BERNEVAL

Michael Cole. “Alexander Romanovich Luira: Cultural Psychologist” (pp. 11-28) in Contemporary Neuropsychology and the Legacy of Luria.

Piaget had earlier stimulated interest in the way small children seem to talk to themselves when playing alongside other children, suggesting that this egocentric speech is a halfway house between an early autistic stage when children fail totally to consider others in the way they behave and a later time when speech becomes properly “for another” and therefore, socialized. Such speech, because it is egocentric, was thought to be functionless, a mere indicator of underlying cognitive immaturity. Luria and Vygotsky had quite the opposite view. In their opinion, egocentric speech is rather the middle stage in a transition from speech that controls another to speech that controls oneself; it is social in its origins and functional in the role it plays in helping the child to master the problem at hand.

The experimental procedure they invented in reaction to Piaget’s interpretation of egocentric speech is a good example of their general methodological strategy: Children were put in problem-solving situations that were somewhat too difficult for them, and as their theory suggested it should, egocentric speech (speech not directed specifically to another), increased.

This was an immensely influtential synopsis for me. I was able to posit that people in situations of distress reach for the mechanism of egocentric speech as a coping mechanism mainly to rehearse scenarios. I was willing to wager that “Pedagogical situations are sensory. They are also interpersonal. Because they are sensory this makes even learning by oneself interpersonal. Egocentric speech is like a dialogue between the senses” http://homes.chass.utoronto.ca/~lachance/S6D.HTM

And so for day 710
22.11.2008

Alberto Manguel in his introduction (dateline of Toronto, 1992) to the anthology The Gates of Paradise is magnanimous in his praise for what has survived and almost mystical in his vision.

Confronted with the task of making art out of a bewildering variety of objects and subjects, acts and variations, feelings and fears; limited by a vocabulary designed for other purposes; walking the perilous edge between pornography and sentimentality, biology and purple prose, the coy and the over-explicit; threatened by societies intent on preserving the aristocracies of established power through the censoring forces of politics, education and religion, it is a miracle that erotic literature has not only survived this long but become braver, brighter, more confident, pursuing a multi-coloured infinity of objects of desire.

For the mystic, the whole universe is one erotic object and the whole body the subject of erotic pleasure. The same can be said of every human being who discovers that not only penis and clitoris are places of pleasure but also the hands, the anus, the mouth, the hair, the soles of the feet, every inch of our astounding bodies. That which physically and mentally excites the senses and opens for us what William Blake called the Gates of Paradise, is always something mysterious and, as we all eventually find out, its shape dictated by laws of which we know nothing. We admit to loving a woman, a man, a child. Why not a gazelle, a shoe, the sky at night?

Quite a domain to explore.

And so for day 709
21.11.2008

I am taken by the generosity of spirit that inhabits this account.

Here, it seems to me, is the key to Luria’s early enthusiasm for psychoanalysis, for Freud; here, too, the permanent heuristic effect of Freud on his thought, whatever reservations and differences were later to appear. Freud offered a principle — the general principle Luria needed, the only tenable principle for a scientific, human psychology. And this principle was, in essence, an orientation which faced two ways: one which looked down into the biological depths of human nature, but equally and simultaneously up into the events and interactions of social life, a science that looked equally into nature and culture.

Goldberg, Elkhonon, ed. Contemporary Neuropsychology and the Legacy of Luria. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1990. Contains: Sacks, Oliver. Luria and “Romantic Science”, pp. 181-194.

And so for day 708
20.11.2008

Paul Goodman concludes “Counter-Forces for a Decent Society” the second of his 1966 Massey lectures (collected under the title the Moral Ambiguity of America) with a description of the radical youth of the time. It is a description extended to all youth of the time. And perhaps of all time since then.

So, describing American radical youth, and to a degree many other American youth, we have noticed their solidarity based on community rather than ideology, their style of direct and frank confrontation and personal contact, their democratic inclusiveness and aristocratic confidence careless of status, caste, or getting ahead, their selectivity and somewhat defiance of the affluent standard of living, their striving to be authentic and committed to their causes rather than merely belonging, their determination to have a say and their refusal to be pushed around or processed as standard items, their extreme distrust of top-down direction, their disposition to anarchist organization and direct action, their disillusion with the system of institutions and their belief that they can carry on major social functions in improvised parallel enterprises. Some of these traits, in my opinion, are natural to all unspoiled young people, but all of them are certainly in contradiction to the dominant organization of American society.

And I reflect on how old I was when that was broadcast on CBC radio. And how many young people have come of age since then.

And so for day 707
19.11.2008

October 24, 1996. Special Section to The Toronto Star entitled “Fast Foward” contains article by Wade Rowland. It is called “Class and the Net”. One of the call outs:

We tend to think of any breakthrough technology in apocalyptic terms, and those who don’t see in it the “end of civilization as we know it” are apt to lend to it magical power to solve all manner of difficult problems.

And then there is this turn on the digital divide:

To avoid creating a new underclass in the information age, we have to concentrate on traditional social goals like education and income redistribution. We have a political job to do … Technology creates opprotunities; opportunities turn into problems when we fail to manage them properly.

The sentiment of these call outs is perenial ***** all the more poignant when we in this wireless epoch read in the body of the text that “[i]n the era of the Internet, access to information is a function of access to telephone jacks.” The technology has evolved. Income redistribution not so much.

And so for day 704
16.11.2008

Michael Balzer describes in the 05.05.05 edition of Eye Weekly the art of Wim Delvoye then on show at the Olga Korper Gallery as part of the photography exhibition CONTACT 2005.

intriguing gimmick: the mosaics are not made of marble or ceramic as they appear to be, but of cold cuts like salami, ham, mortadella and chorizo

In the print edition of the paper, there is alongside the Eye Candy column a poem by Mark Truscott from Said Like Reeds or Things (Coach House Press, 2004) which is tile-like in its repetitions.

Knowing he’s dead, Glenn Gould plays Schoenberg.
Knowing he’s dead, Glenn Gould plays Schoenberg

Of course there is that ghostly ambiguity — not knowing just who the referent of the pronoun “he” might be … similar reference ambiguity — tile or cold cut?

And so for day 703
15.11.2008

I was taken by the phrase “securities in dimorphism”. And then led to ponder the synchronicity of such securities.

Among the markers that distinguish interpretations of women and literature, and the presentation of women in literature, from the interpretations of class and literature, and the presentation of class in literature, is the frequency of the assumption that differences of sex and gender are immutable, ascocial, atemporal — a human embodiment of natural law. Ironically, both sexual conservatives and certain radical cultural feminists share an attraction to such assumptions. The former tends to prize the male; the latter certainly celebrates the female, but both seek synchronic securities in dimorphism.

Catharine R. Stimpson. “Ad/d Feminam: Women, Literature and Society (1980)” in Where the Meanings Are: Feminism and Cultural Spaces.

I like the way she continues the argument:

A powerful conceit magically lifts the artist from society and stabilizes the assignment of creativity to an ahistorical realm. […] to compel some women to find substitutes, signs of female creativity that draw on female biology, on blood, ova, genitalia. Such efforts repeat the pattern of using organic language of the body to transform a social role into a transcendent calling.

Implicitly here in this commentary on metaphors of writing, we are invited to consider just what sort of calling might be the act of reading.

And so for day 701
13.11.2008