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Re: [xmca] The Interpersonal Is Not the Sociocultural



Michael,

Every text has a context, a history and a speaker. To understand a text it is certainly necessary to access each of these resources. Every German speaker will know without a moment's reflection the semantic connection between Tätigkeit, Tat and tun, but I find that few German speakers are aware of the history of the concept from Herder to Fichte to Hess to Marx. It is possible to exactly what Marx is talking about in Theses on Feuerbach, even though Marx never explains what he means by Tätigkeit, because we know the history of the word and who Marx was talking to at the time and the context of Germany after the suppression of Hegelianism. Key words like Tätigkeit have to be studied, and I find that this study is as necessary for German speakers as it is for Anglophile monoglots like me ... especially if they believe that "there is nothing outside of the text" :).

What I don't like about Derrida is that he exaggerates the incompatibility of semantic networks. If he were right, then not just critical reading, but human life would be impossible. :) Thanks to shared material culture, shared activity, shared history and knowing the speaker, people always manage somehow to make each other understood, ... so long as there is an effort. As old Schleiermacher said, we start in the middle, and work backward and forward, we are never completely ignorant of the writer's cultural context because we too are human beings and share ideals.

BTW, the other side of it for English speakers is that English has its Latin and Greek roots, as well as its Anglo-Saxon origins, embedded in the words, and for philosophy it is quite useful. For example, a German speaker can understand a lot about Wesen (Essence) because of its connection with the verb Sein (to be), but on the other hand, English speakers have the esse before their eyes.

Such a wonderful rich tapestry of meaning ...

Andy

Wolff-Michael Roth wrote:
Rather than thinking in terms of the concept :-) interpretation, I think in terms of reading. There are scholarly communities, and they decide which readings are within its bounds and which ones are outside. And there is a lot of politics. There is also a lot of colonialism in the policing and setting up of boundaries. Last night, a doctoral student in one of my methods classes said that there are a lot of bad readings of Vygotksy out there in the educational community, some shallow (Hegel called it "abstract") and others just plain out inconsistent. You cannot flatten all readings into a equal ideas.
In any event, the recurrent suggestion to use an automatic translation system cannot help us better understand one another or a philosophically thinking scholar.

Michael


On 2010-04-02, at 11:41 AM, mike cole wrote:

Two points seem more or less clear from the point you are making about
translation issues, Michael R.

1. They inhere in the subject matter, even within a single language,
depending, upon other things, on theoretical orientation.
2. They are made more damaging from translation from one language to
another.

David kel has been very focused on the second issue. The problems are indeed
very challenging. The best way i can think of to address them is by people
offering their interpretations, discussing the virtues of various ideas that
emerge, and for everyone to exercise a LOT of self-constraint in assuming
that they know the one true story, even as they are convinced that the OTHER
has it wrong.

At present, i am still struggling to understand David Kel's discussion of
concepts moving between the evidence in
whichever translation of LSV and his own, always-challenging, examples from
classroom discourse derived from
his everyday practices and targeted examples-to-think with.
mike



On Fri, Apr 2, 2010 at 11:14 AM, Wolff-Michael Roth <mroth@uvic.ca> wrote:

HI Michael,
you seem to be ascribing to me a position that I don't hold. I don't think
this is the one that Derrida holds. But the one meaning or whatever is a way
of talking about words that has been used here, not by myself. But you don't
understand Heidegger's thinking, form/content, in English,
THe non-dialectical readings of Vygotsky, Leont'ev, Bakhtin and others that
is so pervasive in the Anglo-Saxon culture would not be so convincing if you
were to read the originals, precisely because there is no single "meaning"
(a word that is not used by hEidegger, Derrida, and others) but webs of
significations that are inseparable from the world we live in and are
conscious of---Heidegger uses Geflecht, Derrida picks up on it. It is
inherent in Leont'ev's work, where the object exists twice, once ideally
once materially . . . .
The problem is that English translations allow readings that the original
never would allow . . . and you can see this in scholarship

Michael


On 2010-04-02, at 10:08 AM, Michael Glassman wrote:

Michael,

I suppose there is one point of view - but an entire philosophical school
developed in the United States in contradiction to this idea that you can
"know" words and symbols in general - that they have specific meanings
beyond their immediate context, and beyond the immediate relationships and
connections that they have in that context.  Peirce's ideas of semiosis
reflects on the idea that when we use words they are part of a much larger
communication structure and our understanding of the words occurs within
that structure.  Mead's idea on the danger of claiming some type of
ownership or knowledge of symbols outside of their immediate pruposes cedes
too much control to those who claim this knowledge - leading to the
development of symbolic interactionism.  When you say translatable it is not
just about words but larger communication structures involving time and
place and purposes, and it is ever changing.  It is simply impossible to
know how these connections might play out at any given point in time, and
you never know where insight might come, and you must always be open to that
insight.  Vygotsky, of Leontiev, or Heiddeger do not exist anywhere as
reified entities who we must "understand" - at least I think in the world of
Peirce and Mead.  They exist as tools to solve problems.  Because those
problems exist in the here and now and not in 1931 Soviet Union or Germany
the only way we can know them is in the here and now in the context of the
problem we are trying to solve.  There is the possibility that the new
student who doesn't know any language but English may come up with an
insight that is lost to the seasoned scholar who speaks many languages.

