RE: [xmca] The relationship between practice and activity as concepts

[Julian Williams <julian.williams@manchester.ac.uk>]

Nate

I hope to send you a link to the papers in our "Bourdieu meets CHAT" symposium (Rome, ISCAR, Sept 2011) shortly - they may be relevant even if not spot on your question. 

Im not sure if this is exactly what you want - but here are some starters:

Of course both 'Activity' and 'Practice' go to Marx's conceptions of man's control over nature through 'labour'; but Vygotsky-Leontiev-CHAT appeals specifically to a Marxist social- Psychology (the 'mind', and the internal plane, etc) , whereas Bourdieu/Foucault et al are essentially (can I use that term?) sociologists (and anthropologists), even if of a modern /postmodern(wince) cultural, historical, philosophical variety.

Bourdieusian and other 'modern' trends in sociology are equivocal about Marx, drawing on conceptions from Weber and Durkheim etc (not to mention other trends that draw on Freud: eg Lacan, Zizek, Badiou etc) but also owing a more or less explicit debt to Marx- Engels' (and so - maybe indirectly - Hegel's) dialectics. 

But Bourdieu's criticisms of 'Marxism' seem to me to be more about criticising some Stalinist (and other) tendencies ( eg in the CPF in the 1960-70s) than being fundamentally anti-Marx.  

I am beginning (recently) to argue that CHAT's social-psychology can sometimes usefully be complemented by such sociology, including Bourdieu's concepts of 'cultural capital', 'symbolic violence' etc in relation to 'fields'... (but I am looking to see what the ISCAR cognoscenti say in Rome shortly: blatant advert, this!)

Especially I find Bourdieu's analysis of the educational field within the capitalist system helpful: as with Althusser, the notion of 'reproduction' and the State politic's role become central, and mediating cultural models/capital/values come into the focus of this analysis ...  hence the 'reproduction of labour power'. But here the cultural (eg educational) field is still mediated by economics (and vice versa) - so the terms 'cultural capital' and 'exchange' rates controlled by the State become metaphorically evocative; on the one hand one can 'buy' educational capital (via provate schools , tutorials, etc.) but on the othe rhand educational capital can 'pay back' via enhanced employment prospects, maybe even elevation into the bourgois classes. 

Am I off-beam here - were you looking for something different?

:-)

Julian  

________________________________________
From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu] on behalf of Nathaniel Dumas [ndumas@linguistics.ucsb.edu]
Sent: 13 August 2011 18:23
To: xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
Subject: [xmca] The relationship between practice and activity as concepts

Dear Colleagues,

Thanks to those who sent me responses to my question in response to my
seminar on activities as ethnographic and analytic foci. Along those
lines, I wanted to ask another question…does anyone know of any
critiques that compare the practice turn in many of the social
sciences to CHAT? And how do CHAT perspectives position itself in
regards to the practice turn spearheaded by Bourdieu, Giddens,
Foucault, and others? In short, what was/is the relationship between
activity and practice as concepts for CHAT scholars?

Best,
Nate Dumas

On Aug 12, 2011, at 12:00 PM, xmca-request@weber.ucsd.edu wrote:

