[Xmca-l] Re: That on That

Tue Feb 20 00:17:31 PST 2018

David, I do not know about the history of this particular collection, but given that it is quite common to find letters and other private documents published posthumously, I wonder if there is something particular to this edition or if your "embarrassment" relates to this practice in general and its ethical implications. 

As to how helpful and relevant this collection is to enrich Vygotsky's intellectual legacy, I see many of the challenges of presentation of disconnected materials that you mention. Yet, having had a rather limited look at the book, I did not yet get a sense of this being part of any de-Marxization project, as, just as I find remarks that during a time Vygotsky seemed to reject Marxist ideas, I also read about "a sudden and decisive change ... accepting Marxism, which became one of his main sources of inspiration", and the Zakharino Hospital notes (part of which I think had been published before in 2012) you can read Vygotsky being quite explicit about his marxist methodological project. Also, I (very quickly and not at all exhaustively) looked after the citation to Bernfeld, and I only could find this citation that referred to a 1911 Hebrew Encyclopedia, which leads me to wonder about it rather, than finding it embarrassing, but that may be my own ignorance. In any case, I guess the main questions may be: is it ethically correct to have this notes published, and are they useful at all in moving Vygotsky's legacy further into something good? I am just posing the questions, for I don't have a straight answer yet.

Alfredo

________________________________________
From: xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu <xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu> on behalf of David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com>
Sent: 18 February 2018 18:44
To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: That on That

To tell you the truth, I am finding the notebooks a little embarrassing.
First of all, they consist of a number of things that the author probably
would not have wanted us to read, including high school jottings about the
Bible and love letters. Secondly, the historical context is presented in a
rather undifferentiated and ultimately unhelpful way: for example, how
useful is it to say that when Vygotsky attended gymnasium he became acutely
conscious of Jewish culture unless we know what kinds of Jewish culture
were available (e.g. Bundism, left-Zionism, etc.), and how useful is it to
know that when he was at university he was "ferociously opposed" to Marxism
unless we know what kinds of Marxism he was exposed to (e.g.
Freudo-Marxism, or Austro-Marxism, legal Marxism, Menshevism, or
Bolshevism). When Vygotsky cites S. Bernfeld in his gymnasium writings, he
can't really mean Siegfried Bernfeld, can he? Siegfried was only four years
older than Vygotsky! Thirdly, and most embarrassing, I find it strange to
be discussing jottings of little life like this when huge swathes of
Vygotsky's most important lifework (e.g. defectology, pedology, and
psychotechnics) remain unstranslated and undiscussed. I can't help but
wonder if this isn't part and parcel of the project of rescuing Vygotsky
from Marxism.

David Kellogg

Recent Article in *Mind, Culture, and Activity* 24 (4) 'Metaphoric,
Metonymic, Eclectic, or Dialectic? A Commentary on “Neoformation: A
Dialectical Approach to Developmental Change”'

Free e-print available (for a short time only) at

http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/YAWPBtmPM8knMCNg6sS6/full

On Sun, Feb 18, 2018 at 9:21 AM, Alfredo Jornet Gil <a.j.gil@iped.uio.no>
wrote:

