[Xmca-l] Re: Language in the Time of Covid 19

[Tom Richardson]

David Kellogg's latest 'clarification' is a real source of light and uplift
to me, reducing the every bit of distance between us (all), apart from the
social - David, you feel very close.
I trust that this message does not break any xmca rules about personal
comment.
Tom Richardson (kibitzer) Middlesbrough UK
        BoWen


On Tue, 14 Apr 2020 at 03:11, David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com> wrote:

> In Korea we have a delightful kind of miniature waffe filled with sweet
> red beans called a 붕어빵 (literally, "carp bread"); and in Korean we have a
> rather sardonic saying, "붕어빵에는 붕어가 없다" (not too literally, "there just
> ain't no carp in a carp bread").
>
> One could go all post-modern on this point and talk about Baudrillard and
> simulacra and how chicken testicles are not McNuggets, but one would break
> the one screen rule: I really just want a colorful way to frame the
> argument that there ain't no instruction in self-instruction, at least not
> in the good old Vygotskyan sense of обучение (obuchenie,
> teaching-and-learning, as Mike has insisted that it should be translated).
> Self-instruction is not instruction--because the whole point of обучение is
> a higher form of interdependency we call development; it's not just the
> viral replication of behavior in a form independent from the original.
>
> Three other points of language in the time of Covid 19 seem worth keeping
> in mind as we try to scale up some of the "moments" of XMCA, even to the
> level of the Latour website (it seems to me that responding on the Website
> he designed is probably more scalable than having our own Google Doc, which
> is why I didn't contribute to the Google Doc, Helena....)
>
> a) There is no "social" in "social distancing". The distancing we are
> after is really a mechanical, physiological, medical distance and not a
> social one at all: on the contrary, mechanical distancing is a very high
> form of social solidarity, and as such it comes at a price. One of the
> bereaved wives on the BBC put this beautifully (through her tears). "I am
> alone. I am not lonely, because I have many people talking to me on-line. I
> am less lonely than ever. But I am far more alone. No one can give me a
> hug."
>
> b) There is no "coronavirus" in Covid 19. Just as HIV is not the same
> thing as AIDS, the specific type of coronavirus SARS-Co2-19 is not the same
> thing as the illness which killed Lucien Seve. This seems trivial, except
> that eventually we will have to get it through thick skulls, our own and
> those of our conspecifics, that there are many different coronaviruses and
> most of them are harmless. But more importantly we need to understand that
> many people are going to be dying of things that are only indirectly
> related to the virus and which are directly related to real social
> conditions
>
> (You can skip this part, Helena: it's an exemplificatory aside....I just
> heard Dr. John Campbell, whose views I respect less and less, argue that
> one reason why black people suffer disproportionately from Covid 19 has
> something to do with dark skin and a lack of Vitamin D. This is rather like
> the Chinese who claimed that the reason the disease strikes men harder than
> women must have something to do with the X chromosome rather than, say, the
> simple social fact that in China 50% of men smoke and only 5% of women do.
> Or the catastrophic belief of the US administration that the disease could
> be halted by a physical travel ban back when the process of community
> spread was already well underway.)
>
> c) Many units of social practice are neither scalable nor transitional,
> e.g. on-line classes and  the practice of mooing from your balcony instead
> of singing in support of the National Health Service (as they do in the
> dairy town of Belpy in England), But language is both. As Ruqaiya Hasan
> liked to say, the reason why language solves so many of our problems is
> that language itself is the source of many of our problems, needs, desires,
> hopes, dreams, drives. But that's just another way of saying that you don't
> experience a perizhivanie as problematic until you also experience, in the
> dark and just beyond your fingertips but still exquisitely and
> very palbably there, some means for its solution.
>
> David Kellogg
> Sangmyung University
>
> Book Review: 'Fees, Beets, and Music: A critical perusal of *Critical
> Pedagogy and Marx, Vygotsky and Freire: Phenomenal forms and  educational
> action research'  in Mind Culture and Activity*
>
> https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10749039.2020.1745847
>
> Some free e-prints available at:
>
>
> https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/QBBGIZNKAHPMM4ZVCWVX/full?target=10.1080/10749039.2020.1745847
>
> New Translation with Nikolai Veresov: "L.S. Vygotsky's Pedological Works
> Volume One: Foundations of Pedology"
>
>  https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9789811505270
>
>
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