[xmca] Transhistorical or embodied

[Larry Purss <lpscholar2@gmail.com>]

Hi David

You wrote,

In that sense, "han" is objective and even transhistorical: it exists not in
my brain or in my Dad's brain or even in the great Tang poem "Song of
Eternal Sorrow" (in which the Emperor Xuanzong must slay his favorite
concubine Yang Guifei in order to preserve his empire). It is independent of
all of them, and anchored in transhistorical, transcultural and yet
completely social experience which is embodied in only a trivial sense (the
same sense in which it is "material").
  I think that's why it's fruitless to try to draw straight lines between
embodied 'activity' and sense making, why I can't accept the purely
cognitive approach to metaphor any more than I can accept the purely
cybernetic approach to cognition.


David, I am outside my zone of understanding with the notion of
"transhistorical, transcultural, and yet completely social experience".
Does Jung's notion of *archetype*  as transcultural fit into the notion of
*transcultural*.  I am understand to understand *cognitive* and
cultural-historical processes as holistic processes within a simultaneous
*unity*. The dynamic systems perspective that if a part develops the whole
develops and when the whole develops the part develops in a *field*
[metaphor of the magnetic field and filings]

I also am unsure if Lakoff and Johnson's notion of *prototypes" of basic
primary embodied ways to *orient* to the world is in fact the *source* or
derivative but it is a framework that I am intuitively trying to grasp.  I
am exploring this notion of  *embodied prototypes* as fundamental ways of
orienting to the world.  These prototypes as building blocks have been
assumed to be innate by some theorists and I'm not sure where I stand on the
notion of innateness, but I do believe it is pre-linguistic.

The prototype of *container* as a basic primary way of orienting to the
world, which becomes expressed in  metaphor [images that may be
archetypal???] and the linguistic metaphors DERIVED from the prototypes and
images seems to be promising for linking up cultural-historical/subjective
notions of becoming persons that acknowledges *structure* as a moment in the
dialectic of continuous transformation.  I appreciate Anna Stetsnko's and
Suzanne Kirschner's attempts to link up notions of *embodied*  *enactments*
and *historical institutional structures* as a contnuous transformative
process where the subjective is as central as the intersubjective and the
material.

David,  I'm not sure if embodiment is a purely *cognitive* perspective on
prototypes.  It may be transhistorical and transcultural???  What Lakoff and
Johnson are drawing our attention to is the possible basic structures that
*contain* and orient our activity intersubjectively but within particular
constraints.  They suggest these constraints have their source in prototypes
which are expressed metaphorically in images and affective enactments prior
to  linguistic metaphors which are derived from these basic metaphors.

I must qualify that many of these ideas I am exploring have just recently
started linking up.  I am indebted to the xmca community for allowing me to
think out loud and participate in a conversation that continues to broaden
my horizon of understanding.  Each time I make a new connection I will read
a post by others in this community and realize that I am at the beginnings
of my explorations but the vistas encountered on this forum are
breathtaking.
__________________________________________
_____
xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca