Hi Andy [and others interested in texts and framewoks]
Another author who is searching for socio-cultural common ground but
who is working within an alternative framework of "intersubjective
psychoanalysis" is Donna Orange. It is her description of a metaphor
used by Wittgenstein that I found was exploring similar themes of
entering into the perspective of the other.
Wittgenstein suggests that the task of philosophy now becomes "to show
the fly out of the fly-bottle". [Wittgenstein, 1953] The fly-bottle
metaphor is capturing the notion that "seeing-as" implies a
perspective which weaves thinking and seeing together in an
inextricable whole making it impossible to distinguish them. Anna
Stetsenko makes a similar point in expressing NO GAPS between thinking
and seeing. Donna, in using the fly-bottle metaphor adds,
"surely, the first step, often the most difficult one, is to join the
patient in the PARTICULAR fly-bottle. This means understanding deeply
enough how THIS patient got into THIS fly-bottle, and what it feels
like inside, that it may be possible to find the way out."
This process of "attunement" implies that at least two psychological
worlds, each with a distinct "way of seeing" are required....Donna
then asks, How do we find our way into the fly-bottle? She answers,
By close emotional attunement to the patients experience of emotional
contexts. We find our way into these contexts through verbal and
nonverbal conversation where we establish and identify together the
nature and rules of a PARTICULAR language game, a PARTICULAR
experiential/relational world, a process Donna has characterized as
making sense together. [Donna Orange, in the article "Recognition as:
Intersubjective Vulnerability in the Psychoanalytic Dialogue", June, 2010]
In line with Gadamer's hermeneutics, and Wittgenstein's discursive
framework Donna asks, "Within what emotional world is this true?"
How does a person come to feel such a thing? Where does such a
conviction come from? It is these types of questions that are an
attempt to go into the fly-bottle [enter the other's perspective]
Donna, with Gadamer and Wittgenstein, recognizes that the fly-bottle
is formed and maintained relationally. Donna suggests "seeing-as" is
a stance of the observer in which the other experiences being
recognized and this recognition can create the experience of a
gestalt-shift in perspective. Donna refers to this stance as
"contextualist thinking", conceptualizing BOTH perception and the
organizing of experience as "seeing-as". For Donna, recognition of
the other as the processes of attunement, both products and producers
of new ways of seeing, create ways out of the fly-bottles.
Understanding how we got into the fly-bottle is an essential condition
for the possibility of finding a way out and this new reflective
function [a result of being recognized] often suggests a possible way
out into a larger, more open and flexible experiential world, with
more possible perspectives [ways of seeing]. With this expanded
horizon of understanding it becomes possible to participate more fully
in the dialogic processes of the larger human communities as agentic
persons who actively participate as contributing members.
Andy, I was hesitant to bring Donna Orange into a CHAT conversation as
the translation difficulties may be too large to
bridge. [psychoanalysis to CHAT] However, her using Wittgenstein's
metaphor of the fly-bottle to capture the concept of perspectives, and
frameworks [seeing-as] was in the same spirit as I read your article
and Anna Stetsenko's work. The metaphor of the fly-bottle may be too
structural an image with too rigid boundaries to be an accurate image
but it is the metaphor Wittgenstein used and Donna re-used it
to develop her theoretical perspective of recognition as "seeing-as"
Larry
On Tue, May 31, 2011 at 4:39 PM, Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net
<mailto:ablunden@mira.net>> wrote:
Thank you for introducing that article, Larry. Yes, I do think
there are considerable synergies between Anna Stetsenko's work and
my own, though Anna might not agree. :) But among those points of
commonality is an effort to strengthen links between CHAT (which
is unfortunately very isolated in academia) and other currents of
thinking. I tend to emphasise Hegel as Hegel is a link to such a
broad variety of contemporary currents of thinking that we ought
to be in dialogue with. Vygotsky's appropriation of Hegel ought
to be a point of interest to a lot of people. Gadamer is also
someone who I think has a lot of synergy with CHAT, if we just
understand text and writing to be an important subset of culture
and activity. Anna Sfard is an example of someone who bases her
work on the synergy betweeen the concepts of discourse and
activity, which is a similar connection. I think it is important
to defend and elaborate the fundamental ideas of CHAT while
strengthening our links with divergent currents.
But it is always vital in such exercises to bring front and centre
the differences in meaning and entailment between the central
shared words and concepts. If concepts from one tradition are
thrown willy nilly into another, then only confusion and
eclecticism results.
Andy
Larry Purss wrote:
Hi Andy
I just finished reading the commentary you wrote in "Mind,
Culture, and
Activity" Vol. 17, Issue 1. In this commentary to
Wolff-Michael Roth's
editorial you explore the concept "form" and bring Gadamer
into the
conversation. I really appreciated how you linked up Gadamer's
hermeneutical concepts of "traditions" and "texts" with CHAT
the concept of
"artifact-mediated action". For others who may be interested
in this
theoretical bridging I will attempt a quick summary. [Andy, I
do think this
is written in the same spirit as Anna Stetsenko's project]
Gadamer, [quoted by Andy] is talking about how to interpret
texts that come
out of a different "tradition" He wrote,
When we try to understand a text, we do not try to transpose
ourselves into
the author's mind but, if one wants to use this terminology,
we try to
transpose ourselves into the PERSPECTIVE within which he has
FORMED his
views. But this simply means that we try to understand how
what he is
saying could be right. [emphasis added]
Andy then adds another quote from Gadamer,
The ANTICIPATION of meaning that governs our understanding of
a text is not
an act of subjectivity but proceeds from the COMMONALITY that
binds it to
the tradition. But this commonality is constantly BEING
FORMED in our
relation to tradition. Tradition is not simply a permanent
precondition;
rather, we PRODUCE it ourselves inasmuch as we understand,
participate in
the evolution of tradition, and hence further DETERMINE it.
[emphasis added]
Andy, these 2 quotes exploring the notion of texts and
traditions, as you
point out, are dealing with the production and use of
artifacts.. A concept
of a "tradition" as the perspective within which a writer has
FORMED his
views.is <http://views.is/> a concept you link to the notion
of "an activity" that is
culturally and historically constructed. You then state,
"Tradition implies something MORE EXTENDED than is sometimes
associated with
the words "an activity". somewhat closer to "cultural
context." But in this
connection, I think "tradition" can be validly interpreted as
"an activity,"
which I refer to as "a project".
Andy, I appreciated your translating the terms "texts" and
"traditions" into
the concepts of the CHAT tradition. It is in this spirit of
interpretation
and translation that I also read Anna's works.
As a little aside I also want to bring in a metaphor by David
Kellogg that
he created on May 7, concerning concepts.
David wrote,
"concepts come in a structure which is paradigmatic rather
than syntagmatic;
they GROW ON TALL TREES WITH DEEP ROOTS, and do not
proliferate temporally
like crabgrass."
This metaphor created a strong image of traditions,
perspectives and
concepts as growing deep and tall.
Larry
__________________________________________
_____
xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu <mailto:xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
--
------------------------------------------------------------------------
*Andy Blunden*
Joint Editor MCA:
http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~db=all~content=g932564744
<http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title%7Edb=all%7Econtent=g932564744>
Home Page: http://home.mira.net/~andy/ <http://home.mira.net/%7Eandy/>
Book: http://www.brill.nl/default.aspx?partid=227&pid=34857
<http://www.brill.nl/default.aspx?partid=227&pid=34857>
MIA: http://www.marxists.org <http://www.marxists.org/>
__________________________________________
_____
xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu <mailto:xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca