Understanding Situations, Developing Scripts

Jerome Bruner
Actual Minds, Possible Worlds

Egocentric perspective

Michael Scaife and I [Bruner] discovered, as I mentioned in passing, that by the end of the first year of life, normal children habitually follow another's line of regard to see what the other is looking at, and when they can find no target out there, they turn back to the looker to check gaze direction again. At that age the children can perform none of the classic Piagetian tasks indicating that they have passed beyond egocentrism. This finding led me to take very seriously the proposals of both Katherine Nelson and Margaret Donaldson that when the child understands the event structure in which he is operating he is not that different from an adult. He simply does not have as grand a collection of scripts and scenarios and event schemas as adults do. The child's mastery of deictic shifters suggests, moreover, that egocentrism per se is not the problem. It is when the child fails to grasp the structure of events that he adopts an egocentric framework. The problem is not with competence but with performance. It is not that the child does not have the capacity to take another's perspective, but rather that he cannot do so without understanding the situation in which he is operating.

Listening to Cat Stevens "Where Do The Children Play?" Tea For The Tillerman

And so for day 1953
18.04.2012

Cinema Capturing Chance: Constructing the Event

From the 1995 English Institute Conference, Language Machines (1997) Editors Jeffrey Masten, Peter Stallybrass & Nancy J. Vickers, in which appears Mary Ann Doane, "Screening Time", from page 147 of which I quote

What comes to be known eventually as "deceptive" in the reenactment is made harmless as "illusion" in the narrative film. Clearly, the progressive domination of the industry by narrative is overdetermined (culturally, economically, technologically), but from this point of view, narrative would constitute a certain taming or securing of the instability of the cinematic image. In the same way, narrative becomes the model for the apprehension of the legal unity of film.

The role of "narrative" in taming (I almost wrote "training" in transcribing the passage) is set up by the thematic of event earlier in the piece. See p. 141

The confusion of construction and contingency around the concept of the event is crucial in the historical elaboration of a cinematic syntax. At the turn of the century, contingency is both lure and threat, and this double valence is played out in the rapid representational transformation of the cinema. The embarrassment of contingency is that it is everywhere and that it everywhere poses the threat of an evacuation of meaning. The concept of the event provides a limit — not everything is equally filmable — and reinvests the contingent with significance — The contingent is in effect, tamed.

Story. Shot. Cut.

And so for day 1428
10.11.2010