Re: [xmca] Narration as BIG story in contrast to little story

[David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>]

Thanks, Larry. Somewhere in the headwaters of the current thread on Vygotsky's claims, Andy says that Vygotsky's purposes in psychological inquiry are better set out in "The Socialist Alternation of Man", and Mike counters that his goal in "Thinking and Speech", anyway, is the more modest one of merely accounting for the whole of human consciousness. Well, I want to argue, sort of on the basis of what you've sent and also on the basis of something I have been reading, that these two purposes have more in common than you might think. 
 
I don't have the article at hand. But you quote Bamberg to the effect that any "claim" of identy actually involves:
 
1) sameness of a sense of self across time in the face of constant change;
2) uniqueness of the person vis-a-vis others in the face of being the same
as everybody else; and 
3) the construction of agency as constituted by self
(with a self-to-world direction of fit) and world (with a world -to- self
direction of fit). 
 
You can see why "identity" is a very tenuous claim. You would have to be a very eccentric person, one of Dickens' grotesques, to have the same sense of self accross time in the face of constant change (think of Micawber and his wife, "I have never abandoned Mr. Micawber and I shall never abandon Mr. Micawber!"). 
 
Even if you could somehow manage the trick, it would rather tend to emphasize the things that make you the same as everybody else (we might call this your "embodiments" as opposed to your potentials). Most of all, the idea that the self is somehow a source of agency, a tragic or comic hero, a central figure in the face of all the vicissitudes of the social world in which it discovers itself, with all the trappings of class and race and so on, is somewhat laughable and pathetic; if all the world is a stage, then all the men and women upon it are not actors but only extras.
 
But take a look at this. 
 
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/wallace-shawn/why-i-call-myself-a-socia_b_818061.html
 
It's only an article in the Huffington Post (which, as we all know, does not actually pay for what it prints, and therefore gets scoffed at by "real" writers, but we academics, who are NEVER paid for what we publish are therefore not real writers either, may take it as seriously as I think it is meant). The author is mostly a voice actor, who you may have seen as a goofy high school teacher in "Clueless"; he was also one of the leading sources of ideas for a "poor theatre" that we see in Louis Malle' s great movie "My Dinner With Andre". 
 
Here his idea is that the real key to reconciling all these contradictions of identity is that we are all far, far more than we seem. But only the actor, on the stage, can realize all of the potential identities that a single self can contain. In practice, it is race, class, caste, and above all the country in which the child finds himself or herself unwillingly born that selects and realizes the potential that later becomes a cheap substitute for his or her real identity. If the child wants anything more than this cheap substitute, then we are simply going to have to do something about race, class, caste, and above all national boundaries. 
 
In Volume Five of the Collected Works, Vygosky is writing (at considerable length) about how we might test the James-Lange theory of emotion (that is, the idea that physiological changes in the viscera or the vasomotor system somehow occur as an unmediated response to perceptions and emotion is merely the conscious mind that notices these).  
 
He discusses a "direct theorem" and also a "reciprocal one". The direct one is the surgical realization of James' "gedankenexperiment": through vivisection we prevent all changes in the viscera, the vasomotor system, and even the sympathetic nervous system, and we discover that animals still have emotional responses. The "reciprocal one", though, is the opposite: we produce, through drugs, pathology, or Stanislavskian "method" acting, the changes in the viscera, vasomotor system, and sympathetic nervous system, and we see if there is an emotional response.
 
Now the problem is that these two theorems contradict each other. The direct theorem suggests that physiological changes and emotional experiences really CAN be decoupled. But the Stanslavskian method really indicates the OPPOSITE--we find that when we produce the physiological changes through method acting, we really DO get an emotional response with it.
 
But the contradiction is really only apparent. First of all, the emotional responses that we get from dogs who have had their vagus nerve cut or their spinal cord severed are really very different from emotional response in the wild. They are not adaptive, they are altered by being decoupled from practical activity. For example, if you poke a paralyzed dog with a stick through the bars of a cage, it will get angry, but there is no possiblity of either fight or flight, so the anger is, as Vygotsky says, "anger without the sting".
 
Secondly, the emotional responses we get from actors who have taken on another role are not so much responses to physiological changes as responses to ideas. And these ideas are not just any ideas. They are ideas that must in some way represent POTENTIAL SELVES to the actor. They are a kind of living realization of a potential emotional response rather than a real one. 
 
I guess I think that narration is always a little story; it's always a potential and not a real emotional response. That is why the Stanislavskyan technique seems a technique for testing the James-Lange hypothesis rather than a realistic method for the exploration of real, and not simply potential, human feeling.
 
David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Educaiton
 

--- On Wed, 2/16/11, Larry Purss <lpscholar2@gmail.com> wrote:


From: Larry Purss <lpscholar2@gmail.com>
Subject: [xmca] Narration as BIG story in contrast to little story
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Date: Wednesday, February 16, 2011, 7:12 AM


David Ke

I thought I would bring to your attention an article in the current journal
of Theory & Psychology by Michael Bamberg titled "Who am I? Narration and
its Contributions to Self and Identity".  He is contrasting the biographical
approach [lives as texts] as a metaphor of BIG stories with the Narrative
Practice approach as a metaphor of small stories.

To prime the upcoming discussion on identity formation that this months
article will explore I want to bring Bamberg's perspective on distinguishing
self from identity. On page 6 of the article he writes,

"in broad strokes, identity is a label attributed to the attempt to
differentiate and integrate a sense of self along different social and
personal dimensions" [which the article explains not not distinct or
separate dimensions] "Consequently, identities can be differentiated and
claimed according to varying socio-cultural categories e.g., gender, age,
race, occupation, gangs, socio-economic status, ethnicity, class, nation
states, or regional territory. Any claim of identity faces three dilemmas:
1) sameness of a sense of self across time in the face of constant change;
2) uniqueness of the person vis-a-vis others in the face of being the same
as everybody else; and 3) the construction of agency as constituted by self
(with a self-to-world direction of fit) and world (with a world -to- self
direction of fit). It is argued that IDENTITY takes off from the
continuity/change dilemma, and from here ventures into issues of uniqueness
(self-other differentiation) and agency.  In contrast, notions of SELF and
SENSE OF SELF start from the self/other and agency differentiation and from
here can filter into the diachronicity of continuity and change".

David,  Bamberg is elaborating a notion of a small story approach which is
in the discourse tradition of the Narrative Practice framework. {Hutto is
also working in this realm}  Not sure how these ideas will possibly link up
with notions of identity in the coming article to be posted but I
appreciated how Bamberg opens his article with 3 dilemmas to be answered by
concepts of identity and a sense of self.

Larry
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