Re: [xmca] Narration and Stance

[David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>]

First of all, many thanks to everybody who helped with my enquiry on the Russian version of Vygotsky's manuscript on emotion. It has already been a huge help; I've found several places where the English translation, always a very bumpy read, can be smoothed out.
 
Secondly, I want to apologize for a translation error of my OWN. I wrote: 
 
"In this way, Vygotsky is almost the first to reduce the the problem of the connection...." 
 
Of course, I meant:
 
"In this way, Dumas is almost the first to reduce the problem of the connection..."
 
Thirdly, it seems to me that the Vygotsky manuscript holds the key to the problem Larry raises, which I think is not really the problem of relating potential selves to illusions or to beliefs or to opinions or to performances or to what people like to call "stance" on a stage but rather the problem of the ability of real bodies to do real stuff.
 
When you read Vygotsky, particularly in English, you have a hard time understanding why he keeps rabbiting on and on and on about this James-Lange theory, and why insists and insists and insists that their real forefathers are Descartes and not Spinoza. But by the time you get to the end you realize that the underlying issue is really what Steve Gabosch likes to call "methodology".
 
Vygotsky DOESN'T call it methodology. In fact, he says that Spinoza (who he considers a materialist) and Descartes (who he considers a medievalist) have pretty much the same method: the list the same categories in the same order, and they go about discussing them in pretty much the same way.
 
Vygotsky calls it THEORY. Curiously, he says that Descartes (and James and Lange) are theoretically "naturalist" and "explanatory", but Spinoza (and Vygotsky himself) are "anti-naturalist" and "descriptive". But how is this possible? Isn't Spinoza the man who goes around saying "God or Nature"? Isn't Descartes the guy who lists the various "passions"?
 
It's because Descartes (and James/Lange) explains the "passions" (which means, quite literally, passive sensations, as in the "Passion of Christ") as natural appendages of the mind, and the body is a kind of an appendix that dangles downward from the soul via the pineal gland. 
 
In contrast, Spinoza (and Vygotsky) insist that emotions are about increasing or decreasing our capacity for activity; we experience emotion actively in just the way we experience understanding actively when we respond to an utterance. This interpersonal, social, cultural, anti-naturalist way of seeing emotions as prologues to action (what Sakagawa and Moro call "politico-affective") is the border between spiritualism and psychology, between a kind of homuncular concept of consciousness and a socially based one.
 
The problem is that both Spinoza and Vygotsky genuinely believed that they were on threshold of a complete and total social transformation which would allow people to not simply imagine new human capabilities but also realize them. Both Spinoza and Vygotsky saw imagination not as a kind of substitute for the good life, but instead as a planning stage for it.  That's why, I think, neither one would equate narration with history, or stance with emotion. 
 
Let me (once again) take a leaf out of Larry's book. I quote some points from Larry's letter and my replies (or, in some case, cryptic, Mike-style, elliptical comments):
 
lp: If we are all far far more than we seem [and our beliefs and fantasies keep
us imprisoned or contained or SUBJECTED] how do we go about freeing
ourselves from our illusions?"
 
dk: I think that prisons are what keep people imprisoned, not illusions. Illusions are, or can be, one of the most important means we have of getting people out of prisons, but only when they contribute to actions. When you are actually in prison, you really need illusions of various kinds just to get through the day. Not that different from being out of prison when you think about it. Not all of these illusions are related to imminent action.
 
lp: I have recently been reflecting on narrative practices as "positioning" practices and how we are "given" position [subjected] and the possibility that we can "take" positions
[subjectivity]. This narrative practice perspective is an aspect of the
discursive framework which is exploring positioning theory.
 
dk: I think that the modern use of terms like "positioning", "performing" and "stance" has reduced the actual content of these terms to "striking a pose" and pretty much eviscerated it of the sense of preparing for action. That is why if you do an N-gram of the word, you'll notice that use of it begins to decline in 1998, and it is now at the same level it was at in 1982. But the word really means a bracing position ready for action, and I hope it will come to mean that again.
 
lp: Michael Bamberg, who wrote the current article I referenced on narrative
practice as small stories has edited a book [with Anna Fina & Deborah
Schiffrin] titled "Discourse & Identity" (2006)  The book is a synthesis of
the multiple theories that go under the umbrella term "discourse theory" and
is an attempt to bridge two approaches at opposite extremes of discourse
theories.  The one approach is sustained within the frame of Conversational
Analysis and the other is sustained by scholars working in Critical
Discourse Analysis.
 
dk: CA seems to me to suffer terribly from a Bakhtinian notion of the cultural which reduces the social to the interpersonal. CDA strikes me as literary criticism applied to extremely indifferent literature. While I agree that they are in a sense complementary (bottom up vs. top down) I rather suspect that people who try to combine the two will end up with their weaknesses rather than their strengths. BOTH provide very useful techniques for analysis. NEITHER provides what Vygotsky would call a workable THEORY of the social.
 