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>   3. Fw: [historicalmaterialism] Marx and Philosophy Review of
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>   4. Imaginary Friends (David Kellogg)
>   5. Re: Imaginary Friends (Helen Grimmett)
>   6. Re: Living metaphor and conventionalized language (David Kellogg)
>   7. Re: Imaginary Friends (Robert Lake)
>   8. Re: Living metaphor and conventionalized language (Martin Packer)
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> ------------------------------
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> Message: 2
> Date: Thu, 11 Aug 2011 23:28:51 +0100
> From: Huw Lloyd <huw.softdesigns@gmail.com>
> Subject: [xmca] Polanyi's "Magic of Marxism"
> To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
> Message-ID:
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>
> I'm revisiting a section of Polyani's "Personal Knowledge", p227,
> subtitled
> the "The Magic of Marxism", in which he describes the contradictory
> Marxist
> fervour for anti-idealism and the shielding of this fervour as a
> 'science'.
> I have noted references to Polyani in archived posts and wondered what
> others thought about this.
>
> I was thinking about this in relation to Luria's "Cognitive
> Development" and
> Ratner's preface to "Macro Cultural Psychology", in which the
> scientific
> recognition of the social formation of mind might (would?) then lead
> to
> extensive social changes, such as the unveiling of 'education as
> content'
> rather than environment.
>
> Here are a few ruminative questions:
>
> + Is it possible to have a long standing interest in something without
> having a fervour for it?  Whitehead's 'Religion of science' comes to
> mind
> (Science and the Modern World).
>
> + If valid, to what degree does this fervour pollute the science.
> Is this
> (simply?) a case of discriminating between authentic science and the
> political wielding of 'science'?
>
> + Can we justify this fervour beyond a personal utopian belief,
> founded, for
> instance, on a understanding of what is wrong currently?  Are there
> benefits
> to such an outlook, such as the avoidance of dogma?
>
> Huw
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 3
> Date: Fri, 12 Aug 2011 00:17:38 +0100
> From: "Bruce Robinson" <bruce@brucerob.eu>
> Subject: [xmca] Fw: [historicalmaterialism] Marx and Philosophy Review
>       of      Books: new reviews online
> To: "xmca list" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
> Message-ID: <91EA2C653A194A1A9C21A91310D6F4D9@BRUCEROBINSOPC>
> Content-Type: text/plain;     charset="Windows-1252"
>
> The first review of Andy's edition of Ilyenkov may be of interest to
> xmcaers.
>
> Bruce Robinson
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Sébastien Budgen
> To: historicalmaterialism
> Sent: Tuesday, August 02, 2011 4:53 PM
> Subject: [historicalmaterialism] Marx and Philosophy Review of
> Books: new reviews online
>
>
>
>
> New reviews just published online in the Marx and Philosophy Review
> of Books
> ·        Levant on Ilyenkov’s The Ideal in Human Activity
> ·        Sutton on Badiou on Wagner
> ·        Ainley on Marx and Education
> ·        Marshall on Löwy on Combined and Uneven Development
> ·        Arfken on Critical Companion to Contemporary Marxism
> ·        Carelton on Hobsbawm’s How to Change the World
>
> New comments and discussion
>
> New list of books for review
>
> all at www.marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviewofbooks/
>
> To receive notification of comments and of new reviews when they
> appear, join the Marx and Philosophy Society email list: http://lists.topica.com/lists/mpslist
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>
>
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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> ------------------------------
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> Message: 4
> Date: Thu, 11 Aug 2011 19:26:24 -0700 (PDT)
> From: David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>
> Subject: [xmca] Imaginary Friends
> To: Culture ActivityeXtended Mind <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
> Message-ID:
>       <1313115984.11432.YahooMailClassic@web110308.mail.gq1.yahoo.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
>
> Gadzooks, TWO of my favorite hobby horses in one posting: Julian
> Jaynes and imaginary friends. I don't want to fall between two
> hobby horses; I get wobbly at the knees writing about even one of them
> Â
> I used to think of imaginary friends as what Vygotsky referred to
> as a transitional neoformation: something that appears around age
> 7 or 8 and lasts until the the child is able to attach roles (which
> are functional versions of imaginary friends) to actual people
> (around twelve or thirteen).
> Â
> Vygotsky describes it like this:
> Â
> "Neoformations such as self love and self-evaulation remain, but the
> symptoms of the crisis (affectation, posing) are transitional. In
> the crisis at age seven, because of the fact that a differentiation
> of the internal and external develops and intellectual experience
> first appears, a sharp conflict of experiences also devleops. The
> child who does not know which candy to choose--the bigger or the
> sweeter--finds himself in a state of internal conflict even as he
> vacillates. The internal conflict (contradiction of experiences and
> selection of his own experiences) becomes possible only at this
> time." (The Crisis at Seven, in "The Essential Vygotsky", p. 494).
> Â
> I still think that some imaginary friends are like this: something
> that comes out of the same differentiation between internal and
> external that gives rise to role play. Like me, the child hesitates
> between two hobby horses: imaginary friends and real ones.
> Â
> The imaginary friend then "volatilizes" into abstract rule play and
> conceptual thinking (particularly the concept of "me" "myself" and
> "I"). Just as the child learns to rise to the concrete, by abstract
> away the rule from the role in instances of game play, the child
> learns to attach the ideal figure to the behavior of actual people.
> This is particularly true of imaginary friends connected with
> adolescent diary keeping (e.g. Anne Frank's imaginary friend
> "Kitty").
> Â
> My wife's imaginary friend (also associated with keeping a diary),
> for example, was called "Yi Lin" or "One Forest". As an adolescent
> she later changed her name (which is the Chinese equivalent of "Jane
> Smith") into "Spring Thunder", and although she insists that she did
> this for political reasons ("Spring Thunder" has a certain Cultural
> Revolution ring to it in Chinese) it seems to me that it is more of
> a continuation of the naturalistic imagery we see in "One Forest".
> Â
> But I read a book recently ("Imaginary Companions and the Children
> Who Create Them", by Marjorie Taylor, OUP 1999) which suggests that
> imaginary companions often appear MUCH earlier than I thought they
> did (as early as three or four years of age).
> Â
> So it seems to me that they are not just reifications of imaginary
> play or ideal reconstructions of real people; they might be
> connected to the child's (very early) discovery of things like
> television, fiction, and the child's attempt to reproduce them in
> diaries (as WRITTEN self-directed speech).
> Â
> ("One Forest"Â is also a homophone of a name of a popular magazine
> in China which publishes translations from abroad.)
> Â
> David Kellogg
> Â
> Â
>
>
> --- On Thu, 8/11/11, Rod Parker-Rees <R.Parker-Rees@plymouth.ac.uk>
> wrote:
>
>
> From: Rod Parker-Rees <R.Parker-Rees@plymouth.ac.uk>
> Subject: RE: [xmca] Living metaphor and conventionalized language
> To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
> Date: Thursday, August 11, 2011, 2:19 AM
>
>
> Hi David,
>
> I hope you won't mind if I reply to just one little corner of your
> very eloquent message (I have not been able to keep pace with recent
> discussions).
>
> I am particularly interested in very early communication which, I
> think, has much more of the 'meaty sensuousness' about it - not yet
> pared and polished to the clear austerity of a sign system. It
> occurred to me that 'internalised' verbal thought 'usually' involves
> a considerable degree of paring and polishing - we perhaps learn to
> think with concepts rather than simply to 'relive' relational
> experiences in all their meaty sensuousness. I wondered, then,
> whether the fairly widespread incidence of 'imaginary friends' might
> be understood, at least to some extent, in terms of an early
> reluctance to forego the relational richness of interpersonal
> communication as this comes to be 'internalised'. The feeling of
> relating to another person is importantly different from the feeling
> of 'having a thought' and may, at many levels, feel more satisfying.
> This could lead on to echoes of Julian Jayne's argument about the
> relative recency of our 'ability' to recognise
> thoughts as internal 'products' of our own minds (how much our minds
> are indeed our own is the question here!) but also into dangerous
> territory where our preferred imaginary friend is omnipotent.
>
> Being 'in' relation with another person is an altogether richer,
> more complicated and sensually elaborate experience even than
> remembering or thinking about being with someone and I think a lot
> of the yearning of poetry relates to this sense of the gates of
> perception being clouded by knowledge - once you have tasted the
> forbidden fruit there is no going back (or at least no easy going
> back - some people devote their lives to contemplation, meditation,
> prayer and other ways of trying to still the distracting ruckus of
> 'roof-brain chatter'.
>
> All the best,
>
> Rod
>
> ________________________________________
> From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu] On
> Behalf Of David Kellogg [vaughndogblack@yahoo.com]
> Sent: 10 August 2011 16:27
> To: Culture ActivityeXtended Mind
> Subject: Re: [xmca] Living metaphor and conventionalized language
>
> Did I use the word "system"? I suppose I did. What I really mean is
> what Halliday calls "meaning potential", the way that a traffic
> light can potentially be red or yellow or green. It is what we might
> call leaving things that we could say unsaid.
>
> I guess I think of a system as being just a set of options, you
> know, like a traffic light, or a dictionary entry or the system of
> tense or negation. It's the semiotic resources that Mommy and Daddy
> provide you with, the set of metaphors that have already been made
> with the language, what Vygotsky calls signification.
>
> One of the key unresolved problems in CHAT (which you can see, for
