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RE: [xmca] Gratuitous Difficulty and Guileless Deceit
eric
Oh, I think you hit the mark, or meet the need, and I notice that you take far fewer words than I do to hit it. But I think that MY need here (as I see it) is mostly to disentangle.
Leif is right about xmca as a resource. But to me the most exciting thing is not the way it provides endless goodies at the click of a mouse or the most obscure and recondite historical information at the posting of a query. To me the most exciting thing is that threads that are apparently quite separate come together, meet, tangle, and transform each other.
For example, the current thread on Teach for America seems very related (at least in my mind) to the problem of play and cursing, because the Korean equivalent, an internship programme which is being put forward by the Korean government to temporarily absorb job seekers until the crisis stricken economy improves, has filled our classroom with people who in many cases are at the bottom end of the children's next zone of development.
Alas, this is particularly true of the "conversation specialists" we are getting for English instruction, some of whom are refugees from the crisis stricken economies in the USA and Canada. These teachers-for-awhile tend to emphasize mindless activities (or rather passivities) rather than thinking, the transactional functions of English information at the expense of the reflective, metalinguistic ones, and play rather than school work. And yes, they curse, and some are delighted when they discover that the kids "understand" them, or at least understand that they are cursing.
That's the exciting part; when threads meet. But the problem (for me) is that the very excitement of threads meeting sometimes muddles up the real and important disagreements that we have on this list; there is a rush to mutual recognition and to premature agreement with others, at least in my mind, and I tend to overlook my own point of view in the hurry to acquire the topic, and the view of the topic of others.
For example, I was so anxious to pick up the element of cursing you suggested in your post, I overlooked two rather important things:
a) The whole point of the James McCawley paper that I was citing (why we say "abso-blooming-lutely" and "fan-fucking-tastic" is STRESS. The curse word (clearly "bloody" in the case of Eliza, which is another good example of semantic vacuity) serves to stress the following syllable, and that is abso-blooming-lutely all that it does.
b) The whole point of stressing things in this way is indicativity, and emotional release. But it seems to me that the real point of disagreement which is emerging here (between you and me, and also, I think, between Rod and Larry) is that indicativity and emotional release is not necessarily on the developmental agenda; in many ways what is required of school children is the very opposite: signification, and shared emotion, which in many cases requires emotional restraint and adopting the point of view of the other while necessarily losing some of the emotional involvement.
I feel that as a developmental fossil, cursing cannot play a role in the next zone of development. In fact, I think that only certain forms of play can: only those that are conceptually based, which depend on rules and abstract principles, and which result in the exercise of higher psychological functions such as fairness, justice, and critical thinking. Of course, cursing can be part of this development ("Curse you, Red Baron!" as a form of critical thinking?) but its functions will always be summative rather than formative, retroleptic rather than proleptic. It will not play a developmental role.
Gunilla Lindqvist has really hit the mark and met the needs of the next zone of development--for preschoolers, where the cutting edge of the next zone really is the development of imaginative play by allowing the various threads of thinking and speech to tangle and cross fertilize. I think, actually, that the Socratic Dialogue in our paper may miss the mark precisely because it is not concerned with play, but only with the organization of play. That is why the discussion keeps falling, retroleptically, into non-generalizeable emotion 'We are all Pearl's best friends", as Yongho points out, is a logical contradiction, precisely because, like cursing, it puts a generalizeable sentiment in a retroleptic, nongeneralizeable form.
David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education
--- On Tue, 2/23/10, ERIC.RAMBERG@spps.org <ERIC.RAMBERG@spps.org> wrote:
From: ERIC.RAMBERG@spps.org <ERIC.RAMBERG@spps.org>
Subject: RE: [xmca] Gratuitous Difficulty and Guileless Deceit
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Date: Tuesday, February 23, 2010, 11:01 AM
David:
Nice post, regardless of the curse words. My example was not intended to
provide distaste but was the first example that came to mind where a child
speaks a word they have obviously heard but are unfamiliar with its usage
(except for perhaps hearing it as an exclamation of excitement).
Linguistic chops aside I believe that the child using the profanity is an
expansion of their developmental level.
