Wednesday, October 18th, 2023, at 8:30am Pacific Daylight Savings Time
Guest Speaker: David Bakhurst, Queens College, Ontario, Canada.
We will host a discussion of Russian philosopher Evald Ilyenkov’s writings on creative imagination and how it is essential for the development of an innovative thinker. Ilyenkov’s ideas will be discussed in relation to the writings of L.S. Vygotsky.
Contact Francine Smolucha at lsmolucha@hotmail.com for the ZOOM link.
READINGS:
Bakhurst, D. (2023). “Ilyenkov on Aesthetics: Realism, Imagination, and the End of Art” (Chapter 8), In The Heart of the Matter: Ilyenkov, Vygotsky, and the Courage of Thought. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill.
Bakhurst, D. (2023). “On the Concept of Mediation” (Chapter. 11), In The Heart of the Matter: Ilyenkov, Vygotsky, and the Courage of Thought. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill.
PRESENTATION SLIDES:
Bakhurst, D. “Ilyenkov and Vygotsky on Imagination.” (October 18, 2023).
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Tying a knot is a cultural practice and has many applications, including helping us remember.
The link that follows my comments mentions that the earliest example of knot tying dates back to 8,000 BCE in Finland to create a a fisherman’s net. The article also mentions the
Incas’ Quipu System used for record keeping and communication.
Some individual had to be the first human to tie a knot in a handkerchief to remember something or tie a string around their finger – but first someone had to figure our how to tie a simple overhand knot. Is this the type of activity that might have been invented in different
cultures independently?
There are birds who make (tie) knots when weaving their nests. Is this how humans first learned to weave and tie knots – from watching birds and/or examining the construction of their nests? [Example: the oriole]
Here is the link to the article on history of knots:
https://theartoftheknot.com/the-history-of-knots/
Check this out – Gorillas tie simple knots when building their nests!
“Some historians believe that knot-tying may have begun before humans walked the earth. They say intelligent gorillas may have been the first knotters. They knew how to create simple granny knots with branches to construct their nests.”
https://www.theknotsmanual.com/knots/
There was not enough time to discuss, but I thought that our ongoing exploration of imagination as a temporal process of looping, zigzagging, cycling, and gap creation/filling was relevant to the issue of the dialectics of imagination
Could you please elaborate further on the relation between mediation & creative imagination? Some examples would be helpful to capture this relationship further.
Thanks–Ageliki Nicolopoulou
I had what I think is a related question, Ageliki. I was unclear what David understood the reference to the word “culture” to be. It is no where defined/specified and I got the impression that, say, a knot of string tied to a finger was not itself, cultural, e.g., the string, the knot, and the practice itself. It seems to matter.
To be enculturated for David is to be brought into the space of reasons. The knot is cultural because we already approach it through our culture and it is meaningful through our culture. Similar to people like Gadamer, I take it there is a kind of hermeneutic horizon for David: in McDowell’s phrasing “the conceptual has no outer boundary”. So yes, the string is also a part of culture, as is everything else you care to name. But the string passes through a process where it’s recognised as a string (by way of many related concepts) in people using it as a string with others.
Where I most part ways with David (as does Ilyenkov) is in the idea that the space of reasons is about being able to justify how things are and what I’m doing through language. The part of this I agree with is that once I learn that something is a piece of string, I’m not seeing the string and then applying the concept “string” to it: it’s already a string to me and as for Vygotsky, the word “string” is key to my generalisation. But I think there are many areas (including movements of the imagination) where this is not the only dynamic worth noticing.
Hi Kyrill- But what is the reference of the word/concept “culture” ?
I think isolating a word and asking what it “really” means is rarely a helpful strategy. David is pointing at processes of “enculturation” and other related ideas. He’s noting things about it like how we become sensitive to norms. I don’t know if this helps us to define culture. I like this quote in Chapter 18 of David’s book – even if I’d want to give it an inversion:
I am not word picking, Kyrill. I am trying to interpret passages such as this:
And fourth, the case brings out a prominent aspect of mediation that we have so far not considered: the influence of culture. Diary writing is a speech genre, and what is written about is culturally mediated in various ways (even this tiny entry mentions diet, hobbies, work, relationships, duties, cultural media (film, sport)). It is important not to think of culture as determining what the man writes, or what he has to write about. Rather we inherit psychological tools from culture, and culture provides the context in which our activity makes the sense it does. Understanding the culture is a precondition of understanding the man, a truth that the man himself must reckon with when he goes in search of self-understanding.
Oh gosh, you’re completely right! Apologies for jumping the gun! I don’t know what this could mean! Other than again, that language is so central to David that perhaps the Diary as something for putting language in foregrounds this linguistic aspect
But yes, what could it mean to “understand the culture” apart from understanding diaries, footballs, handkerchiefs we use?
The view I take it David was rejecting was the traditional one following Descartes where our imagination mediates our activity because it is some extra, separate from our general engagement in the world. He’s rejecting the idea that we perceive mental representations of the world and match them with the world or manipulate them in some detached way. Where mediation does come in is in the way we can think out loud or through our diary, musical instrument etc.
My Take on imagination in speech:
For Vygotsky, all speaking goes through a cognitive process of inner speech until that process is embodied in words. Inner speech is the product of an internalization of a speech community that serves as prompts for a much richer conceptualization on the part of the speaker. Speech is itself a prompt for a rich conceptualization on the part of the listener.
To communicate, the language we use must follow the conventions of how it is spoken (phonologically) and what it means (semantically). That’s a large part of what language development aims for.
