Re: [xmca] sensorymotor reguires gaps...?

[David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>]

Larry:
 
I guess I think that the biggest gap we face is still in getting from the social to the psychological. You know, as Bernstein says, "How does outside become inside?"  To be more concrete (that is, more measurable), how does discourse (that is, "Why do apples have seeds?" "Because seeds make seedlings!") to grammar (that is, "Apples have seeds, which produce seedlings, and these produce new apples!").
 
I think Bakhtin doesn't do it. The reason is that Bakhtin really sees the social as reducible to the interpersonal: to "Thou" and to "I". The gap between the interpersonal and the fully social, and cultural (which must include the choir invisible, the voices and contributions and aspirations of countless dead generations) is far too great. Bakhtin fills the gap with God, who enters the "Thou-I" relationship via Christ. That is cheating.
 
I think that Vygotsky provides PART of an answer. On the face of it, his answer is just as unsatisfactory as Bakhtin's: the "ingrowing" of self-directed speech into verbalized thinking is simply another version of "Thou" into "I", and the sociocultural is once again reduced to the interpersonal. It is a very compelling description in the first year of life (and in fact I think Scollon's book "Conversations With a One Year Old", which show how the child manages to put together sentences by participating in dialogue with adults and then eliding the adult, is a very compelling demonstration. But it doesn't really include culture, history, or social relations; it just gives us the interpersonal trappings thereof.
 
But because Vygotsky understands that meanings develop, and that they include the voices and contributions and aspirations of the choir invisible, it is not cheating; it is an explanation which, although it is not workable in its present form, might be worked out.I am using this computer without any real knowledge or control over the way it works, and it seems to me that the gap between the significations of the choir invisible and the sense of the child is, if anything, even bigger. But like other problems of evolution (e.g. the evolution of complex organs like eyes which do not really offer any evolutionary advantage until they are complete) it is now a problem to which I can imagine a possible solution. And I think that this gap, between the sociocultural and the interpersonal, between historical logogenesis and interpersonal logogenesis, is essentially the problem that Halliday worked on, and to which he sketched his solution. 
 
Let me give you a simple example. It will not explain the whole theory to you, but it will illustrate the direction in which I am looking and why. A couple of months ago I was trying to explain to my Korean teachers the social freight of the following sentence of classroom English.
 
T: Look at me!
 
You can see that this is not something that would normally come to a teacher's lips, even in a noisy classroom where kids are not paying attention (the teacher would probably think of "Look here!" or "Listen up!" or "Be quiet" or "May I have your attention please!"  first).
 
But the question is why? The answer, which can be checked statistically, is that English sentences do not normally end with "me". They often begin with "I", but they only rarely end with "me".  The reason is that our grammar tends to organize utterances a kind of bridge from speaker to hearer, with the "starting point" of the speaker at one end and the bit that is stressed and of interest and relevance to the hearer at the other. "Look!" is what I want and "here" is the bit you need to attend to. "Listen" is what I am getting you to do and "up" is the way you need to do it. "May I have your attention" is the jumping off point for my hopes and desires, my anxieties and aspirations, while "please" is the crumb that I am casting your way in return.
 
All of that sounds vague, but it is through vague principles like this that we get statistical regularities and through statistical regularities that we derive grammars. More concretely, it is through vague principles like this that we can explain why the sentence "Look at me!" sounds faintly CHILDISH, and even EGOCENTRIC. Children have just not yet grasped the "tuisimus" (that is, the "thou-ism") of English grammar. Just as they have not understood the principle of "other-centred action" (collaboration), they have not really understood that speech has two real-world metafunctions: the interpersonal, or other directed, and the ideational, which is reflective and representative.
 
So it isn't just a matter of using words that contain the voices of the choir invisible, any more than it is a matter of using tools that were left to us by our forefathers. There is a whole philosophy and ethics that the child has to master before his speech can become a two-edged sword. Fortunately, the child will take it in even more easily than mother's milk, for it is the philosophy of the functions and systems of his or her own tongue. 
 