Pertaining to Vygotsky I believe that the ZPD is a growth of his view that
the child begins by imitating and that the growth occurs as that imitation
is expanded (ala engstrom) into ever exceeding levels of conceptual
understanding. George Carlin did not curse in his comedy acts because of
a lack of esteem but rather as an ever expanding conceptual understanding
of both language and the human condition.
eric
p.s. I see persistant cursing in the adolescent as a lack of vocabulary
rather than esteem
p.p.s sometimes two cents gets u nuthin and somtimes it meets the need,
don't know which one this post is though
David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>
Sent by: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu
02/22/2010 08:01 PM
Please respond to "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity"
To: Culture ActivityeXtended Mind <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
cc:
Subject: RE: [xmca] Gratuitous Difficulty and Guileless Deceit
Warning: this posting contains some foul language, which is semantically
meaningless and syntactically vacuous, but obeys very interesting
phonological regularities, and for, I think, a very good reason.
eric
When I say "fuck you" (which I only do in linguistic circles, for reasons
that will soon be apparent), I do not actually have any sexual act in mind
at all, and the semantic meaning cannot actually be performed as the
imperative that it syntactically appears to be (you cannot actually fuck
yourself, even if you are linguist; it takes two, figuratively, to tango).
However, foul language DOES have phonological rules. One of the earliest
linguistics papers I read as an undergraduate at the University of Chicago
was called about why you can say "fan-fucking-tastic" but you cannot say
"fantast-fucking-tic". Or, to give it a transparent Bowdlerization,
why Eliza Doolittle, in "My Fair Lady" sings:
Oh, so, loverly sittin' abso-bloomin'-lootely still
I would never budge till spring, crept, over me window-sill!
Someone's 'ead restin' on my knee...warm an' tender as 'e could be
Oo tykes good care of me, Oww--wouldn't it be loverly?
Why "Abso-blooming-lutely still" and not "Ab-blooming-solutely still" or
"Absolute-blooming-ly still"?
You know Wittgenstein spends a big part of "Philosophical Investigations"
trying to debunk the Vygoskyan model of the concept, and the example he
hits upon is that of "games". Games, according to Wittgenstein, have no
single trait in common, either internal or external, and are best thought
of as a family where everybody resembles each other to some extent or
another but there is no underlying common essence.
I think Vygotsky would be perfectly happy to say that games and play in
general are preconceptual, a potential concept rather than an actual one,
and the idea of "family resemblances" is exactly what Vygotsky uses to
describe complexes (in Chapter Five of Thinking and Speech). But play IS a
potential concept, that is, a concept for others (scientists and
thinkers) and potentially one for myself (children and other players).
Vygotsky points out that all forms of play have not one but TWO things in
common: the imaginary situation, and the abstract rule. It's just that at
the beginning of development one is explicit and the other is implicit,
and by the end of development the roles are reversed.
We can call these ROLE play and RULE play ("guileless deceit" and
"gratuitous difficulty" were really just my attempts to describe how they
might feel from the user's point of view.) But let me add one MORE
element. At the very beginning of development, the period that Vygotsky
calls "pseudo-play"--there is a form of play that is really just ROTE
repetition.
So foul language does not have any "role play", that is, no role to play
in communication or reflection, and it doesn't have any "rule play", that
is, no rules at the semantic or syntactic level. Yet it clearly is
intimately linked to our emotional life, and it obeys phonological rules.
Why is this?
It seems to me that foul language is a linguistic fossil of ROTE play,
of the period Vygotsky calls "pseudoplay", that is, play for others but
not for myself. Vygotsky notes that most of this is repetitious activity
of a sensorimotor sort (the sort of nose-scratching and ear-pulling and
hair-twisting that my undergrads do when I rabbit on for too long). Foul
language seems very similar to me, and I think it's no accident that
mindless foul language is often a symptom of Asperger's.
Why should we call it play at all? Well, of course, Vygotsky doesn't. But
it seems to me that there are two ways in which it is LINKED to
play. First of all, mindless repetition DOES lead to the creation of a
kind of ideal, potential, model of an action; when children color for
example, they do so by repeating and ordering the kinds of motions they
use for scribbling. Secondly, there is a sense in which role play involves
repeating the SPEAKER but varying the SPEECH in much the same way that
rote play involved repeating the SPEECH.
I think this is why Vygotsky and Voloshinov were both so struck by
the variation-and-repetition of foul language in Dostoevsky's diary. There
is some debate about whether Vygotsky got the example (which is quoted
almost exactly) from Voloshinov, or whether they both took it from an
article on "dialogic speech" by Jakubinsky. It seems to me that
since Voloshinov and Vygotsky were BOTH working at the Herzen Pedagogic
Academy in Leningrad at exactly the same time (1933-1934), the former
seems very likely.
David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education
PS: I had a grad student, an EXTREMELY conscientious teacher and mother
who had a tendency to want to study anything that cropped up in class. She
discovered, through a foreign co-teacher, that some of the kids had
learned a variety of swear words (from movies) and were using them, and
she determined to make this her thesis topic.
Her initial thesis was that kids swear because they "lack self-esteem".