For a dialog to work, the aim is coherence, a meeting of the minds. In all of this imagination, looping, is at work. But, it has to make sense to the interlocutors. That means the looping is tethered by what we can agree on are the meanings in what we say. It is cultural. Of course we can disagree on things, but we don’t get there by talking past one another.
Where I think I part ways with Vygotsky is the extent to which the meanings are language based. There are many other domains of culture (art of all kinds for example) that pair form and meaning. Those other domains, I think, are braided into our verbalizations. So, it is not just our inner speech that is prompting our imagination as we speak and listen. Personally, I draw a lot on kinesthetic and visual imagery.
I would say it’s only in “Thinking and Speech” that he is so focused on language and there too he says language is one system but he could have focused on others. What you need some kind of sign system for is generalisation. This allows for the kind of substitution we were discussing, but Vygotsky is clear that physical affordances are important here: a small stick can be a syringe in a game but my foot can’t.
Hi Kyrill, thank you for this. Would you mind sharing the references you’ve mentioned—that of the other (sign?) systems on which he could’ve focused on, and that of the importance of physical affordances?
Hi Martin, I’m afraid I’m preparing for an exam and don’t have this material at hand (just pulling different threads together). Under my reading, Vygotsky never lets go of the foundation he introduces in History of the Development of Higher Mental Functions, which has all kinds of things acting as signs (dolls, chairs, clocks). As well as this, Vygotsky is explicit that word-meaning isn’t the only unit of analysis worth thinking about. Though I can’t find the syringe reference, I remember he discusses the role of affordances in our volitions and wishes at the start of “Psychology of the Adolescent” (paraphrasing Lewin)
Hi Martin,
During David’s presentation, I brought up the use of object substitutions
in children’s pretend play (such as using a stick as if it was a horse).
Vygotsky used this example in three papers:
Imagination & Creativity in Childhood (1930) that contained
an earlier discussion from the Pedology of Childhood (1929).
The example of using a stick as if it was a horse originated in
Ribot’s book Essay on the Creative Imagination (1901) – which
Vygotsky cites extensively in I&CC.
Vygotsky used the same example (using a stick as a horse)
in The Prehistory of Written Language (1928), along with other
examples.
Most people are familiar, with Vygotsky’s example (of using a
stick as a horse) from his 1933 paper
The Role of Play in Mental Development.
It is important to note that Vygotsky stresses that it is the use of a stick
as if it were a horse (straddling it) not the simple renaming of the stick.
that enables the child to transfer meanings from one object to another.
Learning to recognize such ‘affordances’ leads to figurative/metaphorical thinking (that Henry is talking about).
Thank you very much, Francine!
Thanks for this reply, Kyrill! I’ll track down these examples.
Hi Henry, I find very stimulating this idea of kinesthetic and imagery prompting imagination. Could you please develop it or provide some references to look at?
I’m currently working with student and professional engineers on a project on concept development from a Vygotskian perspective, and the use of other semiotic means keeps popping up, so I’d love to hear more about it.
Hi Martin,
I’m shooting from the hip, but I think one of the best ways of capturing the broad ways that language itself incorporates embodiment is through metaphor. “Shooting from the hip” does it nicely, and I wasn’t thinking of using that particular metaphor when I started this post.
My thinking on the embodied nature of language and cognition comes from Cognitive Linguistics, especially the work of Ronald Langacker. He says, “…the world we construct is grounded in our experience as creatures with bodies who interact with their surroundings through physical processes involving sensory and motor activity.” (Langacker, Cognitive Grammar: A Basic Introduction, 2008, p. 524).
Consider how children with learning difficulties are given activities that have them move their body such that both brain hemispheres are engaged. I do Tai Chi, which does massive amounts of crossing over. My teacher calls it moving meditation. At my age (80), Tai Chi has both physical and cognitive benefits. Incidentally, the postures in Tai Chi have names that reveal how we pair physical form with meaning: White crane spreads its wings, wave hands like clouds, snake creeps down…Dance is gestural language. Incidentally, these postures, when embedded in the extended forms of Tai Chi as one posture bleeds into another, are dynamic. Signed language is often construed as hand positions, for example finger spelling, but the flow of signing belies the idea of linked structures, and presents as flow. Dynamic. The same is true of spoken language.
Non-verbal aspects of spoken language, gesture, is an obvious demonstration of how language is rooted in more than verbalization. It is worth contrasting the forms of written language with those of spoken language. Academia leans in that direction, as does architecture, for example. But I wonder if creative thinking and collaboration, in any domain draws on a sense of movement, kinesthetically and proprioceptively.
Krill just posted a corrective to my thinking that Vygotsky is too tied to the semantics of language. I appreciate that. It helps me see Vygotsky as a semiotician, not stuck in verbal, propositional, language development
Martin,
Vygotsky’s paper “The Genetic Roots of Thought and Language” (1929) is the source of Vygotsky’s model of how thought and speech intersect to produce verbal thought (word meaning). David discussed this model
in his presentation. Many people know this paper as a chapter in
Vygotsky’s 1934 book Thinking and Speech (Thought and Language) –
and mistakenly think this is a later development in Vygotsky’s theory.
If you picture two intersecting circles (as Vygotsky suggests) you have a Venn Diagram, in which the two circles move closer together as the
intersection of verbal thought increases in size. But Vygotsky says, the
two circles never fully intersect leaving a section of thinking that never becomes verbal thought.
Vera John-Steiner discusses this model briefly on page 26 in
Notebooks of the Mind, to emphasize this point – there is always
a domain of thinking that is bodily/kinesthetic and/or visual but not verbal. Also refer to the “Thinking of the Body” p.14 and
Chapter 4 Visual Thinking.
Thanks for sharing this, Henry! I’ll keep giving these ideas some more thought.