It is nonsense to conceive of Nature as a static fact, even for an instant devoid of duration.
There is no Nature apart from transition, and there is no transition apart from temporal dura- tion. This is the reason why the notion of an instant of time, conceived as a primary simple fact, is nonsense. (Whitehead 1938, 152)
There are changes, but there are no things that change; change does not need a support.
There are movements, but there are not necessarily invariable objects that move; movement does not imply a moving body [mobile]. … Change is self-sufficient; it is the thing itself.
(Bergson 1911, 24, original emphasis, underline added)
In Chap. 1, I show how classical psychological theorizing is ontologically based on the primacy of material and ideal things. The material things are located in Cartesian space, which is treated as the substrate for the relationship between mate- rial and geometrical bodies. Ideal things, on the other hand, are non-spatial and ephemeral. In cognitive psychology, this eventually has led to the question about how thought and mind are grounded and how concepts (theory, ideals) come to be related to the material world – the symbol grounding problem in the cognitive sci- ences. Interpreters of cultural psychology do not operate differently, so that the thing (object) becomes a Trojan horse by means of which Cartesian thinking enters and comes to dominate even those theories said to be about “(practical) activity.”
This includes (rightly or wrongly) the theory that Vygotsky developed and also the one by his student A. N. Leont’ev, which today goes under the name of cultural- historical activity theory. As shown in Fig. 2.6 below, a mediational triangle – whether in Vygotsky’s original form or that build on the Helsinki interpretation of Leont’ev’s work1 – epitomizes the thinking in terms of objects; and the relations in those triangles also are things. Sign-things and tool-things come to stand between a person-thing and another person-thing or a material object-thing; or a tool stands between subject and object, a subject stands between division of labor and the object
1 A recent analysis shows that the idea of mediators that stand between people or between people and objects is extraordinarily expanded and becomes a central concept in the Helsinki approach to activity theory (Spinuzzi 2019).
of activity. All these are things with external relation-things that are such so that other things can come to stand between and thereby mediate them.
In this chapter, I provide an outline of the transactional approach, we exists in the ontological primacy of the event. Everything we perceive, experience, can think of, and can affect is of evental nature. This framework is subsequently given flesh, first in the subsequent two chapters, which focus on the extensional qualities of events, and then in the extensions and implications for a transactional perspective on per- sonality (Part II and Part III of this book).
A radical alternative to thinking the world begins with the recognition that nature at an instant cannot be but an abstraction. In thinking of the world at an instant – e.g.
in an assessment of IQ, ability, motivation and the likes – our decomposition ends up with entities that have thing-like characteristics. The approach inherently becomes Cartesian, where physical extension in geometrical space is the primary attribute (quality) of an entity-thing (person). In the transactional perspective, the starting point for theory is the fundamental relationship of physical occasions [that]
is extensive connection” (Whitehead 1929/1978, 288), which leads to a theory based on the relation between whole (e.g. universe) and part (e.g. person, word). The whole (universe) is in flux, a fact articulated in the first introductory quotation. Any actual entity cannot be theorized in terms of a morphology of things but is an event;
and an object-thing always is an abstraction from events. Consider the example of a molecule: it “is a historic route of actual occasions; and such a route is an ‘event’ … and the changes in the molecule are the consequential differences in the actual occa- sions” (80). It is apparent that even the molecule is historicized; and this is even more so in the case of human (cultural) activity, the historical nature of which is amplified by the role that past experiences have in current experience.
The transactional approach recognizes that we never perceive and understand things but always experience nature as passing. Indeed, perception and experience themselves are continuously passing. Without passage, there is no experience. There is no standstill, no possibility for a time-out from life. Time-out is equivalent to death. This is so even for objects that appear to be immediately and constantly pres- ent to visual perception. With tactile perception, it is immediately apparent that movement is required to sense what a surface texture is and feels like. Without movement, there is no texture; nor is there something like a line, a circle, or what- ever other figure we might think of to exemplify the point. Smell requires the pas- sage of air, taste requires the passage of food over the taste buds, and hearing inherently cannot be at an instant because its objects (e.g. a musical note) are extended in a manner that comes to be known as temporal. Visual perception appears to be an exception, as objects seem to impress themselves. Thus, in cognitive psy- chology, there are perceptual models treating the retina as a mirror of nature from which the mind extracts features. But this is not consistent in this way with the results of psychological research on visual perception.
When research participants are asked to fixate a stationary point, the eye does not remain stationary (Yarbus 1967). Instead, it moves, among others, left and right. If this movement were to be registered on something like a pen chart recorder, it would leave a trace displaying a back and forth movement (Fig. 2.1a). When
research participants are asked to follow a vertical straight line, the eye does not just move parallel to the line but instead also features tiny horizontal back-and-forth movements as well as larger horizontal movements up to but generally not exceed- ing 20° (Fig. 2.1b). Finally, asked to count a set of six horizontal lines, researchers recorded both larger movements oriented in the direction of the lines and smaller, saccading movements (Fig. 2.1c). Indeed, if perceptual psychologists fix the image of a figure on the same place on the retina, it fades away into a uniform grey within a short period of time, usually of the order of 1–3 s.
The upshot of such research is that there is a perceptual (percipient) event rather than some recording of a stationary object on one place on the retina from which a stable feature could be extracted. The world that appears in perception also does not sit still; it continues to evolve. The form therefore is an abstraction from this percipi- ent event. With experience, we come to know that there is a specific form in front of us even though we cannot see that form – as shown in the analyses of the perception of a cube (Merleau-Ponty 1945). “Cube” is an abstraction from percipient events, which may vary across situations depending on how we approach the cube. It is bet- ter to speak of perceiving, which we then treat as an event. But the universe does not stand still, nor does anything in the participant stand still. An analogy for this situa- tion is that of two individuals, each of which is on one of two trains moving side by side at the same velocity, that is, speed and direction (Bergson 1911). Each train and the individuals riding them appear immobile (stable) with respect to the other.
Movement only is an added feature to this immobility. The problem arises when immobility, and, associated with it, stable things, are taken as the nature of things;
and as soon as we theorize the world in terms of stable things, we create insoluble problems. Bergson suggests that the mechanisms of human perception are such as in the analogy of the two trains, where internal and external events run in parallel and appear to be stationary with respect to one another. Perception itself is an event that changes as it unfolds. The perceiving subject and the object perceived appear thing-like rather than evental, which leads to the impression that there are certain states or stages. In the case of educational and psychological research, measures prior to and following interventions precisely lead to the ideas of knowledge state and developmental stage. Learning and development are theorized as changes between states or stages.
Fig. 2.1 The eye does not stand still when (a) looking at a point (as would be registered by a pen-chart recorder), (b) following a vertical but stationary line, or (c) counting six given horizontal lines
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.