Like many working hunches, this turned out to be very well founded,
although couched in a language I would call a little too hardworking and
not quite hunchy enough (viz, if we help the kids feel better about
themselves they will stop swearing).
When I started looking at examples, I noticed that the kids tend to swear
in situations where they can't really follow or understand, and swearing
was a kind of emphatic, parodic, almost satirical expression of the
MEANINGLESSNESS, that is, the rote quality, of English in class.
Unfortunately, my grad found it almost impossible to discuss the actual
examples she gathered, so we had to broaden the topic to include
dispreferred and negative language quite generally. But I still get quite
a thrill from looking at the data that has absolutely nothing to do with
its (nonexistent) semantic or syntactic properties.
dk
--- On Mon, 2/22/10, ERIC.RAMBERG@spps.org <ERIC.RAMBERG@spps.org> wrote:
From: ERIC.RAMBERG@spps.org <ERIC.RAMBERG@spps.org>
Subject: RE: [xmca] Gratuitous Difficulty and Guileless Deceit
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Date: Monday, February 22, 2010, 8:02 AM
Such a wonderful discussion occuring pertaining to development and the
consequent study!
The stretching of an experience by play does appear to touch on how
emotions pertain to development. I just consider the different
experiences i had as a child and have observed as both teacher and parent
and know that without emotions then an experience is devoid of meaning.
Associating "more" with food makes perfect sense when attached to emotion
and so the context and the societal sense of a situation feed people's
responses to the play world and these responses are satiated in emotion.
New words are tried out more freely in the play world and the 8 year-old
learns that f*** shouldn't be stated with such clarity, at least in some
company. Would the forbidden utterance be an example of your Guiless
Deceit David?
eric
Rod Parker-Rees <R.Parker-Rees@plymouth.ac.uk>
Sent by: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu
02/22/2010 04:27 AM
Please respond to "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity"
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>,
"lchcmike@gmail.com" <lchcmike@gmail.com>
cc:
Subject: RE: [xmca] Gratuitous Difficulty and Guileless
Deceit
I wish I could remember where I read about a study which illustrated the
cultural construction of 'meaning' through an account of children's use of
the word 'more'. Researchers were rather puzzled by the fact that young
children often pointed to a smaller quantity of objects when asked to
point to the one which was 'more' - after a while they realised that for
these children 'more' was particularly associated with mealtimes (can I
have some more?) and in this context 'more' was usually less (second
portions being smaller than first portions). I think this shows how
concepts are inextricably bound up in the language practices of speakers
so that the distinction between children 'knowing' about conservation of
volume and knowing how to use the word 'more' is delightfully complicated.
Some people are willing to argue about whether a tomato is a fruit or a
vegetable as if there is an objective truth out there which could rule on
the matter.
The question about frustration v. humiliation reminds me of an interesting
paper from 'Early Years' (Licht, Simoni and Perrig-Chiello 2008 - 28,3
235-49) entitled 'Conflict between peers in infancy and toddler age: what
do they fight about' in which the authors argue that many conflicts
between under 2 year olds which have traditionally been understood as
conflicts about ownership can better be understood in terms of frustration
at interruption of an activity (e.g. when one child takes away something
another child was examining or playing with). Vasu Reddy has also argued
(with Colwyn Trevarthen) that very young infants display forms of 'pride'
and 'shame' in their social interactions and perhaps these emotions can be
understood in terms of satisfaction when experiences correspond with
mental models, theories or plans and frustration when they don't - though
these 'personal' responses will also be shaped by cultural patterns of
behaviour which children will experience both directly, in responses to
their actions, and indirectly, observing other people's reactions to other
people's actions.
I too am a bit ambivalent about the playworlds approach - at first it felt
to me like an intrusion into a space which children should be allowed to
own but I can see how it could serve as a form of boundary space between
this more (but not entirely) child-owned space and the more public space
of social interactions with unfamiliar others. There seems to be a form of
trajectory by which children 'develop' from a foetus which can only
function with the support of a womb to infants who can only function with
the support of familiar others, to children who can only function in a
supportive, familiar community (a village), to adults who can function in
progressively wider, more public communities, dealing with people with
whom they have progressively less shared history. The 'higher' levels of
development may not be accessible to all (not all adults feel comfortable
giving a presentation to a room full of strangers) but the 'lower' levels
remain highly important!
Also, it may be no bad thing to give young children clear signals about
the 'oddness' of the cultural context of being at school - always a
playworld but not always acknowledged as such!
