Re: [xmca] Fichtner/Seeger/LSV

Mike, an interesting anecdote. When my son was much younger (he's now 18 and headed off to college soon), maybe in the 5th grade, he found a copy of Pope's translation of The Iliad in my study and often read it--like you, he could barely understand it, but found something attractive about the rhyme and rhythm of Pope's language.

---- Original message ----
>Date: Tue, 31 Jul 2007 07:48:42 -0300
>From: "Mike Cole" <lchcmike@gmail.com>
>Subject: Re: [xmca] Fichtner/Seeger/LSV
>To: "David Kellogg" <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>
>Cc: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
>
>Thanks for the thoughtful exegisis and working through of many complex
>ideas, David. Lots of food for thought.
>
>I am not sure I agree with your conclusions regarding Chukovsky, e.g., that
>his exotic use of fabulated language is beyond children's ability to imitate
>or comprehend. Maybe the difference of interpretation is in
>the imitation/comprehend part.
>
>As a young child I loved to have my mother read me the Arthurian myths in
>middle english. It amazes me that she would do so or that I would want her
>to because neither of us could imitate or comprehend it. But there was
>something about the music and rhythm of it that gave intense pleasure. Not
>revolutionary, I guess, but nothing to get particularly annoyed about.
>
>The thoughts on imitation, self/other regulation, and revolution seemed
>interesting to me. I wasn't clear about the notion I was reading or you were
>writing trivia.Wrestling with very complex ideas seemed a more apt
>description.
>mike
>
>
>On 7/31/07, David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com> wrote:
>>
>> I just got a 1932 English translation of Chukovsky¡¯s Crocodile on E-bay.
>> It¡¯s quite delightful (it has the charming original Russian illustrations,
>> and the translation is full of in-line rhymes and witty allusions) but I
>> really DO see why LSV hated it.
>>
>> Fichtner is absolutely correct to stress the INAPPROPRIACY of applying
>> educational concepts designed for the revolutionary reconstruction of Soviet
>> society to the preservation of capitalist rule (in particular, there is a
>> fundamental contradiction in using methods that aim at REPLACING
>> other-regulation with self-regulation to prepare children for a life
>> of¡¦well, other-regulation, really). Of course, the reverse is just as true:
>> the educational concepts designed for the preservation of capitalist rule
>> are inappropriate to the revolutionary reconstruction of Soviet society.
>>
>> On the other hand, Fichtner may be underestimating the degree to which
>> Soviet education had to impart basic knowledge, practical skills and a
>> modern, scientific frame of mind to people who were in many ways not very
>> receptive to any of the above. It¡¯s a thankless, Sisyphean task that even
>> those who would teach Homer to carpenters must put their shoulders to,
>> whether they work in Russia, in Prussia, or in the present day USA.
>>
>> Chukovsky¡¯s cute little book serves NEITHER purpose very well. It
>> doesn¡¯t teach much about learning to learn OR about literacy, because the
>> language play, fabulous and tintinnabulous, is really quite beyond the power
>> of children to imitate or even comprehend. In that sense it¡¯s a good
>> example of so-called children¡¯s literature that is literature but not
>> really children¡¯s. No wonder Vygotsky and Krupskaya were annoyed.
>>
>> Warning to the drivel sensitive...here are some rather long notes on the
>> Fichtner article and a somewhat far-fetched attempt to tie it to
>> Wolff-Michael's last ruminations on the collective and the individual and
>> some Ribot I've been reading (warning to the drivel sensitive):
>>
>> a) Fichtner says that there is no need to interpret the word ¡°
>> revolutionary¡± in a political sense; we may imagine that any time we have
>> one part of the self raising the self as a whole by the
>> intellectual/emotional bootstraps we have something revolutionary (p. 4).
>>
>> But Fichtner gives us three instructive (if you will pardon the pun)
>> examples of ¡°learning to learn¡± experiments which see too far beyond the
>> social needs that give rise to them and are ultimately demolished by the
>> very societies they set out to serve: Humboldt¡¯s Prussia, Stalin¡¯s USSR,
>> and of course the present day USA. Fichtner says that in each case the
>> approaches were NOT defeated by their own ambitions but rather deliberately
>> and materially crushed by hostile class interests. Well said!
>>
>> But then it¡¯s a little hard to see why it¡¯s not necessary to interpret
>> the word ¡°revolutionary¡± in a political, and not in a simply
>> psychological, sense. And doesn¡¯t the use of the word ¡°revolutionary¡±to describe the creative reconstruction of the relations between
>> psychological functions WITHIN an individual obscure the necessary
>> precondition, which is the destructive overthrow of social functions divided
>> BETWEEN classes in society?
>>
>> b) Wolff-Michael says that any individual act is simply the realization of
>> a potential that exists within a collectivity. This means that even acts of
>> creativity (even acts of revolution!) are the realization of a potential
>> that exists within the collective already. It¡¯s not clear what the word
>> ¡°potential¡± means here: if it simply means that individuals in the
>> collective are capable of them, then this is rather tautological.
>>
>> But if it means more than that (if it means that whole collectives, and
>> not simply individuals or sub-collectives within them, are capable of
>> creative/revolutionary acts), it¡¯s a little hard to see in what sense
>> creative acts are creative and revolutionary acts are revolutionary; it
>> appears that they are not bringing into being anything new at all, but
>> merely realizing potentials that were there all the long, the same as
>> non-creative acts and the same as non-revolutionary ones. What if
>> revolutionary or creative potential is contingent on individual acts? What
>> if revolutionary/creative change in the collective is realizing a potential
>> that was there in the thinking of individual(s) rather than the other way
>> around?
