Re: [xmca] Lindqvist on Leontiev on Play - collision between making sense and made sense

[mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>]

I not only reesENTLY mis represented Rod's name, David, i missed the
article you are talking about?

Was it sent to xmca?

Rod, do you have a web page or some place we can access your work??
mud

On Tue, Feb 2, 2010 at 2:36 PM, David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>wrote:

> Rod (not "Rees", Mike!):
>
> Thanks for your note. One of my grads is using your work in her work--she's
> interested in the extraordinary difference we've discovered between the
> creativity of language (in this case, the GRAMMATICAL creativity of SECOND
> language) in primary intersubjectivity (which as we all know is the leading
> edge of first language development) and secondary intersubjectivity (which
> appears, in some important ways, to lead in second language development).
> She's trying to operationalize alot of what you said about creativity in
> your recent article (which you kindly posted for us here) by using
> Tomasello's neat distinction between fixed expressions, item-based
> "combinations", and what she calls abstract creative constructions.
>
> I'm afraid I'm not as optimistic as you are about the ability of new
> technological means to make a big difference in the way we think. Perhaps
> this is true of technological means of production, both because the actual
> increase in production impacts people's lives in the short run and, in the
> long run, the DECREASE in SURPLUS value produced leads inexorably to a fall
> in the rate of profit. Both of these are material constraints on the way we
> think.
>
>
> It seems to me that the issue you raise, when you talk about how the
> ability to store track changes, is not a difference in production, but
> rather a way in which the very distinction between text and discourse (which
> I have made such hay out of) is starting to disappear, and with it the
> distinction between sense and meaning (which Vygotsky, in his day, also made
> hay with). If the visible trace of a discourse is infinitely malleable,
> unfinalizeable, then it is no longer the trace of a discourse; it's the
> discourse itself. There is ONLY outside text, and no actual text.
>
> You suggest that this might lead to making literature more porous to
> children's responses; we might actually get a child literature instead of a
> children's lit, that is, something that is written as well as read by kids
> the way that, say, Russian literature is written by Russians but read by the
> whole world.
>
> But you also admit, and it seems to me that this more likely, that this
> child literature might get lost in the flood of adult drivel, exactly the
> way that child motives, child aims, child goals for play are completely
> ignored in Leontiev (or, to take a more immediate example, the way that
> e-mail has been strangled by spam, television throttled by 'reality TV', the
> cinema devestated by the 'blockbuster', etc.)
>
> To me, that's just why Lindqvist's critique of Leontiev is so important.
> Here is a man around whom the entire world changed, touched, or at least
> brushed, by the greatest genius in child psychology of the twentieth
> century, a man who then looked both ways and produced a "theory" of play
> that is essentially no different from what Piaget comes up with in "Play,
> Imitation, and Dreams": play is essentiallly assimilative and only labor has
> accomodational potential. For Piaget, that is almost synonymous with
> creative potential. But then why create, if the result is the same old
> drivel?
>
> I have on my desk a version of "Goldilocks" by James Marshall, which, I am
> reliably informed by the cover, won the Caldecott medal, was  a 'pick of the
> lists' for American Bookseller, and an ALA notable book. We are told that it
> is an offbeat and inventive retelling of the story tht will "enchant readers
> young and old" (a nice tip, that; they are going to aim at two audiences,
> the paying and the non-paying. I wonder who will get priority?)
>
> Now, the original story of the Three Bears, by Robert Southey, is not about
> Goldilocks at all; it's really about three bears  (all male; it's not a
> family) who resist the intruder, a rude, mannerless old crone, who is
> collared by the local bailiff for vagrancy. Like most tales of its time
> (1838) it's a pretty vicious anti-working class diatribe (the Lake Poets,
> including Southey, were what we would call neo-Cons today). But the Marshall
> version is not at all "off beat" and it's nowhere near as inventive or
> appealing as the original, of which it is apparently unaware. The funniest
> it gets is when baby bear tastes the porridge and says "I'm dying" at which
> Mama Bear suggests "That's quite enough. Let's go for a walk."
>
> Part of the problem is precisely this unawareness, this loss of track
