[xmca] Utensils Are Egocentric Tools

[David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>]

I am trying to put together some stuff on Piaget and Vygotsky, and this morning while I was retranslating Piaget's comments on Thinking and Speech, Carol's complaint about proliferating categories occurred to me ("We don't need no stinkin' u-tinsels"). 
 
It seems to me that a key difference between "utvar" and "tools" is analogous to the distinction Vygotsky makes between self-directed "egocentric" speech and other-directed social communicative speech.
 
The utinsel is a self-directed tool. Genetically, it is always late emerging (I use a knife to kill an animal before I use it to cook it and eat it; I use a shovel for farming before I use a trowel for gardening). Functionally, it serves individual maintenance and consumption rather than capital circulation and production (I use it in an intimate or interpersonal setting rather than a public one). Structurally, it interfaces with my hand and my mouth, rather than my hand and my environment (I do not share my utinsels as readily as I do my tools).
 
The Acmeists were anti-modernists. They rejected the idea that "modern" art is late emerging; they insisted that the Odyssey (by Homer) is in many ways as modern as Ulysses (by Joyce). They rejected the formalist idea of art as "device" or "tool" of mass media; they insisted that their art was a hearth to warm yourself by in the comfort of your own home. Finally, they rejected the idea that the word is essentially a thing; they insisted that their art existed in the concrete, and intimate, act of speaking and hearing it. That is why Mandelstam wrote poems that he never wrote down but only told to friends. (Of course, that is not the only reason!) 
 
I think they also would have embraced the idea that artworks are self-directed tools, that is, utensils. Like egocentric speech, they are bound to disappear into inner speech. But inner speech continues the functional differentiation we see when social speech splits into self-directed and other-directed. Poetry, their specialty, is an extreme example of a self-directed use of an other-directed material. 
 
Steve, I think there are two reasons why I do not want to treat "real" and "material" as synonymous and would rather treat the "real" as emerging from the "material".
 
The first is rather trivial; it has to do with linguistic gradeability (e.g. the existence of some adjectives like "dead" or "asleep" which cannot be graded, and others like "tall" or "wise" which can). 
 
I want to talk about artworks that are "more real" and "more ideal". But to me it smacks of idealism to say that artworks are "more material" or "less material". All artworks are, in the final analysis, equally and absolutely material. But just like self-directed "egocentric" speech and other-directed social speech, some artworks are more ideal and others are more real.
 
The second is somewhat less trivial. No artist every fully masters his materials; every artist is in the end bested by the stuff to which he lays his cunning hands. Vygotsky portrays the struggle of the artist as a fundamentally TRAGIC one. Like Sisyphus he is doomed to roll his "material" up the hill of ideality, only to have it roll back down long before he reaches the summit.
 
This tragedy, or rather long term tendency for materials to master form despite our best intentions, our most strenuous efforts and our most highly developed techniques, inheres in the artistic enterprise; the ideal has to be made real, and so man must fall and fail.That in itself explains why, for example, realism in art is primal, and idealism is derivative. The "here and now" is always the means by which art has to express the "there and then" and even the "what if".
 
As with the zig-zag of science concepts (towards reality and away from it), the link between "real" and "perceptible" or "observeable" or "tangible" has to be preserved, because it is always and everywhere the starting point of the artwork. 
 
I think that the vulgar materialist tells you that all that is material is tangible or perceptible. The true materialist knows better, and his very knowledge, being intangible, proves the point.
 
David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education
 



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