> example, in the way Ratner disagrees with Wertsch, and even in the
> early disagreements between Vygotsky and Leontiev over "activity"
> and "semiosis") is how culture gets "in": is it "internalized" or is
> it "appropriated"? Is it somehow co-constructed, by the individual
> on the one hand and the society on the other?
>
> Of course, BOTH "internalization" and "appropriation" are metaphors.
> I don't flee from the "internalization" metaphor the way that Martin
> does, partly because I think of it as referring not to a body but as
> to a nation, a country, a city, a community, a family...or some
> particle thereof. In this sense (a sense which I suppose is better
> captured by "interiorization" than by "internalization", just as
> "reflection" is better captured by "refraction") there is no
> duality; when you move from one nation to another you do not change
> worlds, nor do you change nations when you move from one city to
> another.
>
> But I do have a problem--I think that we can't just get culture into
> the picture by referring to cultural artefacts like signs and tools.
> The map is not the territory, and human relations are not, in
> essence, about signs and tools; they are about flesh and blood other
> people. It is here that I think distinguishing between meaning
> potential in a cultural artefact and the actual meaning making that
> goes on between flesh and blood persons is important, not least
> because BOTH of them develop and develop each other in a way that's
> not really explicable by just looking at the artefacts themselves.
>
> Consider, for example, the dictionary as a cultural artefact. You
> know, in the eighteenth century, dictionaries were a little like
> Bartlett's today. They did contain definitions for the really thick-
> skulled (there was a newly literate middle class that had to have
> everything spelled out) but the definitions were sometimes rather
> whimsical (e.g. "pensioner: a man whose flattery is repaid with
> insolence") and the main thing people read them for was the learned
> quotations and snappy put-downs that were provided as examples
> (hence Johnson's dictionary and of course the "Devil's Dictionary"
> of Ambrose Bierce).
>
> So the function of a dictionary was not to systematize the language
> but rather to provide resources for sense. It was to make you sound
> witty and creative and original in the chocolate houses. I suppose
> it must have been rather annoying that dictionaries were so widely
> read, because it meant that many people in your chocolate house
> would know the joke before you told it, or, heaven forfend, try to
> tell the same joke themselves.But of course dictionaries WERE widely
> read, and they became guides to meaning potential rather than a set
> of instances of actual wit.
>
> In the late twentieth century, though, the pendulum began to swing
> the other way, because CoBuild and other dictionaries began to
> inspect computer corpora of actual uses, and they discovered (for
> example) that it is much more common to say, metaphorically, that
> you "run a business" than concretely, that you run a hundred yards
> on your own two feet. To me, though, all that means is that the new
> systemic "meaning potential" has to start with running a business,
> and that what I did this morning for exercise was a kind of
> metaphorical extension of running a business to my muscles and
> achilles tendons.
>
> There is a good poem about the relationship between meaning
> potential and actual meaning by Cecil Day-Lewis. It's metaphorical,
> of course! He begins by defining a sign for us, and pointing out
> that a tree is a sign too (because it stands for itself, or if you
> want to be physiological about it, it produces an image on our
> retina which is interpreted by our brains as a tree.) But it's a
> sign without a system, without much unrealized meaning potential.
>
> This tree outside my window here,
> Naked, umbrageous, fresh or sere,
> Has neither chance nor will to be
> Anything but a linden tree,
> Even if its branches grew to span
> The continent; for nature’s plan
> Insists that infinite extension
> Shall create no new dimension.
>> From the first snuggling of the seed
> In earth, a branchy form’s decreed.
>
> You have to admit the Creator was original. He was certainly
> forceful in his creativity. But rather limited, when you look at it;
> in His later career He kept repeating Himself with only minor
> variations, and most of what was new was not very good. Human
> creativity is a different matter!.
>
> Unwritten poems loom as if
> They’d cover the whole of earthly life.
> But each one, growing, learns to trim its
> Impulse and meaning to the limits
> Roughed out by me, then modified
> In its own truth’s expanding light.
> A poem, settling to its form,
> Finds there’s no jailer, but a norm
> Of conduct, and a fitting sphere
> Which stops it wandering everywhere.
>
> Human creativity, unlike nature, is an embarrassment of riches; we
> need rhyme (which you notice Day-Lewis adheres to quite rigorously)
> and meter to keep us honest. As Adorno says, the bourgeoisie would
> like life to be austere and art voluptuous, but we would really be
> much better off with things the other way around: life full of
> actual meaning, and art full of things left unsaid.
>
> Now here Day-Lewis notes that there is a third thing--and it is the
> thing that Bakhtin wrote almost exclusively about, something that is
> neither system of meaning nor instance of meaning making, something
> that is neither signification nor purely individual sense: it is
> human relationships in all their complex, meaty sensuousness.
>
> Are interpersonal relations more like intra-personal relations or
> are they more like societal relations? Are they more intra-
> psychological or more trans-psychological? Are more things to be
> left said or unsaid? Half said?
>
> Are these going to be austere or voluptuous? Will they depend on
> potential or upon realization?
>
> As for you, my love, it’s harder,
> Though neither prisoner nor warder,
> Not to desire you both: for love
> Illudes us we can lightly move
> Into a new dimension, where
> The bounds of being disappear
> And we make one impassioned cell.
> So wanting to be all in all
> Each for each, a man and a woman
> Defy the limits of what’s human.
>
> Voluptuous then, and almost intrapersonal--but this is a romantic,
> young person's view. Day-Lewis wrote this late in life, after many
> years of what we would have to call development. Human development
> is not like natural development; it means creating more potential
> rather than simply realizing it (and thus leaving less unsaid).
>
> But when we cease to play explorers
> And become settlers, clear before us
> Lies the next need – to re-define
> The boundary between yours and mine;
> Else, one stays prisoner, one goes free.
> Each to his own identity
> Grown back, shall prove our love’s expression
> Purer for this limitation.
> Love’s essence, like a poem’s, shall spring
>> From the not saying everything.
>
> David Kellogg
>
>
>
>
> --- On Wed, 8/10/11, Larry Purss <lpscholar2@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> From: Larry Purss <lpscholar2@gmail.com>
> Subject: [xmca] Living metaphor and conventionalized language
> To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
> Date: Wednesday, August 10, 2011, 10:59 AM
>
>
> Hi David Ke
>
> Your response to Nickolai mentioned the constant movement of living
> metaphor
> and language as a conventionalized SYSTEM.  This seems to me to be
> one more
> example of this living GENERATIVE movement of consciousness.
>
> Larry
> __________________________________________
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> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 5
> Date: Fri, 12 Aug 2011 13:04:51 +1000
> From: Helen Grimmett <helen.grimmett@monash.edu>
> Subject: Re: [xmca] Imaginary Friends
> To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
> Message-ID:
>       <CAGzL+FJ0Y1fY0R6AvqWbE-YpZL9dFNf+eDrTP+eo012v1-B8vA@mail.gmail.com>
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>
> Hi David,
> I can attest to the fact that imaginary friends do appear as early
> as three.
> When my daughter was 3 we travelled around Australia in a motorhome,
> apparently accompanied by an extra imaginary girl (whose name
> escapes me), a
> pair of imaginary twins called Hog and Sock (not sure what gender!)
> and a
> fluffy white imaginary dog called Maddi. I'm sure there were people
> right
> across the country scratching their heads as we had to wait while
> Hog and
> Sock had a turn on the swings before we could get back in the truck,
> and a
> very confused waitress in Darwin who got snapped at by a 3 year old
> when she
> tried to take all the extra (empty) chairs away from our table to
> give us
> more space! I sometimes wonder if this was a coping mechanism Natalie
> developed to deal with the fact that we were in a new place every
> couple of
> days and life was suddenly quite unpredictable, although I think
> these extra
> friends had appeared even before we left on the trip. I am sure it
> helped
> her gain some measure of control over her (and our) life. If it wasn't
> inconveniencing anyone we were happy to pander to the imaginary
> friends, but
> fortunately she was realistic enough to realise that the needs of real
> humans came first (i.e. if someone else was waiting for the swing or
> needed
> the empty chairs). When you are living in a confined space for 3
> months you
> do whatever it takes to keep everyone happy!
>
> cheers,
> Helen
>
> On 12 August 2011 12:26, David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Gadzooks, TWO of my favorite hobby horses in one posting: Julian
>> Jaynes and
>> imaginary friends. I don't want to fall between two hobby horses; I
>> get
>> wobbly at the knees writing about even one of them
>>
>> I used to think of imaginary friends as what Vygotsky referred to
>> as a
>> transitional neoformation: something that appears around age 7 or 8
>> and
>> lasts until the the child is able to attach roles (which are
>> functional
>> versions of imaginary friends) to actual people (around twelve or
>> thirteen).
>>
>> Vygotsky describes it like this:
>>
>> "Neoformations such as self love and self-evaulation remain, but the
>> symptoms of the crisis (affectation, posing) are transitional. In
>> the crisis
>> at age seven, because of the fact that a differentiation of the
>> internal and
>> external develops and intellectual experience first appears, a sharp
>> conflict of experiences also devleops. The child who does not know
>> which
>> candy to choose--the bigger or the sweeter--finds himself in a