David Kellogg
Hankuk University of Foreign Studies
 

--- On Mon, 1/30/12, Larry Purss <lpscholar2@gmail.com> wrote:


From: Larry Purss <lpscholar2@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [xmca] sensorymotor reguires gaps...?
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Date: Monday, January 30, 2012, 9:41 AM


David

I wish I had more background in Halliday and the distinctions you make
in your statement of future directions. You are considering

I think what I will do next term is to look very carefully at the three
pre-verbal "planes" that Vygotsky talks about: the affective-volitional
"feeling" plane, the plane of pre-verbl "thought", the plane of inner
speech. There are gaps between them, of course ("How do you feel?" vs.
"What do you think?", predication vs. nonpredication). But there is also
some overlapping: they are manifestly three different ways of looking at
the same speech act.

I sometimes think (feel? see?) that Halliday's interpersonal metafunction
is mostly FEELING (because in a conversation we are reacting most directly
to MOOD rather than to transitivity or to theme). The ideational
metafunction is mostly THINKING (because in a conversation this is where we
put together an actual representation we want to convey, and because
transitivity, the choice of a verb and its choice of our arguments, is
where that seems to happen in the clause).

And that means that inner speech is really where the ideational and the
interpersonal have to be related in the form of a predication, which in
Halliday is really called the predicator. The predicator is where theme
becomes rheme, where old information becomes new, and where the "me" part
of an utterance passes into the "you" part. It's the  "is" in "This is
Jinho" and the "runs" in "Jinho runs". (But it is also the "mind" in "Mind
the gap!")
The last phrase the PREDICTOR is where theme becomes rheme, where old
information becomes NEW [Mike's creative acts??] and where the "me" part of
an utterance passes into the "you" part.  I read this as Bahktin's notion
of communication being half yours and half mine. Understanding and RESPONSE.

Just a further response on the "affective-volitional" pre-verbal plane.
Ruth Miltenburg & Elly Singer in a 1999 article are exploring Vygotsky's
notion of the affective-volitional plane as a tool for working with
traumatized survivors of child abuse. Human Development 1999 volume 42,
pages 1-17]

On page 5 Miltenburg & Singe  give their definition of affect as following
Adler and Vygotsky's premise that the subjective feeling of deficiency is
the motor that drives us to learn to develop and to create through
compensation. Compensation can lead to supercompensation which is a
"positive" feature.  Vygotsky, in exploring lower functions [biological]
believed these functions were less susceptible to upbringing because
determined biologically.

Vygotsky adopts Spinoza's definition of affect as "that which increases or
decreases our body's ability to ACT, and as that which forces thought to
move in a specific direction."  Miltenburg & Singer amplify this basic
insight by adding

"Affective and intellectual processes form a unity, but during development
the relation between them changes.  In the early stages of development, the
affect and will are identical.  For the young child, the meaning of the
situation and his or her will are determined entirely by the power of
affective incentive, there is a one-sided dependence of thought on
feeling.. But with the development of the higher mental functions, the
child is able to regulate his or her emotions and can be affected by the
will to achieve a goal and to realize MORAL VALUES.  The child can
voluntarily PAY ATTENTION or disregard a situational incentive and can act
on purpose. The chief purposes of thought are:
to define lifestyle and behavior, to change our actions, to direct them,
and to free them from the power of concrete circumstance. The inability in
older children and adults to shape and direct their own thoughts and
actions voluntarily causes distress and leads to affective problems.
According to Vygotsky, underdevelopment of the higher psychological
functions in 'difficult children' is the chief cause of 'primitive
reactions' or 'simple uninhibited manifestations of the chain of powerful
affective reactions' that are normal in the earlier stages of development.
Vygotsky theorized that the transition from the lowest (natural) to the
highest (ETHICAL) affective formations is DIRECTLY tied to changes in the
relationship between affect and intellect"

David, this is a good place to stop to let others respond to this
definition of affect and the particular model of the relation of affect and
intellect and the GAPS [distanciation] assumed to be foundational for this
developmental process.  The gaps in the sensory motor conscious IMAGES
within sense data and the gaps within affect and intellect may be
qualitatively different but what do you think of Mike's point that you can
use the sensorymotor notion of gaps as an analogy of consciousness and
self-consciousness??

