Both the surrounding world and the person change while the psychological experiment, itself an event, is unfolding. The person changes biologically and phys- iologically – as can be seen in the fact of tiring. To understand a person tiring while participating, we need to have associated theoretical categories that make tiring integral to participating. Participation in psychological experiments not only changes participants but also may lead to the sense of having learned. Thus, learning is a form of event associated with participating, and associated with the continuing life of the person as a physical organism and the ongoing evolution of the universe as a whole. The different forms of events that appear in this paragraph are of differ- ent order and range. To be able to model human behavior requires us to investigate the different relations events may have to each other. To my knowledge, nobody has done this better than the quintessential philosopher of process A. N. Whitehead. It is to his work that we therefore turn to elucidate the different relations that events have to one another.
possible but unperceived events, though not sharply differentiated, stand in a figure
| ground relation. Some events stand out against, and make sense because of, a (back-) ground of an infinite number of other events. Because perceiving is an event within some current duration that makes a “slab of nature,” we speak of it as cogre- dient. In mathematics, this adjective is used to refer to processes that occur in lock- step with each other, as when two or more variables are changed in the same way when transformed. Here, this adjective also is used to characterize a percipient event that is unequivocally present within the duration associated with it. In contrast with an ingredient event that could exist as independent and perduring element (sum of parts), a cogredient event cannot be thought independently of the event that extends over it. An event therefore can be cogredient with a specific duration; but the dura- tion may have many events cogredient with it (Fig. 2.2a). Consider the case of a phase in the life of the supermarket, where any percipient event – your perceiving – is cogredient within a particular duration. Whereas there are many other events occurring within the slab, the next percipient event would be associated with a dif- ferent duration. This quality, cogredience, immediately yields for us the experience of “here-now” as distinct from “now-there,” “here-was,” and “here-will-be.” That is, cogredience yields those qualities from which classical scientific notions of timeless space (at an instant) and space-less time are abstracted.
Any event in nature and society is of considerable complexity. We obtain greater simplicity in one of two ways (Whitehead 1919). In the first way, greater simplicity is achieved by focusing on events cogredient with the present duration, and specifi- cally on those cogredient events that are either salient or that constitute the neces- sary ground upon which the salient event occurs. This simplification yields spatial relations, including those of the differently located participants in some event (e.g.
a school lesson, a research interview). The second way is achieved when the analy- sis focuses on certain perduring and permanent characters – e.g. related to an object
Fig. 2.2 Relations between events. (a) A percipient event (event 1) is cogredient with the duration, which may include a number of cogredient events (e.g. event 2, event 3). (b) A complex event may be simplified in one of two ways, the first focusing on those cogredient with it, which yields spatial relations, and the other focusing on perduring qualities and apparently constant characters, which yields temporal relation (here the sequence from event 3 through event 5). (c) A duration or present always has an end that differs from the beginning with novelty emerges in passage; the earlier and later boundaries are blurred. (d) An event may be composed of mini- or micro-events or phases that
“bleed” into each other
that is “here again” and that we know to be there though hidden behind some screen.
This approach therefore separates events into smaller segments that bear what we come to know as temporal relations. It is well known that the experience of object permanence is not innate but emerges in the life of an infant around the age of 8–10 months. Indeed, in the life of the infant, the sense of space and time, subject and object, co-emerge (see Chap. 4).
One important aspect of the analysis of some phenomenon in terms of events is that any smallest unit we can think of still has evental quality. That is, even if we were to proceed to the analysis of perduring qualities and permanence, we might identify events of smaller and smaller (temporal, spatial) extension, but we could never reach an “event at an instant,” an idea that is excluded by the very conception of the event. But saying event means saying change. Thus, none of the “entities”
normally associated with some human activity – individuals, tools, objects, or ideas – are constant but changing, if ever so slowly. Even language, which appears to be stable, actually changes in use together with the social relations within which it is used: there are no other outside forces that change the language, which dies (as Latin did) when it is no longer in use. Even the changes in the literary novel form can be understood only if it is considered in its relation to the ever-changing lan- guage of everyday use, where the novel also has its creative source (Bakhtin 1981).
