[Xmca-l] Re: "sociocultural psychology" ?

[Anthony Barra]

I loved re-reading that and a host of other old posts today, David. Very
cool that you and Nikolai ended up working together (
https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://youtu.be/OcxfVQxe6JI__;!!Mih3wA!SkYhaRM8TOy89VOvIwzZ6-UMIXwOt_jl0kRuZVnW5EJrmDyK-V8Lua5rHG7skH1kv7q09w$ ) after some energized, mildly tense exchanges
early on. As an onlooker, this archive can be quite neat in that regard.




On Sunday, May 24, 2020, David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com> wrote:

> Thanks, Rob. I am not sure where I got "bladeless knives without handles"
> (Mad Magazine when I was a kid, probably....) I'm sure I didn't make it
> up. But when I read the attached post, I can recognze all my usual facial
> tics...far-flung and far-fetched comparisons, sudden changes of subject,
> picturesque details a propos nothing in particular. That much I did make up!
>
> It was shortly afterwards I suggested doing a book on puppets, and you
> were kind enough to edit the mess into "The Great Globe and All Who It
> Inherit". It was a book which had almost nothing to do with
> puppets. because I blew through my puppet budget and still only had enough
> of them for the teacher, so we would teach the kids to use their fingers
> and their imaginations instead (headless puppet without handle).
>
> I notice that it was wildly unpopular as an actual book, but
> people download individual e-chapters from Springer quite a bit. When I do
> teach the book, I find the redundancy of the structure helpful for
> internalizing the argument (Halliday-Vygotsky-Shakespeare in every
> chapter). I had always thought that single chapters and e-books
> were equally both bladeless knives without handles.
>
> (But what do I know? Authors never really know what they are doing. That's
> why God made editors, you know....)
>
> David Kellogg
> Sangmyung University
>
> New Article: Ruqaiya Hasan, in memoriam: A manual and a manifesto.
> Outlines, Spring 2020 https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://tidsskrift.dk/outlines/article/view/116238/__;!!Mih3wA!SkYhaRM8TOy89VOvIwzZ6-UMIXwOt_jl0kRuZVnW5EJrmDyK-V8Lua5rHG7skH0OXI96vg$ 
> 167607
> <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://tidsskrift.dk/outlines/article/view/116238/167607__;!!Mih3wA!QPRn2_tuZRB9hkHJGZJkH3y7JUbXQTUjfPD3KvI8wm1UNSL76RuqyF6u6YNMh3Brlb9M0w$>
>
> New Translation with Nikolai Veresov: *L.S. Vygotsky's Pedological Works* *Volume
> One: Foundations of Pedology*"
>  https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9789811505270__;!!Mih3wA!SkYhaRM8TOy89VOvIwzZ6-UMIXwOt_jl0kRuZVnW5EJrmDyK-V8Lua5rHG7skH074b0duw$ 
> <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9789811505270__;!!Mih3wA!QPRn2_tuZRB9hkHJGZJkH3y7JUbXQTUjfPD3KvI8wm1UNSL76RuqyF6u6YNMh3AzkbrCqg$>
>
>
>
> On Sun, May 24, 2020 at 8:19 AM Robert Lake <boblake@georgiasouthern.edu>
> wrote:
>
> This has always been one of my favorite phrases of your David Kellogg(2011
> :-).
> [xmca] Bladeless Knives Without Handles
> ------------------------------
>
>    - *To*: Culture ActivityeXtended Mind <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
>    - *Subject*: [xmca] Bladeless Knives Without Handles
>    - *From*: David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>
>    - *Date*: Thu, 4 Aug 2011 20:29:50 -0700 (PDT)
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> ------------------------------
>
> A few belated comments, some of them appreciative but mostly quite critical, about Fernando Gonzalez Rey’s “Re-examination of Defining Moments” and his notion of sense.
>
> a)    Both Rey and Veresov (in his article “Vygotsky Before Vygotsky”) emphasize NEGATION in their periodization: they stress absolute differences between the early Vygotsky (interested in art, literature, imagination, creativity, emotion, and personality) and middle Vygotsky (interested in completely unrelated notions such as history, culture, mediation, tools, symbols, and internalization). I think there is indeed a very important distinction to be made, but I think it is more like the distinction between explanans and explanandum than either writer would like to admit. For example, isn’t an artwork a kind of instrument? Doesn’t art work involve the use of both tools and symbols? It is more than a little suggestive that both Rey and Veresov appear to distinguish a “real” Vygotsky concerned with individual development from a false, objectivist and institutionalized Vygotsky concerned with Marxist psychology and (to link this thread to the
>  last discussion article) the Soviet social project. Rey does take this project much further than Veresov, and tries to split Vygotsky away from cultural-historical psychology altogether (whereas Veresov simply tries to split off the early Vygotsky from Marxism).
