[Xmca-l] The Uses of Memory Loss

[David Kellogg]

I'm not sure if I am the David that Mike refers to; I don't remember saying
anything about his lapse of memory, but of course that might be MY lapse of
memory.

Right now, I am working on some wonderful data from seven year olds. Every
Monday, they have to tell a story about their weekend to the rest of the
class and to their teacher. I record 'em, and then analyze them for various
linguistic features that I have mapped onto Vygotsky's "measure of
generality" (Chapter 6 of Thinking and Speech and also his last lectures).

So I've got this one kid who is trying desperately to retell the story of a
movie she saw. As it happens, it is "Finding Dory", which is a movie about
short-term memory loss. And her problem is...well, she can't remember it
very well.

So she ends up describing the irritation of having English subtitles and
the distracting motions of the camera: how it "shimmys" around. The teacher
is intrigued--did she watch it in a car? No, in a theatre. So what is she
talking about?  Have a look and see if you can guess.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tkLUap7oGQ

According to a psychologist at Cornell, the average shot length in an
English speaking movie has gone from nearly twelve seconds in 1930 to only
about two and half today. So in trying to hang onto the child's attention,
the film maker has completely given up on the child's short term memory.

The kids won't give up though. The older children (eleven or twelve) have
developed such a clear sense of "set the scene" (SS), "create the
character" (CC), and then "pose the problem" (PP) that I often have to
check and make sure they are not copying from some on-line synopsis. They
aren't--they have simply learned a useful method for remembering any movie
at all.

I used to think that schemata like "set the scene", "create the characters"
and "pose a problem (which can be resolved by one of the characters in
order to restore the original order of the scene) were just products of
language. It's true that SS is usually done with adverbs or preposititional
phrases ("Long ago", "far away"), CC is a matter of nouns and nominal
phrases ("a beautiful little fish named Dory"), and PP is a set of more or
less dynamic verbs and processes ("lost her parents"). But that in itself
made me suspicious: the explicit knowledge of adverbs, nouns, and verbs
tends to come LATER than SS, CC, and PP--not earlier.

I guess I thought the same thing was true of AT, Jon. That is, I thought
that the triangle is just the product of thinking about normal, canonical
word order in English (Subject-Verb-Object). Since this isn't canonical
word order in many or even most human languages, I didn't think it had the
universal quality that AT attributes to it.

Historically the Subject-Verb-Object order is becoming less and less
canonical in English too: the fact that most verbs can now be both
transitive and intransitive ("Dory sought" or "Dory sought her parents")
shows we are moving towards a more ergative model, which is actually much
better for describing events and happenings rather than heroic
accomplishments and epics of activity.

Ruqaiya Hasan's criticism of Activity Theory, by the way, was precisely
that context was collapsed into "activity"--but I think if you go back over
the thread you will see that Mike attributed that to Yrjo, not that he said
it himself. In any case, I now think that for these children  language is
not so much a tool in an activity of remembering  as a way of making clear
the need for some way or organizing the mess, which they then cobble
together out of categories which only later give rise to categories at the
clause level.

Does this go for geezers like me and Mike? That is, is one of the uses of
memory loss the reconstruction of knowledge in some novel and much more
useful form? I dare say! Who knows, maybe these uses of memory loss were
the motivation for the Polyphonic Autobiography....  If so, like a
stranger, we should bid it welcome...

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