>> state of
>> internal conflict even as he vacillates. The internal conflict
>> (contradiction of experiences and selection of his own experiences)
>> becomes
>> possible only at this time." (The Crisis at Seven, in "The Essential
>> Vygotsky", p. 494).
>>
>> I still think that some imaginary friends are like this: something
>> that
>> comes out of the same differentiation between internal and external
>> that
>> gives rise to role play. Like me, the child hesitates between two
>> hobby
>> horses: imaginary friends and real ones.
>>
>> The imaginary friend then "volatilizes" into abstract rule play and
>> conceptual thinking (particularly the concept of "me" "myself" and
>> "I").
>> Just as the child learns to rise to the concrete, by abstract away
>> the rule
>> from the role in instances of game play, the child learns to attach
>> the ideal figure to the behavior of actual people. This is
>> particularly true
>> of imaginary friends connected with adolescent diary keeping (e.g.
>> Anne
>> Frank's imaginary friend "Kitty").
>>
>> My wife's imaginary friend (also associated with keeping a diary),
>> for
>> example, was called "Yi Lin" or "One Forest". As an adolescent she
>> later
>> changed her name (which is the Chinese equivalent of "Jane Smith")
>> into
>> "Spring Thunder", and although she insists that she did this for
>> political
>> reasons ("Spring Thunder" has a certain Cultural Revolution ring to
>> it in
>> Chinese) it seems to me that it is more of a continuation of the
>> naturalistic imagery we see in "One Forest".
>>
>> But I read a book recently ("Imaginary Companions and the Children
>> Who
>> Create Them", by Marjorie Taylor, OUP 1999) which suggests that
>> imaginary
>> companions often appear MUCH earlier than I thought they did (as
>> early as
>> three or four years of age).
>>
>> So it seems to me that they are not just reifications of imaginary
>> play or
>> ideal reconstructions of real people; they might be connected to
>> the child's
>> (very early) discovery of things like television, fiction, and the
>> child's
>> attempt to reproduce them in diaries (as WRITTEN self-directed
>> speech).
>>
>> ("One Forest" is also a homophone of a name of a popular magazine
>> in China
>> which publishes translations from abroad.)
>>
>> David Kellogg
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --- On Thu, 8/11/11, Rod Parker-Rees <R.Parker-Rees@plymouth.ac.uk>
>> wrote:
>>
>>
>> From: Rod Parker-Rees <R.Parker-Rees@plymouth.ac.uk>
>> Subject: RE: [xmca] Living metaphor and conventionalized language
>> To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
>> Date: Thursday, August 11, 2011, 2:19 AM
>>
>>
>> Hi David,
>>
>> I hope you won't mind if I reply to just one little corner of your
>> very
>> eloquent message (I have not been able to keep pace with recent
>> discussions).
>>
>> I am particularly interested in very early communication which, I
>> think,
>> has much more of the 'meaty sensuousness' about it - not yet pared
>> and
>> polished to the clear austerity of a sign system. It occurred to me
>> that
>> 'internalised' verbal thought 'usually' involves a considerable
>> degree of
>> paring and polishing - we perhaps learn to think with concepts
>> rather than
>> simply to 'relive' relational experiences in all their meaty
>> sensuousness. I
>> wondered, then, whether the fairly widespread incidence of 'imaginary
>> friends' might be understood, at least to some extent, in terms of
>> an early
>> reluctance to forego the relational richness of interpersonal
>> communication
>> as this comes to be 'internalised'. The feeling of relating to
>> another
>> person is importantly different from the feeling of 'having a
>> thought' and
>> may, at many levels, feel more satisfying. This could lead on to
>> echoes of
>> Julian Jayne's argument about the relative recency of our 'ability'
>> to
>> recognise
>> thoughts as internal 'products' of our own minds (how much our
>> minds are
>> indeed our own is the question here!) but also into dangerous
>> territory
>> where our preferred imaginary friend is omnipotent.
>>
>> Being 'in' relation with another person is an altogether richer, more
>> complicated and sensually elaborate experience even than
>> remembering or
>> thinking about being with someone and I think a lot of the yearning
>> of
>> poetry relates to this sense of the gates of perception being
>> clouded by
>> knowledge - once you have tasted the forbidden fruit there is no
>> going back
>> (or at least no easy going back - some people devote their lives to
>> contemplation, meditation, prayer and other ways of trying to still
>> the
>> distracting ruckus of 'roof-brain chatter'.
>>
>> All the best,
>>
>> Rod
>>
>> ________________________________________
>> From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu] On
>> Behalf
>> Of David Kellogg [vaughndogblack@yahoo.com]
>> Sent: 10 August 2011 16:27
>> To: Culture ActivityeXtended Mind
>> Subject: Re: [xmca] Living metaphor and conventionalized language
>>
>> Did I use the word "system"? I suppose I did. What I really mean is
>> what
>> Halliday calls "meaning potential", the way that a traffic light can
>> potentially be red or yellow or green. It is what we might call
>> leaving
>> things that we could say unsaid.
>>
>> I guess I think of a system as being just a set of options, you
>> know, like
>> a traffic light, or a dictionary entry or the system of tense or
>> negation.
>> It's the semiotic resources that Mommy and Daddy provide you with,
>> the set
>> of metaphors that have already been made with the language, what
>> Vygotsky
>> calls signification.
>>
>> One of the key unresolved problems in CHAT (which you can see, for
>> example,
>> in the way Ratner disagrees with Wertsch, and even in the early
>> disagreements between Vygotsky and Leontiev over "activity" and
>> "semiosis")
>> is how culture gets "in": is it "internalized" or is it
>> "appropriated"? Is
>> it somehow co-constructed, by the individual on the one hand and
>> the society
>> on the other?
>>
>> Of course, BOTH "internalization" and "appropriation" are
>> metaphors. I
>> don't flee from the "internalization" metaphor the way that Martin
>> does,
>> partly because I think of it as referring not to a body but as to a
>> nation,
>> a country, a city, a community, a family...or some particle
>> thereof. In this
>> sense (a sense which I suppose is better captured by
>> "interiorization" than
>> by "internalization", just as "reflection" is better captured by
>> "refraction") there is no duality; when you move from one nation to
>> another
>> you do not change worlds, nor do you change nations when you move
>> from one
>> city to another.
>>
>> But I do have a problem--I think that we can't just get culture
>> into the
>> picture by referring to cultural artefacts like signs and tools.
>> The map is
>> not the territory, and human relations are not, in essence, about
>> signs and
>> tools; they are about flesh and blood other people. It is here that
>> I think
>> distinguishing between meaning potential in a cultural artefact and
>> the
>> actual meaning making that goes on between flesh and blood persons is
>> important, not least because BOTH of them develop and develop each
>> other in
>> a way that's not really explicable by just looking at the artefacts
>> themselves.
>>
>> Consider, for example, the dictionary as a cultural artefact. You
>> know, in
>> the eighteenth century, dictionaries were a little like Bartlett's
>> today.
>> They did contain definitions for the really thick-skulled (there
>> was a newly
>> literate middle class that had to have everything spelled out) but
>> the
>> definitions were sometimes rather whimsical (e.g. "pensioner: a man
>> whose
>> flattery is repaid with insolence") and the main thing people read
>> them for
>> was the learned quotations and snappy put-downs that were provided as
>> examples (hence Johnson's dictionary and of course the "Devil's
>> Dictionary"
>> of Ambrose Bierce).
>>
>> So the function of a dictionary was not to systematize the language
>> but
>> rather to provide resources for sense. It was to make you sound
>> witty and
>> creative and original in the chocolate houses. I suppose it must
>> have been
>> rather annoying that dictionaries were so widely read, because it
>> meant that
>> many people in your chocolate house would know the joke before you
>> told it,
>> or, heaven forfend, try to tell the same joke themselves.But of
>> course
>> dictionaries WERE widely read, and they became guides to meaning
>> potential
>> rather than a set of instances of actual wit.
>>
>> In the late twentieth century, though, the pendulum began to swing
>> the
>> other way, because CoBuild and other dictionaries began to inspect
>> computer
>> corpora of actual uses, and they discovered (for example) that it
>> is much
>> more common to say, metaphorically, that you "run a business" than
>> concretely, that you run a hundred yards on your own two feet. To me,
>> though, all that means is that the new systemic "meaning potential"
>> has to
>> start with running a business, and that what I did this morning for
>> exercise
>> was a kind of metaphorical extension of running a business to my
>> muscles and
>> achilles tendons.
>>
>> There is a good poem about the relationship between meaning
>> potential and
>> actual meaning by Cecil Day-Lewis. It's metaphorical, of course! He
>> begins
>> by defining a sign for us, and pointing out that a tree is a sign too
>> (because it stands for itself, or if you want to be physiological
>> about it,
>> it produces an image on our retina which is interpreted by our
>> brains as a
>> tree.) But it's a sign without a system, without much unrealized
>> meaning
>> potential.
>>
>> This tree outside my window here,
>> Naked, umbrageous, fresh or sere,
>> Has neither chance nor will to be
>> Anything but a linden tree,
>> Even if its branches grew to span
>> The continent; for nature’s plan
>> Insists that infinite extension
>> Shall create no new dimension.
>>> From the first snuggling of the seed
>> In earth, a branchy form’s decreed.
>>
>> You have to admit the Creator was original. He was certainly
>> forceful in
>> his creativity. But rather limited, when you look at it; in His
>> later career
>> He kept repeating Himself with only minor variations, and most of
>> what was
>> new was not very good. Human creativity is a different matter!.
>>
>> Unwritten poems loom as if
>> They’d cover the whole of earthly life.
>> But each one, growing, learns to trim its
>> Impulse and meaning to the limits
>> Roughed out by me, then modified
>> In its own truth’s expanding light.
>> A poem, settling to its form,
