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



Hello all:

This fonagy article should be brought into the discussion pertaining to 
the parent infant relationship.  It was briefly touched upon a short time 
ago but not really discussed in depth.

http://communication.ucsd.edu/MCA/Mail/xmcamail.2009_12.dir/pdfu8DjDXTWQv.pdf

eric




Rod Parker-Rees <R.Parker-Rees@plymouth.ac.uk>
Sent by: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu
02/03/2010 04:31 AM
Please respond to "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity"

 
        To:     "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
        cc: 
        Subject:        RE: [xmca] Lindqvist on Leontiev on Play - collision between making sense 
and made sense


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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