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
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
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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