Re: [xmca] Consciousness of budgets and workloads

[Mike Cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>]

Poor people's lean is getting a lot leaner, Paul. My workload is not getting
lighter but
that is my choice.

Light up and have a good evening. Read any good Vygotsky recently?
mike

On Mon, Jun 22, 2009 at 7:20 PM, Paul Dillon <phd_crit_think@yahoo.com>wrote:

> mike,
>
> "UC is stopping paying N days a year but not easing up on the workload!!
> now
> its grad student exam reading time. sigh"
>
> Well, California has an enormous budget deficit, right?,  they're trimming
> where they can: one man's fat is another man's lean.  But not to worry,
> soon pot will be legal in CA and the state will have so much money from the
> pot tax that they'll probably pay you to take time off !!!!
>
> Paul
>
> --- On *Mon, 6/22/09, Mike Cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>* wrote:
>
>
> From: Mike Cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [xmca] Consciousness
> To: "David Kellogg" <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>
> Cc: "Culture ActivityeXtended Mind" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
> Date: Monday, June 22, 2009, 3:45 PM
>
> I'll work through this more carefully david, but when Zinchenko refers to
> carpet bombing in relation to fabric/tissue seems like
> he means fabric. Similarly, when babelfish translates tkan' as fabric, its
> hard for me to argue.
>
> In posting the Vygotsky quote from the trio of articles I was not making a
> back handed argument or any argument at all,
> just trying to fill in with some translating (without looking at your
> translation from Seve or Meccaci) of my own in hopes it
> would help you, ugh, triangulate. And when I pointed to the section from
> the
> article what had originally caught my attention
> was his insistence that the triangular relation was not a string of
> reflexes, but a new structure, such that specifically human
> psych functions are emergent properties of that structure and had not/have
> not carefully considered the issue of the ordering
> of elements into structure and visa versa that you were focused on.
>
> Sorry if this turned out to be a distraction. You know my view: Its up to
> us
> to come to our conclusions based on what we
> can figure out now in 2009 given our life experiences and interpretations
> of
> what others have written, and then test them
> against some problem that confronts us.  Is tissue a better tool than
> fabric. Depends upon what sort of story you are trying
> to weave or what sort of scab you hope will form to stop the flow of blood.
>
> UC is stopping paying N days a year but not easing up on the workload!! now
> its grad student exam reading time.
> sigh
>
> mike
>
> On Sun, Jun 21, 2009 at 5:26 PM, David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com<http://mc/compose?to=vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>
> >wrote:
>
> > In Vygotsky, is it "the fabric of consciousness"...or "the tissue of
> > consciousness".
> >
> > Take a look at p. 172 of your Minick. He's got "Tolstoy is not concerned
> > with the concepts that the chid acquires in learning a system of
> scientific
> > knowledge but with words and concepts that are woven into the same fabric
> as
> > those that have developed in the child."
> >
> > But here's Seve: "Tolstoy speaks of the concept in relation to the
> > teaching of literary language to children. Therefore, what he has in mind
> I
> > not the concepts that the child acquires during the process of
> assimilation
> > of a system of scientific knowledge but words and concepts of current
> > language, which, previously unknown and therefore new, are inserted into
> the
> > tissue of childish concepts which have already been formed."
> >
> > And here's Meccaci: "Thus he has in mind not the concepts that are
> > acquired by the child in the process of assimilating a system of
> scientific
> > understanding but words and concepts of ordinary language which are new
> or
> > unknown to the child, which are inserted into the tissue of the childish
> > concepts which is already formed."
> >
> > At the beginning of 6.6 (p. 224 in your Minick) we've got this: "How is
> the
> > individual concept--this stitch that we tear away from a living integral
