Jay makes the point--on the other line, the one with an unwieldy title
about the sense in which the sensory is not artefactual--that high and
low art (and high and low emotion) are dichotomous.
However useful a dichotomy may be (and they are almost always more
useful than crude monotomies), one of the most useful functions they
have is self-immolation, that is, the ability to differentiate a simple
high-low distinction into a distribution of distinctions, ad infinitium.
It seems to me that this is how Hegel would have essence emerge from
being, and idea from object.
So I think to say the body is monotomously artefactual is pretty
useless; it really is like saying that artefacts consist of objects like
bodies and chairs. I also think that the sense in which it is
culturally artefactual is highly limited: gesture is a communicative use
of the body but open-heart surgery is not. The flesh is not well
designed for social communication; that we have so exapted it is man's
cunning and not nature's.
I agree with Stokoe that the first languages were probably signed and
not spoken, but I also think that there is a good reason why the
mainstream of linguistic development was spoken rather than signed. This
development belies the idea that the body as a skin-bound individual
object is an effective artefact for social communication. Only in the
bourgeois era is it even a convincing metaphor for the self!
Now what does all this have to do with emotion? Actually, everything! I
agree with Andy that "The Teaching Concerning the Emotions" is more
approach than method, more a clearing of the desk and a clearing of the
throat than a finished piece of work (and this is why I always wonder at
references you occasionally see to a book on the emotions that Vygotsky
is supposed to have completed and even published, e.g. in the account we
were given of the Complete Works of LSV!)
But if we look at Vygotsky's early essays on Esthetic Education and
Ethical Education (in Educational Psychology) and especially at this
work Psychology of Art, and Creativity and Imagination in the
Adolescent, we can get a pretty good idea of what might have followed.
Vygotsky sees cognitive development as a socially mediated fusion
between two separate lines of development: phonological development and
practical intelligence (that is, he sees cognitive development as a
function of verbal thinking). This turning point is what divides the
higher and lower psychological functions.
He must have had something similar in mind for emotional development,
since he believed so strongly in the complex unity of cognition and
affect. That's why it strikes me as odd that Jay, who MUST accept that
there is a distinction between, say, naive physics and theoretical
physics, cannot really accept an analogous distinction between lower
emotions and higher ones.
Of course the distinction is not a dichotomous one, or not simply a
dichotomous one: within the dichotomy of high and low there are other
dichotomies. But one aspect of differentiation is the purification of
tendancies that were previously interpenetrated, the untangling of
threads that had previously seemed braided into a single skein.
Within a few years of Kyd's "Spanish Tragedy", which featured a ghost, a
dithering revenger, and a play within a play, we have "Hamlet", which
inspired LSV's Ph.D. thesis work. Kyd, and not Shakespeare, is the
playwright who invented the extended soliloquy, which proved that
characters have consciousnessess.
What a difference a few years make! Kyd's play is a snuff movie: the
play within a play is there to make people wonder and hope that they are
watching real people really kill each other, bite out their tongues, and
nail each other's heads to the floor. It's the kind of thing people
flock to see at the Multiplex today.
Shakespeare's is the opposite. We have poor Hamlet, fresh returned from
his undergraduate studies at the University of Wittenberg, confronted
with a ghost. Instead of a ranting soliloquy to the tune of "Now could I
drink hot blood!" the young rationalist embarks on an extended
meditation which more or less addresses Vygotsky's question about the
difference between being afraid of a bear and being afraid of a ghost.
Do ghosts really exist? And if they do exist, do they always tell the
truth? If you kill a man at prayers, will he go to heaven? And if you
kill a man in revenge, do not you go to hell? How do I know I am not
mad? Isn't justice better served by legal, social, rational means than
by impulsive action?
The play within a play is now not a subterfuge to make the audience
dream of Rome's gladiators; it is a psychological trial, designed to
provide concrete evidence for action. Something is ripening in the state
of Denmark; it is the maturation of higher, reflective, rational emotion.
I see some of the same thing in this data, that we were talking about
last night. The kids have just done a science experiment, and they are
trying to formulate the results, which is that water is a better thermal
battery than sand.
