Re: RE: [xmca] The Frail Chain

[mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>]

Hi David-

More to agree on. Development is badly mis-conceived as links in a chain
which misleads one into linearality, an addition to its negative affordances
you chose.

Could you perhaps provide us with source for Marshall Brown's essay
to which you refer?

I am having difficulty with the insertion of "primitive" into that note --
did it
refer to my prior note in some way, or romantic science in some way, or
just my habitual distrust of the way "primitive" is used.

>From Andy and Nektarios' note we are heirs to a complex history. I learned
about Herder from Marvin Harris's opus on the history of Anthropology from
about the 1960's and Berlin's book on Herder and Vico. To me he seemed a
kind of precursor to Boas. The links to fascism might be worth
more explication.  Invoking the Volk?

I, too, thought of Mary Shelley when reading the prior notes on the
romantic science topic. Seems like a "must read" book for anyone who
thinks its about Bella Lugosi and zombies.

mike







On Thu, Aug 9, 2012 at 2:54 AM, kellogg <kellogg59@hanmail.net> wrote:

>   First of all, I want to thank everybody who has contributed to this
> thread, not only for their remarkable contributions (from which I too have
> learnt rather more than these poor lines will reflect) but above all for
> NOT changing the subject line. I know my subject lines are not particularly
> informative and they have annoyed more than one reader. But in this case
> there is a very good reason.
>
>
>
> I think that development is UNLIKE a chain in at least two senses. First
> of all, the links may be of very different sizes (e.g. the "link" of the
> child's heaps is almost dimensionless and in a very different way so are
> the older child's concepts of the universal, while complexive ways of
> thinking must change with every degree of latitude on the measure of
> generality). Secondly, they are made of very different stuff: of holding,
> of grasping, of pointing, of naming, and of signifying. So in that
> sense development is always a fragile link--like the "and" between
> "Romanticism" and "Enlightenment".
>
>
>
> Marshall Brown, in his wonderful essay on romanticism and enlightenment,
> begins with the rather obvious remark that there was not one enlightenment,
> nor was there any essential romanticism, and if we want to understand
> either, we can really only focus on the "and" that stands between them, and
> treat it as a vector without any actual location or velocity (rather like
> the "and" in Thinking and Speech", or the "and" in Tool and Sign).  I think
> Andy implicitly recognizes this when he reduces the enlightenment to Kant
> alone, and romanticism to Herder.
>
>
>
> But in the end of his essay, Brown (in true Romantic fashion!) relates
> both romanticism and enlightenment to a larger whole, of which we are
> certainly a part. Romanticism, he argues, is a revolutionary reflection
> upon enlightenment--romantic man is the enlightenment becoming
> self-conscious, or, if you like, Herder extending the heterogeneity that
> Kant had found within the mind to "the race".
>
>
>
> Now, in Brown, this "revolutionary" reflection means revolution in the
> eighteenth century sense--a turning inward, an ingrowing, or what Vygotsky
> would later call "intro-volution", vraschevaniye. But I think it can also
> be understood as a disenchantment with the political and social revolution.
> And I find that it is in that sense that it most applicable to Vygotsky,
> and it's really in that sense that Vygotsky himself is an anti-romantic.
>
>
>
> Larry--I think that Freud and Jung BOTH were "revolutionary" in the sense
> of turning back to prescientific ideas about dreams. Both had a fully
> "primitive" idea that these were "royal roads"--not to the future, but
> rather to the past. I also think that Vygotsky despised Freud and for good
> reason--he recognized that all of the most important ideas in Freud
> (transference, the subconscious mind, displacement) were stolen from poor
> old Janet, spiced up with pansexualism, and then marketed to the neurotic
> rich (whereas Janet had placed himself at the service of public medicine).
>
>
>
> What was good in Freud was not Freud, as far as Vygotsky was concerned,
> and what was Freud was not good. In particular, I think that Vygotsky
> resented the fact that where Janet really did believe that neurosis was
> caused, as it is in the novel Frankenstein by the great
> enlightenment-romantic Mary Shelley, by the social mistreatment of the
> individual, Freud positied that it was all the individual mistreating
> himself. For Janet--and for Vygotsky--that was blaming the victim.
>
>
>
> Mike--there is really no question in my mind that you are right; Vygotsky
> did use the term "primitive", and he also believed that at some level the
> disabled person, the uneducated peasant (he actually uses Jews rather than
> Muslims in his examples), and the child do have some things in common. But
> what they have in common with each other they also have in common with us:
> a need for development, and a real sense that development is always and
> everywhere a very fragile "and".
>
>
>
> David Kellogg
>
> Hankuk University of Foreign Studies
>
>
>
>
> <kellogg59@hanmail.net>
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