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Re: [xmca] The Missing Part
How very idealistic of you David. I don't share in your optimistic view
of bringing about a kumbaya utopia. This veil of tears we share has been
shared by our ancestors and shall continue to be shared in all its
brilliance and hair covered moles.
At one time I did possibly believe that humans were developing
phylogenetically but I have turned the corner and believe we are who were
and wherever you go there you are. It is what it is or as the WWII vets
say "comme ci comme ca"
eric
From: David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>
To: Culture ActivityeXtended Mind <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Date: 07/12/2010 06:53 PM
Subject: Re: [xmca] The Missing Part
Sent by: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu
eric:
No, as usual, you have my point pretty much exactly, only without the
silly flourishes I sometimes add. Remember, though, that Mike's magnum
opus was entitled "A Once and Future Discipline" .
Mike says this was an accident; Bradd Shore dibsed the title he really
wanted, ("Culture in Mind") so he went and stole this one from Mallory
("The Once and Future King", i.e. Arthur).
It's not as catchy, but "The Once and Future Discipline" is a better title
than "Culture in Mind" for three reasons:
a) it suggests, correctly, that the key cross cultural insights are not
actually Mike's, but date from a much earlier period, when ethnography was
actually a pretty dirty business. (This is not just true of ethnography,
by the way, Yerkes, who provides a fair amount of the monkey business in
Chapter Four of Thinking and Speech, was involved in army "intelligence"
research dedicated to finding which soldiers were dumb enough to be used
to clear minefields, and his interest in teaching apes to talk is partly
motivated by his theories that some of us are more closely related to apes
than others.)
b) it suggests, correctly, that in order to use this stuff we need to
think a little more about where it came from in the light of where we want
to go with it, to purge it of its geographical, social and cultural
specificity and to harness it for a future where insights made in one
corner of the globe become the common property of all its corners and all
the bits in between as well.
c) it suggests that cultural psych is transdisciplinary rather than
interdisiciplinary, that it's a discipline in the process of transcending
its historical self rather than one which is merely exchanging ambassadors
with bordering disciplines. That is actually what accounts for its
temporary eclipse, and it is equally what will account for its future
resurgence.
Shweder, for example, from whom I stole the idea of universalism vs.
relativism vs. developmentalism, is still embroiled in a controversy about
whether anthropologists in Afghanistan can and should collaborate with the
US Army in the occupation of remote provinces. Shweder's position is that
they can and should, because their presence will help troops understand
local customs (e.g. the custom of "Loving Thursdays" whereby village
elders undertake the sexual initiation of young boys).
Whatever you may think of Shweder's view, it certainly corroborates the
idea that cultural psychology (of which Shweder is probably the leading
advocate after Mike himself) has feet of clay, that it has not yet
entirely freed itself from its roots as an adjunct of imperialist
occupation, and that we have a ways to go before we can really say it has
something to offer every human being it purports to study.
Take English as a global language (PLEASE! Take it away before it hurts
somebody!). English even in its benign forms is a lousy language for world
communication precisely because it is a perfect language for world
domination, a perfect exclusive language for the global community of
airport hopping rich folks.
English is a nightmare choice for a world language. It is phonologically
bizarre, grammatically opaque, and pragmatically obscurantist. It has a
dark past, rooted in a dominance born of genocide and slavery. But it also
has a certain promise, a certain future, a certain freedom which we see
whenever we teach it in a country like Korea, and we see that the more we
teach it, the less English it becomes.
I think these problems with English are roughly the same problems that
cultural psychology had in Vygotsky's time. Bleuler, who was Piaget's
teacher and certainly knew Levy-Bruhl's work extremely well, broke with
both Piaget and Levy-Bruhl precisely over the theorized from of these
problems, the developmental issue of whether "autistic" thinking was
developmentally primary, ontogenetically or sociogenetically.
Bleuler, and Vygotsky too, turned the Europocentric view right
upside-down; they believed tha autism, far from being developmentally
atavistic, required a certain stage of development to achieve: you had to
be able to remember first and only then could you really think about your
wishes, dreams, desires. They also believed that thinking "irrealisically"
about wishes and desires led in a fairly direct way to more
realistic hopes and plans.
For that very reason it was wrong to consider "autism" as an
underdeveloped stage; autism, or as he liked to call it, "irrealism" was
simply that part of human thinking that was genuinely relativistic, where
neither an adult nor a man "at the pinnacle of civilization" (Bleuler is
certainly being ironic here since he is writing at the outset of World War
One) may claim superiority. There may be other areas where one form of
thinking includes, subsumes, and sublates earlier forms (e.g. mathematics
and science generally) but in the humanities we find variation without
development, at least without development in the sense of the emergence of
superior forms which asymmetrically include earlier ones.
That Vygotsky took this on board is very clear from his writings on
creativity and imagination. That Vygotsky went even further than Bleuler
is clear from his argument that irrealist thinking and realist thinking do
not turn in parallel, like the wheels of a desk, only in response to the
external environment, but have an internal connection, an axle, or rather
a differential, which allow them to influence each other, so that in
science too we shall find variation without development and in art and the
humanities some genuine, common, universally valuable (because universally
shareable) developments alongside the dazzling and dizzying variations
which for the most part are hard to share.
