RE: [xmca] Mediation and Intersubjective Interpretations of Hegel

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

Sorry to step in without having read Andy's article (which I look forward to) but I just wanted to note the parallels between what Larry is reporting Wayne Booth as saying (about the need to accept conventional constraints in order to access opportunities to play with alternative possibilities) and what Vygotsky wrote (in The role of Play in Development) about the way children voluntarily subject themselves to constraints when they choose to adopt a role in their play. I suspect that an important feature of both forms of play is that the constraints are 'put-on-and-take-off-able' - that we dress up in them rather than adopt them as our uniform. If we forget that we are dressing up in attitudes, conventions and constraints then they can become un-take-off-able because they have become a part of who we are.

Apologies if this is too far off the point.

Rod

-----Original Message-----
From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu] On Behalf Of Larry Purss
Sent: 21 October 2012 16:15
To: eXtended Mind, Culture Activity
Subject: [xmca] Mediation and Intersubjective Interpretations of Hegel

Andy

I just received a copy of your 2007 article *Mediation and  Intersubjective Interpretations of Hegel* which you posted. This article has offered a new clarity to my understanding of Hegel's use of intersubjectivity and your cautions that in our modern incorporation of Hegel as the ancestor of intersubjectivity we have lost the centrality of *spirit* which IN-forms Hegel's intersubjectivity

Andy, your *genre* of writing which puts in *play* concepts such as spirit, mediation, intersubjectivity, and material culture was engaging and also informative

In the spirit of play within this genre I would like to bring in Wayne Booth who is exploring similar themes in his article "Freedom of
Interpretation: Bakhtin and the Challenge of Feminist Criticism".

 He opens the article with this paragraph:

Most critics today would see the "politics of interpretation"as beginning and ending not with freedom but with power.... In this view, the search for freedom of interpretation becomes the problem of how to resist power - how to wrest it from those who have it or how to produce a text that will not be co-opted by it.  WHO has the power - which class, which ruler, which faction. which sex - to impose what can be said and not said? Whose language, because of the power of its users, imposes a given view of reality upon whoever fails to resist the language?"

Booth's response [in the article] is to explore the contrast between freedom *from* & freedom *to*.
Freedom from external restraints and the power of others to inhibit our actions AND freedom to act effectively when restraints are less constraining.

Booth writes such freedom to is gained,
"only by those who surrender to disciplines and codes invented by others, giving up certain freedoms from.

This way of exploring mediation is using a different genre but seems to me to be playing on the same field.

Andy, thanks for the article clarifying Hegel's notion of spirit.

Larry
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