RE: [xmca] Lindqvist on Leontiev on Play - collision between making sense and made sense

["Deborah Rockstroh" <d_rockstroh@bigpond.com>]

Hi David, Rod and all, 

Just a few thoughts about technology having the ability to change the way we
think, and using the analogy that Rod has provided, the ability of (some)
new technologies to make a difference to the way we think occurs when a
technology assumes the role previously performed by the human, and then
amplifies the role beyond the capability of that human. For instance, the
written word enabled knowledge to be stored so that the capacity to remember
became less important for those circumstances than it was in preliterate
times. The development of the printing press (and recorded voices) enabled
knowledge to be distributed across place and throughout time to a wider
audience than was previously possible by that one human. Freeing the mind
from needing to remember this knowledge opens spaces for new ways of
thinking to emerge, where memory may once have dominated. We may not think
the printed word changes the way we think (rightly or wrongly), but back
when it was 'new', it would have been more profound. A more contemporary
example is with the proliferation of information available on the internet,
the ability to access, search and select are perhaps more utilised thinking
capacities than those of remembering vast stores of facts. 

Is this along a similar line of thought Rod? And thanks for Rod's article
just received David, I look forward to reading it as I do with all of the
articles posted here :) 

Regards, 
Deb

Deborah Rockstroh
Southern Cross University, Coffs Harbour, NSW, 2450

-----Original Message-----
From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu] On
Behalf Of David Kellogg
Sent: Wednesday, 3 February 2010 4:27 PM
To: lchcmike@gmail.com; Culture ActivityeXtended Mind
Subject: Re: [xmca] Lindqvist on Leontiev on Play - collision between making
sense and made sense

It's this one, Mike!
 
David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education

--- On Tue, 2/2/10, mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com> wrote:


From: mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [xmca] Lindqvist on Leontiev on Play - collision between making
sense and made sense
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Date: Tuesday, February 2, 2010, 8:53 PM


I not only reesENTLY mis represented Rod's name, David, i missed the article
you are talking about?

Was it sent to xmca?

Rod, do you have a web page or some place we can access your work??
mud

On Tue, Feb 2, 2010 at 2:36 PM, David Kellogg
<vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>wrote:

