[Xmca-l] Re: Passions, (Projects?) and Interests

[mike cole]

Very neat summary of the situation, Rob.
Workers of different kinds, however, with all the consequences of
inequality that follow.
Audit culture is a nice way to describe the operation of an "efficient"
neoliberal regime,
the "*cutting* edge" of technology.
mike

On Fri, Jan 11, 2019 at 9:07 AM robsub@ariadne.org.uk <robsub@ariadne.org.uk>
wrote:

> Fifteen hours a year sounds more reasonable :-)
>
> The contrast between Vygotsky, as in your summary (all that is new to me,
> so thank you for that), and what actually happens, at least here, could not
> be more stark. This is one of those areas where the audit culture fails us
> really badly.
>
> Audit culture is primarily suited to turning out workers, not people or
> citizens - hence relationship and sex education, among other teachable
> things, doesn't feature highly. It aids the employability agenda, with its
> own internal contradiction of needing workers who use their initiative to
> do their jobs profitably but are otherwise wholly and uniformly compliant.
>
> And the actual effects may be self contradictory - I have just been
> reading some research whch suggests that the people trackers Amazon uses in
> its warehouse may reduce productivity. People are not automatons, whoda
> thunk it.
>
> To revert to the basics of CHAT, the box that gets ticked has become the
> object rather than the tool, and it shows no sign of giving up that
> position. What will it take to shift it?
>
> Rob
>
>
> On 11/01/2019 10:57, David Kellogg wrote:
>
> Sorry, Rob. I mean fifteen hours a year. The government has itinerant
> specialists who lecture from school to school. There is even a bus for
> visiting the provinces.
>
> In contrast, Vygotsky says:
>
> a) No class with ONLY sex education--since anatomical, sexual, and
> sociocultural maturation do not coincide in modern humans, sex education is
> not a science of a natural whole, where the object of study is given to us.
>
> b) No classes WITHOUT sex education--since sex education is simply
> learning how to be with people who may be of sexual interest, all classes
> must have some form of sexual "enlightenment".
>
> c) No sex education without INTEREST. But what, exactly, is interest?
>
> David Kellogg
> Sangmyung University
>
> New in *Language and Literature*, co-authored with Fang Li:
> Mountains in labour: Eliot’s ‘Atrocities’ and Woolf’s
> alternatives
> Show all authors
>
> https://doi.org/10.1177/0963947018805660
>
>
>
>
> On Fri, Jan 11, 2019 at 5:40 PM robsub@ariadne.org.uk <
> robsub@ariadne.org.uk> wrote:
>
>> Fifteen hours a week???
>>
>> I hope it's not all practicals - the teachers would be exhausted.
>>
>> In the UK nowadays the very inadequate thing we do in schools is called
>> Sex and Relationship Education. The "and Relationship" bit was tacked on
>> some time in the 90s or maybe early 2000s, if I recall rightly. They missed
>> a trick there - they should have put it the other way round "Relationship
>> and Sex Education". A very large lump of the population go into a tabloid
>> induced panic as soon as they hear the word "sex", especially when related
>> to children, and then fail to hear the "and relationship" it.
>>
>> Rob
>>
>> On 11/01/2019 07:14, David Kellogg wrote:
>>
>> Last July in Geneva, I got into a bit of a tiff with my hosts over
>> whether or not Vygotsky had a theory of emotion. The commonplace position,
>> taken by almost all high Vygotskyans including my francophone friends, is
>> that Vygotsky spent too much of his life developing a theory of thinking
>> and intellect, complexes and concept formation, and when he turned his
>> attention to the lower and higher emotions, that dark side of the moon, it
>> was too late. He worked out a kind of prolegomena, in the form of "Teaching
>> on the Emotions" (or "Study of the Emotions" or perhaps "The Doctrine of
>> the Emotions"--you can read what he did in Volume 6 of the Collected
>> Works). And the rest was silence.
>>
>> Here in Korea we are bringing out our tenth volume of Vygotsky's works
>> (see attached cover, with blurbs from Renee Van der Veer and Irina
>> Leopoldoff-Martin). It's all about sex education, which is a very important
>> topic here in Korea, because we have fifteen hours of sex education a week
>> mandated by the government, but the ministry of education has more or less
>> withdrawn the downloadable materials for this, not for the usual reasons
>> but instead because of criticism from Human Rights Watch (it is terribly
>> sexist, homophobic, and just plain ignorant).
>>
>> Vygosky's view is that sex education (which he calls "sexual
>> enlightenment") has to be integrated into ALL subjects (so for example the
>> test of a good sex enlightenment programme would be one that ensures equal
>> participation of boys and girls in math and physics), it has to start as
>> soon as preschoolers enter primary school, and it has to be INTERESTING. In
>> other words, instead of the "sex education without sex" programme we have
>> here in South Korea, we need non-sex education...but with a good deal of
>> sex.
>>
>> All of which has got me thinking about the problem my Geneva friends set
>> before me. I think that Vygotsky really DOES have a theory that unites
>> passions and interests. It's like that book by Hirschmann on how the unity
>> of passion and interest gave rise to capitalism, but instead it is all
>> about how passions, shared projects, and interests give rise to sexual
>> love, and it is more or less right before we would expect to find it: in
>> the Pedology of the Adolescent, right before the chapter on concept
>> formation, which shows how complexes (which are categories for others)
>> become concepts (categories for themselves). This is the chapter on
>> interests, which explains how passions (which are sensations in themselves)
>> become interests: that is, emotions for themselves. (There is already a
>> passable translation of this in Volume Five of the CW). The only thing is
>> there is a need for a transitional form--a feeling with others. Andy's idea
>> of the Project?
>>
>> David Kellogg
>> Sangmyung University
>>
>> New in *Language and Literature*, co-authored with Fang Li:
>> Mountains in labour: Eliot’s ‘Atrocities’ and Woolf’s
>> alternatives
>> Show all authors
>>
>> https://doi.org/10.1177/0963947018805660
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
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