>> Finds there’s no jailer, but a norm
>> Of conduct, and a fitting sphere
>> Which stops it wandering everywhere.
>>
>> Human creativity, unlike nature, is an embarrassment of riches; we
>> need
>> rhyme (which you notice Day-Lewis adheres to quite rigorously) and
>> meter to
>> keep us honest. As Adorno says, the bourgeoisie would like life to be
>> austere and art voluptuous, but we would really be much better off
>> with
>> things the other way around: life full of actual meaning, and art
>> full of
>> things left unsaid.
>>
>> Now here Day-Lewis notes that there is a third thing--and it is the
>> thing
>> that Bakhtin wrote almost exclusively about, something that is
>> neither
>> system of meaning nor instance of meaning making, something that is
>> neither
>> signification nor purely individual sense: it is human
>> relationships in all
>> their complex, meaty sensuousness.
>>
>> Are interpersonal relations more like intra-personal relations or
>> are they
>> more like societal relations? Are they more intra-psychological or
>> more
>> trans-psychological? Are more things to be left said or unsaid?
>> Half said?
>>
>> Are these going to be austere or voluptuous? Will they depend on
>> potential
>> or upon realization?
>>
>> As for you, my love, it’s harder,
>> Though neither prisoner nor warder,
>> Not to desire you both: for love
>> Illudes us we can lightly move
>> Into a new dimension, where
>> The bounds of being disappear
>> And we make one impassioned cell.
>> So wanting to be all in all
>> Each for each, a man and a woman
>> Defy the limits of what’s human.
>>
>> Voluptuous then, and almost intrapersonal--but this is a romantic,
>> young
>> person's view. Day-Lewis wrote this late in life, after many years
>> of what
>> we would have to call development. Human development is not like
>> natural
>> development; it means creating more potential rather than simply
>> realizing
>> it (and thus leaving less unsaid).
>>
>> But when we cease to play explorers
>> And become settlers, clear before us
>> Lies the next need – to re-define
>> The boundary between yours and mine;
>> Else, one stays prisoner, one goes free.
>> Each to his own identity
>> Grown back, shall prove our love’s expression
>> Purer for this limitation.
>> Love’s essence, like a poem’s, shall spring
>>> From the not saying everything.
>>
>> David Kellogg
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --- On Wed, 8/10/11, Larry Purss <lpscholar2@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>> From: Larry Purss <lpscholar2@gmail.com>
>> Subject: [xmca] Living metaphor and conventionalized language
>> To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
>> Date: Wednesday, August 10, 2011, 10:59 AM
>>
>>
>> Hi David Ke
>>
>> Your response to Nickolai mentioned the constant movement of living
>> metaphor
>> and language as a conventionalized SYSTEM.  This seems to me to be
>> one more
>> example of this living GENERATIVE movement of consciousness.
>>
>> Larry
>> __________________________________________
>> _____
>> xmca mailing list
>> xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
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>> _____
>> xmca mailing list
>> xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
>> http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
>> __________________________________________
>> _____
>> xmca mailing list
>> xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
>> http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
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>>
>
>
>
> --
> Helen Grimmett
> PhD Student, Teaching Associate
> Faculty of Education
> Monash University, Peninsula Campus
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 6
> Date: Thu, 11 Aug 2011 20:54:03 -0700 (PDT)
> From: David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>
> Subject: Re: [xmca] Living metaphor and conventionalized language
> To: Culture ActivityeXtended Mind <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
> Message-ID:
>       <1313121243.6209.YahooMailClassic@web110315.mail.gq1.yahoo.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
>
> Dear Rob:
> Â
> Thanks for the kind words, and above all for the Wallace Stevens,
> neither fragment of which I knew, but whose rather self-defeatingÂ
> sentiments I am very fond of (for reasons that actually do have
> something to do with the reasons that I will probably never be able
> to unload any of this stuff in the Journal of Aesthetic Education or
> any other peer-reviewed journal).
> Â
> I like to think of Stevens as the greatest insurance agent who
> every wrote poetry about it. Insurance companies make money by
> betting with you that you are wrong when you wake up in the night
> and imagine that something absolutely catastrophic is going to
> happen to you in the morning.
> Â
> But what happens when an insurance company issues a fire policy on
> its own headquarters? In both fragments you cite, Stevens picks up
> where Blake leaves off:
> Â
> Mock on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau;
> Mock on, mock on; 'tis all in vain!
> You throw the sand against the wind,
> And the wind blows it back again.
>
> And every sand becomes a gem
> Reflected in the beams divine;
> Blown back they blind the mocking eye,
> But still in Israel's paths they shine.
>
> The Atoms of Democritus
> And Newton's Particles of Light
> Are sands upon the Red Sea shore,
> Where Israel's tents do shine so bright.Â
>
> Blake would never bother to take out life insurance on Israel's
> paths and tents; he believes in their eternal life, and he looks
> forward, gleefully, to collecting on Voltaire and Rousseau.
> Â
> I think Stevens is not so sure. When we read "Anecdote of a Jar" or
> "The Idea of Order"  we can see that he believes that any human
> artefact imposes reasons and a kind of order in the place of chaotic
> nature.
> Â
> The way a Tibetan woman dresses, as she walks "korla" around the
> Jokhang Temple in Lhasa, imposes a clockwork regularity on the whole
> of existence. Vygotsky? Oh, I think there is no question about it.
> He would have bet with Voltaire and Rousseau against Israel's
> paths and tents (probably wearing a square hat or some kind of
> phylacteries).
> Â
> There is a good defense of Vygotsky's rationalism in Bakhurst's
> article "Vygotsky's Demons" (in the Cambridge Companion), and I
> agree with it. The only really rationalist demon that Bakhurst
> refuses to defend is the one that troubles Mike from time to time,
> the idea that cultures must be said to be different, and that some
> of them must be said to be more developed than others.
> Â
> Actually, even this seems defensible to me, but we have to face the
> fact that "we" will probably belong to the senescent, post-
> development others rather than to the most developed. Take, for
> example, the crudest possible quantitative measure of aÂ
> "developed" society, namely the average life expectancy it offers to
> its newborn children. In China, the average life expectancy in Tibet
> (at least in the rural areas) is in the thirties and forties, while
> the rest of the country has easily twice that.
> Â
> Life expectancy fell when Russia re-established capitalism, and of
> course it is falling in the USA, and it seems to me this too
> suggests something about their changing level of social and
> cultural development. So on the one hand, development is real,
> substantial, and it does apply not just to individual lives but also
> to those of cultures and societies. And on other, unlike individual
> development, it can really never said to be over and therefore there
> can't be any absolute sense in which any race has won the race.
> Â
> I think Stevens would have felt the contradiction between those two
> statements, but Vygotsky would have been able to explain it. Wearing
> a sombrero!
> Â
> David Kellogg
> Â
>
>
> --- On Thu, 8/11/11, Robert Lake <boblake@georgiasouthern.edu> wrote:
>
>
> From: Robert Lake <boblake@georgiasouthern.edu>
> Subject: Re: [xmca] Living metaphor and conventionalized language
> To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
> Date: Thursday, August 11, 2011, 7:04 AM
>
>
> David Kellogg,
> Thank-you for this wonderful posting.
>> From what I have been reading of your work
> for over a year now, writing like this
> represents your best work.
>
> I recommend you submit something to the
> *Journal of Aesthetic Education.*
>
> Thanks for the poetry and your commentary.
> I have never read anything by Cecil Day-Lewis and now I must have
> more.
> Here are the last two stanzas -from Wallace Stevens........
>
> *Six Significant Landscapes*
>
> I include the first one for the sheer beauty of metaphor and the
> last one
> just for fun.
>
> Robert Lake
>
>
>
> Not all the knives of the lamp-posts,
> Nor the chisels of the long streets,
> Nor the mallets of the domes
> And high towers,
> Can carve
> What one star can carve,
> Shining through the grape-leaves.
>
>
> Rationalists, wearing square hats,
> Think, in square rooms,
> Looking at the floor,
> Looking at the ceiling.
> They confine themselves
> To right-angled triangles.
> If they tried rhomboids,
> Cones, waving lines, ellipses --
> As, for example, the ellipse of the half-moon --
> Rationalists would wear sombreros.
>
>
> On Thu, Aug 11, 2011 at 12:27 AM, David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com
> >wrote:
>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Did I use the word "system"? I suppose I did. What I really mean is
>> what
>> Halliday calls "meaning potential", the way that a traffic light can
>> potentially be red or yellow or green. It is what we might call
>> leaving
>> things that we could say unsaid.
>>
>> I guess I think of a system as being just a set of options, you
>> know, like
>> a traffic light, or a dictionary entry or the system of tense or
>> negation.
>> It's the semiotic resources that Mommy and Daddy provide you with,
>> the set
>> of metaphors that have already been made with the language, what
>> Vygotsky
>> calls signification.
>>
>> One of the key unresolved problems in CHAT (which you can see, for
>> example,
>> in the way Ratner disagrees with Wertsch, and even in the early
>> disagreements between Vygotsky and Leontiev over "activity" and
>> "semiosis")
>> is how culture gets "in": is it "internalized" or is it
>> "appropriated"? Is
>> it somehow co-constructed, by the individual on the one hand and
>> the society
>> on the other?
>>
>> Of course, BOTH "internalization" and "appropriation" are
>> metaphors. I
>> don't flee from the "internalization" metaphor the way that Martin
>> does,
>> partly because I think of it as referring not to a body but as to a