The problem is that they can't talk abstractly about temperature; they
are still, at least initially, enmeshed with the "up" and "down" of the
thermometer. The use of the teacher's body does not, initially, help
them free their thinking.
T: And one more thing. Sand gets...(teacher gestures with her hands)
S : Down.
Ss : Down
T : Down?
S : Cold
S : Low
S ; Colder.
T : Right. Who can make the sentence? Who can make the sentence?
(some kids raise their hands. Teacher nods to one)
T : Yes.
S : Sand gets warm faster cold water. (sic)
T: Seongmun?
Seongmun: Sand gets cold faster than water.
David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education
--- On *Mon, 12/7/09, Andy Blunden /<ablunden@mira.net>/* wrote:
From: Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net>
Subject: Re: [xmca] bodies and artifacts
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Date: Monday, December 7, 2009, 4:27 AM
... sorry. To further explain my point ...
So I found that in such instances one can say "... an artefact *or*
the human body ..." And that works fine. But why all the time say
"artefact or the body"? The body *is* an artefact.
That was my reasoning.
Andy
Mabel Encinas wrote:
> Ok. You have a point. Then, lets start thinking from an embodied
approach :)
> Let's accept that the body is an artifact. What is then the
difference between a chair and the body. Both are yes, "products of
human art", as you express it. However, only in the process
(practice) there seem to be a difference. Both are material and
ideal (the body is not separated from the mind; the chair, this one
here that I feel is made of cloth and a cushioned material, plastic,
metal, and involves the ideal that a designer and workers in a
factory transformed so people could seat on). What is the difference?
> Mabel
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>> Date: Mon, 7 Dec 2009 22:53:40 +1100
>> From: ablunden@mira.net
<http://us.mc1103.mail.yahoo.com/mc/compose?to=ablunden@mira.net>
>> To: liliamabel@hotmail.com
<http://us.mc1103.mail.yahoo.com/mc/compose?to=liliamabel@hotmail.com>
>> Subject: Re: [xmca] bodies and artifacts
>>
>> Well, the body is the body is the body. The reason the question
arises for me is when we make generalisations in which things like
person, artefact, consciousness, concept, action, and so on, figure,
where does the body fit in? My response was that even though it is
obviously unique in many ways, it falls into the same category as
artefacts.
>>
>> My questions to you are: what harm is done? why is anything
ignored? And, what is the body if it is not a material product of
human art, used by human beings?
>>
>> Andy
>>
>> Mabel Encinas wrote:
>>> Is this way being fruitful? That is why I do not like to
consider the body as an artifact. Did not cognitive pscyhology do
that? (Bruner, Acts of Meaning). Then intentions and all the
teleological aspects are so much ignored...
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Mabel
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>> Date: Mon, 7 Dec 2009 20:21:09 +1100
>>>> From: ablunden@mira.net
<http://us.mc1103.mail.yahoo.com/mc/compose?to=ablunden@mira.net>
>>>> To: liliamabel@hotmail.com
<http://us.mc1103.mail.yahoo.com/mc/compose?to=liliamabel@hotmail.com>
>>>> Subject: Re: [xmca] bodies and artifacts
>>>>
>>>> Sure. But the body has been constructed like a living
>>>> machine - the various artefacts that you use (especially but
>>>> not only language and images) are "internalized" in some
>>>> way. So one (external) artefact is replaced by another
>>>> (internal) artefact. Yes?
>>>>
>>>> Andy
>>>>
>>>> Mabel Encinas wrote:
>>>>> However, sometimes practices do not involve other artefact
>>>>> than the body (some practices are directed to the body), and
that was
>>>>> why I was talking about the limit of thinking about the body as
>>>>> artefact... is that a limit? That is why I mentioned the body
as "the
>>>>> raw material". I was thinking for example practices linked to
>>> meditation
>>>>> and the like, for example, among many others.
>>>>> Mabel
>>>
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>> --
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>> Andy Blunden http://www.erythrospress.com/
>> Classics in Activity Theory: Hegel, Leontyev, Meshcheryakov,
Ilyenkov $20 ea
>>
>
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Classics in Activity Theory: Hegel, Leontyev, Meshcheryakov,
Ilyenkov $20 ea
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