All the best,
Rod
-----Original Message-----
From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu] On
Behalf Of David Kellogg
Sent: 22 February 2010 00:52
To: lchcmike@gmail.com; Culture ActivityeXtended Mind
Subject: Re: [xmca] Gratuitous Difficulty and Guileless Deceit
First of all, I have a rather stupid question. In the "conservation"
studies that Piaget does, when we ask children whether there is more
liquid in the taller glass or the shorter glass, how do we know what the
question actually means to the children?
Isn't it possible that it might mean "the level is higher"? When I myself
check the the mark on the side of a well I usually just think the level is
higher. If you asked me in an unguarded moment, I might say, lazily, that
somehow there is more or less water in the well (rather than talk about
the water table).
I might think that a higher tide mark means that somehow there is "more
tide", and if my wife checks the oil or the transmission fluid in the car
using a dipstick, I doubt if she considers whether the transmission fluid
is conserved (perhaps it is hiding somewhere in the engine)?
So I often wonder, when we think about issues of face, and menace, and
even risk, whether these concepts really mean what we mean when we use
them. When children worry about "losing face", isn't it the FRUSTRATION
component which is dominant and the HUMILIATION component that is
secondary? When they consider "risk", is it the consequences of failure
that primarily weigh upon them (as they do with us) or is it instead other
the initial outlay of bother and effort that is their prime concern?
Of course, at the adult end of development, kids are like us. One of us,
Kim Yongho, created some "avatars" out of children's photographs, and
found that the third and fourth graders were very happy to have these used
in class, but fifth and sixth graders really hated it. Their humiliation
is like our humiliation and the consequences of ridicule fall heavily on
their consciousnesses. But that's not what we've got in this article; far
from it.
In some ways, Gunilla Lindqvist's whole concept of "playworlds" is the
very opposite of what we see in the data. Instead of having a tightly
circumscribed activity, with a clear beginning and end, in which the
principles of an imaginary situation (guileless, shared deceit) and of
abstract rules (gratuitious difficulty) hold sway, a kind of carefully
bounded "carnival" space where things are turned upside down without in
any way impinging on normal relations, Lindqvist actually takes the kids
out of doors and has stuff hidden for them to find, and even members of
staff dressed as characters hiding in the woods.
When I first read this, I was pretty shocked, because it seemed to me that
it's precisely the DELINEATION of gratuitous difficulty from the normal
everyday sort that makes it play, and the DIFFERENTIATION of guileless
deceit from the manipulative sort that makes it a fictioin as opposed to a
lie. It seemed to me that the whole idea of "playworlds" erases this
boundary.
Now I am not so sure. It seems to me that in Vygotsky a "social situation"
(whether it's the "social situation of development" or the "environment"
[среды]) is really a RELATION rather than a physical environment of some
kind. After all, children don't seem to link play acting to any particuar
physical site; it's a way of being rather than a place to be.
Or rather it's a bunch of different ways of being. Gratuitous difficulty
has to reconstruct guileless deceit before it can fully supplant and take
over its functions, including its developmental functions.
So school-age children who, in their guileless deceit, successfully play
cops and robbers or cowboys and indians or (as my wife did as a girl,
Americans vs. communists), are more developed than preschoolers who stick
to "socialist realism" ("house", "school", "hospital", or, as one of my
students who grew up over a butcher shop used to, "meat market" games).
Requiring toys and props and friends to do this represents a lower
developmental moment than being able to do it with nothing but a piece of
paper and a pencil.
But in the same way, gratuitous difficulty represents a higher
developmental moment than guileless deceit, and soccer, which requires
physical mediation, represents a lower developmental moment than chess
(which can actually, at a very high level, be played with nothing but a
piece of paper).
Not better. But in a developmental sense higher, in the sense that the
child who can do the higher can do the lower with great ease, but the
child who can do the lower may not be able to do the higher at all.
And also in the sense that if I really think about the well and the tide
and the dipstick in the transmission fluid I can see conservation at work,
but it would take billions of physically mediated measurements to prove it
(and any mismeasurement, at least according to Karl Popper, would force me
to start again from zero!)