>> nation,
>> a country, a city, a community, a family...or some particle
>> thereof. In this
>> sense (a sense which I suppose is better captured by
>> "interiorization" than
>> by "internalization", just as "reflection" is better captured by
>> "refraction") there is no duality; when you move from one nation to
>> another
>> you do not change worlds, nor do you change nations when you move
>> from one
>> city to another.
>>
>> But I do have a problem--I think that we can't just get culture
>> into the
>> picture by referring to cultural artefacts like signs and tools.
>> The map is
>> not the territory, and human relations are not, in essence, about
>> signs and
>> tools; they are about flesh and blood other people. It is here that
>> I think
>> distinguishing between meaning potential in a cultural artefact and
>> the
>> actual meaning making that goes on between flesh and blood persons is
>> important, not least because BOTH of them develop and develop each
>> other in
>> a way that's not really explicable by just looking at the artefacts
>> themselves.
>>
>> Consider, for example, the dictionary as a cultural artefact. You
>> know, in
>> the eighteenth century, dictionaries were a little like Bartlett's
>> today.
>> They did contain definitions for the really thick-skulled (there
>> was a newly
>> literate middle class that had to have everything spelled out) but
>> the
>> definitions were sometimes rather whimsical (e.g. "pensioner: a man
>> whose
>> flattery is repaid with insolence") and the main thing people read
>> them for
>> was the learned quotations and snappy put-downs that were provided as
>> examples (hence Johnson's dictionary and of course the "Devil's
>> Dictionary"
>> of Ambrose Bierce).
>>
>> So the function of a dictionary was not to systematize the language
>> but
>> rather to provide resources for sense. It was to make you sound
>> witty and
>> creative and original in the chocolate houses. I suppose it must
>> have been
>> rather annoying that dictionaries were so widely read, because it
>> meant that
>> many people in your chocolate house would know the joke before you
>> told it,
>> or, heaven forfend, try to tell the same joke themselves.But of
>> course
>> dictionaries WERE widely read, and they became guides to meaning
>> potential
>> rather than a set of instances of actual wit.
>>
>> In the late twentieth century, though, the pendulum began to swing
>> the
>> other way, because CoBuild and other dictionaries began to inspect
>> computer
>> corpora of actual uses, and they discovered (for example) that it
>> is much
>> more common to say, metaphorically, that you "run a business" than
>> concretely, that you run a hundred yards on your own two feet. To me,
>> though, all that means is that the new systemic "meaning potential"
>> has to
>> start with running a business, and that what I did this morning for
>> exercise
>> was a kind of metaphorical extension of running a business to my
>> muscles and
>> achilles tendons.
>>
>> There is a good poem about the relationship between meaning
>> potential and
>> actual meaning by Cecil Day-Lewis. It's metaphorical, of course! He
>> begins
>> by defining a sign for us, and pointing out that a tree is a sign too
>> (because it stands for itself, or if you want to be physiological
>> about it,
>> it produces an image on our retina which is interpreted by our
>> brains as a
>> tree.) But it's a sign without a system, without much unrealized
>> meaning
>> potential.
>>
>> This tree outside my window here,
>> Naked, umbrageous, fresh or sere,
>> Has neither chance nor will to be
>> Anything but a linden tree,
>> Even if its branches grew to span
>> The continent; for nature’s plan
>> Insists that infinite extension
>> Shall create no new dimension.
>>> From the first snuggling of the seed
>> In earth, a branchy form’s decreed.
>>
>> You have to admit the Creator was original. He was certainly
>> forceful in
>> his creativity. But rather limited, when you look at it; in His
>> later career
>> He kept repeating Himself with only minor variations, and most of
>> what was
>> new was not very good. Human creativity is a different matter!.
>>
>> Unwritten poems loom as if
>> They’d cover the whole of earthly life.
>> But each one, growing, learns to trim its
>> Impulse and meaning to the limits
>> Roughed out by me, then modified
>> In its own truth’s expanding light.
>> A poem, settling to its form,
>> Finds there’s no jailer, but a norm
>> Of conduct, and a fitting sphere
>> Which stops it wandering everywhere.
>>
>> Human creativity, unlike nature, is an embarrassment of riches; we
>> need
>> rhyme (which you notice Day-Lewis adheres to quite rigorously) and
>> meter to
>> keep us honest. As Adorno says, the bourgeoisie would like life to be
>> austere and art voluptuous, but we would really be much better off
>> with
>> things the other way around: life full of actual meaning, and art
>> full of
>> things left unsaid.
>>
>> Now here Day-Lewis notes that there is a third thing--and it is the
>> thing
>> that Bakhtin wrote almost exclusively about, something that is
>> neither
>> system of meaning nor instance of meaning making, something that is
>> neither
>> signification nor purely individual sense: it is human
>> relationships in all
>> their complex, meaty sensuousness.
>>
>> Are interpersonal relations more like intra-personal relations or
>> are they
>> more like societal relations? Are they more intra-psychological or
>> more
>> trans-psychological? Are more things to be left said or unsaid?
>> Half said?
>>
>> Are these going to be austere or voluptuous? Will they depend on
>> potential
>> or upon realization?
>>
>> As for you, my love, it’s harder,
>> Though neither prisoner nor warder,
>> Not to desire you both: for love
>> Illudes us we can lightly move
>> Into a new dimension, where
>> The bounds of being disappear
>> And we make one impassioned cell.
>> So wanting to be all in all
>> Each for each, a man and a woman
>> Defy the limits of what’s human.
>>
>> Voluptuous then, and almost intrapersonal--but this is a romantic,
>> young
>> person's view. Day-Lewis wrote this late in life, after many years
>> of what
>> we would have to call development. Human development is not like
>> natural
>> development; it means creating more potential rather than simply
>> realizing
>> it (and thus leaving less unsaid).
>>
>> Â  But when we cease to play explorers
>> And become settlers, clear before us
>> Lies the next need – to re-define
>> The boundary between yours and mine;
>> Else, one stays prisoner, one goes free.
>> Each to his own identity
>> Grown back, shall prove our love’s expression
>> Purer for this limitation.
>> Love’s essence, like a poem’s, shall spring
>>> From the not saying everything.
>>
>> David Kellogg
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --- On Wed, 8/10/11, Larry Purss <lpscholar2@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>> From: Larry Purss <lpscholar2@gmail.com>
>> Subject: [xmca] Living metaphor and conventionalized language
>> To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
>> Date: Wednesday, August 10, 2011, 10:59 AM
>>
>>
>> Hi David Ke
>>
>> Your response to Nickolai mentioned the constant movement of living
>> metaphor
>> and language as a conventionalized SYSTEM.  This seems to me to be
>> one more
>> example of this living GENERATIVE movement of consciousness.
>>
>> Larry
>> __________________________________________
>> _____
>> xmca mailing list
>> xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
>> http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
>> __________________________________________
>> _____
>> xmca mailing list
>> xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
>> http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
>>
>
>
>
> --
> *Robert Lake  Ed.D.
> *Assistant Professor
> Social Foundations of Education
> Dept. of Curriculum, Foundations, and Reading
> Georgia Southern University
> P. O. Box 8144
> Phone: (912) 478-5125
> Fax: (912) 478-5382
> Statesboro, GAÂ  30460
>
> *Democracy must be born anew in every generation, and education is its
> midwife.*
> *-*John Dewey.
> __________________________________________
> _____
> xmca mailing list
> xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
> http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 7
> Date: Fri, 12 Aug 2011 09:13:49 -0400
> From: Robert Lake <boblake@georgiasouthern.edu>
> Subject: Re: [xmca] Imaginary Friends
> To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>,
>       helen.grimmett@monash.edu, vaughndogblack@yahoo.com
> Message-ID:
>       <CAGivucn1v0YnQmS21M4+TBiz2Oifo4qU8Ab_QFv2pqFQA+vFCg@mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
>
> Dear Helen, David, Larry and all,
> I appreciated the postings about imaginary friends. A few weeks ago,
> I wrote
> this for
> a section of* Vygotsky on Education Primer* for Peter Lang
> Publishers, which
> should be out in March of 2012.
> In it I cite Laura Berk and add a story from a friend (cited with
> permission).*
>
> *
>
> Berk shares another powerful example of private speech at work (or
> should I
> say at play) which can be seen in the form of children creating
> imaginary
> playmates. Berk sees this as much more than self entertainment for
> bored
> children. “Dialogues with make-believe partners may serve a
> special coping
> function, offering a safe context in which to practice social skills
> with
> nonthreatening “playmates” before transferring them to the
> real world of
> peer play”(2004. p.96). Some parents and teachers have bought
> into the idea
> that such activities should be restricted or stopped altogether.
>
>
> One story comes from two sisters who shared an imaginary playmate
> named
> Speedy Harbor. These two girls were often cared for by their aunt
> since the
> parent’s work involved quite a bit of travel. The aunt decided
> that the
> girls were spending too much time with the imaginary playmate so one
> day she
> told the girls that Speedy Harbor had died. Needless to say they
> were really
> upset by this news so they decided to have a funeral for Speedy
> Harbor by
> placing him in a shoebox and burying him. Years later one of the
> sisters
> told this story to her classmates in an undergraduate psychology
> class and
> of course the professor was horrified.
>
>
> According to Berk, “25-45 percent of 3-7 year olds have at least
> one
> imaginary friend, and many more than one” (ibid, p.97). Other
> estimates are
> higher. For example Taylor, Carlson, Maring, Gerow,& Charley (2004)
> reported
> that “Overall, 65% of children up to the age of 7 had imaginary
> companions
