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a blanket (Figs. 4.1b and 4.2b). When the child is younger than about 9 months of age, it will stop attending to the toy as soon as it has disappeared underneath a cover (Fig. 4.1c, d). However, when the infant is only a little older – generally around the age of 9–10 months – it will lift the cover without hesitation and get the toy (Fig. 4.2c). In the first instance, the toy-thing does not appear to exist once it disappears from sight, whereas in the second instance, the infant is actively looking for and getting the toy-thing even though it cannot be perceived. That is, the regu- larity continues to exist in the experience of the infant even though it is not present.
This, therefore, is “an awareness of perception of the object as related to certain other definite events separate from the specious present” (Whitehead 1919, 82).
That is, next to sense-awareness, there is another event of awareness in which are recognized earlier events of sense-awareness. Remembering thus becomes part of the percipient event in the present. The object has existed in the past, and this exis-
Fig. 4.1 The classical Piagetian experiment testing for object permanence with a 7-months-old infant. (a) The infant holds (“plays with”) the object (toy). (b) The experimenter takes the object away and hides it under a blanket. (c, d) The infant no longer attends to the object, as in the adage,
“Out of sight, out of mind” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVqJacvywAQ)
Fig. 4.2 The same Piagetian experiment but with a 12-months-old infant, who, in the third frame, can be seen to have searched for and found the object (toy). (https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=wQyEB_yNHnU)
tence carries over into the present, is part of the character of the present even when it is not part of the percipient event. But prior to the appearance of the object as such, there is sense awareness associated with sense objects – e.g. a color, smell, and hardness.
Related to the object, the emergence of two qualities therefore has to be shown:
(a) the object-as-permanence that exists beyond the immediacy of the percipient event and (b) the social nature of this object. Tied to the second quality, therefore, is the challenge to the constructivist idea that the individual mind is a closed system that makes up its own world – a version that is continuously refined to make it adequate to the individual’s experience – including the social world that it consti- tutes with others. These others are constructions of the individual mind, which comes about when the internal model of the natural world and self are externalized to become things among things (Piaget and Inhelder 1966). In the process of social- ization, the individual – implicitly or explicitly assumed to be wild and untamed – comes to be social. The situation is not much different in the literature taking sociocultural or social constructivist perspective, where any object (including
“meaning”) is first constructed in the public arena and then internalized (by means of individual construction) to become an aspect of the self and the individual mind.
The self is something that the individual constructs and then externalizes, and which is a model for its constructions of the other (self).
In the preceding sketch, it is apparent that the individual is one manifestation of theoretical approaches that work with things rather than with events as events. The conception of the individual as thing (self) is a counterpart and correlate of the con- ception of a thing-in-itself. The ontology of things is present everywhere even in much of Vygotsky’s work, such as when he ties particular concepts and their mean- ing to the mind of individual child. Both the concept and the meaning are theorized in thing-like fashion, and they are somehow the property or characteristic of the individual. This individualism is present when meaning is attributed to a specific person, as Vygotsky does in his earlier work – e.g. the “word meaning characteristic of the child” (Vygotskij 1934, 119 [134]).1 This is the very position that pragmatist philosopher have critiqued as an instance of a primitive (scientific) discourses, because it supposes that “individual words in language name objects” and that
“every word has a meaning. This meaning is correlated with the word. It is the object for which the word stands” (Wittgenstein 1953/1997, 2). This individualism leads straight to intellectualism. Characteristic of the earlier work are statements such as: “The child establishes social interaction with adults through words that have meaning” (Vygotskij 1934, 119 [134]). This is a very reductionist description of a social relation as the result of the child’s efforts and words that have pre- existing
“meanings.” The child as an individual entity (self) is presupposed much in the same way that are the word and the meaning associated with it.
