Catarsis

Esto escribe A.N. Leontiev en la introducción a la Psicología del arte de Vygotsky:

La "oposición de sentimientos" sugiere que el contenido emocional, afectivo de la obra evoluciona en dos direcciones opuestas que, pese a todo, luchan por confluir en un único punto supremo. En esa intersección, una fugaz unión o clausura de ambas crea el efecto: la transformación y depuración de los sentimientos.

Para dar nombre a ese fundamental movimiento interno cristalizado en la estructura de una obra artística, Vygotsky utiliza un término clásico: catarsis. El significado del término, tal y como Vygotsky lo usa, no es el mismo que le atribuye Aristóteles, ni el que adquirió en la psicología freudiana. Para Vygotsky, la catarsis no es la simple liberación de unas tremendas atracciones afectivas que, mediante el arte, se desprenderían de sus "cualidades negativas". Más bien es la resolución de cierto conflicto estrictamente personal, la revelación de una verdad humana más elevada, más general, en los fenómenos de la existencia.  

Soneto 123

¡No! Tiempo, no te vanaglories de mi mudanza:
Tus pirámides erigidas con renovado poder
No son para mí nada nuevo, nada extraño;
sino aspectos de una visión anterior.
Nuestra vida es corta y por tanto admiramos
Todo lo antiguo que nos reiteras e impones
Como si fuera nuevo lo que deseáramos
En lugar de lo repetido tantas veces.
A ti y a tus anales desafío
No me asombran ni el presente ni el pasado
Pues tus memorias y nuestros ojos mienten
Víctimas de tu empecinada prisa.
Te juro que en mí encontrarás constancia,
No cambiaré a pesar de tu hoz y de ti mismo.

No! Time, thou shalt not boast that I do change:
Thy pyramids built up with newer might
To me are nothing novel, nothing strange;
They are but dressings of a former sight.
Our dates are brief, and therefore we admire
What thou dost foist upon us that is old,
And rather make them born to our desire
Than think that we before have heard them told.
Thy registers and thee I both defy,
Not wond'ring at the present nor the past,
For thy records and what we see doth lie,
Made more or less by thy continual haste.
This I do vow and this shall ever be;
I will be true, despite thy scythe and thee.

The strangest language

The Pirahã people have no history, no descriptive words and no subordinate clauses. That makes their language one of the strangest in the world -- and also one of the most hotly debated by linguists.

Article

Diario de viaje

11 de marzo de 2008

Es de noche. Un mendigo se acerca con el cigarrillo colgando por la comisura de los labios y una jarra de cerveza en la mano. Viene a venderme una camisa azul celeste. Tiene un tufo que apesta a vinagre de cerveza. Me pide seis libras por la camisa.

12 de marzo de 2008

Café Costa, Estación Victoria. Me apresto a ir al Museo de Historia Natural. Leo a Bolaño, “2666”. Morini va a Londres y ve a Norton.

Me llama la atención la cantidad de entrevistas de trabajo que ocurren en las cafeterías. Suelen participar, de un lado, un ejemplar de raza blanca, limpio, pasado por lavanda, y, de otro, un ejemplar de una minoría: un negro, un indio, un alemán del este, una mujer ucrania, una estona que ganaría un concurso de belleza en un país sudamericano.

Museo de Historia Natural: No hay muchas huellas de Darwin en el museo. El “pliosaur” mide cinco metros (Rhomaleo Saurus Cramptoni), tiene 187-178 millones de años de edad. ¿Cuándo se celebrará su cumpleaños?

Comprar una pluma y escribir finito, finito, como una reliquia china.

Al pliosaurio lo encontraron en Whity, Yorkshire.

Algo tienen los imperios que se convierten en agujeros negros. Chupan la cultura, fagocitan ejemplares, respiran narraciones, relatos, relaciones de viajes, muchas veces pagan la factura y, las más de las veces, se alimentan de la sangre de los esclavos. Aun así,  pese a todo, dejan testimonios de la vida que solo pueden encontrarse en sus capitales. La vida en Chile está demasiado abocada a lo local, a lo próximo. Su capacidad de estudio es disminuida. En cambio, en los imperios, se codicia el conocimiento vasto. Se elimina la raíz del origen, se evoluciona con el ADN de todas las naciones, todos los puntos geográficos, todas las costumbres. Hay altivez en esta empresa imperial. Sin imperio Darwin no existe.