> Rod (not "Rees", Mike!):
>
> Thanks for your note. One of my grads is using your work in her 
> work--she's interested in the extraordinary difference we've 
> discovered between the creativity of language (in this case, the 
> GRAMMATICAL creativity of SECOND
> language) in primary intersubjectivity (which as we all know is the 
> leading edge of first language development) and secondary 
> intersubjectivity (which appears, in some important ways, to lead in
second language development).
> She's trying to operationalize alot of what you said about creativity 
> in your recent article (which you kindly posted for us here) by using 
> Tomasello's neat distinction between fixed expressions, item-based 
> "combinations", and what she calls abstract creative constructions.
>
> I'm afraid I'm not as optimistic as you are about the ability of new 
> technological means to make a big difference in the way we think. 
> Perhaps this is true of technological means of production, both 
> because the actual increase in production impacts people's lives in 
> the short run and, in the long run, the DECREASE in SURPLUS value 
> produced leads inexorably to a fall in the rate of profit. Both of 
> these are material constraints on the way we think.
>
>
> It seems to me that the issue you raise, when you talk about how the 
> ability to store track changes, is not a difference in production, but 
> rather a way in which the very distinction between text and discourse 
> (which I have made such hay out of) is starting to disappear, and with 
> it the distinction between sense and meaning (which Vygotsky, in his 
> day, also made hay with). If the visible trace of a discourse is 
> infinitely malleable, unfinalizeable, then it is no longer the trace 
> of a discourse; it's the discourse itself. There is ONLY outside text, and
no actual text.
>
> You suggest that this might lead to making literature more porous to 
> children's responses; we might actually get a child literature instead 
> of a children's lit, that is, something that is written as well as 
> read by kids the way that, say, Russian literature is written by 
> Russians but read by the whole world.
>
> But you also admit, and it seems to me that this more likely, that 
> this child literature might get lost in the flood of adult drivel, 
> exactly the way that child motives, child aims, child goals for play 
> are completely ignored in Leontiev (or, to take a more immediate 
> example, the way that e-mail has been strangled by spam, television 
> throttled by 'reality TV', the cinema devestated by the 'blockbuster', 
> etc.)
>
> To me, that's just why Lindqvist's critique of Leontiev is so important.
> Here is a man around whom the entire world changed, touched, or at 
> least brushed, by the greatest genius in child psychology of the 
> twentieth century, a man who then looked both ways and produced a 
> "theory" of play that is essentially no different from what Piaget 
> comes up with in "Play, Imitation, and Dreams": play is essentiallly 
> assimilative and only labor has accomodational potential. For Piaget, 
> that is almost synonymous with creative potential. But then why 
> create, if the result is the same old drivel?
>
> I have on my desk a version of "Goldilocks" by James Marshall, which, 
> I am reliably informed by the cover, won the Caldecott medal, was  a 
> 'pick of the lists' for American Bookseller, and an ALA notable book. 
> We are told that it is an offbeat and inventive retelling of the story 
> tht will "enchant readers young and old" (a nice tip, that; they are 
> going to aim at two audiences, the paying and the non-paying. I wonder 
> who will get priority?)
>
> Now, the original story of the Three Bears, by Robert Southey, is not 
> about Goldilocks at all; it's really about three bears  (all male; 
> it's not a
> family) who resist the intruder, a rude, mannerless old crone, who is 
> collared by the local bailiff for vagrancy. Like most tales of its 
> time
> (1838) it's a pretty vicious anti-working class diatribe (the Lake 
> Poets, including Southey, were what we would call neo-Cons today). But 
> the Marshall version is not at all "off beat" and it's nowhere near as 
> inventive or appealing as the original, of which it is apparently 
> unaware. The funniest it gets is when baby bear tastes the porridge 
> and says "I'm dying" at which Mama Bear suggests "That's quite enough.
Let's go for a walk."
>
> Part of the problem is precisely this unawareness, this loss of track 
> changes. Of course, we all know that it is perfectly possible to 
> understand the original of something through the parody. Many of us 
> have read Don Quixote without reading Amadis de Gaul, and more of us 
> know Goldilocks as a heroine than as a villain.
>
> But parody is always a very BACKWARD looking understanding; in many 
> ways like the replacement of sense with meaning of which you speak 
> (meaning SUBSUMES sense, but in so doing a lot of the vigor and 
> liveliness and directness of sense is lost). And when the original is 
> entirely lost sight of, the child has sacrificed sense and gained no 
> meaning in return; we have somehow managed to produce disenchantment 
> without having any enchantment in the first place.
>
> David Kellogg
> Seoul National University of Education
>
> --- On Tue, 2/2/10, Rod Parker-Rees <R.Parker-Rees@plymouth.ac.uk> wrote:
>
>
> From: Rod Parker-Rees <R.Parker-Rees@plymouth.ac.uk>
> Subject: RE: [xmca] Lindqvist on Leontiev on Play - collision between 
> making sense and made sense
> To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
> Date: Tuesday, February 2, 2010, 3:36 AM
>
>
> I have always been struck by Vygotsky's reference (in 'The development 
> of higher mental functions') to the collision between the creative 
> meaning making of children and the created meanings available to them 
> in the culture in which they swim:
>
> "The very essence of cultural development is in the collision of 
> mature cultural forms of behaviour with the primitive forms that 
> characterise the child's behaviour." (not sure about the translation
here).
>
> For me it is the active making of sense which each new generation 
> contributes which keeps the 'made sense' of culture alive and 
> responsive to changing circumstances. There is also an argument that 
> the made culture feeds back into the process in that oral cultures 
> tend to be much more conservative, keen to maintain and preserve their 
> lore, than literate cultures which can rely on books to 'keep track' 
> of changes and allow us to go back if we find that changes don't work 
> out too well. New technologies which allow massive amounts of 
> information to be stored, including endless versions with all their 
> 'track changes' annotations and commentaries should make us more open 
> to the sparks struck by collisions with children's 'outsider' 
> perspective but I wonder whether they might also tend to exclude these 
> 'naïve' contributions, much as literacy tends to shut out the preliterate
and the illiterate.
>
> All the best,
>
> Rod
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu] 
> On Behalf Of David Kellogg
> Sent: 02 February 2010 05:24
> To: xmca
> Subject: [xmca] Lindqvist on Leontiev on Play
>
> Or rather, Monica Nilsson on the magnificent Gunilla Lindvist on 
> Leontiev on play, writing in one of the papers in the current issue of
MCA:
>
> "Lindqvist is critical of how Vygotsky's successors came to interpret 
> his theory of play. Vygotsky emphasized teh dialectics expressed 
> through the relation between the adult world and the child's world and 
> also between the will and the emotion. She writes that Leontiev sees 
> no tension between the adult world and the child's world and that 
> play, for him, is about a child's inability to acquire adult roles. 
> When a child can't perform adult actions he instead creates a 
> fictitious situation. This situation, Lindqvist writes, is, for 
> Leontiev, the most significant sign of play. Thus play is the sign of 
> the child's inferiority, and hence play is in fact an infantile 
> activity because, as Lindqvist states, from this perspective, the child
will gradually grow into the adult world and play is diected toward the
future.
> Moreover, she claims that the implication is a stress on reproduction 
> (of adult roles) at the expense of creativity. Therefore, she attempts 
> to reinterpret Vygotsky's play theory, based on his original thoughts 
> in The Psychology of Art, and his inquires (sic) into creativity and
imagination.
> According to Lindqvist, Vygotsky's idesas give rise to a creative 
> pedagogical approach instead of an instrumental one. This is because 
> Vygotsky shows how children interpret and perform their experiences by 
> creating new meaning and how emotions characterize their 
> interpretations, that is, how emotion and thought unit in the process 
> of knowledge construction." (p. 16).
>
> Kozulin remarks (on p. 25 of HIS magnificent book, Psychological 
> Tools, on how Leontiev's emphasis on practical activity instead of 
> semiotic tools led him into a kind of "Piagtian program of exploring 
> the internalization of sensorimotor actions".
>
> But it really took Gunilla Lindqvist to point out the terrible 
> consequences that a neo-Piagetian program like Leontiev's might have 
> for children at precisely the age that Piaget called "sensorimotor".
>
> David Kellogg
> Seoul National University of Education
>
>
>
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