Can I pick the collective brain again for my work on Mead and Honneth, this
time about what I think is a wrong conception of role-taking play?
Vygotsky and Elkonin give us a wonderful description of the development of
play from baby-'playing'-baby up to setting the world record for the 100
metres. Mead/Honneth talks about a two-stage genesis of play from
role-taking to competitive games.Leaving aside the poverty of this
two-stage reduction of such a complex process, I challenge their
description of role-taking play. And I'm wondering if those of you with
real concrete knowledge of the subject can prove me right or wrong.
According to Honneth's appropriation of Mead, in role-taking play children
imitate the actions of their partner in play. For Mead this substantiates
his idea of the emergence of self-consciousness in terms of an
object-position 'me', in which the subject-to-be's perceptions of their own
vocalisations are associated with that of their 'partners' and they pretty
literally see a mirror image of themselves in the reaction of the others,
which actually, according to Mead/Honneth, constitute the objective
self-image called 'me'. For Honneth, this construction substantiates his
idea of a stage in the development of 'recognition' in which people learn
that they are people with just the same rights as everyone else.
(Competitive games are supposed to be the stage in which people learn about
their own uniqueness.)
I think this is all wrong. In role-taking play, even in its embryonic
stage, children do not imitate the role of their partner, which after all
could be not a person but an artefact! They play a complementary role.
Their first experiences are as part of sets in which every player plays a
different, complementary role. Personally, I think rights develop in the
same way too as a matter of fact. "Equality" only comes later. And
furthermore, the 'me' concept is slightly wrong too, as the subject-to-be
associates its own sensor-motor actions with the audio-visual perceptions
of the reactions of others, and conversely, but this is not an A=A
relation, but rather a complementary, equal-but-opposite relation.
What do people think?
Andy
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