Both the idea of a point-like instant in time and that of a singular point in space are the results of abstractions, whereby the analysis identifies characters as limits extracted from the different forms of extension of an event. Both philosophical ideas, space, as the accumulation of distinct points, and time, as the serial order of instantaneous moments, are the result of extensive abstraction (Whitehead 1919).
Readers interested in how this works are referred to the philosopher’s work – but it does require some mathematical background. The characters, abstractions, are not of evental nature and, thus, external to the event.
Relationships between such externalities are incidental and do not reveal the inner nature of the event (see also Hegel 1807). We can create illusions of change, such as when playing the photographs of a movie reel fast enough so that the people shown seem to move, but we do not thereby get the inner dynamic of that move- ment. This has been referred to as the cinematographic mechanism of life associated with a mechanistic illusion of life (Bergson 1908). In this illusion, an external force is required that turns the reel on the projector to create the illusion of the movement, an illusion created by moving pictures. This external force is the artificial link that has to be established between stable states to create the semblance of movement and change. That is, what we see is not an actual movement but a movement that is hid- den in the projector. The projector motor is external to the contents of the photo- graphs that are played and that when played fast enough appear to show movement.
Any such attempt in reconstituting movement from still images (states) presupposes that movement consists of immobilities.
There are two important qualities to duration: its beginnings and endings are indeterminate, and, because of its creativity, the ending always includes novelty over the beginning (Fig. 2.2c). We intend getting the saltshaker but in fact knock over the wine glass; we intend hammering a nail into the wall but hit the thumb instead; or
we feel saying one thing but will have said something else (as in a “Freudian slip”).
Each duration, occasion, situation, passage, or present therefore comes with creativ- ity or emergence so that every next instant comes with some form of novelty over what is now (Mead 1932; Whitehead 1933). Thus, “the real duration is that in which each form flows out of anterior forms while adding to them something new, and is explained by them as much as it explains them” (Bergson 1908, 391).
Passage therefore is nothing like what we might infer from physics, where a self- identical train has simply been displaced by a certain amount on the self-identical tracks in the exact ways that the mathematical equations allowed us to calculate ahead of the movement. In such a world, there is no novelty; and such a world is indifferent with respect to past and future. It does not matter whether the train moves from A to B or B to A. Sadi Carnot’s equations of the heat engine also describe reversible processes, whereas we experience our world as irreversible. Creativity and emergence mean that there is something new that could not have been predicted based on the antecedent conditions alone. The idea is familiar to those with some knowledge of chaos or catastrophe theory, where the concept of bifurcation takes a central place. The state of a system following the emergence cannot be predicted based on the known states preceding the emergence. But in the world that we inhabit, each duration constitutes not just a bifurcation but represents a furcation with many even infinite possibilities, only one of which materializes itself in the passage of the once-occurrent nature (Whitehead 1938). Near the beginning of a conversational duration there are an infinite number of possibilities for its evolution only one of which realizes (materializes) itself in the actual saying and is completed when the saying has ended and therefore is an irrevocable fact (Roth 2014). Novelty here is not exceptional. Instead, “the creative urge belongs to the essential constitu- tion of each situation” (Whitehead 1933, 249). Thus, we could not ever say what the world at an instant is, because the smallest event still has the quality of creativity, emergence, and novelty so that anything identified within it is different at the end from what it was at the beginning.
In one conception of the relation between events, those with perduring characters were presented as sequences of events with shorter durations that are adjoined at hard boundaries – such as event 3 and event 4 or event 4 and event 5 (Fig. 2.2b).
