We learn from this analysis that what matters are forms of conduct that lead to certain evental forms (pickup and carry, copulation). In the case of the bonobo, we observe the presence of conduct that increases the range of situations that conclude with a phase denoted to be the “enactment” of a “ballistic event,” but later involves other forms of conduct in the preparation. When we focus on speaking rather than on words and other signs, we may then transition to a transactional approach that analyzes not only speaking-as-event but also “world-as-event” and “Being-as- event” (Bakhtin 1993). This approach to speaking is extensively explicated in Chap. 3, and thus does not have to be repeated here. The move toward events as the basis for analyzing situations is characteristic of pragmatic approaches to language, as seen in the example of a most primitive language-game between a builder A and an assistant B consisting of the four sound-words “‘block,’ ‘pillar,’ ‘slab,’ and
‘beam’. A calls them out;—B brings the stone which he has learnt to bring at such- and-such a call” (Wittgenstein 1953/1997, 3). Here, making particular sounds leads into the next phase of building, which includes carrying and bringing stones of shapes associated with sounds. One can easily imagine that some time in the evolu- tion of the genus Homo, the making of certain sounds led to the handing of certain materials – a rock for cracking nuts, as some hordes of chimpanzees do, or a twig for pulling termites from their nests, as other hordes have been reported doing. What matters is acting in ways that are providing for conditions that make certain conse- quent events more likely than others. This allows us to abandon the notion of “mean- ing” of the sounds altogether, because the only question is the ways in which they lead up to other phases of the activity, or, in other words, what matters is how some sound- word is used and how the recipient acts after the sound has been made. In all of this conduct, the “sign” is but a recurrent feature of conduct, that is, of evental forms across occasions. We also learn from this about the inherently social nature of communication that imposes itself as soon as we take the event as the minimum unit and then ask how different events are related. Events of communication lead to coordination in subsequent phases of what will have been one single event.
section, I use such a situation from a second-grade classroom where children are to give a blob of plasticine the same shape as that of an object hidden in a shoebox a small, screened hole so that it can be touched by one hand only but cannot be seen.
The children are to see whether the two or three members of their group arrive at the same type of plasticine model. In classical terms, this task asks the children to create a signifier such that if held up, another child could pick from a collection of objects the one corresponding to the signifier or if asked what is inside the shoebox, they could indicate the contents by holding up the corresponding plasticine shape. That is, the task was asking the children to create a signifier by shaping one portion of the continuum (plasticine) to correspond to another portion of the continuum (mystery object). However, the sign – i.e. signifier–signified relation – would not exist in and for itself but would already be conceived as serving a particular function for future events – communicating which object is to be picked from a heap or indicating to others what is contained in a box and thus hidden from sight.
When they begin the task, the children in each group reach into the shoebox given to them and then pick up and work their plasticine. When they reach into the box, they do not immediately withdraw their hands, as if they had “grasped” the object at an instant, as is often assumed in visual perception (see Chap. 2). Instead, the fact that the children are groping around and quite apparently are turning and feeling the unseen object shows that there is an extended percipient event of the tactile kind. There is another event on the outside, which consists in the shaping of the material. The event character is not specific to the material character of the task, but is also found in other modalities. Thus, infants learn to speak over extended periods of time during which they come to consistently shape sound events they originate. For a signifier to be born, there needs to be a second form of event to which the first comes to be linked in repeated and repeatable ways. The other por- tion of the continuum may be of the same kind (e.g. sound) or be of a different kind, such as the visual shapes of the stones in Wittgenstein’s example of the builder. We see another example in Chap. 4, where the infant boy consistently uses the sound
“po poo” together with a pointing gesture to the images of balls. In Chap. 2, I show that even in visual perception, we do not perceive an object as such but that there is a percipient event at the end of which the sense of the thing emerges.
The coordination between the two permanences that come to constitute what we know as a sign is itself an extended event: learning. In the second-grade mathemat- ics lesson, there were different types of plasticine shapes that had emerged in one group of three girls. Jane and Sylvia had made rectangular solids (slabs), whereas Melissa had shaped a cube from her plasticine. After the teacher had grouped the two rectangular solids and had distinguished them from the cube, the girls were encouraged to resolve the apparent conflict. Over the course of the discussion between the three girls, a procedure was evolved whereby one hand was in the shoe- box feeling and turning the object while the other hand was doing the same with one of the differing plasticine shapes. Melissa repeatedly reached into the shoebox. But, despite others’ repeated characterizations of the mystery object as something other
than a cube, Melissa articulated supporting evidence, such as verbally stating that she had felt three equal sides while rotating the cube and holding the three orthogo- nal edges against the thumb-index finger of the other hand in a constant caliper configuration (Fig. 5.3). Melissa also stated that she had felt the object in the shoe- box in the same way that she was doing it while saying that there are three equal sides (i.e. edges). In this way – speaking with Dewey (2008) and Peirce (1932) – she provided a pragmatic definition that is more useful than a definition in the sense that it describes what has to be done to perceive the object corresponding to the word.
That is, the definition is entirely in evental terms: doing, which entails seeing.
