Re: [xmca] If all hopes are lost for establishing a more workable social system , then please tell me where A.N.Leontyev has gone wrong with his definition of "Personal Meaning"

Today, I'm reviewing my colleague Professor Yun's textbook on phonology, and he uses this example sentence:
   
  Q: Do you advocate the overthrow of the US government by force or by violence?
   
  The reason he likes this sentence so much is that like me has a very lively interest in intonation. If you say it like this:
   
  Q: Do you advocate the overthrow of the US government by force (UP)...or by violence (UP)?
   
  It is possible to answer without committing treason:
   
  A: No.
   
  But if you say it like this:
   
  Q: Do you advocate the overthrow of the US government by force (UP) or by violence (DOWN)?
   
  You cannot give a non-treasonable answer. Malcolm X, of course, answered like this:
   
  A: By any means necessary.
   
  This is, like Christ's answer to the money-changers, exactly right: it throws the onus of treason back on the questioners: if you stand in our way, the resulting force/violence is on your head. This is simply historically correct: the most successful act of forceful, violent treason in American history was the white secession that triggered the Civil War.
   
  I was in America in February during Martin Luther King's birthday when Hillary and Obama got into a flap over whether LBJ or MLK were responsible for the "gains" of the Civil Rights movement: e.g. busing (RIP), and affirmative action, (ditto).... This made me wonder. Was Malcolm (and the Black Panther Party for Self Defense that succeeded him) a kind of transitional neoformation?
   
  I think they were! We know that in childhood neoformations rise and suddenly disappear with no apparent sequel; for example, the period of "autonomous speech", the "negativism" of the terrible twos, and the affectation and posing of the crisis at seven. We know that these critical neoformations appear to have a catalytic function--they appear to be related, though not in any clear causative way, to major achievements and advances such as intonation ("autonomous" speech), volition ("negativism"), and role/'rule play ("affectation").
   
  I guess I think Malcolm and the Black Panther Party for Self Defense were similarly related to the very limited gains made in integration and affirmative action under the Nixon administration (subsequently wiped out by more "liberal" administrations). I know, those fleeting gains too disappeared.
   
  But sometimes a transitional form carries within itself the seed of a more workable social system, and when it vanishes utterly, it still plays a catalytic function. I suppose in our more optimistic moments, when we are indulging our poetic and non-materialist side, we can call the memory of these transitional functions "hope". Not to be confused with "the politics of hope"!
   
  David Kellogg
  Seoul National University of Education
    

       
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Received on Mon Mar 3 16:14 PST 2008