Larry





On Wed, Jan 25, 2012 at 1:38 PM, David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>wrote:

> Bill, Larry, Mike, Andy...
>
> Larry is generous in many ways--but one of them is his editing. Notice
> what he did with what I wrote:
>
> "(Language) can do this (break up sensorimotor unity) because it is
> introducing into
> the reflex arc exactly what the motor theory of consciousness takes away:
> volition, which is derived, paradoxically, from socio-cultural necessity.
> The problem is that treating a response to a word as being similar to a
> response to a noise, as Dewey does, does exactly the same thing."
>
> At this point Larry covers for my incoherence with a discrete ellipsis.
> But what I meant was that by comparing the response to a word to the
> response to any other kind of noise, we also take away volition; that is,
> we take away the crucial distinction that in order to interpret a word as a
> word, we must impute volition to another person.
>
> I've taken the liberty of adding ellipsis and a question mark to Larry's
> subject line. To me, the ellipsis and the question mark suggest "...for
> what?" It seems to me that speech requires very different gaps, both
> intermentally and intra-mentally, than the kind of gap we require when we
> are walking down a narrow street and we are wondering whether to interpret
> the sound behind us as an approaching automobile or a truck.
>
> I'm not disputing the idea that in general sensorimotor activity requires
> gaps. But I am disputing the idea that sensorimotor activity is a good way
> of describing the way in which we hear and respond to a word, an utterance,
> a turn of talk in a conversation, or a posting on xmca.
>
> Next term, by popular request, I get to go back to my old school, Seoul
> National Universiy of Education, to teach a class in classroom discourse
> once a week. I too have a gap to fill; it is the great gap between teaching
> Thinking and Speech on the one hand, and teaching ways of looking at and
> thinking about classroom discouse to elementary school teachers.
>
> One way to handle this gap is to treat Thinking and Speech as a
> progressive attempt, increasingly successful as we approach Chapter
> Seven, to overcome the idea that language is just a stimulus or a signal or
> a perception like any other one: something that children attend to the same
> way they would attend to any other loud noise in a classroom.
>
> Usually, Bill, what I do is to teach my teachers to think of language in
> terms of Hallidayan metafunctions (this is called the ideational, the
> textual, and the interpersonal, but we end up calling it the WHAT, the HOW
> and the WHO of an utterance).
>
> These metafunctions do map, fairly well, onto the three main intonations
> and the three main grammatical forms that teachers use when they are
> keeping their teaching talk canonical (that is, when they are NOT being
> indirect, using a question to give information, using a statement to make a
> request, or using a command to check integration (these are Jay Lemke's
> categories).
>
> We use commands ("Look!" "Listen!") to get attention, which is a key
> interpersonal metafunction. We use statements ("This is Jinho.") to give
> informaton, which is the core of ideation. And we use questions ("Who is
> this?") to check integration of information and understanding, and so on.
>
> Of course, we also use commands to check integration ("Tell me about...").
> We use statements to get attention ("I want you all to be quiet"). And we
> use questions to give information all the time! But when we do it creates a
> certain gap between the intonation and the actual sense of what we are
> saying (which is why "May I have your attention please!" hardly ever
> actually sounds like a question.
>
> I always have a problem when we reach Chapter Seven, and Vygotsky brings
> in Paulhan's distinction between sense and signification. It seems to me
> that this distinction is too much liike the sensorimotor approach to
> language: "sense" is simply the sum total of all the "ideas" produced by a
> stimulus-word. "Signification" is the most stable, socially agreed,
> contractually canonical of these senses. We are back to the reflex arc
> interpretation of the word.
>
> The reflex arc really is both bitty and dualist. As Dewey points out, it
> divides each act of attending into a one-hundred percent material stimulus,
> a one hundred percent mental idea, and a purely EXTERNAL synthesis of the
> two, the active response which is both mental idea and material reaction.
> And "sense" and "signification" fall too neatly into the "mental idea" to
> be much use in understanding Chapter Seven .(It works better if I interpret
> "sense" as "theme" and "signification" as dictionary denotation, but
> still....)
>
> I think what I will do next term is to look very carefully at the
> three pre-verbal "planes" that Vygotsky talks about: the
> affective-volitional "feeling" plane, the plane of pre-verbl "thought", the
> plane of inner speech. There are gaps between them, of course ("How do you
> feel?" vs. "What do you think?", predication vs. nonpredication). But there
> is also some overlapping: they are manifestly three different ways of