Michael

________________________________

From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu on behalf of Wolff-Michael Roth
Sent: Fri 4/2/2010 12:49 PM
To: ablunden@mira.net
Cc: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
Subject: Re: [xmca] The Interpersonal Is Not the Sociocultural



I am thinking about what Vygotsky says, about the intertwining of thought
and language, I prefer to say, thinking and speaking. And if this is the
case, then Heidegger, Hegel, Vygotsky, Leont'ev are, strictly speaking,
untranslatable. This is the point that Ricoeur and Derrida make. But
equally, because there is translation from English into another such English
every time you are asked "what do you mean," and you give it a second try,
there is an inner contradiction or continual dialogue that makes every
language non-identical with itself. THis is precisely the engine for the
change of language Bakhtin writes about, the point that makes a language to
live, and a language no longer spoken is a dead language precisely because
it is dead, nobody speaks it, and so it is fixed.

So grammarians, many linguists, are dealing with corpses, well, they say
they deal with corpuses, perhaps corpuses are corpses. . . . telling us
little about the life of language, which is the language of life . . .

Michael


On 2010-04-02, at 6:51 AM, Andy Blunden wrote:

Why not use it? Absolutely, and German has so many absolutely beautiful and
untranslatble words! (Russian is a closed book to me unfortunately) ...
Gestalt, Bildung, Schwerpunkt, Anschauung, and others who semantic netowrk
is so extensive and rich, Begriff, Wesen, and so on, .. ... the list goes on
forever. Since Kant taught philosophy to speak German, I think any English
speaker has struggled to keep up. You can imagine that studying Hegel
without fluency in German has always been a struggle. There is an excellent
Hegel Dictionary by Michael Inwood, which helps a great deal in navigating
through these multilingual mazes.

Andy

Wolff-Michael Roth wrote:
Andy, in a footnote of an article I am working on with Luis Radford,
where we do a Leont'ev reading of mathematical activity, I wrote this:
We ground our reading in the German version, which is in many ways more
just to the original than the English translation. For example, the Russian
and German versions distinguish between two very different nouns, Tätigkeit
(deyatel'nost' [????????????]) and Aktivität (activnost' [??????????]), both
of which are rendered in English as activity. The Russian and German
versions distinguish phenomena that are societal (gesellschaftlich,
obshchestvennoi [????????????]) from those that are social (sozial, sozial'n
[????????]), but the English version renders both as "social." In English,
we find the word "meaning" that translates znachenie (????????)/ Bedeutung
even though the Russian / German equivalents refer to an objective
phenomenon at the cultural-historical level rather than the personal sense
(Sinn, smisl [?????]) students make ("construct") as part of lessons. Our
specific word choices have b
een made such as to promote the specific, the very different reading of
Leont'ev's work that the German version allows.
As you can see, other languages do make the difference. We do have the
means to make the distinction when it comes to the adjective
social/societal, so why not employ it? Cheers,
Michael
On 2010-04-02, at 6:26 AM, Andy Blunden wrote:
Michael, I only heard the word "societal" for the first time in 2005. It
is a technical word not found in the ordinary language or even in Marxism,
SFAIK, ... well that's my excuse for going 60 years without learning it.  :)
It was only when I came into contact with academic psychology and sociology
that I discovered that "social" had an interpersonal meaning actually! :)
Otherwise what I now call societal was what I used to call social.
It was Weber who said that the task of sociology is to reduce concepts
about society to "understandable action, that is, without exception, to the
actions of participating
individual [persons]."
But I think most people don't even think of societal phenomena as
relevant to psychology. Societal phenomena are just objects of perception.
Conversely, Weber was saying this because people generally believed the
converse, that, like the weather, societal phenomena exist independently of
the actions of individual people.
Andy
Wolff-Michael Roth wrote:
Jay,
one of the sources of this problem is that in many cases, where another
language (Russian, German) uses the adjective "societal" the English
translations use social. The former has all the political and cultural
dimensions you want to see, whereas the "social" becomes unpolitical and
uncultural.
Michael
On 2010-04-01, at 10:25 PM, Jay Lemke wrote:
In the course, and on the exams, I found it necessary to push students
very hard to understand that "social" did not simply mean interpersonal, but
also cultural. Whether talking about ZPD or scaffolding or any sort of
social theory of learning, students, even good, bright, phd students, unless
previously trained in anthropology (rare) and even if with some training in
sociology or political science, simply saw the social as always the
interaction among individuals. (Non-American students seemed to have less of
this problem.)
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