>
> b)    Both Rey and Veresov stress that they are the FIRST to make this distinction (and thus ignore each other, as well as writers (Mauricio Ernica, Gunilla Lindqvist) who have made similar points in a less ambitious, less absolutist and (as a result) more acceptable fashion. For example, van der Veer and Kozulin have taken into account the clear examples of reflexological terminology in “Psychology of Art” (even idiots like me! See “The Real Ideal” in the LCHC discussion papers pigeonhole); actually the whole work uses as a unit of analysis an “aesthetic reaction”. Oppositely, there are those pesky works by Vygotsky himself, e.g. “Imagination and Creativity in the Adolescent” which came out in 1931 at the very nadir of Vygotsky’s supposedly “objectivist” period. Of course, knowing how hard it is to get published in MCA, I quite understand the temptation to make extravagant claims of priority and extreme claims of periodization.
>  Still, I can’t help but wonder how it is that our respected, (even feared!) reviewers could so easily have had the wool pulled over their eyes!
>
> c)    Rey appears to me to be trying to establish sense as a psychological category rather than a linguistic one, that is, as a matter of belief and identity rather than speaking role and reference. I agree that simply putting in culture between the subject and object in the form of an objective tool-like “meaning” will not work; the historico-cultural project founded by LCHC was to examine differences in cognition made by culture, and not simply material artefacts. I also agree that calling both tools and symbols "artefacts" (ideal or material) does not do anything other than to account for them historically and genetically; it doesn't, for example, help to distinguish them functionally and structurally.  But I don’t think that trying to de-historicize and de-culturize sense will work either, for a very simple reason: there is no such thing as sense without established (historic-culturally established) meaning, just as there is no
>  meaning-making without actual sense, without mentally reconstructing the mind of the interlocutor.Psychological sense without (historic-cultural) meaning and meaning without sense are both both meaningless and senseless.
>
> It seems to me that sense without historico-cultural meaning is a bladeless knife without a handle. That is because sense is not simply part of the user-friendly handle of a word; it is also inherent to the way that it is interpreted by the interpreter.
>
> Similarly, meaning is not simply part of the environment-friendly “blade” of the word: it is inherent to the way the speaker dissects the reality he has gathered, hunted, and brought home (Whorf, of course!).
>
> Last night (well, the night before last now), my wife and I returned to Seoul. Our suitcase arrived in baggage claim with a yellow plastic lock that played a pleasant ringtone, but was accompanied by a plainclothes policeman who notified us that our bag had been identified as containing a dangerous weapon.
>
> About four days ago, coming down from the mountains in Western Sichuan, we passed through one of the villages of the Tushan people, who, until about a generation ago, were a nomadic forest tribe practicing slash and burn agriculture to supplement a diet of hunting and gathering.
>
> The area is now a panda reserve. So the government has endeavoured to persuade the Tushan to settle in villages like the one we passed through, called Bai Ma (although I noticed that there were still slash and burn plots dotting the mountainside around the village).
>
> The villagers, erstwhile hunters and gatherers, don't really know how to make a living, so they flag your car down and try to sell you stuff. I bought about a kilo of their yellow plums, obviously gathered in the forest and very tasty, and my brother-in-law found some watermelon knives he liked, which had sheaths made of the horn of some animal and hilts beautifully sculpted with the profile of an old man.
>
> The Tushan insisted that the old man was Genghis Khan, a man some of them claim as an ancestor. (Of course, 8% of Asian men are descended from him, but it is also said that he died of dysentery contracted in the Gansu town of Tianshui [literally, “heavenly water”!])
>
> When we left for Seoul, my brother-in-law looked at the old man on the handle and decided one of them would make a good present for my father (a.k.a. Genghis Khan). But the customs official who took it out of our suitcase only had eyes for the blade: scimitar shaped and about twenty centimeters long. (Who knows, maybe Genghis Khan was really trying to cut a watermelon with it, and the blade slipped.
>
> My poor brother-in-law had forgotten the most important difference between tools and symbols, and also between meaning and sense, between social usage and personal use; one, but only one, can be used in an autocentric way. Or not, as the case may be.
>
> David Kellogg
> (Unemployed)
>
>
>
> On Sat, May 23, 2020 at 5:45 PM David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> I didn't mean to confuse you, Annalisa. But Andy and and the various
> philosohers on this list have used expressions that I in turn find very
> confusing and I suppose I have also confused in my own turn. It is one of
> the hazards of putting together people from different backgrounds without
> proper intellectual social distancing.
>
> Here are two statements from philosophy that linguists like me find
> confusing:
>
> a) Everything is one hundred percent mediated and one hundred percent
> unmediated.
>
> b) (I)t is argument about the beginnings of philosophy, not psychology,
> and certainly about the distinction between basic and higher mental
> functions.
>
> I find the first statement confusing, because it seems to me to rule out
> "more" or "less" as applied to mediated and unmediated. This rules out the
> possibility that children develop more mediated functions (e.g. volitional
> attention, semanticized perception, logical memory, verbal thinking) on the
> basis of less mediated functions (involuntary attention, optical/aural
> perception, eidetic memory, and purely practical intelligence). Andy has
> now amended this to two separate yes/no questions ("Is objectivity mediated
> for the subject?" "One hundred percent yes." "Is objectivity unmediated for
> the subject?" "One hundred percent yes"). By separating it into two
> different clauses, Andy is reproducing the grammar of the original Hegel in
> dialogic form, but he is also acknowledging the inadequacy of the
> translation that he announced he would not discuss because it is too clear.