> looking at the same speech act.
>
> I sometimes think (feel? see?) that Halliday's interpersonal metafunction
> is mostly FEELING (because in a conversation we are reacting most directly
> to MOOD rather than to transitivity or to theme). The ideational
> metafunction is mostly THINKING (because in a conversation this is where we
> put together an actual representation we want to convey, and because
> transitivity, the choice of a verb and its choice of our arguments, is
> where that seems to happen in the clause).
>
> And that means that inner speech is really where the ideational and the
> interpersonal have to be related in the form of a predication, which in
> Halliday is really called the predicator. The predicator is where
> theme becomes rheme, where old information becomes new, and where the "me"
> part of an utterance passes into the "you" part. It's the  "is" in "This is
> Jinho" and the "runs" in "Jinho runs". (But it is also the "mind" in "Mind
> the gap!")
>
> David Kellogg
> Hankuk University of Foreign Studies
>
>
> --- On Wed, 1/25/12, Larry Purss <lpscholar2@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> From: Larry Purss <lpscholar2@gmail.com>
> Subject: [xmca] sensorymotor reguires gaps
> To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
> Date: Wednesday, January 25, 2012, 7:18 AM
>
>
> David and Mike
> I decided to open up a new thread to repond to David by returning to your
> article developing the centrality of gap formation for the imaginal
>
> David. you wrote,
>
> Here's what I think. Dewey's attack on the reflex arc was an attack on its
> bittiness and its dualism only, not on its inapplicability to language. He
> thought the idea that the reflex arc has a clear beginning in sensation, a
> clear middle in thinking, and a clear end in action was wrong. He saw the
> mind as sensorimotor unity (hence the motor theory of consciousness, and
> functional psychology).  Sensorimotor unity is not a good theory of
> language. For one thing, it's not a social theory or a cultural theory;
> it's purely individual and physiological. Actually, LSV and ARL point out
> (Chapter Three of Tool and Sign) that language has the effect of BREAKING
> UP this sensorimotor unity! It can do this because it is introducing into
> the reflex arc exactly what the motor theory of consciousness takes away:
> volition, which is derived, paradoxically, from socio-cultural necessity.
> The problem is that treating a response to a word as being similar to a
> response to a noise, as Dewey does, does exactly the same thing. Worse, it
> creates a view of language
>
> As I read this passage a gap openned in my thinking and a few random
> thought poured into the gap.
>
> After reading Mike's article on the "fragmenting" and gap forming processes
> at the micro micro level as a process which opens up space and distance for
> IMAGINATION  my thoughts have been alighting on notions of "negating" or
> "negativity" at the heart of consciousness at all heterochronic and
> heterospatially "ways" of orienting to the world.
> Your example of language fragmenting the sensory motor in order for
> volition is also creating a GAP for imagination.
>
> Merleau-Ponty's suggesting that perceiving is the body  "grasping the
> world" at optimal DISTANCES. In an art gallery moving clser or further from
> a painting to perceive its Imaginal meaning.
>
> Aposhia [NEGATING consciousness] where the eyes perceive, and the visual
> part of the brain registers the sensory input BUT there is no CONSCIOUS
> re-solving thes inputs into images. [go to PBS broadcasting and see the
> discussion on aposhia on Monday's ongoing series on the brain]  This
> dysfunction is known as "negating awareness". The person "sees" and
> "registers" the sensory motor data, and the visualmotor areas of the brain
> light up but NO conscious awareness.
>
> Bahktin's notion that the VITAL aspect of understanding" is the RESPONSE of
> the other. Without the response  which ACTUALIZES and re-solves
> understanding there is no understanding. In other words between the
> understanding and the response a gap opens in which imagination emerges.
>
> The notion of volition as distancing from the object [a gap forming] within
> which imagination arises within the gap and the reflectively
> phenomenologically emerging moves into the world as creative acts.
>
> Mike, as you can TELL :-)) [see / understand]  your article has the
> POTENTIAL to bear multiplel fruitful dialogical understandings & responses
> which have the potential to "re=solve" situations in our ongoing dwelling
> in the world
>
> The question still to be pondered within this notion of imaginal volition
> is how much of this imaginal process is under the control of the sovereign
> self and how much is a dance of understanding & RESPONSE  BETWEEN persons.
> The answer to THAT question brings us back to moral questions of particular
> "stances" or "dispositions" or character or personality as we give more or
> less priority to "identity" or "difference" [alterity]  Patchen's book
> "Bound BY Recognition" as Greg points out offers an alternative Western
> perspective which goes back to Greek philosophy.
>
> Larry
>
>
>
>
> On
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