[Xmca-l] Re: Perezhivanie and Organic

[lpscholar2@gmail.com]

Lois,
Thank you for the link to you, Richard, and Ken, on stage with the new generation.
The scene where Ken asks you to extend your hand and then he responds within four differing  ‘()’ – frames – was thought provoking. His way of understanding how each frame ‘changed’ who you were as his ‘()’ and your rejoinder within your ‘()’.
So... Relation itself means multiple ‘()’ within ‘()’. 

I recommend watching this video that engages the understanding of performance studies

Sent from my Windows 10 phone

From: Lois Holzman
Sent: February 6, 2017 6:23 AM
To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: Perezhivanie and Organic

I’ll take a stab at summarizing it later this week, Mike.

Lois Holzman
Director, East Side Institute for Group & Short Term Psychotherapy
119 West 23 St, suite 902
New York, NY 10011
Chair, Global Outreach, All Stars Project, UX
Tel. +1.212.941.8906 x324
Fax +1.718.797.3966
lholzman@eastsideinstitute.org
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> On Feb 5, 2017, at 6:42 PM, mike cole <mcole@ucsd.edu> wrote:
> 
> Your own work ought to provide an example of a long-standing program that
> could serve as a model for people to consider, Lois.
> mike
> 
> On Sun, Feb 5, 2017 at 10:52 AM, Lois Holzman <
> lholzman@eastsideinstitute.org> wrote:
> 
>> Here are two links to two videos in which Richard Schechner addresses
>> politics and performance studies. He is a pioneer and friend of performance
>> activism.
>> 
>> in 2012—https://vimeo.com/54675823 <https://vimeo.com/54675823> (begins
>> around 57 minutes)
>> in 2016—http://www.performingtheworld.org <http://www.
>> performingtheworld.org/> click on PTW 2016 Plenary Part 1. It’s a
>> conversation between Schechner, Ken Gergen, me and two inner city young
>> women. The set up is long but interesting. The conversation begins with
>> Schechner at around 20 min.
>> 
>> Lois Holzman
>> Director, East Side Institute for Group & Short Term Psychotherapy
>> 119 West 23 St, suite 902
>> New York, NY 10011
>> Chair, Global Outreach, All Stars Project, UX
>> Tel. +1.212.941.8906 x324
>> Fax +1.718.797.3966
>> lholzman@eastsideinstitute.org
>> Social Media
>> Facebook  <https://www.facebook.com/lois.holzman.5>| LinkedIn <http://www.
>> %20linkedin.com/pub/lois-holzman> | Twitter <https://twitter.com/
>> LoisHolzman>
>> Blogs
>> Psychology Today <http://www.psychologytoday.
>> com/blog/conceptual-revolution>| Psychology of Becoming <
>> http://loisholzman.org/> | Mad in America <http://www.madinamerica.com/
>> author/lois/>
>> Websites
>> Lois Holzman <http://loisholzman.org/> | East Side Institute <
>> http://eastsideinstitute.org/> | Performing the World <http://www.
>> performingtheworld.org/>
>> All Stars Project <http://allstars.org/>
>> 
>> 
>> 
>>> On Feb 5, 2017, at 1:30 PM, lpscholar2@gmail.com wrote:
>>> 
>>> 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
>>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>> 
>>