[xmca] Capriccio

Michalis:
   
  You are right, but it's the ECOLOGY part of it that is Batesonian. Van Lier really sees language as a jungle, and human language-users as tigers; the tiger does not "acquire" the jungle or "learn" the jungle (the way we seek to acquire or learn a language system) but only learns to use certain resources the jungle contains to get what the tiger needs. In the same way, I use only a very small part of the Seoul subway system; I have absolutely no need or inclination to learn the names of all the lines and stops or to memorize the entire map.
   
  And therein lies a crucial difference, at least to me. One reason I do NOT want to learn the names of all the subway lines and stops is that I know that I can access these in any subway station. Unlike the tiger, the human language learner has a way of acquiring useful areas of the language system on a "just in time" basis; when particular problems in meaning-making come up, we have ways of negotiating solutions on the spot. This is not simply an affordance; it is an affordance that allows me to create my own affordances as necessary. My approach to Korean is more like this: I want expandable affordances, not fixed dialogues for renting cars or opening bank accounts.
   
  This kind of expandable affordance does seem in an important sense "internal" to me, because I have volitional control over it. To use another analogy, it's like the browser in my computer and the internet. There is an important sense in which the internet is an affordance in the environment, quite external to my computer and independent of my will. But that suggests that the browser that I have, which is under my conscious control, is in some sense internal to my computer. The same thing happens when I use a dictionary, or ask a colleague the polite way to address him, or negotiate a thesis with a grad student.
   
  Richard Strauss' opera "Capriccio" is based on an old idea that Salieri used to try to win a one-act opera competition with Mozart (Mozart's contribution was "Die Schauspieldirektor"). Salieri's problem was this: When you write an opera, do you begin with a libretto, or a musical score?
   
  It seems a rather self-referential and even self-indulgent basis for an opera, but it was actually a response to the then contemporary debate between Rousseau and Rameau about whether the phylogenesis of music preceded that of language or not. Rousseau thought that music was the direct response to the natural jungle and that language was derivative and therefore debased. Rameau, who was more musical and less literary than Rousseau, took exactly the opposite position.
   
  Strauss's solution is, at bottom, a Vygotskyan one: a mediated response arises on the basis of a less mediated one:
   
  Flamand (the musician): The cry of pain preceded all speech!
  Olivier (the poet): But only words can truly explain suffering.
   
  This solution is actually reflected in almost every line of the opera, because it is written in a kind of "singspiel" in which every line begins with a strong melody but ends with conversational intonation. Not so very far from the ENDING of "Thinking and Speech" where Vygotsky replaces Goethe's "In the beginning was the DEED" with "In the BEGINNING was the deed".
   
  But it's what happens after the beginning that gets interesting. Perhaps language is a jungle, but it is a jungle that is made by man. That doesn't mean that ALL parts of it are under our control, but it DOES mean that some of them can be.
   
  David Kellogg
  Seoul National University of Education
   

       
---------------------------------
Never miss a thing. Make Yahoo your homepage.
_______________________________________________
xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
Received on Wed Mar 26 20:09 PDT 2008