1 The numbers in square brackets refer to the page in one of the available English translations (Vygotsky 1987).
Near the end of his life, Vygotsky recognized the intellectualist bias in his earlier work, which is associated with a psychophysical problem that he indicated to be addressing in his future work that he never came to realize. At that time, his empha- sis shifted to sense, which is a more important phenomenon than meaning and exists already before language appears – e.g. a sense of how the world works. Meaning is only one of the phases of sense; and the sense of the word is a function of the world as a whole. But sense is a function of the world; and unless such a world exists, there cannot be sense and even less meaning of words. One of the key problems with intellectualism is that it is based on a split of body and mind, which Vygotsky refers to in his notes as the psychophysical problem. In the attempt to overcome this prob- lem, he became interested in the work of the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza, for whom there is only one substance. This one substance, though inaccessible directly, manifests itself as body and as thought. But theorizing in terms of substance, body and thought still deal in things rather than process. This is where the process- oriented, evental take of transactional psychology makes a decisive advance.
Beginning with the event as the fundamental unit allows us theorists to move away from the reduction of life to things. But that leaves us with the task to explain how the object emerges as a recurrent form across different events.
For the later Vygotsky language was an integral aspect of a sense-giving field.
But we would not make any advance if we considered it to be a thing, employed as a tool by people to construct whatever analysts are interested in – including knowl- edge, meaning, identity, and intersubjectivity. It is only if language itself is thought as event that we get to a dynamic perspective of an interconnected world, a perspec- tive that had emerged during the Romantic period in Germany, which the later Vygotsky was taking up (Bertau 2014). Rather than thinking the sense-giving field in terms of forces acting between things (e.g. people), we are better of thinking about them in terms of electromagnetism (Mead 1938; Whitehead 1919). This allows understanding time and space – which Immanuel Kant assumed to be the a priori of experience – not as things but as abstractions from more fundamental phe- nomena of the natural and social world: events. The “meaningful action” and
“meaningful language,” which are the objects of our science, are abstractions from a transactional and translocutional world of process that becomes thingified in self- identical actors and objects (cf. Ricœur 1986). The sense-giving field thus consists of all the events cogredient within the same duration or “slab of nature.” Objects are abstractions from this evental field in the same way as observed objects (e.g. elec- trons, photons) are abstractions from the quantum field.
Even before Vygotsky made his shift from meaning to sense, from intellectual- ism to a Spinozist unity of body and mind, there existed in the scholarly literature the notion of an objective field that orients the conduct of individuals and groups.
This objective field is realized in the threefold relation (gesture to first person, sec- ond person, and future phases of activity) of a (vocal and non-vocal) gesture between two people in one and the same given social act (Mead 1972). The sense of some- thing exists in the form of those logical relations of the parts of a situational whole
that participants indicate to one another. The word, and thus its sense and meaning are objective, social characteristics because it is in consciousness “absolutely impossible for one person, but possible for two” (Vygotskij 1934, 318 [285]). In making this statement, Vygotsky draws on the German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach, who whose aphorism extended to any thing: “but only that exists, which exists for me and the other at the same time, wherein I and the other agree, which is not only mine [mein] – which is general [allgemein = common to all]” (Feuerbach 1846, 308). The philosopher argued that some object could not be said to exist unless there are at least two persons for which the thing objectively exists, that is, for whom the thing exists as object. This proof cannot be produced from thought alone, for the being of the object requires that it be different from thought. It is only when something also exists for another that we know it is not a mere figment of our mind. In this case, the object can be referred to. Among the earliest form of referring to an object is pointing. True pointing, however, presupposes the object pointed to.
True pointing thus presupposes both the object pointed to and the associated gesture that allows the object to be seen.
We are thus confronted with a complex of phenomena that are distinct in object- oriented theoretical approaches to psychology but that come to be closely related in an event-oriented transactional psychology of education. Here, the individual as self in the face of the other is a manifestation of the relation between subject and object.
It turns out that the relation between subject and object also is a manifestation of the human relation that emerges into the relation between self and other in the course of the development of an infant (which, as research shows, that not experience itself as distinct from its mother during the earliest phases of its life). The question of the other in the self inherently confers to the transactional approach its cultural and historical characters. In object-oriented approaches, the two members of each pair are approached as separate things, whereas they are constitutive parts of one phe- nomenon – the unity/identity of {individual | environment} (see Chap. 3) – in the transactional take. The emergence of the object and thus the emergence of the world is articulated and discussed below in an investigation of pointing and the original relations from which this evental phenomenon emerges.