Re: [xmca] bodies, artifacts and the ghost in Hamlet

[David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>]

Brecht offered, partly as a joke, the following reading of Hamlet: Horatio and his schoolmate go off to university at Wittenberg where they are exposed to the very latest in post-medieval rationalism. Upon their return home, Hamlet discovers that his homeland is still very much enmired in the glorified tribalism of the feudal order, and his new rationalist education simply hampers him. 
 
Brecht meant this partly as a commentary on the art of our own age, where absolutely every movie we see is based subjectively on a kind egocentric assimilation of the world to the perceived interests of the main character and objectively on the destruction of that interest. 
 
But it is a good reading of Shakespeare in its own right; it's particularly good on the histories, which are largely about the slow emergence of a polity based on law and right from one based merely on trials of strength and selective treachery (and this is also a theme of the Merchant of Venice and can explain why Shylock gets the best lines). 
 
I think that it's possible to see in the replacement of irrational violence by rationally motivated violence, and, mutatis mutandis, of lower art forms by higher ones, nothing more than an ideological War of the Roses, the replacement of an order based on direct violence with one based on a technology of coercion is nothing more than the rivalry of  the house of York with the house of Lancaster. That's clearly how Foucault sees matters.
 
The will of the child is an illusion. Adaptation to the environment is absolutely inevitable; it is simply a matter of whether it will take place in a decentred accomodation or through an egocentric assimilation. Language is nothing but an audible afterthought, and it cannot change thinking qualitatively in any way, much less master it.
 
That is how Piaget saw things. But that isn't how Vygotsky sees things. Between two coercive orders, one based on the material act and one based on the symbolic word, there really is a sea-change difference. There's a good reason why poor art forms are rich in semiotic capital and not in the material sort. It's actually the same reason why Hollywood prefers computer-assisted graphics to the language of Shakespeare: talk is cheap, and it potentially offers a real voice to everybody.
 
 
In the last few days, Korea has been rejoicing over the relatively successful ice-skating career of 19-year-old Kim Yeona at Lake Placid in the USA. Sometimes her routines take up half the nightly news. As a patriotic Korean, I was a first appalled at how bored I was and I couldn't really explain it, since I have loved ballet all my life and my own sister is involved in ice dancing choreography. 
 
Then, as Kim Yeona ended her routine by playfully "shooting" the camera with a finger pistol for the umpteenth time, it struck me; this is an art form that is all about a SINGLE physically bounded body, the bounds and leaps have no dialogism whatsoever and do not involve an interaction with anything except literal space. Even its rare symbolic gestures are entirely about animal sexuality and physical violence; it is like watching bear-baiting instead of Hamlet. 
 
David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education
 
 
PS: To get back on task: I guess one of the things that bothers me about the Gratier et al article is the idea that a consensus based on the plebiscite of an either-or question ("al acqua fresca o salada?") is in some ways preferable to one based on at least potentially open questions ("Tell me what does an artist do?") Behind that difference I see, not Latino culture and Anglo, but rather Powerpoint culture on the one hand and an organization of the social environment of learning that allows children to potentially put their hands on the points and the levers of power.

dk
--- On Wed, 12/9/09, Jay Lemke <jaylemke@umich.edu> wrote:


From: Jay Lemke <jaylemke@umich.edu>
Subject: Re: [xmca] bodies, artifacts and the ghost in Hamlet
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Date: Wednesday, December 9, 2009, 6:05 PM


Just a couple corrections regarding my own views on these points.

I don't really accept a sea-change distinction between high and low in matters of art, feelings, or physics. I wrote a separate post about some of this.

To the extent that I do find it heuristically useful to pay attention to some of the differences between what we call high and low in these cases, as with "higher mental functions" so with all these others, I also think it important to subvert the distinctions so as to keep from being misled by our own reifications, not to mention our own cultural value systems.

And my unpublished work on emotions makes a fundamental set of distinctions among primarily bodily feelings (like pain or nausea), classic externally targeted emotions (like fear or anger), and what I reserve the term "affects" for, which correspond very closely to the "higher" emotions (a feeling of nobility, a sense of expectation, etc.) These are not, however, neat classifiers. There are bodily felt components in all, there are often external objects for the higher as well as the classic ("animal" emotions, though this attribution is mostly ideological, I think), and most feelings likely have some "higher" variations, with perhaps physiological common grounds, but quite different cultural meanings mediating the nuance of the feeling.

JAY.

PS. So what do all the people who think Hamlet is NOT boring have in common?


Jay Lemke
Professor (Adjunct, 2009-2010)
Educational Studies
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, MI 48109
www.umich.edu/~jaylemke

Visiting Scholar
Laboratory for Comparative Human Communication
University of California -- San Diego
La Jolla, CA
USA 92093






On Dec 7, 2009, at 5:25 PM, David Kellogg wrote:

> 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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> -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------
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> Classics in Activity Theory: Hegel, Leontyev, Meshcheryakov, Ilyenkov $20 ea
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