Re: [xmca] Mediation and Intersubjective Interpretations of Hegel

[Haydi Zulfei <haydizulfei@rocketmail.com>]

So good to see your papers on academia.edu , Andy ! The following five lines of yours talk a lot to me . I dare say I understand ! them ; I dare say I understand Vygotsky , Leontiev or Luria . And I follow all the messages one by one though at times I remain with a bunch of one two hundred behind only to reach up for them at the earliest possible time . One thing is certain : we have giants here and standing on their shoulders is not so easy a task , I heartily accept . But one thing stings me now and then : is there any similarity between what we read in these messages and what marx , engels , vygotsky , voloshinov , the Giants Three , the Giants Eight really meant by what they left as their heritage . I have never liked to talk big words and I have always looked at myself contemptuously . Mike felt the discussion reached a point where it got limited to just few lovely guys and invited to put a halt to it and yet , quite strangely to say , I'm still
 among those who offered their thirst for the continuation of the matter at hand , that is , microgenesis . This I said because sometimes I feel some lovely ones like to pour all they know , all the terminology at their disposal , all the jargon and all the cash coinages they might find gracefully beneficial , over our little heads ! sticking the prefixes to suffixes , infixes to both , doubling , trebling them at times taking them to a point where the overweight of the meaning they intend causes them to fall down to the depths of sort of ambiguity . I thank those especial scholars who have always been able to bring the deviated notions back to their original sites . Be kind Andy to put stuff to yet hallow shells you've left out there , this one in particular : various talks on the foundations of activity theory . Many thanks in advance ! I never forget I'm honourably stationed on and in CH....................a......................T !! 
Best
Haydi   



________________________________
 From: Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net>
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu> 
Sent: Monday, 22 October 2012, 3:48:19
Subject: Re: [xmca] Mediation and Intersubjective Interpretations of Hegel
 

Thank you Larry.


For Hegel, Freedom is in the very nature of a human being. A person may at a given moment be denied freedom, but such a person remains, in their essential nature, free, even whilst lanaguishing in the deepest and darkest dungeon. On the other hand, theorists of our time, as you say, following Foucault, take the opposite stance: that power is the master signifier which constitutes all other categories and experiences, including the human subject itself, and freedom recedes beyond the horizon of possibility. I prefer Hegel.


The material world is, if you want to see it that way, a constraint upon our freedom, but freedom is after all expressed in the world our predecessors have fashioned for us and which we constantly refashion. That's why what Hegel calls spirit does not spring anew from each individual ego who wants to bounce intersubjectively of someone else, but is constituted and reconstituted by human activity.


Andy

http://ucsd.academia.edu/AndyBlunden

Larry Purss wrote:

> 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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>  


-- ------------------------------------------------------------------------

*Andy Blunden*

Home Page: http://home.mira.net/~andy/

Book: http://www.brill.nl/concepts


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