David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education
--- On Sun, 2/21/10, mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com> wrote:
From: mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [xmca] Gratuitous Difficulty and Guileless Deceit
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Date: Sunday, February 21, 2010, 10:40 AM
I would add, Rod, in this case, part of what is unusual owing to the
nature
of the play world this scene is linked to is that the teacher is also a
risk
taking co-player, in this sense/con-text a peer in the "safe space" of the
play where he takes risks that at times made the researcher's practically
drop their teeth!! All very difficult to get into a single article.
mike
On Sun, Feb 21, 2010 at 3:52 AM, Rod Parker-Rees <
R.Parker-Rees@plymouth.ac.uk> wrote:
> I wonder how gratuitous the gratuitous difficulties introduced in play
> really are - if we see play as being (among other things) a way of
> organising, calibrating and revising our 'mental models' or theories
about
> how the world works, these added difficulties can be seen as a strategy
for
> testing the range of applicability of the model or of monitoring how it
> works in new situations. Bruner wrote about how adults 'up the ante' in
> their interactions with developing children, adjusting their level of
> support as children are able to take over more of a shared task and this
> aspect of play may be a way by which children can up their own ante. It
is
> now easier to recognise that the relationship between child and adult is
not
> 'one-way' - that even babies play a part in educating their parents,
> training them to develop mutually acceptable ways of interacting and one
of
> the advantages of introducing 'guileless deceit' into play is that it
> affords opportunities for 'dressing up' in social practices associated
with
> negotiation of interests. If maternal love serves to modify aspects of
> mothers' social monitoring (the 'love is blind' argument made by Fonagy,
> Gergely and Target on p. 298 of their article 'The parent-infant dyad
and
> the construction of the subjective self') this may provide a 'safe
space' in
> which infants can play their way into social processes and indeed babies
do
> appear to take on much more active, co-creating roles when playing with
more
> familiar partners. Even playing at deceit may be considerably more risky
> when one's partner is less well known - familiarity provides a degree of
> security which allows social risk taking to be thrilling rather than
> frightening.
>
> In the context of the playworlds paper, these children (and their
teacher)
> are having to work out a space between friendship and the more formal,
> managed relationships between children and teacher to identify how much
> scope there really is for children to shape the future course of their
> activity. The question for me is how children can be helped to make the
step
> from negotiation of play planning among peers to this more sophisticated
way
> of 'playing the game', which involves awareness of the teacher's
interests
> and constraints so that these can be negotiated. It seems to me that a
> factor which would support this transition would be the degree to which
the
> children know the teacher, not only as a teacher (role-holder) but also
as a
> person - what he likes and dislikes, how he reacts to teasing and
> challenging, how willing he is to respond to children's suggestions etc.
> Playing social games is supported by familiar 'more competent others'
and
> develops skills which allow us to engage in interactions with less
familiar,
> less congenial 'adversaries'.
>
> All the best,
>
> Rod
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu]
On
> Behalf Of David Kellogg
> Sent: 20 February 2010 21:55
> To: xmca
> Subject: [xmca] Gratuitous Difficulty and Guileless Deceit
>
> Very well, let me try to take the play discussion in a rather new
> direction. So far we've mostly discussed how play manages to highlight
the
> different e-motions of very young children and mostly speculated about
how
> this might be developmental.
>
> In some ways it seems to me that the article is rather poorly suited to
> this view. First of all, the actual data is not play per se but only
> preparation for play. One can easily imagine this play taking place
without
> this preparation and therefore it doesn't seem a necessary component.
>
> Secondly, even if we accept the preplay discussion as a necessary stage
of
> this form of play, it's not clear to me how e-motion is a necessary part
of
> the resolution of the discussion. One can easily imagine the discussion
> being resolved without reference to friendship or best friends, etc.
>
> But take the following dialogue, from our third grade textbook:
>
> Minsu: I like apples.
> Julie: I don't like apples.
> (Minsu's mother turns the plate so Julie can see some fresh Keobong
grapes)
> Julie: Grapes! I like grapes.
> Minsu: I don't like ...
>
> When we ask the kids to continue the dialogue (either as "volleyball" or
> "pingpong" they will go like this for hours. They will not stick to the
> concept of 'fruit' either (we don't teach the word fruit, because it
> presents a very difficult plural in English). They will extend the use
of
> the verb to virtually any field of experience, at hand or not.
>
> In fact, the verb "like" turns out to be BY FAR the preferred verb in
third
> grade; the verb which is most likely to be used when we put the kids in
> teams or groups and ask them to improvise on ANY dialogue. This is
strange,
> because it's not at all frequent in the material we teach.
>
> So I want to suggest two ways in which play per se requires emotion and
in
> particular requires not only emotion but the mastery of emotion. The
first
> we can call the principle of Gratuitious Difficulty, that is, the
> introduction of extraneous problems and unnecessary rules whose only
> apparent purpose is to complicate the game, rather like the introduction
of
> obstacles between the hero and the goal in a story.
>
> The second we can call the principle of Guileless or Guiltless Deceit,
> that is, the introduction of a conceit, or an imaginary situation which
is
> shared but also contested in some way. I want to suggest that these two
> principles are common to all forms of play, but not the preplay activity
> which the article is concerned with.
>
> David Kellogg
> Seoul National University of Education
>
>
>
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