RE: [xmca] Notions of suffering, enduring, undergoing

[Rod Parker-Rees <R.Parker-Rees@plymouth.ac.uk>]

Sorry about the delayed response but I wanted to pick up on Andy's reference to Vygotsky's comment about 'good little boys and girls'. While it may be true that good little boys and girls seldom go on to become 'great men' or 'great women' of history, it may also be worth considering whether the great men and women who are celebrated in history would have been able to achieve what they did achieve if they had not had the support of 'good little boys and girls' who kept things going around them (emptying the bins, installing phone lines, even running university administration committees). I was reminded of a talk gven by Vera John-Steiner in Bristol (about her book on 'Creative Collaboration', I think) where she emphasised the collective endeavour out of which 'genius' can emerge - ideally like the rugby player hoisted into the air by team-mates in a line-out but also, sometimes, from a less decorous scrambling over heaps of toiling masses.

Perhaps this puts a rather different gloss on 'undergoing' which may feel very different for the hoisters or those who get clambered over!

All the best,

Rod

________________________________________
From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu] On Behalf Of Andy Blunden [ablunden@mira.net]
Sent: 05 November 2011 15:09
To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
Subject: Re: [xmca] Notions of suffering, enduring, undergoing

That's an interesting observation, Robert. I have been trying to
summarise in what way Dewey did not quite get to where Vygotsky got to.
Up till today I had written that "Pragmatism could explain ideas as
means of adaptation to the world, but not why people were prepared to
die for them; it could explain how people pursued goals, but was less
effective in understanding how people formed their goals." But then I
read the excellent article "Experience is Pedagogical" where he has an
exposition on interest, which fits well with Leontyev's ideas about how
children develop an interest in something. He is very strong on the
question of the primacy of interest. And he certainly agrees that
everything depends on motivation, will and teleology. Menand's wonderful
book, "The Metaphysical Club" placed the emergence of Pragmatism as a
reaction to the disastrous Civil War, and what they saw as reckless
pursuit of Big Ideas. So this seemed to tally. The Pragmatists could not
understand why the Abolitionists and Confederates were prepared to enter
a national holocaust on a principle.
Dewey says that "the chief characteristic trait of the pragmatic notion
of reality is precisely that no theory of Reality in general,
/überhaupt/, is possible or needed." Holmes' theory of law rests on the
same conviction. I still feel that there is something missing in when
they rule out the role of abstractions in motivating human beings. And
that is what lies at the root of Tragedy, isn't it? I suspect Dewey well
knew tragedy, but dedicated his life trying to eliminate it!

