Thanks, Mike. I wasn't sure if I wanted to continue with this project. Paula's busy, and I have a lot more to say than I can put in a half hour interview with Andy. But I will keep plugging away.
For example, here is what I've got on the second part of Psychology of Art, the Critiques of "perception", of "technique", and of Freudianism.
When we wrote "Pulgasari" we were not very sure about the links between aesthetic concepts and ethical ones. Obviously, they are part of language; in every language I've ever studied, the word "good" has both an aesthetic and an ethical dimension. But they are not part of education.
Kant divides them up, putting them in entirely separate critiques (and he kind of runs out of steam in the Critique of Judgement, as if he is gradually becoming aware that he's writing the same book all over again).
Spinoza throws them altogether, in his slim little "Ethics". And of course I DO think that art in all historical epochs, with the possible exception of our own, has contained some notion of the "good life", and aesthetic education is largely a matter of teasing it out.
It seems to me that there is an answer to all this somewhere in this book. It's not vulgar or even straightforward (e.g. the ethical is simply a socially general form of what I like). But it's there.
Leontiev writes, on no particular evidence, that Vygotsky didn't want to publish (p. x) the book, but the commentary by Ivanov says it was published from a manuscript prepared for publication by Vygotsky himself (p. 270). There are parts of it that read like "brouillon", but one suspects that it has been badly translated.
Does anyone know if the original Russian text is available on line?
David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education
--- On Tue, 9/21/10, mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com> wrote:
From: mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>
Subject: [xmca] DavidK on LSV: Aeshetics and Ethics, Art, &&&
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture,Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Date: Tuesday, September 21, 2010, 8:20 PM
David--
The beautiful and apt pictures, your own included, complemented a really
interesting and challenging
text. I found the meta commentary on the rhetorical strategy and its
relation to that rhetorical strategies
in LSV's works particularly helpful as a means of linking together texts,
the early ones of which, are
rarely taken seriously as the "buds" to the later works in important ways so
that in identifiable senses, the
end is in the beginning.
I also was helped to understand your earlier note on aesthetics and ethics
which I had been puzzling over,
having missed the context in the prior discourse. But i am so educated, that
I found that I REALLY need to
go read the chapters you focus on from "Educational Psychology" in order to
be able to follow the flow
better. I also need to re-read the article on consciousness that is said to
have played such an important role
in his subsequent career (and all the rest of course, but those foremost for
me).
I have ordered Educational Psychology, but as i suspected, andy has had a
hand in getting the key chapters
you are talking about, and the article on consciousness at
http://www.marxists.org/archive/vygotsky/works/1926/educational-psychology/index.htm
So, for others who also want to go back and read these texts, and least some
parts are only a click away.
More anon.
mike
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