However, such a relation between events that are part of a continuity is inconsistent with the idea that novelty is inherent in the passage from past to future that occurs in and constitutes the present. If there were hard boundaries, then one event in a historical continuity could be said to be the cause of a later event – once we know the intervening connection – because the two are separate. But any actual causal attribution is possible only after the fact and after an effect is known (Dewey 1938;
Nietzsche 1922b). Because passage comes with novelty, we cannot know the end until after the happening is over (Fig. 2.2c). We model the unfolding of a larger event by means of mini- or micro-events that constitute its phases; and these phases intersect, that is, they overlap and thereby are common (Whitehead 1919). In other words, the phases of some event – which we may think in terms of mini- or micro- events depending on the phenomenon investigated – blend into each other (Fig. 2.2d).
The novel end of one phase is the factual base of the next phase, which ends with
the emergence of novelty that becomes the beginning of the subsequent phase. An immediately apparent situation where such an approach turns out to be useful is that of a conversation, where a turn at talk is beginning while listening to the preceding speaker to which the turn replies. If the reply were not beginning in listening, the two turns would have no connection – giving rise to a “dialogue of the deaf,” which is not a dialogue at all. The implications and relevance of thinking about conversa- tions and the continuity of experience are worked out and exemplified in Chap. 3.
In any duration, there are many (streams of) events that do not share in continuity (Fig. 2.2a) but that still may be joined. Consider the relation between a person and some object in the immediate environment. Both the person and the object are thought and theorized in evental terms, as life-threads, lifelines, bundle of lines, families of durations, families of events, or lines of flight2: the person is to be thought of as a family of events of the type “‘active’ condition” and the object is an event of the type “‘passive’ condition” (Whitehead 1919, 86) in the event that extends over (contains) both. Instead of the term family, we may also use that of nexus (plural nexūs). When the person (e.g. event 2, Fig. 2.3) perceives the object (e.g. event 1, Fig. 2.3), the two lifelines or families of events come to be joined. How are they joined? Again, they are joined by an (micro-) event, which above is discussed as the percipient event (e.g. event 1,2, Fig. 2.3) overlapping with the “transmission” event (e.g. the sound heard as another person’s speaking). The object comes to exist as such for the person only after the percipient event has come to an end – e.g. the said is available only after saying and hearing have ended. But in the percipient event they are joined. Some readers may hastily conclude that an object does not “partici- pate” in the percipient event. But reflecting on the preceding description of what the eyes do rapidly allows us to conclude that they eyes would not know where to move unless they followed the contours.
In the nexus of two events (Fig. 2.3) is embodied the essentially social nature of the universe. Indeed, the figure visualizes central aspects in the definition of a nexus:
A nexus enjoys “social order” where (i) there is a common element of form illustrated in the definiteness of each of its included actual entities, and (ii) this common element of form
2 Whitehead uses the concepts life-thread and family of events. The notions line of flight [ligne de fuite] and bundle of lines [paquet de lignes] are used by Deleuze and Guattari (1980), which Ingold (2011), who also uses the term lifeline, takes up in his anthropological studies. The notion family of durations appears in Mead (1938).
Fig. 2.3 The relation between two events in the same duration is established by means of an event.
For example, a rock and a person come to be related by means of a percipient event
arises in each member of the nexus by reason of the conditions imposed upon it by its pre- hensions of some other members of the nexus, and (iii) these prehensions impose that con- dition of reproduction by reason of their inclusion of positive feelings of that common form.
(Whitehead 1929/1978, 34)
The nexus with social form thus designates a society, which allows us to under- stand a person – an enduring organism – as a “society whose social order has taken the special form of ‘personal order’” (Whitehead 1929/1978, 34). Throughout this book, I think with Whitehead when theorizing the person and personality.