> changes. Of course, we all know that it is perfectly possible to understand
> the original of something through the parody. Many of us have read Don
> Quixote without reading Amadis de Gaul, and more of us know Goldilocks as a
> heroine than as a villain.
>
> But parody is always a very BACKWARD looking understanding; in many ways
> like the replacement of sense with meaning of which you speak (meaning
> SUBSUMES sense, but in so doing a lot of the vigor and liveliness and
> directness of sense is lost). And when the original is entirely lost sight
> of, the child has sacrificed sense and gained no meaning in return; we have
> somehow managed to produce disenchantment without having any enchantment in
> the first place.
>
> David Kellogg
> Seoul National University of Education
>
> --- On Tue, 2/2/10, Rod Parker-Rees <R.Parker-Rees@plymouth.ac.uk> wrote:
>
>
> From: Rod Parker-Rees <R.Parker-Rees@plymouth.ac.uk>
> Subject: RE: [xmca] Lindqvist on Leontiev on Play - collision between
> making sense and made sense
> To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
> Date: Tuesday, February 2, 2010, 3:36 AM
>
>
> I have always been struck by Vygotsky's reference (in 'The development of
> higher mental functions') to the collision between the creative meaning
> making of children and the created meanings available to them in the culture
> in which they swim:
>
> "The very essence of cultural development is in the collision of mature
> cultural forms of behaviour with the primitive forms that characterise the
> child's behaviour." (not sure about the translation here).
>
> For me it is the active making of sense which each new generation
> contributes which keeps the 'made sense' of culture alive and responsive to
> changing circumstances. There is also an argument that the made culture
> feeds back into the process in that oral cultures tend to be much more
> conservative, keen to maintain and preserve their lore, than literate
> cultures which can rely on books to 'keep track' of changes and allow us to
> go back if we find that changes don't work out too well. New technologies
> which allow massive amounts of information to be stored, including endless
> versions with all their 'track changes' annotations and commentaries should
> make us more open to the sparks struck by collisions with children's
> 'outsider' perspective but I wonder whether they might also tend to exclude
> these 'naïve' contributions, much as literacy tends to shut out the
> preliterate and the illiterate.
>
> All the best,
>
> Rod
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu] On
> Behalf Of David Kellogg
> Sent: 02 February 2010 05:24
> To: xmca
> Subject: [xmca] Lindqvist on Leontiev on Play
>
> Or rather, Monica Nilsson on the magnificent Gunilla Lindvist on Leontiev
> on play, writing in one of the papers in the current issue of MCA:
>
> "Lindqvist is critical of how Vygotsky's successors came to interpret his
> theory of play. Vygotsky emphasized teh dialectics expressed through the
> relation between the adult world and the child's world and also between the
> will and the emotion. She writes that Leontiev sees no tension between the
> adult world and the child's world and that play, for him, is about a child's
> inability to acquire adult roles. When a child can't perform adult actions
> he instead creates a fictitious situation. This situation, Lindqvist writes,
> is, for Leontiev, the most significant sign of play. Thus play is the sign
> of the child's inferiority, and hence play is in fact an infantile activity
> because, as Lindqvist states, from this perspective, the child will
> gradually grow into the adult world and play is diected toward the future.
> Moreover, she claims that the implication is a stress on reproduction (of
> adult roles) at the expense of creativity. Therefore, she attempts to
> reinterpret Vygotsky's play theory, based on his original thoughts in The
> Psychology of Art, and his inquires (sic) into creativity and imagination.
> According to Lindqvist, Vygotsky's idesas give rise to a creative
> pedagogical approach instead of an instrumental one. This is because
> Vygotsky shows how children interpret and perform their experiences by
> creating new meaning and how emotions characterize their interpretations,
> that is, how emotion and thought unit in the process of knowledge
> construction." (p. 16).
>
> Kozulin remarks (on p. 25 of HIS magnificent book, Psychological Tools, on
> how Leontiev's emphasis on practical activity instead of semiotic tools led
> him into a kind of "Piagtian program of exploring the internalization of
> sensorimotor actions".
>
> But it really took Gunilla Lindqvist to point out the terrible consequences
> that a neo-Piagetian program like Leontiev's might have for children at
> precisely the age that Piaget called "sensorimotor".
>
> David Kellogg
> Seoul National University of Education
>
>
>
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