[Xmca-l] Re: Fernando Rey

[David Kellogg]

I never met Fernando Gonzalez Rey, but I remember his periodization scheme
for Vygotsky's work (which I completely disagreed with) and his hospital
bed intervention at the Sydney ISCAR conference. His work on emotion, on
Vygotsky's "Psychology of Art" and on the use of 'perezhivanie' as a unit
of analysis for consciousness were much discussed in December at the ISCAR
Blue Mountain retreat in Australia. He was a presence.

If you think about it non-dialectically, it's pretty easy to demonstrate
that the present doesn't exist, or that it is vanishingly small, or that
what we think of as "present" is nothing but the immediate past (which I
think was Bergson's point of view) or that what we think of as the
"present" is simply an actor's prologue (which is Shakespeare's).

I guess we make the present present by reflecting on it. This morning I was
reflecting on that TED talk by Deb Roy which we discussed on this list
eight years ago, just before I went to Sydney and started reading Fernando
Gonzalez Rey. If you missed it, the TED talk is here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RE4ce4mexrU

Going over it this morning, I realized how quaint and naive it seems,
particularly in the light of Fernando Gonzalez Rey's work. It smells of the
era of big data, approached atheoretically, as if all you have to do is
to keep acquiring those data points and the theoretical conclusions will
self-assemble.

At around 2:00 Roy makes the point that the data set is 250,000 hours. What
he doesn't point out is that it would take around thirty years just to
listen to it, let alone analyze it. He then presents, in lieu of analysis,
a visualization--space time worms. But visualization is NOT analysis,
and in fact by construcing a "space time worm", all he really does is
replace the real time dimension with another space dimension, which has the
disadvantage (to the linguist) of being entirely unreal.

At around 3:30 Roy presents a "time lapse" construction of the word "water"
by his child. Although he has destroyed the context of the child's work
(and thus made the construction seem at once a solitary invention and a
gradual evolution), you can still see that the child's progress is exactly
what the "space time worm" seems to deny: it's NOT linear at all. There are
clear moments of reflection, of explicit study, of delliberate attempts to
master something in the milieu, and that's what Deb Roy's data set leaves
out in the visualization.

I don't think much of this would have impressed Fernando Gonzalez Rey. What
bothers me is that it impressed me eight years ago. Live and learn, as they
say...but they don't tell you how much more there is to learn than there is
to live. From the point of view of individual existence, presence just
doesn't exist--fortunately, from the point of view of this list, every
presence is prologue.

David Kellogg
Sangmyung University

New Article;

 David Kellogg (2019) THE STORYTELLER’S TALE: VYGOTSKY’S ‘VRASHCHIVANIYA’,
THE ZONE OF PROXIMAL DEVELOPMENT AND ‘INGROWING’ IN THE WEEKEND STORIES OF
KOREAN CHILDREN, British Journal of Educational Studies, DOI:
10.1080/00071005.2019.1569200
<https://doi.org/10.1080/00071005.2019.1569200>


Some e-prints available at:

https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/GSS2cTAVAz2jaRdPIkvj/full?target=10.1080/00071005.2019.1569200




On Thu, Mar 28, 2019 at 4:53 AM Luisa Aires <laires11@gmail.com> wrote:

> Sinto muito, Alfredo.
>
> Abraço,
> Luísa A.
>
> Alfredo Jornet Gil <a.j.gil@ils.uio.no> escreveu no dia quarta,
> 27/03/2019 à(s) 19:34:
>
>> Dear all,
>>
>>
>> Fernando González Rey (1949-2019)
>>
>> For the CHAT community, it is a deep sorrow to inform of the
>> untimely death of
>> our colleague and friend Fernando González Rey on the night of March 26,
>> in the city of São Paulo, at 69 years of age. A deep and powerful live
>> devoted to psychology and social sciences, to understanding Vygotsky and
>> going
>> beyond his legacy; to opening new horizons regarding human personality,
>> qualitative methodology, motivation, sense, perezhivanie and subjectivity
>> from a cultural-historical approach. His ashes will be taken to Cuba,
>> where he was born, and as he was wish. We are sure that his strength,
>> integrity, sense of humor and passionate for life, for psychology and for
>> social and human sciences will remain alive on our thoughts and hearts.
>>
>>
>> ​
>>
>>
>
> --
>
> ____
> Department of Education and Distance Learning, Universidade Aberta
> ObLID Network, LE@D-UAb
> R. Amial, nº 752, 4200-055 Porto, Portugal
> laires@uab.pt
> www.uab.pt
> www.contemcom.org
>
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