>>
>> c) Ribot says: ¡°La volonte/ n¡¯a pas de mouvement propres en patrimoine:
>> il faut qu¡¯elle coordonne et associe, puisqu¡¯elle dissocie pour former des
>> associations nouvelles. Elle re`gne par droit de conque^te, non par droit de
>> naissance. -–De me^me, l¡¯imagination cre/atrice ne surgit pas tout arme/e.
>> Ses mate/riaux sont les images qui sont ici les e/quivalents des mouvements
>> musculaires; elle traverse une pe/riode d¡¯essai; elle est toujours, au
>> de/but (pour des raisons que nous indiquerons plus tard), une imitation;
>> elle n¡¯attient que progressivement ses formes complexes.¡± Ribot, Th.
>> (1908) Essai sur l¡¯imagination créatrice. Paris: Félix Alcan, pp. 6-7.
>>
>> (Will does not have in its patrimony its own sensorimotor movements. It
>> must coordinate and associate other movements, for it disassociates in order
>> to form new associations. Will rules by right of conquest, not by right of
>> birth. In the same way, the creative imagination does not emerge in full
>> armor. Its materials are images which are, here, the equivalent of muscular
>> movements; it must go through a period of trial and error; it is always, in
>> the beginning (for reasons we will explain later) an imitation: it only
>> gradually achieves its complex forms.)
>>
>> The classical allusion to the goddess of wisdom emerging fully-armed from
>> Zeus¡¯ fractured skull would have captivated Humboldt, who believed that
>> every carpenter should learn Greek! But being captivated is really not the
>> same thing as being convinced, and the idea that all creativity begins with
>> imitation is, to any one who has suffered a freshman year in art school, not
>> very convincing.
>>
>> For an art school freshman, will is, at least at first, quite imperfect in
>> its coordinations and associations, especially in associating a perception
>> with a memory (remembering what people look like for example) and in
>> coordinating a perception with a motor action (attempting to draw their
>> portrait from memory). In attempting to copy exactly, the best perception
>> and motor control can achieve is an imperfect imitation. Let us, in a
>> Hegelian vein, call this variation-in-itself.
>>
>> In an OBJECTIVE sense, therefore, variation is easier to achieve than
>> exact imitation; it is always easier to vary an action (even your own
>> action) than to repeat it precisely. When this kind of initially involuntary
>> variation itself becomes will-governed (SUBJECTIVE variation, or
>> variation-for-oneself instead of just variation-for-others), we may say that
>> imitation has become creative, and when we all contemplate the product as
>> something new, we say that creativity has taken place.
>>
>> If this is so, then it is not really true to say that imitation precedes
>> creativity: imperfect imitation (and all imitation is involuntarily
>> imperfect from the outset) provides the OBJECTIVE basis for creativity and
>> deliberately ¡°imperfect¡± imitation supplies its SUBJECTIVE basis.
>> Creativity, therefore, is indeed implicit in the idea of imitation from the
>> very beginning, just as Vygotsky taught!
>>
>> BUT (to return to points a and b above):
>>
>> a) Let us call this creativity, but not revolution. For it to be
>> revolution, there must be real, concrete, social destruction first. (There
>> is no need to destroy the Department of Education; Ronald Reagan did that
>> already. The Department of Defense or the Department of Justice would be a
>> much more obvious place to start, particularly since both have apparently
>> usurped the place of university for many who don¡¯t want to enter working
>> life with massive student debt.)
>>
>> b) Let us say that collective institutions (even the school, the
>> army, the prison) provide the ENVIRONMENT for creativity (and even for
>> revolution) rather than say that they provide the potential. Let us then say
>> that individuals provide the actual creativity and revolutionary
>> organizations provide the actual revolutions (with leadership and with
>> luck).
>>
>> c) This is in a way similar to Halliday¡¯s otherwise puzzling
>> formulation, namely that sociocultural development provides the ENVIRONMENT
>> for ontogentic development, but ontogenetic development provides the RAW
>> MATERIAL for the next stage (the future stages) of sociocultural
>> development. But let us recognize that using this formulation RULES OUT:
>>
>> i) skepticism about causality in the relationship
>> between sociocultural development and individual behavior (even in the
>> rather weak form that Geertz endorses, namely that it is better to talk
>> about culture being the context that makes individual behavior meaningful).
>> Schools, prisons, and armies cause individual behavior in obvious ways; the
>> causality of individual creativity is not so obvious but this does not mean
>> it is uncaused and uncausable.
>> ii) glib formulae to the effect that creativity and
>> collectivity are mutually constitutive, or that one is constructed by and
>> constructs the other. The relationship between PAST sociocultural evolution
>> and FUTURE child development is poorly served by the terms ¡°symmetrical¡±,
>> ¡°mutual¡±, or ¡°simultaneously ¡¦ed and ¡¦ing¡± for the same reason that
>> a conversation is poorly described as two people both talking and listening
>> at the same time rathr than taking turns talking and listening.
>>
>>
>> David Kellogg
>> Seoul National University of Education
>>
>>
>>
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Received on Tue Jul 31 05:46 PDT 2007