SungWon Hwang

A Vygotskian Approach to Heterogeneous Communication and Multi/cultural Literacy: Commentary on David Kellogg's “Taking Uptaking Up, or, a Deconstructionist ‘Ontology of Difference’ and a Developmental One”

In this commentary, I review Kelloggs comments on a recent editorial in the journal Mind, Culture, and Activity (Roth, 2008). Concerning Kelloggs code-switching model for learning language, I present and exemplify a dialectic problem of multi/cultural literacy: the first articulation that crosses the boundaries of cultures and languages presupposes the heterogeneous Self and culture/ language in which the boundaries are already problematized. I take a Vygotskian approach and articulate that the heterogeneous nature of communicative performances constitutes the central aspect for this dialectic constitution of multi/cultural literacy. Therefore, I comment that ontology of difference constitutes the theoretical framework that explains development.

Mathematics in the Flesh

This displacement of the memory from the domain of thought to that of the flesh, this corporeal memory of which Maine de Biran had the unheard-of intuition, doubles itself depending on whether it is considered at work in the delivery to the senses or in its immanence, before the intervention of any intentionality.

Of human bodies in scientific communication and enculturation

How do students become enculturated and come to enact culture in ways that are new to them? This study probes the dialectical processes of enculturation, the central aspect of which is the role of human bodies in communication. For students, as for any individual, culture exists in terms of action possibilities that presuppose their intelligibility to and communicability with a generalized other. The body is crucial in enculturation because it concretely articulates possibilities in communication that exist in a generalized way at the collective level; it is through their bodies that people make available these possibilities to another as well as to oneself. This study articulates four aspects of the body in enculturation. Firstly, bodies concretely realize cultural possibilities to others. Secondly, as bodies are engaged in configuring materials and themselves, the possibility increases for contradictory understandings to be revealed. Thirdly, to resolve contradictory situations, the bodies enact new possibilities that have been available but were not salient. Fourthly, the body of a culturally more competent person makes new action possibilities available to newcomers. We conclude that culture is made available to and appropriate in concrete, material ways rather than through some mysterious process of transferring mental structures.

The Body in/of Research Ethics

What is immanent to our sensible life and constitutes its being is truly the subjective being of movement which defines both the power of our body and the peculiar quality of our individuality. To be an individual is to have an absolutely original relationship with the world, and this not by way of an ethical decision at the end of a deliberately undertaken effort, but everywhere and always, in romantic exultation as well as in daily banality.

Learning – from the Perspective of the Unknown

To learn means to come to know something heretofore unknown. While still unknown, we inherently cannot aim at an object (e.g., knowledge, concept). We cannot even know that there is something like an object to be parceled out. The unknown is both massive and undifferentiated and known only through its presence as non-presence.

The Body in/of Mathematical Concepts

Objects then become the transcendent ensemble that reveals my incarnation to me. A contact is a caress; that is, my perceptions not the utilization of the object and the surpassing of the present in view of an end; but to perceive an object, in a desiring attitude, is to caress myself with it.

Lectures as Corporeal Performances

Lectures are often conceptualized in terms of information transfer. Science and mathematics professors tend to talk about using lectures to “get information across” and about how much their students do or do not “get” the main points of a lecture.

Literacy as Bodily Performance

Language is not in the world or inside the world, as though the world were its body: it is the outside of the world in the world. It is the whole of the outside of the world; it is not the eruption of an Other, which would clear away or sublimate the world, which would transcribe it into something else; instead, it is the exposition of the world-of-bodies as such, that is, as originarily singular plural.

Mathematical Inscriptions and Cultural Development

It is the important function of the written to enable the continual objectivity of ideal sense formations in the curious form of virtuality. Once documented in writing, the ideal object exists virtually in the world and may be produced actually at any instant.

Heterogeneous Performances and Linguistic Hybridity

But without the really formed capacity of a reactivation of the originary activities that are embodied in the fundamental concepts and of its prescientific materials, geometry would be a tradition without sense. A tradition of which, if we had lost this capacity, we could not even know whether it has or ever had a sense.