The perception of an object is not somehow constructed, and it is not simply
“extracted” from the retina activated by the light that has come from the object and activated certain cells. Just as the hands of a person who cannot see but only touch an object (because of blindness or because the object is hidden from sight) follow the contours – such as edges, surfaces, and corners of a cube – the event has the eyes follow the perceptual contours that the object provides. As is apparent in the gram- matical structure of the preceding phrase, both person and object are actively involved. But each also is passively involved, for the object gives itself to the person who receives the image (e.g. Marion 1996) all the while it is passive with respect to the movements that occur within the person-related nexus of events, including the one that defines the object. The notion of feeling –Vygotsky might have translated Whitehead’s term using the Russian word perezhivanie – designates the event by means of which some aspect of the social or material environment-as-event comes to be immanent in the becoming of the person. The event is one of concrescence, a coming together of events in the constitution of what will be the subject. Such feel- ings thus are “creations of their own creature,” and thus describe an actual entity like a person “in a state of process during which it is not fully definite, [but] determines its own ultimate definiteness” (Whitehead 1929/1978, 255).
The percipient event does not just bring about the object in the awareness of the person. The object does not exist as such and in itself. Instead, the object is an abstraction from an event that stands against all the other events in the same dura- tion (Whitehead 1919). The duration extends over (encompasses) the percipient event that brings into the accented visible one or more objects (i.e. other events) that stand against everything else over which the present duration extends. Although little headed in mainstream educational psychology, we never perceive objects as such. Instead, objects always are perceived as recurrences in the encompassing event, within which they also obtain their function. Thus, anything on top of my office desk is perceived against the desk upon which they appear, itself located in the office (see also Heidegger 1928/1977). That is, these things are office stuff, unless they do not seem to fit and perceived as foreign. But this foreign quality occurs against a presupposed ground of familiarity with office stuff.
In percipient events of the visual type, the person-as-event clearly is changed – the person has come to know something about the object – whereas the object-as- event tends to be relatively stable. As a result, each event becomes immanent in the other even after they have separated again. When we have a conversation with someone else, we both can refer to it because we have it in common (see Chap. 3).
But the conversation is something we have accomplished jointly, so that there is
something of the other in ourselves after we have parted. In other types of percipient events, the sensible event itself may change, such as when the fingers leave a trace on the surface as a result of a touching intended to find out the quality of its feel. The trace is a feature of the surface that marks the immanence of person-related event in the object that is no longer the same; and the change in the person-related event marks the immanence of the object-related event in the person. Habits and habitual experience precisely point to the immanence of recurrent patterns that arise in one family of events in the course of repeated relational events with other events (e.g.
tools) in the same duration. But when the joining event is of the practical type, then the objects at hand clearly are changed as well, that is, together with the person performing the practical action. In the case of a conversation between two people, the two lifelines come to be joined in a common event. The joining occurs in coor- dinated irreducible pairs of micro-events {speaking | listening} that alternate in their direction such that speaking and listening fall within the lifelines corresponding to each person. In other words, a conversation is happening only if speaking is directly associated with listening, if the two occur together in constituting a phase of the conversation. Moreover, listening involves an irreducible pair of micro-events in the form {attending to | actively receiving}. The details of the approach and their impli- cation for the analysis of teaching and learning are worked out in Chap. 3.
The transactional approach also allows us to appreciate in new ways the relation- ship between person and event. An event does not exist as such, as something that can be referred to and grasped as a whole, until it is completed (Fig. 2.4). The dis- tinction between an ongoing happening and an event as grasped is reflected in the distinction between “the general stream of experience” and “an experience,” avail- able only “when the material experienced has run its course” (Dewey 1934/2008, 42). The event is therefore not grasped while it is unfolding, and any percipient during the event (Fig. 2.4) thus has to be thought of as witnessing; and it is only after the fact that we can say with any certainty what the witnessing has witnessed. This is quite apparent when we use Dewey’s own example of “that meal in a Paris restau- rant,” an experience that will have been of a very different kind for philosopher than for those dining in the restaurants Le Petit Cambodge and Le Carillon (Paris, France) that were stormed by Islamists on the evening of November 13, 2015, leaving 15
Fig. 2.4 The relation between an extended event, itself part of the duration of the world, and a series of percipient events occurring while it is lasting. The event as a whole can be perceived and grasped only after it has ended