[Xmca-l] Re: does this screed have an inkling of merit?

Wed Feb 26 16:05:16 PST 2020

David,
My wife and I finally rented “Parasite”, the first non-English movie to receive the Oscar. (I also just watched “Indochine” in French, which got the Oscar for Katrine Deneuve, though the movie didn’t get it.)  I still don’t quite understand the metaphor of the title for class divisions in Korea, but it’s almost prescient, considering the Corona-19 virus. Having watched it, I was struck by the nuclear family set-up for rich and poor, though the poor family’s children were older. Would you say that is typical, or are Korean households more multi-generational? Perhaps you are familiar with an article in the current Atlantic by David Brooks, the “The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake”. He argues that it just isn’t a sustainable arrangement for the future.
Henry

> On Feb 26, 2020, at 4:28 PM, David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Anthony:
> 
> Yes, it's a little hard to imagine what life is like outside "self-quarantine", much less what life is like outside South Korea just now. We hardly go out at all, and we are preparing to teach all of our classes from home, through the internet, in order to stop the spread of the Corona-19 virus (there is something of a political kerfuffle on what to call it, because the pro-American anti-Chinese party insists on "Wuhan Virus", while the government insists on "Corona-19"). Today the government announced that masks for going out will finally be made available at pharmacies and post-offices, but only five per customer. I don't really believe in the effectiveness of masks (they seem to work mostly by keeping you from touching your mouth and lips rather than by actually standing between you and the virus). So I mostly just stay in.
> 
> From the point of view of the virus, a body is a body is a body. But from the point of view of a teacher and even a doctor, a body is not a virus-carrying body unless it is organized into a vector of infection, and these infectious vectors look a lot like socio-cultural rather than biological organisms.
> 
> Here's the situation in South Korea (and it may well come to be a situation near you sooner than you think). Until about two weeks ago, we were just like any other country--we had a few cases, but they were directly linked to people arriving from China by airline and they were easily quarantined; if anything we were better off, because we had SARS and MERS and so we'd developed a very good institutional "immune response" in the form of a very solid public health infrastructure. The death rate for C19 is extremely low (less than one percent here in Korea) so nobody was very concerned. But then there was a mysterious spike in the city of Daegu (and in fact 82 percent of the cases are still in Daegu and environs). For many days the Corona-19 cases doubled every single day, from 51 to around six hundred. This was apparently connected with a church--more of a cult, really, since the 240,000 members are secretive and believe that their leader enjoys eternal life. The leader's brother, however, did not enjoy eternal life--he died, apparently of C19, and his funeral and the hospital where he died appears to have been a major source of contagion
> 
> The right wing opposition, which is largely based in Daegu and in the churches, continues to blame everything on China and demands that all arriving Chinese people be sent home. But since the budget cuts and the half-price tuition reforms were implemented by the liberal government, Korean universities have become financially dependent on Chinese foreign students. About 70,000 of them were set to arrive this week, but classes are now delayed for two weeks, and it looks like only 10,000 students will arrive in all.
> 
> Korea, which supposedly has the highest index of child unhappiness on earth, was recently listed second, after Norway, among countries that allow the health and above all the education of children to flourish. But because of the collapsing birth rate here in South Korea (which is in turn linked to the high price of having, raising and educating a child) the profession of teaching is no longer a secure one. So I am often asked to teach classes which will innoculate my students against the instability of the job market. For example, last semester I co-taught a class in "Your Specialism and Start-Ups" with a friend who is a professor of business studies at Tehran University. The argument my colleague put to the student was that only about three out of our class of forty will ever manage to become teachers. But towards the end of the class he admitted that about SEVENTY PERCENT of start-ups fail within the FIRST YEAR. When you are planning a life, these statistics are much scarier than the current death rate from Corona-19. Needless to say, I argued that teaching is still your best option. But of course that's MY specialism....
> 
> 
> David Kellogg
> Sangmyung University
> 
> New Article: 'Commentary: On the originality of Vygotsky's "Thought and Word" i
> in Mind Culture and Activity
> https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10749039.2020.1711775 <https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10749039.2020.1711775>
> Some free e-prints available at:
> https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/SK2DR3TYBMJ42MFPYRFY/full?target=10.1080/10749039.2020.1711775 <https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/SK2DR3TYBMJ42MFPYRFY/full?target=10.1080/10749039.2020.1711775>
> 
> New Translation with Nikolai Veresov: "L.S. Vygotsky's Pedological Works Volume One: Foundations of Pedology"
> 
>  https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9789811505270 <https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9789811505270>
> 
> 
> On Thu, Feb 27, 2020 at 7:56 AM Anthony Barra <anthonymbarra@gmail.com <mailto:anthonymbarra@gmail.com>> wrote:
> David, thank you.  Extremely interesting response, including some of the statements I can't quite follow yet, outsider that I am (e.g., "Cities, churches, college campuses and airline companies are simply the forms which human biology have taken, and so they are inevitably the conduits through which viruses reorganize human biology for their own apparently purposeless purposes."  -- Simply?  e.g., "Viral anarchy of the labor market").  I don't have the background knowledge to fully understand these metaphors, but I think they're intriguing.
