[Xmca-l] The House of Government

[David Kellogg]

(I'm changing the name of this thread, both to reflect the content and
because I don't think that Wolff-Michael's comment on the gender of "Frage"
in German is picky at all.)

I think that "The House of Government" is not really an instance of
ethnography of speech; that is only what in the seventeenth century was
called a "conceit"--an instance of wit that involves unlikely
juxtaposition, like fleabites and romantic love.

It's really a sustained argument about two propositions that the author
finds utterly contradictory: that the future is somehow in some way already
programmed and that its realization is still somehow in some way contingent
on your participation. Both propositions seem very poorly framed to me, but
I do recognize that frame of mind that likes to frame historical problems
in these inexplicable, inextricable muddles (for example: my sister has
just sent me an urgent link urging me to give up chocolate in order to
struggle against child labor in the Ivory Coast--not, mind you, in order to
lower the price of chocolate!)

Early on, the author points out how some authors tried their best to write
revolutionary epics but could not resist the lure of irony. This was
actually two paths, and not one. For the early generation of artists
(Mayakovsky, Babel), what was involved was adherance to the revolutionary
camp, a sudden consciousness of the religious element of that zeal, and
then a very different moment of "campiness", a reflective moment we might
almost call revolutionary perezhivanie. As if through a looking glass, the
later generation of artists (Shokolov, Ostrovsky) took the opposite path: a
certain aloofness from the events of the revolution, a sudden interest in
intensive realism, in "permeating art with life", and as a result the kind
of cynicism that became very explicit and very profitable (and which is
quite typical of Chinese art today).

Something of the sort could also be said about psychology: there was a
first generation for whom the revolution was the moment when humans could
exercise rational free will over everything from economics to child
development, and there was a later generation which proceeded the other way
around, working on lie detectors and programmed learning that would allow
us to plan the human. Perhaps the real dividing line in generations is not
when you are born but rather when and how you died. I think of Vygotsky
(and Trotsky) as belonging to the first generation, while Luria (and
Leontiev) belonged to the second.

(Wolff-Michael: I am still wondering about "der Frage", but let me
guess--In *Endlösung der Judenfrage,*"der" actually doesn't mean the
masculine article, but a preposition + article combination like "de la" in
French.)

David Kellogg
Sangmyung University

New Article:
Han Hee Jeung & David Kellogg (2019): A story without SELF: Vygotsky’s
pedology, Bruner’s constructivism and Halliday’s construalism in
understanding narratives by
Korean children, Language and Education, DOI: 10.1080/09500782.2019.1582663
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09500782.2019.1582663

Some e-prints available at:
https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/KHRxrQ4n45t9N2ZHZhQK/full?target=10.1080/09500782.2019.1582663
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