David,
I don't think I am all that optimistic about the ways in which
technology is still transforming the relationship between
'individuals' and their cultural ecology. I am interested in the
ways in which communication at a distance depends on a
sophisticated internalisation of 'primary' aspects of communication
- I have never met you but I have a set of assumptions about how
you are likely to respond to things I type. What makes me less
optimistic is the feeling that 'remote' communication might be
eating into the time which people have available for the more
intimate, face to face and body to body forms of communication (I
mean picking up on cues about feelings which are expressed in vocal
tension, gesture, gaze direction etc.). If we see communication
more and more in terms of a trading in symbols rather than a
sharing of sense (co-creation of common meanings with all the
tangles of emotional and corporeal connotations) then I see a risk
of social dis-integration. On the other hand, I can see myself as
an old chimpanzee grumbling that the newfangled use of speech means
that people don't do as much fur grooming and nit-picking as they
used to - and I can see in my own children that the massive
increase in symbol-trading has not turned them into social
isolates, they still manage to get on fine with friends when they
do meet up and they seem to enjoy meeting up every bit as much as I
do.
I came across a lovely analogy on the 'Edge' website recently -
http://www.edge.org/q2010/q10_2.html George Dyson writes about the
difference between Aleut kayak building (gather pieces of
driftwood, bone etc, tie it all together to make a frame and then
stretch skins over it to make a boat) and Tlingit dugout canoes
(take a tree trunk and remove as much as you can until a boat is
left). Dyson argues that we used to take an Aleutian approach to
information, assembling arguments from scarce and hard won pieces
of information but that we may now need to focus more on digging
arguments out of the mass of information available to us. We have
to chop out the spam, the reality TV etc. to make something useful,
elegant and pleasing from the mass of stuff at our disposal.
Stories for children is a whole other thing! Written, published,
sold and bought by adults, even though the stories may be already
well within the common domain, they tell us more about adults'
anxieties about childhood than about what children are interested
in. All the arguments about 'age appropriate material' seem to miss
the crucial fact that when an adult shares a book with a child the
book is a tool to support, frame and pattern interaction, not a
chest of meanings to be delivered from the page to the child's
mind! The scary bits of fairy tales (child-killing, eating of
people, cutting stomachs open etc.) provide opportunities for a
child to experience horrific situations while safely cuddled up
with an adult who can offer reassurance and safety - if any
possibility of upset is edited out (I remember versions of 'Little
Red Riding Hood' in which she jumps onto a wardrobe rather than
being eaten by the wolf) children will not have the opportunity to
enjoy the experience of contemplating danger from a safe vantage
point.
I have just been teaching a group using Merlin Donald and Steven
Mithen's arguments about the importance of mimesis as a kind of
'missing link' between prelinguistic and later ways of making sense
of the world and I think Donald's sections on 'mythic culture' have
a lot to say about how information has a very different status for
oral cultures (if the stories are not retold, the accumulated
knowledge of the group is lost) and for literate ones. For children
the structure and patterning of stories seem to be at least as
important as the details of their content - surprise is fun but
knowing what to expect is comforting.
Apologies for a rambling response.
Rod
-----Original Message-----
From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-
bounces@weber.ucsd.edu] On Behalf Of David Kellogg
Sent: 02 February 2010 22:37
To: Culture ActivityeXtended Mind
Subject: RE: [xmca] Lindqvist on Leontiev on Play - collision
between making sense and made sense
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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