lp:  One approach brackets and focuses on the emergence of identities in interaction in local contexts to explain the emergence of subjectivity. The other approach brackets and
focuses on the context in which identities are produced or imposed [given or
subjected] and frame the way identities are perceived.  David, the article
you posted is an excellent example of this approach.
 
dk: You mean it's a good example of the second approach and not the first. Yes, I agree. But I think Shawn is mourning the gap between the two: he is complaining that all the world is NOT a stage, and as a result the stage is one of the very few moments where real social change can really be sketched out. Something Shawn doesn't develop is his sense of OUTRAGE that this very rare opportunity is being wasted, that theatre is being replaced with circus, and stance in the sense of preparing action with stance in the sense of spectacle.
 
lp: David, I'm curious about the concept of positions "given" [subjected],
positions "taken", [subjectivity] and positions "exchanged"
[intersubjectivity] as ways we construct, imagine, and fantasize possible
worlds and how we are situated within them.

dk: I guess I am not as curious as you about static positions, in which I would include most versions of "stance" and even "identity". If you are going to stay in one position while the rest of the world goes to hell, then it will inevitably tend to lock you in to a set of social relations that you really don't want to have around you. If you are going to change it, why are you so worried about it?

lp: The other basic primary metaphor that weaves through my speculations on this
topic is the metaphor of "container" and containment.  The tension of being
contained [as subjected AND subjectivity AND intersubjectivity].  What are
the "right" relationships for "containing" development [identity & security
needs] and also developing the capacity to agentively "take" positions
beyond security needs.  In other words, to develop the capacity to imagine
and act to create possible new worlds of containment beyond the "given"

dk: What I notice is the adverb "agentively" attached to a semantically empty "take" (like "take a bath" or "take a walk", where the actual verbal work is being down by a noun). I think this inevitably happens when we take a stance based on performing an identity rather than a stance based on realizing a programme. Attention shifts to non-verbal components.
 
I guess I think that real development has to have some element that is entirely unpredictable. That is one of the very few senses in which I am always glad that all the world is not a stage; what we speak off stage is real discourse and not just text.
 
David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education





On Wed, Feb 16, 2011 at 7:13 PM, David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>wrote:

> Thanks, Larry. Somewhere in the headwaters of the current thread on
> Vygotsky's claims, Andy says that Vygotsky's purposes in psychological
> inquiry are better set out in "The Socialist Alternation of Man", and Mike
> counters that his goal in "Thinking and Speech", anyway, is the more modest
> one of merely accounting for the whole of human consciousness. Well, I want
> to argue, sort of on the basis of what you've sent and also on the basis of
> something I have been reading, that these two purposes have more in common
> than you might think.
>
> I don't have the article at hand. But you quote Bamberg to the effect that
> any "claim" of identy actually involves:
>
> 1) sameness of a sense of self across time in the face of constant change;
> 2) uniqueness of the person vis-a-vis others in the face of being the same
> as everybody else; and
> 3) the construction of agency as constituted by self
> (with a self-to-world direction of fit) and world (with a world -to- self
> direction of fit).
>
> You can see why "identity" is a very tenuous claim. You would have to be a
> very eccentric person, one of Dickens' grotesques, to have the same sense of
> self accross time in the face of constant change (think of Micawber and his
> wife, "I have never abandoned Mr. Micawber and I shall never abandon Mr.
> Micawber!").
>
> Even if you could somehow manage the trick, it would rather tend to
> emphasize the things that make you the same as everybody else (we might call
> this your "embodiments" as opposed to your potentials). Most of all, the
> idea that the self is somehow a source of agency, a tragic or comic hero, a
> central figure in the face of all the vicissitudes of the social world in
> which it discovers itself, with all the trappings of class and race and so
> on, is somewhat laughable and pathetic; if all the world is a stage, then
> all the men and women upon it are not actors but only extras.
>
> But take a look at this.
>
>
> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/wallace-shawn/why-i-call-myself-a-socia_b_818061.html
>
> It's only an article in the Huffington Post (which, as we all know, does
> not actually pay for what it prints, and therefore gets scoffed at by "real"
> writers, but we academics, who are NEVER paid for what we publish are
> therefore not real writers either, may take it as seriously as I think it is
> meant). The author is mostly a voice actor, who you may have seen as a goofy
> high school teacher in "Clueless"; he was also one of the leading sources of
> ideas for a "poor theatre" that we see in Louis Malle' s great movie "My
> Dinner With Andre".
>
> Here his idea is that the real key to reconciling all these contradictions
> of identity is that we are all far, far more than we seem. But only the
> actor, on the stage, can realize all of the potential identities that a
> single self can contain. In practice, it is race, class, caste, and above
> all the country in which the child finds himself or herself unwillingly born
> that selects and realizes the potential that later becomes a cheap
> substitute for his or her real identity. If the child wants anything more
> than this cheap substitute, then we are simply going to have to do something
> about race, class, caste, and above all national boundaries.
>
> In Volume Five of the Collected Works, Vygosky is writing (at considerable
> length) about how we might test the James-Lange theory of emotion (that is,
> the idea that physiological changes in the viscera or the vasomotor system
> somehow occur as an unmediated response to perceptions and emotion is merely
> the conscious mind that notices these).
>
> He discusses a "direct theorem" and also a "reciprocal one". The direct one
> is the surgical realization of James' "gedankenexperiment": through
> vivisection we prevent all changes in the viscera, the vasomotor system, and
> even the sympathetic nervous system, and we discover that animals still have
> emotional responses. The "reciprocal one", though, is the opposite: we
> produce, through drugs, pathology, or Stanislavskian "method" acting, the
> changes in the viscera, vasomotor system, and sympathetic nervous system,
> and we see if there is an emotional response.
>
> Now the problem is that these two theorems contradict each other. The
> direct theorem suggests that physiological changes and emotional experiences
> really CAN be decoupled. But the Stanslavskian method really indicates the
> OPPOSITE--we find that when we produce the physiological changes through
> method acting, we really DO get an emotional response with it.
>
> But the contradiction is really only apparent. First of all, the emotional
> responses that we get from dogs who have had their vagus nerve cut or their
> spinal cord severed are really very different from emotional response in the
> wild. They are not adaptive, they are altered by being decoupled from
> practical activity. For example, if you poke a paralyzed dog with a stick
> through the bars of a cage, it will get angry, but there is no possiblity of
> either fight or flight, so the anger is, as Vygotsky says, "anger without
> the sting".
>
> Secondly, the emotional responses we get from actors who have taken on
> another role are not so much responses to physiological changes as responses
> to ideas. And these ideas are not just any ideas. They are ideas that must
> in some way represent POTENTIAL SELVES to the actor. They are a kind of
> living realization of a potential emotional response rather than a real one.
>
> I guess I think that narration is always a little story; it's always a
> potential and not a real emotional response. That is why the Stanislavskyan
> technique seems a technique for testing the James-Lange hypothesis rather
> than a realistic method for the exploration of real, and not simply
> potential, human feeling.
>
> David Kellogg
> Seoul National University of Educaiton
>
>
> --- On Wed, 2/16/11, Larry Purss <lpscholar2@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> From: Larry Purss <lpscholar2@gmail.com>
> Subject: [xmca] Narration as BIG story in contrast to little story
> To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
> Date: Wednesday, February 16, 2011, 7:12 AM
>
>
> David Ke
>
> I thought I would bring to your attention an article in the current journal
> of Theory & Psychology by Michael Bamberg titled "Who am I? Narration and
> its Contributions to Self and Identity".  He is contrasting the
> biographical
> approach [lives as texts] as a metaphor of BIG stories with the Narrative
> Practice approach as a metaphor of small stories.
>
> To prime the upcoming discussion on identity formation that this months
> article will explore I want to bring Bamberg's perspective on
> distinguishing
> self from identity. On page 6 of the article he writes,
>
> "in broad strokes, identity is a label attributed to the attempt to
> differentiate and integrate a sense of self along different social and
> personal dimensions" [which the article explains not not distinct or
> separate dimensions] "Consequently, identities can be differentiated and
> claimed according to varying socio-cultural categories e.g., gender, age,
> race, occupation, gangs, socio-economic status, ethnicity, class, nation
> states, or regional territory. Any claim of identity faces three dilemmas:
> 1) sameness of a sense of self across time in the face of constant change;
> 2) uniqueness of the person vis-a-vis others in the face of being the same
> as everybody else; and 3) the construction of agency as constituted by self
> (with a self-to-world direction of fit) and world (with a world -to- self
> direction of fit). It is argued that IDENTITY takes off from the
> continuity/change dilemma, and from here ventures into issues of uniqueness
> (self-other differentiation) and agency.  In contrast, notions of SELF and
> SENSE OF SELF start from the self/other and agency differentiation and from
> here can filter into the diachronicity of continuity and change".
>
> David,  Bamberg is elaborating a notion of a small story approach which is
> in the discourse tradition of the Narrative Practice framework. {Hutto is
> also working in this realm}  Not sure how these ideas will possibly link up
> with notions of identity in the coming article to be posted but I
> appreciated how Bamberg opens his article with 3 dilemmas to be answered by
> concepts of identity and a sense of self.
>
> Larry
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