Norton pasea a Espinoza y Pelletier por Cromwell Road la noche en que les dice que los va a dejar momentáneamente para pensar. El Museo de Historia Natural está precisamente en Cromwell Road. Leo esto en Hamburguer Union, Leicester Square. 

13 de marzo de 2008

Los negros en Londres parecen entregados a la conversación. He visto parejas que conversan por horas sin más compañía que una botella de vino o una taza vacía de café. Son austeros. Parecen disfrutar del diálogo más que “los otros”, que el resto. Es jueves en Londres, jueves 13.

Un viejo que podría ser Bertrand Russell está sentado leyendo el periódico en la cafetería Costa de la Estación Victoria.

Uno siente que pertenece a una ciudad cuando los pasajeros comienzan a preguntarle ¿pasa este tren por Hammersmith? Eso mismo me pregunta una señora.

En el avión rumbo a Japón el telediario de NHK no tenía rostros. El edificio del Banco de Japón, la gente anónima. No había personas. Se trataba del relato colectivo de personajes anónimos que no se encarnaban en nadie en particular. Las noticas de la BBC, en cambio, parten de de historias humanas, dan pie al cuestionamiento de la sociedad. Solo entonces intervienen las autoridades. 

En el futuro 

Perro muerto a punto de morir. El pobre perro estaba tirado en la Avenida Colón cerca de Manquehue. Un charco de sangre lo rodeaba y aullaba, ladraba esporádicamente como pidiendo una ambulancia. El perro decía “llamen una ambulancia, me han atropellado”. Nadie se acercaba y yo seguía conduciendo por Avenida Colón en busca de mis padres, pero el perro no se salía de mi cabeza y empecé a llorar, primero unas lágrimas y luego mares de lágrimas que me borraron los árboles de la avenida, los plátanos orientales. Y hacía sol y calor y creo que abrí la ventanilla del coche, o la cerré, o apagué la radio. 

Contradictions in early forms of capitalism: The case of the made-in-China Philippine cloaks in 17th century

Reading Silvio A. Zavala’s (1935) monumental work on Spanish Encomienda, La encomienda Indiana, I found a passage that captured particularly my attention. It dealt with the problem Spanish Crown officials faced when taxing the natives entrusted to Spanish grantees in the Philippines, the so called encomenderos at the beginning of the 17^th century. The questions the Spanish monarchy and its officials were asking at that time were: How do we tax Philippine natives? Do we tax them by collecting the fees in goods or by collecting actual money, that is, gold and silver?

This is the passage that intrigued me, as it reflected the many contradictions of early forms of capitalism:

The royal decree of 16 February of 1602 commanded the governor of the Philippines, Don Pedro de Acuña, to oversee if, as the prosecutor of the Audience informs, the tax of eight reales that the Indians pay now in goods by their own choice is inconvenient. The prosecutor held the view that before, by demanding to pay their taxes in goods, they produced them; now they buy the cloaks from the Chinese and do not weave them, and they do not mine gold. The King mandates that the most appropriate order be given to charge the fees. (Zavala, 1935, pp. 773-774)

These contradictions could be expressed nowadays by competing forms of economic development. On the one hand, we have economies that encourage the making of a fast buck, such as those of developing countries that encourage free trade, open up their domestic markets and engage in the retailing of products manufactured abroad, including China. The way to finance the consumption of foreign goods is by selling no manufacture-intensive commodities, that is, raw material. Because the economy is not labour intensive and the production processes are simple, the entrepreneurs and the workforce remain unsophisticated. On the other hand, we have economies that are not that radical in the defence of open markets, at least they are not keen on opening up their domestic markets, and prefer to manufacture goods locally. This kind of system requires massive amounts of capital and may create the true capitalist entrepreneur, the industrialist and the proletariat.