> 
> And yes, we Americans tend not to be keen on excessive central planning. 
> 
> This was an interesting read, David.  Thanks again.  Even more so, I really enjoyed your Commentary here, re: 'Vygotsky's originality' (which I recommend to anyone yet to read it): https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10749039.2020.1711775?journalCode=hmca20 <https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10749039.2020.1711775?journalCode=hmca20> 
> 
> Anthony 
> 
> 
> 
> On Mon, Feb 24, 2020 at 6:06 PM David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com <mailto:dkellogg60@gmail.com>> wrote:
> We are living through a public health emergency here in South Korea. I won't provide the details, which are (fortunately) even more widely available than the virus itself and (unfortunately) far more available than the F94 disposible masks we are supposed to be wearing whenever we go out. Going out is strongly discouraged, and schools, gyms, and even local government facilities remain closed.  But I think that public health emergencies are actually a more useful "lens" (as people in our field like to say these days) through which to read your article than the the author's admittedly irrelevant trip to the beach. 
> 
> First of all, a good public health emergency like this one, or the Broad Street Pump cholera epidemic, the AIDS/HIV epidemic in the 1980s, and SARS/MERS in the early years of the present millenium) exposes in a very graphic way how inescapable the cultural-historical organization of human biological content is. Cities, churches, college campuses and airline companies are simply the forms which human biology have taken, and so they are inevitably the conduits through which viruses reorganize human biology for their own apparently purposeless purposes. Unlike viruses, markets, and imaginary libertarian/anarchist paradises populated by atomistically inclined "free-thinking individuals" opposed in principle to planned behaviors of any kind, these cultural-historical forms have the great advantage of being potentially conscious, deliberate, and purposeful--i.e. plannable.
> 
> Secondly, and as a direct result, a good public health emergency like this one also evokes a cultural-historical immune response. Broad Street evoked modern immunology. AIDS/HIV evoked ACT-UP, and this had the indirect result of showiing how inextricably gay people are part of our cities, churches, college campuses and even airline industry and thus helping bring out equal marriage rights. SARS/MERS created the medical infrastructure that is starting to bring the epidemic under control even in Daegu. This morning the leader of the pro-dictatorship pro-American party had to be tested for the virus, because he sat next to the virus-positive leader of a corporatist teachers "union" in a rally; he tested negative, but not before a session of the national assembly had to be cancelled, and then he immediately called a halt to all rallies and asked people to cooperate with the medical establishment instead of travelling all over the country agitating for travel bans on Chinese people.
> 
> When I was recently in the USA, I noticed (partly under the influence of having to buy short-term medical coverage for myself and my wife) that even Americans are starting to take seriously the idea that health care should not be completely marketized, that more than just  preventive medicine might be usefully nationalized, collectivized, and even planned. The "Common Core" and the National Curriculum which motivates the article you sent around are both similarly American (i.e. similarly tentative and timid) steps in the realization that education might usefully follow suit. I also noticed, however, that very few Americans (including the most "left" of the current candidates for president) would be willing to see plannability extended to other necessities, such as housing, transportation, and basic necessaries of life, let alone the underlying factors of capital and labor. Education does many things, and inevitably some of the things it does can be made to look manipulative and dangerous by free-thinking and free-wheeling proponents of the free market like your author and our own pro-dictatorship pro-American party. But education remains the only cultural-historical immune response to the viral anarchy of the labor market that young people really have. 
> 
> David Kellogg
> New co-translation, with Nikolai Veresov:
> 
> ‘L. S. Vygotsky's Pedological Works: Volume 1. Foundations of Pedology’.
> 
> Free downloadable PDF with introductory essay, concluding essay.
> 
> Free summarizing outlines.
> Book product page: https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9789811505270 <https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9789811505270>
> The eBook is available here: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-981-15-0528-7 <https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-981-15-0528-7> 
> 
> 
> 
> On Tue, Feb 25, 2020 at 4:25 AM Anthony Barra <anthonymbarra@gmail.com <mailto:anthonymbarra@gmail.com>> wrote:
> To me, it seems a product of motivated reasoning and confirmation bias, but I ask sincerely: does anybody find any inklings of merit in this 2014 essay? http://invisibleserfscollar.com/unveiling-the-true-focus-of-the-common-core-obuchenie-within-students-to-gain-desired-future-behaviors/ <http://invisibleserfscollar.com/unveiling-the-true-focus-of-the-common-core-obuchenie-within-students-to-gain-desired-future-behaviors/>
> 
> I stumbled upon the article while googling "obuchenie and perezhivanie," two terms I'm in the early stages of understanding. The blog's proprietor writes with a lot of . . . energy. (And perhaps, a cocktail of hubris and pseudoconcepts - http://tiny.cc/dpbgkz <http://tiny.cc/dpbgkz> )
> 
> To briefly add, for whatever it's worth: I am probably more familiar with the (somewhat paranoid) style of argumentation in the attached essay than I am with the finer points of cultural-historical theory.  But I'm not a very refined consumer of either. 
> 
> The blogger writes in a style I'm not particularly fond of -- i.e., wielding a sword and swinging it around wildly.  Amidst the wild swinging, I ask: does any of it hit?
> 
> I'd be interesting in any productive thoughts at all.  
> 
> Thanks ~ 
> Anthony 

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