> at some point during their lives”(p.1,abstract). Further
> research is needed
> in this area but as of this moment in 2011, it is clear that imaginary
> friends for the most part play a positive role in social processes of
> development and language internalization.
>
>
> Have a great weekend and tell your imaginary friends I said hi!
>
>
> Robert Lake
>
>
> * *
> * *
>
> *Berk, L.(1992). Children’s private speech:An overview of theory
> and the
> status of research. In R.M. Diaz & L. Berk (Eds.), Private speech:
> From
> social interaction to self-regulation. Hillsdale, NJ : Lawrence
> Erlbaum
> Associates.*
> * *
>
> * *
> * *
>
> *Berk, L. (2004). Awakening Children's Minds: How Parents and
> Teachers Can
> Make a Difference. Cary, NC. Oxford University Press. *
> * *
>
> On Thu, Aug 11, 2011 at 11:04 PM, Helen Grimmett
> <helen.grimmett@monash.edu>wrote:
>
>> Hi David,
>> I can attest to the fact that imaginary friends do appear as early as
>> three.
>> When my daughter was 3 we travelled around Australia in a motorhome,
>> apparently accompanied by an extra imaginary girl (whose name
>> escapes me),
>> a
>> pair of imaginary twins called Hog and Sock (not sure what gender!)
>> and a
>> fluffy white imaginary dog called Maddi. I'm sure there were people
>> right
>> across the country scratching their heads as we had to wait while
>> Hog and
>> Sock had a turn on the swings before we could get back in the
>> truck, and a
>> very confused waitress in Darwin who got snapped at by a 3 year old
>> when
>> she
>> tried to take all the extra (empty) chairs away from our table to
>> give us
>> more space! I sometimes wonder if this was a coping mechanism Natalie
>> developed to deal with the fact that we were in a new place every
>> couple of
>> days and life was suddenly quite unpredictable, although I think
>> these
>> extra
>> friends had appeared even before we left on the trip. I am sure it
>> helped
>> her gain some measure of control over her (and our) life. If it
>> wasn't
>> inconveniencing anyone we were happy to pander to the imaginary
>> friends,
>> but
>> fortunately she was realistic enough to realise that the needs of
>> real
>> humans came first (i.e. if someone else was waiting for the swing
>> or needed
>> the empty chairs). When you are living in a confined space for 3
>> months you
>> do whatever it takes to keep everyone happy!
>>
>> cheers,
>> Helen
>>
>> On 12 August 2011 12:26, David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Gadzooks, TWO of my favorite hobby horses in one posting: Julian
>>> Jaynes
>> and
>>> imaginary friends. I don't want to fall between two hobby horses;
>>> I get
>>> wobbly at the knees writing about even one of them
>>>
>>> I used to think of imaginary friends as what Vygotsky referred to
>>> as a
>>> transitional neoformation: something that appears around age 7 or
>>> 8 and
>>> lasts until the the child is able to attach roles (which are
>>> functional
>>> versions of imaginary friends) to actual people (around twelve or
>> thirteen).
>>>
>>> Vygotsky describes it like this:
>>>
>>> "Neoformations such as self love and self-evaulation remain, but the
>>> symptoms of the crisis (affectation, posing) are transitional. In
>>> the
>> crisis
>>> at age seven, because of the fact that a differentiation of the
>>> internal
>> and
>>> external develops and intellectual experience first appears, a sharp
>>> conflict of experiences also devleops. The child who does not know
>>> which
>>> candy to choose--the bigger or the sweeter--finds himself in a
>>> state of
>>> internal conflict even as he vacillates. The internal conflict
>>> (contradiction of experiences and selection of his own experiences)
>> becomes
>>> possible only at this time." (The Crisis at Seven, in "The Essential
>>> Vygotsky", p. 494).
>>>
>>> I still think that some imaginary friends are like this: something
>>> that
>>> comes out of the same differentiation between internal and
>>> external that
>>> gives rise to role play. Like me, the child hesitates between two
>>> hobby
>>> horses: imaginary friends and real ones.
>>>
>>> The imaginary friend then "volatilizes" into abstract rule play and
>>> conceptual thinking (particularly the concept of "me" "myself" and
>>> "I").
>>> Just as the child learns to rise to the concrete, by abstract away
>>> the
>> rule
>>> from the role in instances of game play, the child learns to attach
>>> the ideal figure to the behavior of actual people. This is
>>> particularly
>> true
>>> of imaginary friends connected with adolescent diary keeping (e.g.
>>> Anne
>>> Frank's imaginary friend "Kitty").
>>>
>>> My wife's imaginary friend (also associated with keeping a diary),
>>> for
>>> example, was called "Yi Lin" or "One Forest". As an adolescent she
>>> later
>>> changed her name (which is the Chinese equivalent of "Jane Smith")
>>> into
>>> "Spring Thunder", and although she insists that she did this for
>> political
>>> reasons ("Spring Thunder" has a certain Cultural Revolution ring
>>> to it in
>>> Chinese) it seems to me that it is more of a continuation of the
>>> naturalistic imagery we see in "One Forest".
>>>
>>> But I read a book recently ("Imaginary Companions and the Children
>>> Who
>>> Create Them", by Marjorie Taylor, OUP 1999) which suggests that
>>> imaginary
>>> companions often appear MUCH earlier than I thought they did (as
>>> early as
>>> three or four years of age).
>>>
>>> So it seems to me that they are not just reifications of imaginary
>>> play
>> or
>>> ideal reconstructions of real people; they might be connected to the
>> child's
>>> (very early) discovery of things like television, fiction, and the
>> child's
>>> attempt to reproduce them in diaries (as WRITTEN self-directed
>>> speech).
>>>
>>> ("One Forest" is also a homophone of a name of a popular magazine in
>> China
>>> which publishes translations from abroad.)
>>>
>>> David Kellogg
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> --- On Thu, 8/11/11, Rod Parker-Rees <R.Parker-Rees@plymouth.ac.uk>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> From: Rod Parker-Rees <R.Parker-Rees@plymouth.ac.uk>
>>> Subject: RE: [xmca] Living metaphor and conventionalized language
>>> To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
>>> Date: Thursday, August 11, 2011, 2:19 AM
>>>
>>>
>>> Hi David,
>>>
>>> I hope you won't mind if I reply to just one little corner of your
>>> very
>>> eloquent message (I have not been able to keep pace with recent
>>> discussions).
>>>
>>> I am particularly interested in very early communication which, I
>>> think,
>>> has much more of the 'meaty sensuousness' about it - not yet pared
>>> and
>>> polished to the clear austerity of a sign system. It occurred to
>>> me that
>>> 'internalised' verbal thought 'usually' involves a considerable
>>> degree of
>>> paring and polishing - we perhaps learn to think with concepts
>>> rather
>> than
>>> simply to 'relive' relational experiences in all their meaty
>> sensuousness. I
>>> wondered, then, whether the fairly widespread incidence of
>>> 'imaginary
>>> friends' might be understood, at least to some extent, in terms of
>>> an
>> early
>>> reluctance to forego the relational richness of interpersonal
>> communication
>>> as this comes to be 'internalised'. The feeling of relating to
>>> another
>>> person is importantly different from the feeling of 'having a
>>> thought'
>> and
>>> may, at many levels, feel more satisfying. This could lead on to
>>> echoes
>> of
>>> Julian Jayne's argument about the relative recency of our
>>> 'ability' to
>>> recognise
>>> thoughts as internal 'products' of our own minds (how much our
>>> minds are
>>> indeed our own is the question here!) but also into dangerous
>>> territory
>>> where our preferred imaginary friend is omnipotent.
>>>
>>> Being 'in' relation with another person is an altogether richer,
>>> more
>>> complicated and sensually elaborate experience even than
>>> remembering or
>>> thinking about being with someone and I think a lot of the
>>> yearning of
>>> poetry relates to this sense of the gates of perception being
>>> clouded by
>>> knowledge - once you have tasted the forbidden fruit there is no
>>> going
>> back
>>> (or at least no easy going back - some people devote their lives to
>>> contemplation, meditation, prayer and other ways of trying to
>>> still the
>>> distracting ruckus of 'roof-brain chatter'.
>>>
>>> All the best,
>>>
>>> Rod
>>>
>>> ________________________________________
>>> From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu] On
>> Behalf
>>> Of David Kellogg [vaughndogblack@yahoo.com]
>>> Sent: 10 August 2011 16:27
>>> To: Culture ActivityeXtended Mind
>>> Subject: Re: [xmca] Living metaphor and conventionalized language
>>>
>>> Did I use the word "system"? I suppose I did. What I really mean
>>> is what
>>> Halliday calls "meaning potential", the way that a traffic light can
>>> potentially be red or yellow or green. It is what we might call
>>> leaving
>>> things that we could say unsaid.
>>>
>>> I guess I think of a system as being just a set of options, you
>>> know,
>> like
>>> a traffic light, or a dictionary entry or the system of tense or
>> negation.
>>> It's the semiotic resources that Mommy and Daddy provide you with,
>>> the
>> set
>>> of metaphors that have already been made with the language, what
>>> Vygotsky
>>> calls signification.
>>>
>>> One of the key unresolved problems in CHAT (which you can see, for
>> example,
>>> in the way Ratner disagrees with Wertsch, and even in the early
>>> disagreements between Vygotsky and Leontiev over "activity" and
>> "semiosis")
>>> is how culture gets "in": is it "internalized" or is it
>>> "appropriated"?
>> Is
>>> it somehow co-constructed, by the individual on the one hand and the
>> society
>>> on the other?
>>>
>>> Of course, BOTH "internalization" and "appropriation" are
>>> metaphors. I
>>> don't flee from the "internalization" metaphor the way that Martin
>>> does,
>>> partly because I think of it as referring not to a body but as to a
>> nation,
>>> a country, a city, a community, a family...or some particle
>>> thereof. In
>> this
>>> sense (a sense which I suppose is better captured by
>>> "interiorization"
>> than
>>> by "internalization", just as "reflection" is better captured by
>>> "refraction") there is no duality; when you move from one nation to
>> another
>>> you do not change worlds, nor do you change nations when you move
>>> from
>> one
>>> city to another.
>>>
>>> But I do have a problem--I think that we can't just get culture
>>> into the
>>> picture by referring to cultural artefacts like signs and tools.
>>> The map
>> is
>>> not the territory, and human relations are not, in essence, about