Andy

Robert Lake wrote:
> Andy,
> That is an astute observation about the notion of "happy".
> Maxine Greene owes much of her view of aesthetics to Dewey's "Art as
> experience"
> yet her main critique of Dewey was that "he had no sense of the tragic".
> Unlike Vygotsky whose personal perezhivanie  was marked by the tragic
> and perhaps
> as Kozulin speculates, was one reason he was fascinated with Hamlet.
> Robert Lake
>
> On Sat, Nov 5, 2011 at 9:25 AM, Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net
> <mailto:ablunden@mira.net>> wrote:
>
>     In this same essay, Dewey is insistent that an experience is not
>     composed of components which are respectively practical, emotional
>     and intellectual, but these adjectives (he says) only arise in
>     subsequent discourse about experience, when we interpret
>     experience. An experience is essentially an irreducibly all of
>     these things, and in his view any attempt to seaprate out an
>     emotional component will destory the unity of the experience.
>
>     And I liked it when Vygotsky said, in Educational Psychology:
>     "People with great passions, people who accomplish great deeds,
>     people who possess strong feelings, even people with great minds
>     and a strong personality, rarely come out of good little boys and
>     girls."
>
>     I think the same goes for "happy little boys and girls."
>
>     Andy
>     Rod Parker-Rees wrote:
>
>         Hi Larry,
>
>         I certainly didn't want to suggest that children are (or even
>         should be) care-free, only to note that not ALL of their
>         experiences (or ours) are  best described as suffering. Your
>         post clearly helps to explain why we tend to focus more on
>         distressing experiences, since it is these, more than more
>         positive ones, which call others into sympathetic action so
>         they are more note-worthy. An unusually happy child is not
>         likely to have a teaching assistant allocated to provide
>         special support, nor to be seen by an educational psychologist
>         but this does not mean that we should understand experience as
>         suffering.
>
>         There is another can of worms around the relationships between
>         emotions and the development of individualised identity but
>         that may be for another thread!
>
>         All the best,
>
>         Rod
>
>         -----Original Message-----
>         From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu
>         <mailto:xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu>
>         [mailto:xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu
>         <mailto:xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu>] On Behalf Of Larry Purss
>         Sent: 05 November 2011 12:46
>         To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
>         Subject: [xmca] Notions of suffering, enduring, undergoing
>
>         Hi Rod and Andy
>
>         Andy
>         Thank you for the article on Dewey.  I thougt that article
>         should remain the focus of that thread, but the question of
>         the centrality of suffering to experience is also worth exploring.
>
>         Rod, you wrote
>
>          I am intrigued by the focus here, as in many of the postings
>         on perezhivanie, on experience as 'suffering'. The etymology
>         of 'suffer' (from 'sub' - under and 'ferre' - to bear) makes
>         it a close cousin of 'undergo'
>         and it is, I think, interesting that both terms have been used
>         in ways which have moved their meaning towards the dark side.
>
>         Rod, you caution us not to impose our care-worn adult
>         sufferings onto the experience of children who are more "care
>         free".
>
>         In my work in schools I am called to respond to children who
>         are experiencing what I will call "foul frustration" as an
>         experience of what is not working.  This experience is often
>         expressed as anger that is a passionate response to what is
>         not working.  Infants also seem to express e-motions that may
>         be understood as frustration for what is not working.
>
>         A developmental psychologist in Vancouver [Gordon Neufeld]
>         sees development as biological and innate. Though his origin
>         narrative I don't agree with, he does have an interesting
>         perspective on how to respond to a childs foul frustration for
>         what is not working.
>
>         He believes that a person must come to a place of "rest"
>         before going in a new direction.  What is sometimes needed to
>         move frustration from anger to experiencing saddness are for
>         what is not working are "tears of futility".
>         He suggests that these tears of futility are expressed within
>         particular types of relational configurations that are safe,
>         secure, and "attached".
>
>         When the tears of futility are met and "held" by the other
>         this releases the frustration for what is not working and the
>         child can lean into the other person and come to rest.  Often
>         the child at this point is exhausted.  However, after coming
>         to rest the child is now moved to exploration of the world and
>         is care free and open to new experiences.
>
>         This idea of expressing "tears of futility" for what is not
>         working [foul frustration] within intersubjective forms of
>         caring and "holding" gives me a way to respond to expressions
>         of "anger".  Suffering or enduring or undergoing can sometimes
>         be an experienceof stuckness in patterns that are not working.
>
>         In summary
>
>         The ideal is for children to be care free but frustration is
>         an inevitable aspect of becoming and e*motion.  If not met and
>         "held" by others this frustration can lead to a stuckness that
>         must be endured, and undergone.
>         It is others who are central in channeling the path of
>         frustration for what is not working.  Now I want to emphasize
>         it is not "merely" intersubjective as the artifactual "worlds"
>          mediating experience are the conditions which lead to
>         frustration or being care free. Focusing on changing the
>         conditions that lead to the frustration is also a central
>         project but frustration is inevitable and unavoidable. When
>         undergoing foul frustration how one is met within this
>         experience is vital for how the child goes on.
>
>
>         Larry
>         Larry
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>
>     --
>     ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>     *Andy Blunden*
>     Joint Editor MCA: http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/hmca20/18/1
>     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>
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> --
> *Robert Lake  Ed.D.
> *Assistant Professor
> Social Foundations of Education
> Dept. of Curriculum, Foundations, and Reading
> Georgia Southern University
> P. O. Box 8144
> Phone: (912) 478-5125
> Fax: (912) 478-5382
> Statesboro, GA  30460
>
>  /Democracy must be born anew in every generation, and education is
> its midwife./
> /-/John Dewey.
>
>

--
------------------------------------------------------------------------
*Andy Blunden*
Joint Editor MCA: http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/hmca20/18/1
Home Page: http://home.mira.net/~andy/
Book: http://www.brill.nl/default.aspx?partid=227&pid=34857

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