An object as something permanent requires recurrence in the associated percipi- ent events. “Object” is a way of marking this recurrence. The word, as sound event, is a recurrence in the auditory experience across situations; and the material «cube»
is a recurrence in visual or tactile experience across situations.3 A sign, according to the definition given above, involves the coordination of two portions of the living continuum, two events associated with recurrent experiences (objects). It therefore marks multiple percipient events cogredient in the current duration. An object, and with it all signifiers, are literal abstractions, patterns of events and experience not dependent on their relations, whereas “an event is just what it is, and is just how it is related” (Whitehead 1919, 64). The objects – two slabs and a cube – are but ways of generating recurrences in communicative events, for example, by associating a particular sound with a particularly shaped stone during a construction project. In the case of Melissa, who eventually reshapes the «cube» into a «slab», we observe the disappearance of one form and the birth (generation) of a new form. The rela- tionship of the particles going into a blob of plasticine is not the same so that we may conceive the blob as a family of events. Cube and slab are but particular ways in which the different part contributing historical lines come together to give what are recognized to be stable forms that allow other events to happen – not in the least more efficacious communication and coordination.
3 The guillemets are used to mark that instead of «cube» there should be a shape: . Fig. 5.3 Three different edges come to be aligned with the same caliper configuration of the right hand, thus providing evidence for the nature of the object as a cube
The conversation between the girls goes on for a while, bringing forth different (iconic) descriptions of the characteristics of the mystery object some supporting the slab-like shape, others suggesting a cubical form. The group then evolves a strategy for testing the relationship between a model (signifier) and the mystery object (signified), and two of the models are tested repeatedly. One hand enters the shoebox, which, though never seen, is taken as feeling over the mystery object.
Simultaneously, the other hand outside the box feels over the model under consid- eration (Fig. 5.4). The person acting in this way is simultaneously experiencing two percipient events related to the sense of touch. Here, as before, feeling out the object involves touching the entity, turning it over, touching it again, and so forth. It is apparent that when one or the other entity emerges as a thing, the thing-like quality of the material is the result of an extended event. “Cube” and “slab” are abstractions from extended percipient events that are related to other percipient events from which the same or similar qualities may be extracted.
In Melissa’s case, the procedure is used during the eighth time with the hand in the shoebox, and it is at that time that what is happening in her face is manifesting surprise (i.e. emotion, affect). This is the antecedent event to the birth of a new sig- nifier form, which manifests itself in the event of giving rectangular prism (slab) shape to the plasticine. And it is the birth of a new sign, understood as the relation between signifier and signified, here in a simple case of ostension. This situation is not unlike that of “ostensive teaching of words” (Wittgenstein 1953/1997, 4), which involves saying “slab” while pointing to that shape (i.e. «slab»). In the ostensive teaching of words, too, two percipient events come to be associated, one related to sound, the other to sight.
Fig. 5.4 The strategy that is antecedent to agreement involves one hand feeling the object in the box, the other hand on a plasticine model
In the preceding description, the phenomenon of the sign – here signifier–signi- fied relation – has been entirely expressed in relations of events. In each situation, two percipient events come to be related. The relationship, too, is not a thing but an event, in which the sameness of two events of feeling is itself felt. The episode clearly illustrates a number of important issues. “The word” is not a thing. The word, as commonly understood, is an abstraction from events; it arises from a sense of permanence of sound experience arising from percipient events. The word – and even more clearly the phrase and the statement – is not instantly. In the case of the girls in the mathematics classroom, the percipient event related to the mystery object is not instantaneous but extended in ways characteristic of events. Similarly, the percipient event related to the signified (the mystery object in the box) clearly is not instantaneous. This situation may serve as an analogy for thinking about the meaning that the use of meaning in traditional theories of educational psychology.
It shows that whatever the plasticine shape serving as a signifier points to or “means”
arises from the experience of permanence in and of a percipient event. There is no more to it when we consider, for example, the phrase “I walked up the stairs.” If someone said this phrase, we would not have to interpret; its “meaning” would be immediately apparent. That event of hearing these recurrent sounds, if requested, can lead us to talk about many experiences related to stairs that we have walked or crawled or pulled ourselves up. One of my personal stories concerning walking up stairs is related to the experience of chronic fatigue and not being able to walk up a flight after riding the bicycle on the previous day. That is, the speech event is related to other events in experience; and, in the telling of such stories, attention and a per- cipient event are presupposed on the part of the recipient as much as the events and experiences that are among the conditions for the speech event to make sense.
The case of Melissa also teaches us about the importance of experiences in the context of which it makes use to mobilize certain signifiers. Even though we cannot ever see the six equal sides of a cube, the word “cube” makes sense, for despite all its different appearances when viewed from different sides – which reveal only some aspects at a time – we can discover those six sides by turning about the cube or by making it turn in our hands in the way we observe Melissa do it (Fig. 5.3). As a result, “The cube with six equal sides is the limiting idea by means of which I express the carnal presence of the cube that is there, before my eyes, under my hands, in its perceptual self-evidence” (Merleau-Ponty 1945, 236–237). The sense of the word “cube” is related to the bodily senses by means of which we have expe- rienced that permanence designated by the word. An experience is not a thing but an event involving a whole family of events, including all the different percipient events and those that give us our feelings (affect, emotion). A word, such as “cube,”
makes sense precisely when the saying (writing) or hearing (reading) of it gives rise to that (however vague) presence of the object in the here and now of the word.