> I always appreciate David's fascination with the way history, language,
> and psyche intertwine, which really is a Vygotskian concern.
> As for the book, and as far as I know, Mike, Beth is already moving things
> to get that book reviewed. I have been reading here and there, and there is
> clearly a challenge in presenting a myriad of single notes—as compared to a
> manuscript that had at least to some extent been composed by the author.
> The authors do a huge job in putting the notes together by topics, but yet
> it requires a lot of back and forth reading to catch up with Vygotsky's
> meandering and developing ideas. So endless topics for endless readings
> indeed!
> Alfredo
> ________________________________________
> From: xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu <xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu>
> on behalf of mike cole <mcole@ucsd.edu>
> Sent: 17 February 2018 20:18
> To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
> Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: That on That
>
> Lots of interesting thoughts in your emails, David. "Essays on a
> Hallidayan Pedology"
> perhaps?
>
> Have your read the Vygotsky notebooks? They must contain endless topics for
> discussion.
>
> mike
>
> On Sat, Feb 17, 2018 at 7:32 AM, David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > Consider the following sentence, which was, according to the recent
> > indictment, sent by a Russian agent posing as an American citizen to the
> > Republican presidential campaign in 2016.
> >
> > "We gained a huge lot of followers and decided to somehow help Mr. Trump
> > get elected."
> >
> > Of course, many American citizens write like this. But even staunch Trump
> > supporters would find the word order oddly un-American sounding in at
> least
> > two places, the noun group "a huge lot" and the verb group"decided to
> > somehow help". And they would be right. But why?
> >
> > The answer is that elements in a noun or a verb group in English have a
> > certain functional order. We sometimes teach this in very complicated
> ways,
> > e.g. "size, color, age, material, function" to explain "big brown leather
> > handbag". But describing the problem is too example-driven: it lacks the
> > generality and generative power of theory: for example, it doesn't
> account
> > for quantifiers like "many", "few", "a lot of" or for deictics like
> "this",
> > "that", "these", "those", and "the", and it can't explain why things have
> > that order in English. It also won't explain our verb group: it won't
> tell
> > us why "to somehow help Mr. Trump get elected" somehow sounds more
> foreign
> > than "to boldly go where no man has gone before". Finally, it won't tell
> us
> > anything about how this order develops in children: what they learn first
> > and what they learn next.
> >
> > Vygotsky will explain all this, with a little help from Halliday. In
> > Chapter Five of Thinking and Speech, he argues that children learn
> > syncretic "heaps" first ("That on that"). There are three kinds of these
> > (purely syncretic, spatial, and two-stage) but what they all have in
> common
> > is that they are "deictic"--the main purpose is "that on that". Then
> come a
> > variety of complexes, which include the concrete, objective, "factual"
> > properties: number, size, shape, etc. Only then do we find concepts, and
> > these too come in two different varieties: everyday and academic. The
> > everyday are distinguished by modifiers at the same level of generality
> as
> > the concept (e.g. "leather handbag"), and the academic are distinguished
> by
> > conceptual hiearchies that involve different levels of generality (e.g.
> "a
> > type of personal accessory").
> >
> > In Halliday's Introduction to Functional Grammar, we learn that groups
> are
> > just like clauses. They start with a Theme (an element which is speaker
> > oriented, the "point of departure" of the speaker) and they end with a
> > Rheme (an element which is hearer oriented, the place where the speaker
> > comes in). Like clauses, groups tend to go from me to you, from old to
> new,
> > from deictic words to defining ones.That's why we start a noun group with
> > "a", "the", or "some". That's why we continue it with numbers, and then
> > with descriptors (which go from speaker-oriented-subjective to
> > hearer-oriented-objective), and that's why scientific "classifiers" come
> > after judgmental epithets. "A huge lot" is functionally misordered,
> because
> > it starts with a deictic but then puts in a descriptive before the
> > numerative (like "little three pigs" or "black four and twenty birds
> baked
> > into a pie"). With verb groups, the modifiers can go before or after the
> > verb, but not in the middle: "somehow to help" or "to help somehow". But
> if
> > we say "to somehow help" it really appears that "somehow" is part of the
> > meaning of the verb itself (as in "to boldly go") and not the means of
> the
> > action.
> >
> > Halliday explains how they are ordered. But Vygotsky explains why.
> >
> > David Kellogg
> >
> > Recent Article in *Mind, Culture, and Activity* 24 (4) 'Metaphoric,
> > Metonymic, Eclectic, or Dialectic? A Commentary on “Neoformation: A
> > Dialectical Approach to Developmental Change”'
> >
> > Free e-print available (for a short time only) at
> >
> > http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/YAWPBtmPM8knMCNg6sS6/full
> >
>