Salazar (2003) traces back this contradiction to the discovery and colonial periods, to the collision of different modes of production represented by the higher ideals set by traders, merchants and military captains that engaged in exploration and pillaging as a way to acquire gold, what he calls ‘the first conquest enterprise’ or ‘societas maris’, and the deviant and lower ideals set by the conquerors as they became settlers and sought autonomy from European powers, what he calls the ‘popular enterprise of production and exporting’ that created a proto colonial bourgeoisie (pp. 36-37). Eventually, the deviant idea was the seed of independence. The former mode of production is the one of the adelantados, explorers such as Cortés in Mexico and Pizarro in Peru. The latter mode of production is the one of Valdivia in Chile, an adelantado that did not find any treasures to pillage and therefore had no other choice than putting his soldiers to work in the settlements.

Yet there is still another contradiction in the aforementioned case of the Philippine Encomienda. If the Spaniards let the Indians engage in trading and retailing of commodities, taking advantage of the Philippines geographic position as a trading hub, as it stands near continental China and the Pacific islands that produced spices and manufactured goods, the master-serf relation that characterised the Encomienda would de facto come to an end. Ultimately, this meant that the natives would become entrepreneurs, businessmen and gain extraordinary levels of autonomy. They would move upward the social ladder severing the ties that locked them to their colonial masters. Thus, the Spaniards had many reasons to control Chinese trade in Manila and the Philippines in general and tax the Philippine natives in goods instead of cash. In that way they could have them working in the fields and mines, keeping them as serfs. However, these reasons betrayed the Spanish mercantilist fixation with rapidly acquiring gold and silver. The introduction of the market, ruled by the abstraction of exchange value and currency, was a way to end up the old feudal order.

Referencias

Zavala, Silvio (1935). La encomienda Indiana. Madrid: Editorial Porrúa.

Salazar, Gabriel (2003). Historia de la acumulación capitalista en Chile. Santiago: LOM Ediciones.

Lacan on the untainable real

Whatever in man is loosened up, fragmented, anarchic, establishes its relation to his perceptions on a plane with a completely original tension. The image of his body is the principle of every unity he perceives in objects . . . .Because of this . . . all the objects of his world are always structured around the wandering shadow of his own ego. They will all have a fundamentally anthropomorphic character . . . . Man’s ideal unity, which is never attained as such and escapes him at every moment, is evoked at every moment in this perception. . . . The very image of man brings in here a mediation which is always imaginary, always problematic, and which is therefore never completely fulfilled.

Lacan, The Seminar, Book II (New York: Norton, 1991), 166

Vygotsky and Sociology

Building on earlier publications by Harry Daniels, Vygotsky and Sociology provides readers with an overview of the implications for research of the theoretical work which acknowledges a debt to the writings of L.S. Vygotsky and sociologists whose work echoes his sociogenetic commitments, particularly Basil Bernstein. It provides a variety of views on the ways in which these two, conceptually linked, bodies of work can be brought together in theoretical frameworks which give new possibilities for empirical work. This book has two aims. First, to expand and enrich the Vygotskian theoretical framework; second, to illustrate the utility of such enhanced sociological imaginations and how they may be of value in researching learning in institutions and classrooms. It includes contributions from long-established writers in education, psychology and sociology, as well as relatively recent contributors to the theoretical debates and the body of research to which it has given rise, presenting their own arguments and justifications for forging links between particular theoretical traditions and, in some cases, applying new insights to obdurate empirical questions.

Contents

1. Curriculum and pedagogy in the sociology of education; some lessons from comparing Durkheim and Vygotsky 2. Dialectics, Politics and Contemporary Cultural-historical Research, Exemplified through Marx and Vygotsky 3. Vygotsky and Bernstein 4. Sixth Sense, Second Nature and Other Cultural Ways of Making Sense of our Surroundings: Vygotsky, Bernstein and the Languaged Body 5. The Concept of Semiotic Mediation: Perspectives from Bernstein’s Sociology 6. Negotiating Pedagogic Dilemmas in Non-Traditional Educational Contexts: An Australian Case Study of Teachers’ Work 7. Modalities of authority and the socialisation of the school in contemporary approaches to educational change 8. Semiotic Mediation, Viewed Over Time 9. Boys, skills and class: educational failure or community survival? Insights from Vygotsky and Bernstein 10. ‘Identity’ as a unit of analysis in researching and teaching mathematics 11. Schooling the social classes: Triadic zones of proximal development, communicative capital, and relational distance in the perpetuation of advantage 12. The Pedagogies of Second Language Acquisition: combining cultural historical and sociological traditions