Re: [xmca] Intravolutions and Revaluations

[mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>]

I'll try to catch up, David. I have gathered up what I hope are all concepts
around vrashchivanie in a file
and am trying to check on translations from Russian dictionaries. I think we
can gain some insight into
the apparently contending currents of thought about development by such an
excercise. Lets see.
mike



On Mon, Oct 4, 2010 at 6:15 PM, David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>wrote:

> Mike has protested, and quite rightly, about my subject lines. The jokes
> are not that funny, and the threads become too sinuous. So I am reverting to
> "intravolution", but I want to add an additional problem that is related to
> hyphenation rather than neologism.
>
> I want to complain about how Vygotsky uses to the word "znachenie" to refer
> to a subordinate concept of meaning which includes "sense" and a subordinate
> concept of meaning which excludes it. I will call this problem the
> "revaluation" of "znachenie".
>
> Last time, Mike said he preferred "involution" to "intravolution" because
> "intravolution" suggests a completed process. I argued that "intravolution"
> has a clear neological antonym in "extravolution" and an even better one in
> "inter-volution", which fits this context exactly, because Vygotsky is
> trying to describe how (some) functions become intra-mental after an
> inter-mental and extra-mental existence.
>
> There's another problem. "Involution" is already taken, specifically in the
> first part of Chapter Four, where Vygotsky uses it to describe the
> pathological reverse of evolution: instead of speciation, we have a
> convergent evolution.
>
> Дальше мы попытаемся установить, что в процессах разложения, инволюции и
> патологического изменения отношение между мышлением и речью не является
> постоянным для всех случаев нарушения, задержки, обратного развития,
> патологического изменения интеллекта или речи, но принимает всякий раз
> специфическую форму, характерную именно для данного типа патологического
> процесса, для данной картины нарушений и задержек.
>
> "Further on we will attempt to establish that in the processes of
> decomposition, involution and pathologic change the relation between
> thinking and speech is not constant for all cases of disturbance, delay,
> reverse development, or pathologic change in intellect or speech, but
> assumes every time the specific form and precise characteristics of this
> type of pathologic process, this whole picture of disturbance and delay."
>
> (I had a heartbreaking example of this the other night: my mother-in-law,
> who is multi-dialectal in Chinese, has suffered a stroke, and now finds it
> very hard to speak in any dialect other than her first one, Shaanxinese,
> which makes it very hard for me to understand her.)
>
>
> Now, in English, we do have a device where we can reverse speciation in the
> lexicon. We can take words that have a separate lexical existence and mash
> them together with hyphens, like this:
>
>                REVOLVEMENT
>             /                         /
> INTRA-REVOLVEMENT  INTER-REVOLVEMENT
>
> And that brings me to the problem of revaluating "znachenie" and "smysl" in
> the light of Capital.
>
> In Chapter Seven, Vygotsky says that "smysl" is BIGGER than "znachenie";
> "znachenie" is only the most stable, most self-identical, most fixed form of
> "smysl". This is psychologically correct. It is historically correct.
>
> Usage is a late-emerging interloper, a knighted,
> enthroned, institutionalized form of popular use. Language as a concrete
> psychological reality is "smysl", and not "znachenie".
>
> Historically, dictionaries didn't even appear in most languages until the
> Eighteenth Century, and "znachenie" is largely a product of WRITING and
> TEXT, not SPEAKING and DISCOURSE.
>
> So it should REALLY be this:
>
>          SMYSL-VALUE
>          /                 /
> SMYSL-SENSE   ZNACHENIE-MEANING
>
> But it isn't. The problem is that "meaning" is a very general term in
> Russian, just as it is in English. So Vygotsky uses "znachenie" as the
> superordinate concept, because in most people's minds, "znachenie" is the
> most general term. So what we really have is this:
>
>           ZNACHENIE-VALUE
>            /                      /
> SMYSL-SENSE      ZNACHENIE-MEANING
>
> Which is terrible, because it suggests the exact opposite of the truth.
> "Sense" appears as an interloper, and "znachenie" as the original value.
> What we want is exactly the opposite.
>
> A very valued member of our team once pointed out that the key to the whole
> problem is Marx's distinction between USE value and EXCHANGE value. The USE
> value of words is their older pragmatic function in concrete language, and
> the EXCHANGE value is something that arises in relatively modern times,
> above thanks to the production and exchange of texts.
>
>  So the most THEORETICALLY accurate way would be to hyphenate, and use
> "meaning" with everything, like this:
>
>            MEANING-VALUE
>              /                  /
> MEANING-SENSE    MEANING-SIGNIFICATION
>
> Alternatively, we could do away with the meaningless word "meaning" and
> instead substitute the word "value".
>
>                  VALUE
>                /        /
> SENSE-VALUE  SIGNIFICATION-VALUE
>
> David Kellogg
> Seoul National University of Education
>
>
>
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