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[xmca] Problems With Primitivism



In addition to all the other problems I have with "Tool and Sign", I'm having some problems with the idea of primitivism. They are not exactly the same problems that Mike raised in his contribution to the symposium on concept formation, but they are not entirely unrelated either. See:
 
http://vimeo.com/groups/39473/videos/13550409
 
Mike's objections to the idea of primitivism is that they essentially deny the ecological validity of knowledge: they suggest that somehow our adults are more adult than those of pre-modern societies. 
 
I agree with that. But what really disturbs me are the developmental implications: it seems to me there is more than a whiff of Haecklian "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" here, only instead of phylogeny we have sociogenesis.
 
This is from Chapter Four of Tool and Symbol. It's the eleventh paragraph.
 
Совершенно понятно, что в такой высшей символической операции, как употребление знаков для запоминания, мы имеем продукт сложнейшего исторического развития; сравнительный анализ показывает, что такого рода деятельность отсутствует у всех видов животных, даже у высших, и есть все основания думать, что она является продуктом специфических условий общественного развития. Ясно, что такая аутостимуляция могла возникнуть лишь после того, как подобные стимулы уже были созданы для стимуляции другого, и что за ней лежит огромная
 специальная история. Знаковая операция проходит, видимо, такой же путь, какой в онтогенезе проходила речь, бывшая раньше средством стимуляции другого человека и уже затем ставшая интрапсихической функцией. 
 
I gather this means someting like:
 
a) Obviously, the use of signs is the product of a complex historical development.
b) It does not occur in animals, not even the higher apes.

c) We may assume that it is specific to social development in humans.

d) It it clear (???) that this could only happen after the instrumental stimulus is used to act upon others.

e) A long history of communicative use must have (???) preceded its mnemonic use..

f) So sign operations must take the same path in sociogenesis that they took in ontogenesis.
 
In general, whenever Vygotsky or Luria are WEAK in their logic, they begin to bluster and say things like “obviously” and “clearly””. A particularly WEAK form of logic is the idea that sociogenesis and ontogenesis must follow the same path. That’s not at all obvious or clear, and in fact there are many ways in which the opposite is true (e.g. children are born in sociogenetically modern hospitals; they go to sociogeneticlaly advanced kindergartens and the learn things in school which have been only recently discovered, and on the other hand they do not begin to work until very late although human labor must have been one of the very first forms of cultural activity).
 
In fact, it turns out that tallies and even cuneiforms are a highly select and sometimes even a private code (that is, only the person who ties the knot or makes the tally really knows what it means). So it’s not at all clear that the sociogenesis of this particular form of sign follows the same path as the ontogenesis of speech.
 
A few years ago, Paul Dillon untied the Quipu for me. He explained that no one has really been able to "crack" the code used to knot a Quipu, and it seems quite possible that there wasn't one: it was just a private mnemonic system used the way you tie a string around your finger or knot your handkerchief. There's some counterevidence, but:
 
http://www.slate.com/id/2298567/
 
If the primitive sign really does have a social origin (and not a private one) wouldn’t it be based on a system of shared meanings and not on a private meaning? 
 
Historically, the earliest use of external stimuli in China, for example, appears to have been not memory but divination—that is, not thinking of the past but predicting the future. It’s not clear to me that this must have come from a communicative use; on the contrary, I can easily imagine private rituals, such as we find in small children. 
 
Thus the quipus, the tally, and the knotted handkerchief are CRITICAL neoformations: FAILED attempts at creating socially communicative signs, and their appearance is the sign of a crisis and not a sign of its resolution.The fate of the primitive sign is not the fully developed system of communicative speech, but rather the child’s autonomous speech—babbling and cooing: a linguistic fossil, entirely dependent on higher forms for meaning.
 
David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education
 
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