>>> signs
>> and
>>> tools; they are about flesh and blood other people. It is here
>>> that I
>> think
>>> distinguishing between meaning potential in a cultural artefact
>>> and the
>>> actual meaning making that goes on between flesh and blood persons
>>> is
>>> important, not least because BOTH of them develop and develop each
>>> other
>> in
>>> a way that's not really explicable by just looking at the artefacts
>>> themselves.
>>>
>>> Consider, for example, the dictionary as a cultural artefact. You
>>> know,
>> in
>>> the eighteenth century, dictionaries were a little like Bartlett's
>>> today.
>>> They did contain definitions for the really thick-skulled (there
>>> was a
>> newly
>>> literate middle class that had to have everything spelled out) but
>>> the
>>> definitions were sometimes rather whimsical (e.g. "pensioner: a
>>> man whose
>>> flattery is repaid with insolence") and the main thing people read
>>> them
>> for
>>> was the learned quotations and snappy put-downs that were provided
>>> as
>>> examples (hence Johnson's dictionary and of course the "Devil's
>> Dictionary"
>>> of Ambrose Bierce).
>>>
>>> So the function of a dictionary was not to systematize the
>>> language but
>>> rather to provide resources for sense. It was to make you sound
>>> witty and
>>> creative and original in the chocolate houses. I suppose it must
>>> have
>> been
>>> rather annoying that dictionaries were so widely read, because it
>>> meant
>> that
>>> many people in your chocolate house would know the joke before you
>>> told
>> it,
>>> or, heaven forfend, try to tell the same joke themselves.But of
>>> course
>>> dictionaries WERE widely read, and they became guides to meaning
>> potential
>>> rather than a set of instances of actual wit.
>>>
>>> In the late twentieth century, though, the pendulum began to swing
>>> the
>>> other way, because CoBuild and other dictionaries began to inspect
>> computer
>>> corpora of actual uses, and they discovered (for example) that it
>>> is much
>>> more common to say, metaphorically, that you "run a business" than
>>> concretely, that you run a hundred yards on your own two feet. To
>>> me,
>>> though, all that means is that the new systemic "meaning
>>> potential" has
>> to
>>> start with running a business, and that what I did this morning for
>> exercise
>>> was a kind of metaphorical extension of running a business to my
>>> muscles
>> and
>>> achilles tendons.
>>>
>>> There is a good poem about the relationship between meaning
>>> potential and
>>> actual meaning by Cecil Day-Lewis. It's metaphorical, of course! He
>> begins
>>> by defining a sign for us, and pointing out that a tree is a sign
>>> too
>>> (because it stands for itself, or if you want to be physiological
>>> about
>> it,
>>> it produces an image on our retina which is interpreted by our
>>> brains as
>> a
>>> tree.) But it's a sign without a system, without much unrealized
>>> meaning
>>> potential.
>>>
>>> This tree outside my window here,
>>> Naked, umbrageous, fresh or sere,
>>> Has neither chance nor will to be
>>> Anything but a linden tree,
>>> Even if its branches grew to span
>>> The continent; for nature’s plan
>>> Insists that infinite extension
>>> Shall create no new dimension.
>>>> From the first snuggling of the seed
>>> In earth, a branchy form’s decreed.
>>>
>>> You have to admit the Creator was original. He was certainly
>>> forceful in
>>> his creativity. But rather limited, when you look at it; in His
>>> later
>> career
>>> He kept repeating Himself with only minor variations, and most of
>>> what
>> was
>>> new was not very good. Human creativity is a different matter!.
>>>
>>> Unwritten poems loom as if
>>> They’d cover the whole of earthly life.
>>> But each one, growing, learns to trim its
>>> Impulse and meaning to the limits
>>> Roughed out by me, then modified
>>> In its own truth’s expanding light.
>>> A poem, settling to its form,
>>> Finds there’s no jailer, but a norm
>>> Of conduct, and a fitting sphere
>>> Which stops it wandering everywhere.
>>>
>>> Human creativity, unlike nature, is an embarrassment of riches; we
>>> need
>>> rhyme (which you notice Day-Lewis adheres to quite rigorously) and
>>> meter
>> to
>>> keep us honest. As Adorno says, the bourgeoisie would like life to
>>> be
>>> austere and art voluptuous, but we would really be much better off
>>> with
>>> things the other way around: life full of actual meaning, and art
>>> full of
>>> things left unsaid.
>>>
>>> Now here Day-Lewis notes that there is a third thing--and it is
>>> the thing
>>> that Bakhtin wrote almost exclusively about, something that is
>>> neither
>>> system of meaning nor instance of meaning making, something that is
>> neither
>>> signification nor purely individual sense: it is human
>>> relationships in
>> all
>>> their complex, meaty sensuousness.
>>>
>>> Are interpersonal relations more like intra-personal relations or
>>> are
>> they
>>> more like societal relations? Are they more intra-psychological or
>>> more
>>> trans-psychological? Are more things to be left said or unsaid? Half
>> said?
>>>
>>> Are these going to be austere or voluptuous? Will they depend on
>> potential
>>> or upon realization?
>>>
>>> As for you, my love, it’s harder,
>>> Though neither prisoner nor warder,
>>> Not to desire you both: for love
>>> Illudes us we can lightly move
>>> Into a new dimension, where
>>> The bounds of being disappear
>>> And we make one impassioned cell.
>>> So wanting to be all in all
>>> Each for each, a man and a woman
>>> Defy the limits of what’s human.
>>>
>>> Voluptuous then, and almost intrapersonal--but this is a romantic,
>>> young
>>> person's view. Day-Lewis wrote this late in life, after many years
>>> of
>> what
>>> we would have to call development. Human development is not like
>>> natural
>>> development; it means creating more potential rather than simply
>> realizing
>>> it (and thus leaving less unsaid).
>>>
>>> But when we cease to play explorers
>>> And become settlers, clear before us
>>> Lies the next need – to re-define
>>> The boundary between yours and mine;
>>> Else, one stays prisoner, one goes free.
>>> Each to his own identity
>>> Grown back, shall prove our love’s expression
>>> Purer for this limitation.
>>> Love’s essence, like a poem’s, shall spring
>>>> From the not saying everything.
>>>
>>> David Kellogg
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> --- On Wed, 8/10/11, Larry Purss <lpscholar2@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> From: Larry Purss <lpscholar2@gmail.com>
>>> Subject: [xmca] Living metaphor and conventionalized language
>>> To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
>>> Date: Wednesday, August 10, 2011, 10:59 AM
>>>
>>>
>>> Hi David Ke
>>>
>>> Your response to Nickolai mentioned the constant movement of living
>>> metaphor
>>> and language as a conventionalized SYSTEM.  This seems to me to be
>>> one
>> more
>>> example of this living GENERATIVE movement of consciousness.
>>>
>>> Larry
>>> __________________________________________
>>> _____
>>> xmca mailing list
>>> xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
>>> http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
>>> __________________________________________
>>> _____
>>> xmca mailing list
>>> xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
>>> http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
>>> __________________________________________
>>> _____
>>> xmca mailing list
>>> xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
>>> http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
>>> __________________________________________
>>> _____
>>> xmca mailing list
>>> xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
>>> http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Helen Grimmett
>> PhD Student, Teaching Associate
>> Faculty of Education
>> Monash University, Peninsula Campus
>> __________________________________________
>> _____
>> xmca mailing list
>> xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
>> http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
>>
>
>
>
> --
> *Robert Lake  Ed.D.
> *Assistant Professor
> Social Foundations of Education
> Dept. of Curriculum, Foundations, and Reading
> Georgia Southern University
> P. O. Box 8144
> Phone: (912) 478-5125
> Fax: (912) 478-5382
> Statesboro, GA  30460
>
> *Democracy must be born anew in every generation, and education is its
> midwife.*
> *-*John Dewey.
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 8
> Date: Fri, 12 Aug 2011 14:08:04 -0400
> From: Martin Packer <packer@duq.edu>
> Subject: Re: [xmca] Living metaphor and conventionalized language
> To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
> Message-ID: <66D2727E-5C2E-47E3-81ED-C39EE66C20AF@duq.edu>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252
>
> Larry, David...
>
> I don't like the word "internalization" because I can't see that
> anything internal is involved! As LSV put it:
>
> “Consciousness does not occur as a specific category, as a specific
> mode of being. It proves to be a very complex structure of behaviour”
>
> David Bakhurst describes well the 'radical realism' those guys were
> developing:
>
> "Thought is conceived not as a barrier or interface between the self
> and the world beyond the mind, but as the means by which the
> individual enters into immediate cognitive contact with the material
> world. Thought, the mode of activity of the socially defined
> subject, reaches right out to reality itself" (1991, p. 261)
>
> If the "inner" is out there in the "outer," we've got the metaphors
> wrong, IMHO.
>
> Martin
>
> On Aug 11, 2011, at 12:27 AM, David Kellogg wrote:
>
>> Of course, BOTH "internalization" and "appropriation" are
>> metaphors. I don't flee from the "internalization" metaphor the way
>> that Martin does, partly because I think of it as referring not to
>> a body but as to a nation, a country, a city, a community, a
>> family...or some particle thereof. In this sense (a sense which I
>> suppose is better captured by "interiorization" than by
>> "internalization", just as "reflection" is better captured by
>> "refraction") there is no duality; when you move from one nation to
>> another you do not change worlds, nor do you change nations when
>> you move from one city to another.
>>
>
>
>
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>
> End of xmca Digest, Vol 75, Issue 12
> ************************************

Nathaniel Dumas
UC President's Postdoctoral Fellow
Department of Linguistics
University of California, Santa Barbara
http://ucsb.academia.edu/NathanielDumas/About



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