[Xmca-l] Re: sense and emotion

[David Kellogg]

You know, in a funny, weird way, I think the problem of who wrote what in
Chapter Seven is related. Take, for example, that great quote from
Dostoevsky's diary that appears verbatim, more or less, in Voloshinov. Did
Vygotsky take it from Voloshinov, or did he take it from Dostoevsky? I used
to think this was terribly important (and I used to think it was terribly
important that who said what when in Mind in Society was terribly
important). What made me give this up was precisely the argument that
because Vygotsky relied on and even made free use of the words of others to
construct his argument, that argument lacks the originality and importance
that we have imputed to it. As Sonia Sotomayor says that Andre Gide says,
"Toutes choses sont deja dites, mais puis'qu'on n'ecoute rien, il faut
recommencer."

So when you are reading a translation, there is always the
possibility--nay, the certainty--that you are reading the translator and
not the translatee. This is because language isn't just made of ideational
meaning; it's not just about what was said but about who said it and when.
In Halliday, this "who" is called "interpersonal meaning", and it is just
as important as the representational, or informational meaning: for many
purposes, including first language acquisition, it is more important. If
you are reading Vygotsky in English, you are probably reading something
somebody else wrote after reading Vygotsky. That person may be quite close
to us in time (if you are reading the translations done by the late
Francois Seve or those being done by Irina Leopoldoff-Martin) or they may
be lost in the mists (if you are reading "Tool and Sign"). But that person
is not actually Vygotsky, which is why you can understand it at all and do
something with it yourself. I don't think "tongue" is such a bad
translation of "yazik" for my purposes, actually: it corresponds pretty
exactly to what we call "mother tongue" or "our word" in the Korean
curriculum. It's the system of the native language, with all of its meaning
potential and its context of culture.

But I do believe, as Halliday does, that meaning is made at all levels,
from semantics right down to phonetics and back again. Of course, some of
these levels are more resilient to death than others. Interpersonal meaning
is, as Halliday says, "field like": what  he means is that it is not about
constructing a representation out of particle like words (SVO or SOV or
Participant-Process, etc.) but rather about giving and getting
(propositions and proposals, goods and services, sense and emotion). This
is quite literally wave like: it is largely conveyed through sound waves,
through intonation and through stress, and so it doesn't weather quite as
well as ideational meaning does when the speaker dies. But this should not
make us think there was never anything there except ink and paper,
information and logic, dictionary words and grammar book rules

Because I am teaching phonology today, I was trying to make the point that
the consonants and vowels are not equally vehicles of intonation and
stress: vowels are far more intonio-extressive than consonants. That's why
you can write a telegramme with all consonants, but not with all vowels.
And it's also why you can sing with all vowels but not with all consonants.
It stands to reason, then, that the vowels, which as the name suggests,
carry so much voicing, should carry the burden of sense rather than
signification. When I was in my twenties, for reasons that need not concern
us here, I spent fifty five days in solitary confinement; I was allowed out
for a piss once a night, and so I had to regulate my water intake very
carefully to make sure that I didn't get caught short. When I was finally
released, into a cell which had it own toilet, it was better than freedom,
even better than food. Summer was coming (it was in a very hot country) and
here suddenly I could drink as much water as I wanted and even take diluted
coffee and sugared tea with breakfast! Even now, thirty years later, when I
have to get up in the middle of the night, I can almost hear the prisoners
in Fidelio singing "O Welche Lust!": (Out here is life, back there was the
grave!) (Notice how much of this song is vowels, and how much you can
understand the interpersonal meaning with out any of the words!)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdB0roPqg7Q

(It turns out, by the way, that Vygotsky and Voloshinov BOTH got the
Doestoevsky passage, not from Dostoevsky, but from Jakubinsky! Somehow, the
idea of Vygotsky and Voloshinov reading some third text together as they
rode the tram to the Herzen Pedagogical Institute, makes it even more
wonderful than if one had just read it in the work of the other.)


David Kellogg
Sangmyung University

Recent Article in *Early Years*

The question of questions: Hasan’s critiques, Vygotsky’s crises, and the
child’s first interrogatives
<https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09575146.2018.1431874>

Free e-print available at:
https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/6EeWMigjFARavQjDJjcW/full


On Mon, Apr 9, 2018 at 1:35 AM, Peter Smagorinsky <smago@uga.edu> wrote:

> Here's how it appears in MiS, in two places. First as the tool of thought,
> then as tool of tools. No more tongues in the volume.
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-l-bounces@
> mailman.ucsd.edu] On Behalf Of mike cole
> Sent: Saturday, April 7, 2018 6:49 PM
> To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity <xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu>
> Cc: VEER@FSW.leidenuniv.nl
> Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: sense and emotion
>
> Peter-
>
> I have put of reading Rene's article, but will try to get it to the top of
> the always-growing stack of "must read nows."
>
> Just a quick comment to say that the use of the term, tongue, with respect
> to Dewey is almost certainly a mistranslation of the term, язык which in
> this context should be translated as language. Another casualty of
> collective editing of the translator's work.
>
> mike
> editing.
>
>
>
> On Sat, Apr 7, 2018 at 12:41 PM, Peter Smagorinsky <smago@uga.edu> wrote:
>
> > I had an opportunity to read the article by Rene van der Veer and
> > colleague on the last few chapters of Thinking and Speech, and found
> > it interesting for a number of reasons. First, he does some historical
> > work to argue that it was more a compilation of earlier work and ideas
> > borrowed heavily from other sources than an original culminating
> > statement on human development, an issue obscured by editors who
> > removed quotation marks from appropriated material. The ways in which
> > Vygotsky as we now know him was shaped by those who produced the volume
> is interesting in and of itself.
> >
> > I can't say exactly how I came to what follows, but it was something
> > that occurred to me throughout the article's discussion of meaning and
> sense.
> > Below, I'll paste in something I wrote nearly 20 years ago on this
> > smysl/znachenie distinction, and I think I still believe what I wrote
> then.
> > What struck me this time around is how smysl:sense has a deeply
> > emotional foundation, consistent with LSV's insistence that cognition
> > and affect can't be separated. This was the first time I ever saw how
> > that process might work. Emotion, as I'm thinking about it right now,
> > produces the material through which ideas/thoughts take shape on their
> > way to articulation via speech (or other mediational tool).
> >
> > [as an aside, I recently reviewed Mind in Society prior to using it in
> > a class I taught in Mexico, and was struck by the quote about how "the
> > tongue is the tool of tools"....I'd forgotten the "tongue" part
> > because I typically see this phrasing accorded to speech, not the more
> > alliterative tongue. Very nice.]
> >
> > In any case, I posted Rene's article, so feel some obligation to
> > follow up with the group, and so am offering this notion, which I find
> interesting.
> > Am I on the right trail?
> >
> > http://www.petersmagorinsky.net/About/PDF/RER/RER2001.pdf
> > The Russian term smysl has been translated as sense (i.e.,
> > unarticulated inner speech), while the term znachenie has been
> > translated as meaning (i.e., the articulation of thought through a sign
> system such as words).
> > Vygotsky, however, viewed both smysl and znachenie as constituents of
> > the meaningful whole. I next explain each of these two zones of
> > meaning in greater detail.
> >             Smysl is the set of images and associations one makes with
> > a sign such as a word in the area of consciousness Vygotsky (1987)
> > called inner speech, that is, the abbreviated syntax and
> > stream-of-consciousness properties of unarticulated, inchoate thought.
> > Smysl corresponds to what Rosenblatt (1978) refers to as the initial
> > zone of meaning in a reader's evocation, or what Gallas (2001) refers
> > to as imagination. Rosenblatt describes this experience as
> >
> > a penumbra of "memories" of what has preceded, ready to be activated
> > by what follows, and providing the context from which further meaning
> > will be derived. Awareness-more or less explicit-of repetitions,
> > echoes, resonances, repercussions, linkages, cumulative effects,
> > contrasts, or surprises is the mnemonic matrix for the structuring of
> > emotion, idea, situation, character, plot-in short, for the evocation of
> a work of art.
> > (pp. 57-58)
> >
> >             Smysl is as yet unarticulated, being instead the storm
> > cloud of thought that produces the shower of words, to use Vygotsky's
> > (1987) metaphor. One great limitation of the concept of smysl is that
> > it cannot be empirically demonstrated, only inferred. Vygotsky's
> > formulation of inner speech came from his observations of egocentric
> > speech in young children, which he theorized became internalized as
> > inner speech. Once speech (or another tool) is articulated and thus
> > observable, it appears in the zone of meaning that is the shower of
> > words (or other signs) that Vygotsky calls znachenie. Znachenie, then,
> > is the zone of meaning available in represented form, corresponding to
> the notion of a sign, regardless of modality.
> >             Because these two zones compose a meaningful whole,
> > referring to znachenie as "meaning" can be misleading. I retain the
> > translation of sense for smysl: "the aggregate of all the
> > psychological facts that arise in our consciousness as the result of
> > the word. Sense is a dynamic, fluid, and complex formation which has
> several zones that vary in their stability"
> > (Vygotsky, 1987, p. 275). For znachenie, I use articulation:
> >
> > It is the most stable, unified, and precise of these zones. In
> > different contexts, a word's sense changes. In contrast,
> > [articulation] is a comparatively fixed and stable point, one that
> > remains constant with all the exchanges of the word's sense that are
> > associated with its use in various contexts. (p. 275)
> >
> >
>