> > fabric--intertwined and interwoven with he system of concepts present in
> the
> > child?"
> >
> > In Seve, it's this: "How is the isolated concept, like a cell which we
> > have detached from the whole, living tissue, interlaced and woven into
> the
> > system of child concepts, out of which it cannot appear, survive, and
> > develop?"
> >
> > Here's Meccaci: "An isolated concept, a cell which we have torn from the
> > living, whole tissue--how is it interlaced with the whole tissue of the
> > system of child concepts within which it must appear, live, and develop?"
> >
> > There are a lot of instances of this throughout! In fact, EVERY place
> where
> > Vygotsky says "tissue" and "cell", Minick has "fabric" and "stitch". In
> one
> > place, Vygotsky even talks about "dendritic cells" (that is, nerve
> cells),
> > and it is still translated as "stitch".
> >
> > So we checked with Vygotsky himself:
> >
> > "Как отдельное понятие, эта клеточка, вырванная нами из живой, целостной
> > ткани, вплетена и воткана в систему детских понятий, внутри которой она
> > только может возникать, жить и развиваться?"
> >
> > Which is WELL beyond the limits of my Russian, but here's what a quick
> > Babelfish gives:
> >
> > "As separate concept, this cell, pulled out by us from the living, of
> > integral cloth, it is intertwined and interwoven into the system of
> > children's concepts, inside which it only can to appear, to live and to
> be
> > developed?"
> >
> > This looks like "tissue" and not "fabric" to me, and that is how we've
> > translated it throughout.
> >
> > I've got two other points about what you said yesterday, Mike. The first
> > has to do with the TRIANGLE of mediation. At the beginning of Thinking
> > and Speech (bottom of p. 40 in your Minick translation), Vygotsky warns:
> >
> > "(T)here is a great deal that we once believed to be correct that has
> been
> > excluded from this book because it represented simple delusion on our
> part."
> >
> > Of course, it would be nice to have a more complete list at this point.
> > What exactly were the "simple delusions" that had to be excluded? Well,
> one
> > thing that IS clearly missing from Thinking and Speech (which is almost
> > NEVER missing from any of LSV's pre-1930 work on thinking and speech) is
> the
> > triangle of mediation, the idea of subject-object mediated by
> tools/signs,
> > etc.
> >
> > The second problem goes back to the lesson of the water molecule, which
> > also figures in Chapter One and Again in Chapter Seven (and also in
> > Bakhtin/Medvedev's "Formal Method"). Minick says that "to say that water
> > consists of hydrogen and oxygen is to say nothing that relates to water
> > generally or to all its characteristics. It is to say nothing that
> relates
> > to the great oceans and to a drop of rain, to water's capacity to
> > extinguish fire and to Archimedes' law".  (See p. 45, and also p. 244).
> >
> > But Seve and Meccaci says that the whole problem is that it DOES say
> > something that relates to all of these phenomena equally, and therefore
> it
> > has nothing to say about the concrete problems concerned with the
> analysis
> > of thinking and speech (e.g. explaining the structure, functions, and
> > history of consciousness).
> >
> > Here's the Russian again:
> >
> > Это есть, скорее, возведение к общему, чем внутреннее расчленение и
> > выделение частного, содержащегося в подлежащем объяснению феномене. По
> самой
> > своей сущности этот метод приводит скорее к обобщению, чем к анализу. В
> > самом
> > деле, сказать, что вода состоит из водорода и кислорода, значит сказать
> > нечто такое, что одинаково относится ко всей воде вообще и ко всем ее
> > свойствам в равной мере: к Великому океану в такой же мере, как к
> дождевой
> > капле, к свойству воды тушить огонь в такой же мере, как к закону
> Архимеда.
> >
> > So it looks to me like Vygotsky is once again complaining about
> > OVER-ANALYSIS, but making the rather subtle point that such overanalysis
> > leads to OVER-GENERALIZATION. The trick is to find in the particular the
> > laws of the general phenomenon under investigation (viz. consciousness),
> and
> > not general laws in general.
> >
> > David Kellogg
> > Seoul National University of Education
> >
> >
> >
> >
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