Nevertheless I think Vygotsky shares Bleuler's basic insight,which we see
here in the chapter which begins with the Missing Part. By putting the
"autistic" function at the beginning of development, and by lumping
selfishness, stupidity, schizophrenia, and perfectly normal cultural
variation into a single syncretic heap, Freud, Levy-Bruhl and Blondel are
behaving more like idealist savages than intellectual scientists.
So it goes. From Bleuler to Vygotsky, and from Vygotsky to Mike, and from
Mike to me, and then from me to you, with each of us forgetting something
and each of us adding on at every step of the way. This is why Vygotsky
comes up with the confusing image of a chain that has a "central" link.
But it's also why there can be, at one and the same moment, universalism
("We're all the same"), relativism ("We're all different, but equal") and
developmentalism ("We're all different, and the differences matter") at
one and the same time.
David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education
--- On Mon, 7/12/10, ERIC.RAMBERG@spps.org <ERIC.RAMBERG@spps.org> wrote:
From: ERIC.RAMBERG@spps.org <ERIC.RAMBERG@spps.org>
Subject: Re: [xmca] The Missing Part
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Date: Monday, July 12, 2010, 6:24 AM
David:
This indeed is an important passage in understanding LSV's developmental
theories. But I believe cross-cultural research speerheaded by Cole and
others has discounted 'primitive' cultures as being less developed in
thought and practice when compared to 'western' culture. Or am I
misunderstanding your point?
eric
From: David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>
To: xmca <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Date: 07/12/2010 02:38 AM
Subject: [xmca] The Missing Part
Sent by: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu
This is the beginning of Chapter Two of Thinking and Speech that was not
translated into English. I posted it once several years ago, and Anton
thought it didn't add very much.
I think it does: it structures the whole chapter, because it makes it
clear that Freud, Levy-Bruhl, and Blondel share a common idealist basis as
well as a common canonical stature.
≪Мы полагаем, . говорит он, . что настанет день, когда мысль ребенка по
отношению к мысли нормального цивилизованного взрослого будет помещена в
ту же плоскость, в какой находится ≪примитивное мышление≫,
охарактеризованное Леви-Брюлем, или аутистическая и символическая мысль,
описанная Фрейдом и его учениками, или ≪болезненное сознание≫, если
только это понятие, введенное Блонделем, не сольется в один прекрасный
день с предыдущим понятием≫ (1, с.408).1 Действительно, появление его
первых работ по историческому значению
этого факта для дальнейшего развития психологической мысли должно быть по
справедливости сопоставлено и сравнено с датами выхода в свет ≪Les
fonctions mentales dans les societes inferieures≫ Леви-Брюля, ≪Т
олкования сновидений≫ Фрейда или ≪La conscience morbide≫
Блонделя.
Больше того, между этими явлениями в различнейших областях научной
психологии есть не только внешнее сходство, определяемое уровнем их
исторического значения, но глубокое, кровное, внутреннее родство . связь
по самой сути заключенных и воплощенных в них философских и
психологических тенденций. Недаром сам Пиаже в огромной мере опирался в
своих исследованиях и построениях на эти три
работы и на их авторов.
“It is therefore our belief", says (Piaget), "that the day will come when
child thought will be placed on the same level in relation to adult,
normal, and civilized thought as ‘primitive mentality’, as defined by
Lévy-Bruhl, as autistic and symbolical thought as described by Freud and
his disciples and as ‘morbid consciousness,’ assuming that this last
concept, which we owe to M. Ch. Blondel, is not simply fused with the
former.” (p. 201-202). In reality, the appearance of this first works, in
regard to the historic importance as a fact for future reference in the
development of psychological thought must be on the compared with the
appearance of “Les fonctions mentales dans les societes inferieures” of
Levi- Bruhl, Freud’s “The interpretation of dreams’, or Blondel’s “La
conscience morbide”. It is not simply that between these phenomena in the
development of the field of scientific psychology there is a formal
resemblance, determined by their level of historic importance, but that
there is a deep, internal kinship, a connection in essence which is
visible in their philosophical and psychological tendencies. Not without
reason does Piaget himself base in enormous measure his own studies and
constructions on these three works and on their authors.
Last night I was re-reading Bleuler's criticisms of Freud in "Autistic
Thinking" and I also came upon these words, which Vygotsky quotes
approvingly.
"Examining the more grown-up child, I also do not much observe that he
would prefer the imaginary apple to the real. The imbecile and the savage
are alike practitioners of Realpolitik and the latter, (exactly like us,
who stand at the apex of cognitive ability) makes his autistic stupidities
only in such cases when reason and experience prove insufficient: in his
ideas about the universe, about the phenomena of nature, in his
understanding of diseases and other blows of destiny, in adopting measures
to shield himself from them, and in other relationships which are too
complex for him.”
It seems to me that here and elsewhere in this chapter Bleuler is arguing
for, and Vygotsky is agreeing with, a position that is simultaneously
universalist, relativist, and developmentalist. It is universalist in the
sense that it argues for a universal human autistic response to areas of
experience of which we are ignorant. It is relativist in the sense that it
argues for the independence of an "autistic" response from rationality and
an autonomous art and autonomous humanities based on that independence
that is in no way subordinate to rationality. It is developmentalist in
the sense that it argues for an autistic response which develops out of a
narrow, immediately realistic (perception based?) reality function rather
than vice versa (as in Freud, Janet, and Levy-Bruhl).
David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education
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