development, experience [perezhivanie] and consciousness became important to him only very late in his short life. This late arrival is shown by the fact that the problem of consciousness – a problem even more important than the problem of thinking and its relation to speech – was formulated as the main problem of psy- chology only in the final paragraphs of his last completed work Thinking and Speech. His lecture about the unity of individual and environment, denoted by the term perezhivanie [experience], was held only a month before entering the hospital where he died. Thus, the present part takes up some of they main phenomena of interest to those working in the lineage of a cultural psychology of education, but, in articulating these phenomena in the evental discourse of a transactional approach, provides new and different insights; and, in so doing, it changes our way of conceiv- ing them.
A lot has been written about signs and sign mediation – on the part of the early Vygotsky and subsequently on the part of his followers. Signs (representations) and signing are means and ways of making present something absent or distant and bringing it into the accented visible (i.e. making it figure and topic). But how do signs and signing come to life? Vygotsky (1997) provided the example of how a child fails in its attempt to grasp an object, the mother then treats the movement as a pointing gesture and hands the object to the child, and eventually the child begins to point (see Chap. 4). Recent research shows that this is not the developmental trajectory. But even this newer research fails to address the question of the (perma- nent) object, which, as Mead (1938) describes, does not exist as such until a phase in the infant’s life where it has a presence in the actions of the individual whether it is at hand, at a distance, or out of view all together. Mead’s analysis even better than Vygotsky’s work provides an explanation of the (cognitive) development of deaf- blind children, which is a form of awakening to life (see Chap. 4). In passage, some thing – e.g. the hammer is not present in consciousness while the seasoned carpenter is nailing. This is also the case for what are referred to as signs. In Chap. 5 I show how signs – signifier and indicated real or ideal objects – emerge.
In educational psychology, “meaning” is probably the most important and most frequent of ideal objects indicated by word-things and other sign-things. Meaning is often invoked with reference to the work in cultural-historical theory and especially on the groundbreaking work of Vygotsky with respect to signs and words. However, in the course of the months prior to his death, Vygotsky was changing his tune: word meaning was to be only a phase of a larger phenomenon, sense, which in fact
“depends on one’s understanding of the world as a whole” (Vygotsky 1987, 276).
He recognized the predominance of sense over meaning and that the children’s first questions are about sense rather than meaning. Yet most research in educational psychology still is concerned with thing-like words, meanings, rules, identities, and so forth rather than with the larger phenomenon that is a precondition of meaning (dictionary sense). Unrecognized in current research is the fact that no difference would be recognizable if there were not already an existing and presupposed com- mon sense; everything appearing in a constantly evolving sense-giving field makes sense like a figure against ground (Mead 1972; Schütz 1932). Drawing on a meeting in an advanced experimental biology lab, I show in Chap. 6 why and how common
sense constitutes the condition for cooperative joint activity and, thus, for the sense of where things are at, how things are going, and, if an issue at all, what the mean- ings of words and phrases might be. Words are to the occasion what figures are against ground: integral part of the whole but standing out to accomplish a specific function in speaking. They make sense because of the commonsense ground that the participants in the occasion share. That common sense, which is based on a com- mon ground, is not a single but rather multilayered phenomenon. Vygotsky intuited this to be the case based on his readings of the French philosopher Frédéric Paulhan (1928); and he captured this intuition in stating that meaning only was one of the zones of sense.
In everyday life as much as in the context of formal disciplines, humans use concept words, ways of dealing with a variety of phenomena all of which have something in common – dog is a concept-word because it summarizes many experi- ences of entities with four legs that bark, even though there are huge variations in the specific looks and barks of these entities. It is a recurrent experience across occasions of different kind. How humans learn concepts and other abstractions has been a core interest of educational psychology; and some of the classical studies in cultural psychology of education concern the categorization of schooled and unschooled peasants in Central Asia (Luria 1976). Classroom studies, especially in science and mathematics education, take up the earlier works of Vygotsky to theo- rize how students develop universal scientific concepts. But that early work over- intellectualized concept development by characterizing it as mental (even in the late work Thinking and Speech) rather than focusing on a concrete human psychology according to which mind truly is public, physically existing in the relations between people (Vygotsky 1989). In Chap. 7, I build on the work of George H. Mead, Evald V. Il’enkov, and Karl Marx on the nature and emergence of the ideal (i.e. of con- cepts) from a transactional (relational) perspective. The origin of the universal [Rus.
vseobshchie] is not merely social but is a characteristic of society [Rus. obshchestvo].
In a first phase, the ideal emerges when transactional relations between people come to determine the transactional relation to objects, and transactional relations with objects determine the transactional relations between people. The universal is an ideal characteristic: not of social relations (e.g. dyad, group) but of societal relations and the universal habits of the community. I use examples from mathematics class- room at the elementary school level to exemplify and theorize the trajectory at the end of which we observe children’s actions exhibit universally valid patterns (abstractions).
At the end of his life, Vygotsky writes that consciousness is a problem much larger than that of the relation between thinking and speech. That program has not been taken up in classical educational psychology. The question of consciousness is associated with that of the unquestioned (common) ground. Consciousness is a product of evolution that provided the human species with an advantage; through the event of speaking, it is an aspect of the emergent material field in which social relations-as-events take place. Whereas Vygotsky was only at the beginning of pointing to and sketching a non-dualistic perspective on consciousness, Mead already had worked one out: “Consciousness becomes our experience of things not
as they are but as they impress us from a distance which we can never overcome except in imagination” (Mead 1938, 74). Consciousness thus arises as the experi- ence of past or anticipated future experience. Remembering is key to the phenomenon of consciousness. But remembering is different from memory, especially when the latter is merely conceived in computer science term, as some information stuffed away in the mind. The transactional approach provides a particularly interesting perspective, because in it, experience is experience of events, and in remembering, past events (e.g. a lesson or examination) are present together with the current event (e.g. an interview or a debriefing session). In Chap. 8, I exhibit and theorize various phenomena related to remembering in terms of the transactional approach, includ- ing corporeal remembering, reminiscing, reminding, and recognizing. These phe- nomena show that remembering is an aspect of occasions and exists at the crossroad of corporeal and social events.
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