Re: [xmca] The Study of Procrastination and the Procrastination of Study

[Huw Lloyd <huw.softdesigns@gmail.com>]

On 12 July 2012 02:24, kellogg <kellogg59@hanmail.net> wrote:

>   First of all, belated thanks to Mike and Huw for their concern about my
> cyber-health. At Huw's suggestion, I junked the yahoo account (they must
> have the WORST news on the internet, and the biggest bevy of bigots
> commenting on it) and resubscribed.
>
>
I amazed that people tolerate all those flashing adverts.



>
>
> It took me a while! Partly it was thanks to a ferocious spam filter at
> uni, but mostly it was because I have been reading...well...actually...you
> see...to tell you the truth...it's all about the psychology of
> procrastination.
>
>
>
> Procrastination is something I have always meant to write about but never
> quite gotten around to. It seems to me that a good deal of Vygotsky's
> method, both for studying the development of higher psychological functions
> and for studying literature, has to do with the artificial generation and
> observation of procrastination and its role in making actions deliberate
> and ultimately moral (and also in robbing them of any actual utility and
> significance).
>
>
>
> For example: In Act Three, Hamlet makes a bloodthirsty speech:
>
>
>
> ….Now could I drink hot blood
>
> And do such bitter business as the day
>
> Would quake to look on.
>
>
>
> He then happens upon the king at prayers. Hamlet draws his sword. Hamlet
> raises his hand. And Hamlet does not strike, because to kill the king at
> prayers would send him to heaven.
>
>
>
> Now, many critics—including Vygotsky (1971: 171) have considered this
> reason frivolous. More religious (and less anachronistic) critics, have
> been offended by Hamlet’s belief that a human being can decide whether
> another human is to be damned or saved, simply by killing at the right
> instant. (The truly religious believe that evil humans simply cannot repent
> at the last moment, and this is in fact the solution that Mozart shows us
> in his opera *Don Giovanni, *and it sometimes seems to me that our
> debates over assisted suicide and the over the moment of conception show a
> similar obsession with the moral significance of precise timing.)
>
>
>
> No, there is no contradiction here. As the Ghost says, one of the horrors
> of the king’s death is that he died without confession (“unhouseled,
> disappointed, unaneled”), and it’s for this precise reason that he is now
> tortured in purgatory by day, and only allowed to communicate with his son
> at night:
>
>
>
> Doomed for a certain term to walk the night
>
> And for the day confined to fast in fires
>
> Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature
>
> Are burnt and purged away. But that I am forbid
>
> To tell the secrets of my prison house,
>
> I could a tale unfold whose lightest word
>
> Would harrow up thy soul, freeze they young blook,
>
> Make they two eyes like stars start from their spheres
>
> And each particular hair to stand an end
>
> Like quills upon the fretful porpentine
>
> But this eternal blazon must not be
>
> To ears of flesh and blood!
>
> (1.5.10~21)
>
>
>
> Blasphemously or not, Hamlet believes that the king’s brother has sent his
> father to purgatory by simply murdering him without a confession and
> without the last rites.
>
>
>
> Hamlet, who is no theologian but an ordinary moralist like the rest of us,
> cannot imagine that justice would be served by sending his evil uncle to
> heaven while his father is still being purged in hell. It is no wonder that
> Hamlet finds it so hard to carry out the ghost’s instructions even when the
> means, the leisure, and the opportunity are all given.
>

I liked the book (psy of art) though I did, and do, wonder why he didn't
bring into focus an additional piece of logic that would add a little more
coherence to the play: that Hamlet could only kill the king under
particular circumstances.  To kill the king without proof of evil doings
would make Hamlet as bad as the king himself.  This provides a slightly
different account of killing the king twice, poetically reinforced by
double poisoning.

Maybe this also explains our procrastination at times, i.e. the conditions
aren't quite right.


>
> I sometimes feel that way about xmca, particularly when I contemplate the
> enormous amount of reading required to participate intelligently. But one
> thing we learn from Vygotsky is that intelligence, like procrastination, is
> sometimes a consequence and not a cause....
>

It's certainly a struggle at times.  These conversations help me identify
particular texts worthy of the time though.

Glad you made it back. :)

Huw


>
>
> David Kellogg
>
> Hankuk University of Foreign Studies
>
>
>
>
> <kellogg59@hanmail.net>
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