[Xmca-l] Re: Hegel for Social Movements

[David Kellogg]

Andy--

So it's not "Hegel for Linguists"? I'm not so sure. It depends what kind of
linguist you are, I think. Systemic-functional linguistics is an explicitly
Marxist approach (see Halliday's "The Influence of Marxism", in "Halliday
in the Twenty-first Century"), and Halliday himself got his start in
linguistics in one of the great social movements of the twentieth
century--the Chinese revolution. Ruqaiya Hasan certainly knew Hegel better
than I did.

The reason I mention it is that, we are re-translating Chapter Five of T&S
to be Chapter Ten of Pedology of the Adolescent (we thought this would
involve minor changes, but our language skills have changed alot since we
did T&S twelve years ago). Being rather "visual-illustrative" (there's a
good Russian word for this, but no very good word in English), I got caught
up in your God's Eye View of the Hegel universe on p. 157. And the left leg
of it, the Logic, still looks to me like a map of Chapter Five/Ten.

Syncretic heaps are pure being--they are based on quantity, quality, and
measure. Complexes are syncretic heaps which are reorganized by reflection,
by appearance, and ultimately (pseudoconceptually) by actuality. The real
concept is the unity of subject, object, and idea--but also a
recapitulation of the syncretic heap (Subject only), the complex (Object),
and the Act-ual.

Vygotsky struggles a little with the Logic because it's kind of "outside
in": the genetic law insists that every function appears twice, first
inter- and then intra-personally. That means that the child's own
development happens for others before it happens for the child himself or
herself. And that means that the starting point is not one but two.

So for example Paula Towsey, in her paper in MCA ("Wolves in Sheep's
Clothing", Towsey and Macdonald 2009), says that Vygotsky uses
"pseudoconcept" in two contradictory ways--first, as an umbrella term that
covers ALL the complexes (and that's how she's labelled her pictures).
Secondly, as a unique stage WITHIN complexes--the highest, transitional
form, the bridge to the concept.

I think one way to resolve this contradiction is to say that Chapter
Five/Ten is abstraction in action--it's a kind of desert island on which
children play without adults, and the child's forms of thinking display
what they would be without any adult influence. But what we see in "real"
life is mostly pseudoconcepts, because in real life the starting point is
not one but two.

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



On Mon, Sep 2, 2019 at 1:58 AM Helena Worthen <helenaworthen@gmail.com>
wrote:

> OK, OK, I get it. I am a bit behind in doing my reviewing assignments
> because of shifting house from Vermont back to CA. My first reaction after
> whipping through Andy's first chapter was an uncanny sense that this book
> was indeed written directly with me in mind. I guess “Me” would mean any
> person who started out not being “political” (in my case, an English comp
> and literature person) and came into the world of social movements by
> bumping up against reality often enough and now wants to make sense of it.
>
> OK, I’ll get on it!
>
> H
>
> helenaworthen@gmail.com
> helena.worthen1
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Sep 1, 2019, at 6:30 AM, Andy Blunden <andyb@marxists.org> wrote:
>
> Glad you're enjoying it, David. I hope that I will have my copies soon
> too! Both you and Helena have managed to get copies before me!
>
> Your questions: (1) Hegel does tend to deal with topics in terms of the
> very end points and extremes, and this has brought a lot of criticism and
> misunderstandings down on his head, especially from our generation. Mainly
> I deal with it by simply ignoring the passages of Hegel which go to God and
> the Absolute Idea, World History and so on. I recently put an article on my
> website and Hegel and Teleology, in which I specifically advised people to
> read Hegel without obsessing on these excesses. I should have put something
> to this effect in the book. You are right there.
>
> (2) Hegel's writing on language are in the Philosophy of Subjective
> Spirit, and they are not very interesting, I thought, in the context of
> linguistics today. But I can imagine that if Linguistics was your thing,
> then reading the Logic you would see Language everywhere. It is like that.
> But my book is "Hegel for Social Movements" not "Hegel for Linguists."
>
> (3) I must have not made myself clear, David, somehow. Hegel completely
> supported the Haitian Revolution and he was a complete Realist in
> International Relations, which he called "the animal kingdom of the
> spirit." He said states should honour treaties that they have entered into,
> but that's all. Quite confronting for the modern reader. It was Kant who
> promoted a "United Nations" and Fichte who used recognition of national
> sovereignty as a model for intersubjective relations. For Hegel, there was
> nothing higher than the nation state.
>
> The term "immanent critique" actually dates from the Frankfurt School.
> Hegel never used the term. But the Logic is clearly the model of immanent
> critique. Hegel was actually pretty dogmatic in how he critiqued his
> contemporary protagonists.
>
> Andy
> ------------------------------
> *Andy Blunden*
> https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/index.htm
> On 1/09/2019 8:15 pm, David Kellogg wrote:
>
> I'm reading "Hegel for Social Movements", and I highly recommend it,
> particularly to Helena. Although Andy doesn't say very much about his own
> rich experience in trade unionism, it clearly illuminates a lot of his
> examples.
>
> I have three questions though. They are questions that I kept stumbling
> over when I read the Logic and I have yet to really find anything that
> answers them in Andy's book.
>
> First of all, why is Hegel so big on purity? He is always talking about
> pure being, and absolute idea. I guess I don't believe in purity--I not
> only don't believe it exists, I am not even sure it should exist.
>
> Secondly, one of the delights of Andy's book is that he likes to switch
> back and forth between (e.g.) the Logic and the Grundrisse.  Bloomfield
> remarks that when he read Capital he thought it was a book about
> linguistics (because of the part on exchange value and use value, which
> does look kind of Saussurean if you squint a little!) A lot of what Andy is
> saying about how movements become first conscious of their own existence
> (there is a line like that in Malraux's "Les Conquerants"--les coolies ont
> decouvert ils existent, seulement qu'ils existent....), and then become
> conscious of their internal differences--these seem to be statements about
> the development of LANGUAGE and not simply language-pure consciousness. So
> why so little explicit treatment of language?
>
> Thirdly, Andy sometimes slips into Hegelian (rather than Marxist)
> politics, e.g. on Haiti (p. 55) and and when he considers "international
> law" an absolute (35). Haiti did not slip into neocolonialism because of
> some lack of international civil society but BECAUSE of that "international
> community" and still is!
>
> (Andy--I thought "immanent critique" (the practice, not the term) was
> Kant, not Hegel! How is Hegel's use of the practice different from Kant's?)
>
> 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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