaft (society,organic solidarity) and also in the
> work of Bernsetin (workers have a mechanical solidarity based on likeness
> while middle class people have organic solidarity based on mutual
> instrumentality).
> 
> (Of course, there's the same problem. Even working class families have an
> organic solidarity, while it is sometimes hard to believe that white collar
> office workers sitting at computers in cubicles are anything bt
> mechanical....)
> 
> David Kellogg
> Macquarie University
> 
> On Fri, Feb 3, 2017 at 4:20 AM, Edward Wall <ewall@umich.edu> wrote:
> 
>> Stanislavisk seems to consider what is termed ‘organic’ in his taking up
>> of perezhivanie. Vygotsky also uses the term ‘organic,’ although as near as
>> I can tell, without regard to perezhivanie. However, what seems to be being
>> called ‘organic’ is very different (or so it seems) in these two cases. Is
>> the Rusiian different?
>> 
>> Ed Wall
>> 
>>> On Feb 2, 2017, at  11:15 AM, lpscholar2@gmail.com wrote:
>>> 
>>> Beth and Monica explore the phenomena occurring in playworlds generating
>> perezhivanie.
>>> 
>>> Playworlds are performance worlds and these worlds may be exploring the
>> relation of ‘unity’ and ‘difference’.
>>> 
>>> Another term that may have relevance when Beth and Monica refer to
>> negating the negation is the operation of ‘apophasis’.
>>> William Frank (On What Cannot Be Said) describes the apophatic :
>>> 
>>> *In apophasis, which empties language of all positive content, absolute
>> difference cannot be distinguished from absolute unity, even though the
>> respective discourses of difference and unity nominally stand at the
>> antipodes. BOTH configurations, unity and difference, are exposed as
>> relatively arbitrary and, in the end, equally inadequate schemas for
>> articulating what cannot be said. (Franke)
>>> 
>>> Claire Chambers in her book (Performance Studies and Negative
>> Epistemology) comments on the above Franke citation :
>>> 
>>> *If unity and difference cannot be distinguished from one another (we
>> cannot KNOW what makes them distinct), then it is impossible to determine
>> what either ‘is’ – meaning that knowing and being, epistemology and
>> ontology, are also impossible to distinguish from one another.(Claire
>> Chambers Chapter 1)
>>> 
>>> I am not sure how far to go with this theme of : Negating the negation?
>>> I hear this theme in playworlds.
>>> 
>>> If this seems relevant, i can post the first chapter of Claire Chambers
>> book. I will just mention that Vygotsky’s Judaic childhood and adolescence
>> would have encountered this apophatic ‘tradition’.
>>> Enough for one probe or possible pivot?
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> Sent from my Windows 10 phone
>>> 
>> 
>> 
>>