[Xmca-l] Re: Trump's speech and Perezhivanie

[Alfredo Jornet Gil]

Dear Martin, 

thanks for the nuances you introduce. Yes, I agree with you, it is totally sensible to hear Trump's words with hope and actually experience (perezhivat) them in such a way as to become moving force towards transformation. I was only approaching the speech from a developmental stages perspective, where, to hear the speech with contempt given the speech's formal structure as a type of generalisation, would mean to hear them within that stage that Andy very appropriately (in my view) called as "magic". Vygotsky (I think) also used this term to refer to a stage in child development. 

But I do not wish to say that contempt is the only possible quality, and so, as you very nicely remark, hope, enthusiasm, empowerment, all these and their developmental and historical conditions should be considered as possibilities of hearing Trump's speech. 

Thanks a lot for the resources/links, I am incorporating them to our joint document.
Alfredo

________________________________________
From: xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu <xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu> on behalf of Martin John Packer <mpacker@uniandes.edu.co>
Sent: 22 January 2017 16:08
To: xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu
Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: Trump's speech and Perezhivanie

Hi Alfredo.

I think your proposal is very interesting; that we could explore two different ways of hearing and understanding Trump’s words. But if I understand you correctly, I don’t agree that “in the first case, there is no hope for change, there is contempt.”  I have lived in Michigan and Pennsylvania, and in both states industries that were central to the economic rise of the working class, auto manufacturing and steel foundries, collapsed as a result of globalization. I have seen first hand some of the communities that were almost completely destroyed. I believe that people who experienced these changes do hear Trump’s words with hope for change, and if they have contempt it is for professional politicians who they feel speak but do not act.

But perhaps you mean it was a lack of hope that *led* people to Trump:

<http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/08/donald-trump-manufacturing-jobs-hope/496541/>

The New Yorker has published several articles by George Packer (no relation) on the appeal that Trump has to the white working class. For example:

<http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/05/16/how-donald-trump-appeals-to-the-white-working-class>

Martin





On Jan 21, 2017, at 3:44 PM, Alfredo Jornet Gil <a.j.gil@iped.uio.no<mailto:a.j.gil@iped.uio.no>> wrote:

Dear Helena, Andy, all,


Unfortunately, I have not been able to find the time to watch the movie Fate of a Man, but I have followed the very interesting analyses and conversations about it. I am opening this thread as connexions between those analyses, perezhivanie, and current tragic social and political situation in the US and elsewhere. This also connects with the article that Mike shared on the position of the Learning Sciences with regard to this situation (how happy I was to see this initiative!).


In particular, I wanted to pick up on Helena's very true comment that "the US is going to have to produce some works of scholarship or art, or both, that attempt to explain what is happening now here in the US -- for example, this afternoon, under President Trump."


Yesterday, we saw at home Trump's speech. Although we had followed Trump's campaign and its denigrating tenor, it was yesterday, for the first time, that my wife and me got this gut feeling of true tragedy, of a real *drama* as we heard those empty, but to recover the prior article for discussion, hollowed and hollowing words coming out of that mouth. It came upon us that there may be lots of people for whom those words are not hollowed, but actually encouraging, rich, beautiful. How can you hear that as beauty?


So, I was wondering, and in following up with our 2016 MCA Issue 4 discussion,  whether we could not actually conduct an analysis of the sort Marc offers in his article of the perezhivanie. Just as Vygotsky explains how 3 different children experience the situation of an alcoholic mother differently, could not we perform an analysis ?of that perezhivanie in which a person experiences yesterday's situation as one of encouragement, of freedom and hope. Would that not be a way to try to understand what is going on? This would not be a piece of art, but could be something we could do to try to understand and change this situation.

We could then contrast that perezhivanie with the one many of as have, in which the situation is experience as a real TRAGEDY. I think in the first case, there is no hope for change, there is contempt; in the second, hearing those words as hollowed and hollowing require that you live the situation as a doubled situation in which you experienced it from a very different developmental stage. One in which the speech sounds as a case of involution.

Should we find the transcribed speech and perform such analysis?


Going now to support the Woman's march here in Victoria BC.

Alfredo