>
> I find the second statement even more confusing: I am not sure how one can
> discuss the distinction between basic and higher mental functions without
> beginning psychology, but you can apply to Andy for details on what exactly
> he meant.
>
> Vygotsky (and Vera John-Steiner, and the other leading representtive of
> the New Mexico school which you are associated with) believed in higher and
> lower functions. This was  common among psychologists at the time, but it
> was not a way of quantitatively comparing subjects. It was usually
> interpreted in a dualistic way--like a two story house, with immediate
> perception on the lower floor (animals and infants) and higher perception
> on the upper (angels and aduls), immediate attention (like when you hear
> thunder and jump) on the lower floor and voluntary attention (the ability
> to listen to somebody's meanings and edit out all the pauses and fillers)
> on the upper.
>
> Vygotsky pointed out that the two were just as linked as they were
> distinct (that was what Ruqaiya Hasan always got out of Vygotsky and she
> was right). Vygotsky also thought that all the rooms in the supposed upper
> floor were semantically joined through word meanings (because word meaning
> participates in the formation of all higher functions) creating a unified
> system. This is not true of lower functions: involuntary attention and
> practical intelligence are not developmentally linked the way that
> voluntary attention and verbal intelligence are,  We know that Vygotsky
> criticized his own early work for seeing the higher and lower functions in
> the two-story house way and not seeing that the higher functions are
> systemically linked. A lot of my own interest in systemic-functional
> linguistics, an approach that has nothing to do with the sentence
> diagramming you refer to, is about seeing those higher functions as
> systemically linked through wording (lexicogrammar), and not simply through
> word meaning (lexis). The latter was Ruqaiya's critique of Vygotsky, and
> Andy has strongly objected to it as treating Vygotsky as a linguist.
>
> Brabantio: What profane wretch art thou?
> Iago: I am one, sir, that comes to tell you your daughter and the Moor are
> making the beast with two backs.
> Brabantio: Thou art a linguist.
> Iago: You are---a philosopher.
>
> (Othello, Act I Scene I, but perhaps my logical/verbal memory misgives me
> there at the end...)
>
> David Kellogg
> Sangmyung University
>
> New Article: Ruqaiya Hasan, in memoriam: A manual and a manifesto.
> Outlines, Spring 2020 https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://tidsskrift.dk/outlines/article/view/116238/__;!!Mih3wA!SkYhaRM8TOy89VOvIwzZ6-UMIXwOt_jl0kRuZVnW5EJrmDyK-V8Lua5rHG7skH0OXI96vg$ 
> 167607
> <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://tidsskrift.dk/outlines/article/view/116238/167607__;!!Mih3wA!RH6LAnBsef6doJ6EFER3t2j96hvVmo059l2sBPsmjgn5k_DATUUAK4ZP39b0ytp83Zymrg$>
>
> New Translation with Nikolai Veresov: *L.S. Vygotsky's Pedological Works* *Volume
> One: Foundations of Pedology*"
>  https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9789811505270__;!!Mih3wA!SkYhaRM8TOy89VOvIwzZ6-UMIXwOt_jl0kRuZVnW5EJrmDyK-V8Lua5rHG7skH074b0duw$ 
> <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9789811505270__;!!Mih3wA!RH6LAnBsef6doJ6EFER3t2j96hvVmo059l2sBPsmjgn5k_DATUUAK4ZP39b0ytqwIQuWfQ$>
>
>
>
> On Sun, May 24, 2020 at 4:56 AM Annalisa Aguilar <annalisa@unm.edu> wrote:
>
> Hi David and Andy,
>
> When I read this:
>
> "b) Chiaroscuro paintings are equally both dark and light in Caravaggio's
> time and in our own."
>
>
> I would have interpreted this to mean that paintings are 50% dark and 50%
> light. Not 100% dark and 100% light. I suppose this depends upon where one
> places the parentheses. I can't remember exactly how to diagram sentences,
> and I would be difficult for me to do that here in an email client,  but
> what of this:
>
> (Chiaroscura (paintings)) are (equally both) ((dark) and (light)) (in
> (Carraviagio's (time)) and (in (our (own [time]))).
>
> or
>
> (Chiaroscuro (paintings)) are (equally (both ((dark) and (light))) (in
> Caravaggio's (time)) and (in (our own ([time]))).
>
> I would never have presumed something could be 100% X and 100% Y unless we
> were talking about two separate, but joined, entities.
>
> In that case I'd interpret this to mean that the definition of Chiaroscuro
> paintings no matter what historical period have two types, what might be
> called white paintings and what might be called black paintings. Say, were
> there an opposite of Film Noir, called Film Blanc. And these were related
> paintings because of similar painting methods and composition, and even
> subject matter, but one is predomin
>
>
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