formulation2 of the event that has just happened follows: “you are telling me the colors.” The infant boy’s turning of the gaze toward the left page then initiates another phase in this reading episode, and thereby also constitutes a positive affir- mation of what the saying in turn 23 will have said.
It is quite apparent that in the exchange, the movement of the head and the direc- tion of gazing are taken as a manifestation of the orientation toward a specific object.
But the nature of this object is not apparent to the second participant. We observe a series of {offering | rejecting} sequences until success is manifested by means of an {offering | accepting} pair (turn 23 | turn 24). The naming of the characters presup- poses their objective existence in the public forum of their joint work and the pos- sibility for the character to be identified on the part of the infant. Thus, the joint work also includes percipient events, the results of which are manifested in naming.
The event pairs such as {offering | rejecting} are to be considered in the same way as the verbal exchanges in Chap. 3, for the event of rejecting implies the events of having attended to and received an offering. Naming, which in one case occurs through recognizable English words and in the other through what we might take to be proto-words that already have the ring of real words to them. They are already social through and through, for they have a function in their joint work to assist another in the identifying a specific object of orientation presupposed to exist for the other in the same way that it exists for the self. These “proto-words” are sound events that establish a double relation: between mother and infant and between the pair and the features on the book page. In each instance, the infant-produced sound and his thumb on the ball is but the initial phase in the completion of a social act of pointing that it initiates.
The very fact that the work is conducted makes evident that there is something missing on the part of the doings associated with the infant that would have made the object apparent. Possible ways of making the object of interest apparent are first offered on the part of the parent, followed by the offerings on the part of the infant boy. That is, we now observe events on the part of the “‘active’ conditioning” family of infant-related events that are part of the work of achieving successful pointing, which will have arrived only with turn 23. Here, it takes a number of exchange events until the mutual alignment of the pair to a specific character – the color of the ball on the dog’s head – comes to be successfully achieved. At that point, reading continues concerning other features on another page.
Prior to the emergence of object permanence, the universe of the infant is without objects that exist even though they cannot be seen. (There also cannot be a self as object.) The world of the infant consists of moving and inconsistent scenes that appear only to disappear again (Piaget and Inhelder 1966). Whereas infants do take things and toys into their hands, studies of congenitally blind and deaf children show that they do not grasp these things as objects or try exploring them through their sense of touch to find out any characteristics (Meshcheryakov 1974). They do not have a world. These children do not show signs of recognizing toys or of under- standing what these are. Indeed, they show no inclination of wanting to explore their surrounding world. When given material things, they tend to drop them without ever trying to feel them out. Therefore, and unlike this tends to be presupposed in con- structivist paradigms, such children do not come to have or know a world on their own. They do not appear to have such a need. Whatever attempts educators in these studies might have made, deaf-blind children did not exhibit the conduct required for orienting them to selfsame objects over and against them. Objects as such exist only for the tutored deaf-blind children. Before, they did not exist other than in the form of resistances encountered as a child bumps into them. They do not exist as recurrent characters with particular functions. Objects become the selfsame things that they are in common use when they are part of directed, purposeful human activities, characterized by the relationships with others and the material world. The orientation toward an object as a thing-in-itself arises in the relationship with others oriented toward the satisfaction of a need:
Orientative-investigatory activity [deyatel’nost’] emerges as a vital activity [aktivnost’]
directed toward recognizing an object [predmet] that previously figured in a “practical”
activity [deyatel’nost’]. The result of such vital activity [activnost’] is the actualization of the image of the thing, with the help of which some organic need of the child was previ- ously satisfied. (Meshcheryakov 1974, 79)
In the quotation, two forms of events are marked as distinct, though in English (in contrast to Russian and German), there is only one term: activity. In this descrip- tion, the object emerges from vital activity – e.g. a percipient event, seeing or feel- ing without a specific intent – after it has figured in a practical, purpose- or motive- oriented activity (e.g. feeding that satisfies hunger). What is referred to as the “image of the thing,” of course, is required for object permanence: the image allows the object to be (virtually) present even if it is absent. A past percipient event (or its results) is alive in the present and recognized in a form that object-oriented approaches name memory; it is an event of the form of non-sensuous perception (Whitehead 1920). From this perspective, therefore, the image is an emergent, even- tal phenomenon, arising only from inherently joint, societally motivated activity [deyatel’nost’].3 Typical sequences in the life of an infant include eating with a spoon, which begins with the parent feeding the child, the child holding the spoon without and before using the spoon, and eventually using the spoon to eat (satisfy a need). Percipient events thereby come to be subordinated to more encompassing
3 This is the form of activity theorized by means of the triangle in Fig. 2.6.
events in which the former are integral parts. Without such orientation characteristic of (social) activity, the image associated with object permanence does not emerge even though some form of image of the object may have appeared on the retina many times before. The research with the congenitally deaf-blind children shows that their world of things is related to their world of people, where these things have particular functions in the relations to other people. The experiments thus exemplify the results of an earlier analysis, whereby the relation to the world (objects) charac- terizes the relations between people, and the relationships with other people charac- terizes their relation to the world (objects) (Marx and Engels 1978). As presented in Chap. 3, the relation is not a thing, some state between two things, but an event. In an event such as pointing, these multiple relations between people and between people and recurrent evental features in the environment are quite apparent.
When an Object Is Not Yet an Object
The preceding review of the empirical evidence in early infant life and in the lives of genitally deaf-blind children shows that there is no world filled with and built up of objects. A stable thing that exists even if it is not seen because hidden or not part of the situation is an emergent phenomenon in the life of a human being. This does not mean that prior to a stable world of things, the infant is one event among others in passage. Normally overlooked is the fact that parents and their infants relate in different forms of events scattered throughout the day. In these relations, there are some micro-events that lead to specific other micro-events; and both the preceding conditioning and succeeding conditioned events are phases of one and the same encompassing, inherently social event. The following examples show that there are relations, involving things that are not yet permanent objects.
The fragment is part of a video from a day in the earliest phase of the life of an infant (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wUT3k7wDQNI). In this fragment, the infant lies with its back on a pillow holding onto a rubber giraffe and the mother is providing a running commentary. Even though the infant barely is old enough to hold her head in a specific position, we observe a relation that manifests itself in conduct. More specifically, behavior that might be associated with discontent or displeasure on the part of the infant is followed by conduct on the part of the mother that is recognizable as the expression of a her intent to return the situation to what it was before and from which the manifestation of discontent/displeasure had disap- peared. Even here, the infant’s (vital) activity – we do not see any evidence in sup- port of a claim that she does have conscious goals – initiates acts of social exchange that are already indicated in those vital activity.
Fragment 4.3
1 M: but sophie’s probably her absolute favorite toy right now (0.1) she::: (1.2) lo:ves
sophie
2 I: hu hu ha ((drops toy)) 3 M: ↑WHAt? (0.9) WHAt?
4 (1.2)
5 xi xi xi xi xi ((M does 5 squeals with giraffe)) 6 (1.9) ((hands doll
back; pushes to produce a squeel, child stops crying, doll again in its mouth)) 7 I: uh ha
8 (0.3)
9 M: what are you doin (0.3) ↓ crazy girl?
10 (1.3)
11 I: uh han ((sounds calmed)) 12 (0.6)
13 M: ny yea 14 I: ha
The fragment begins with events of mutual gazing, which develop into an exchange where in which a sign of discontent or displeasure – the “cry” transcribed as “hu hu ha” – leads into the dropping of the toy from the infant’s hand, which initi- ate an exchange completed by the query for the reason: What? What? (turn 3).
Obviously, the infant is too young to reply in language. But the turn offers up sounds that may constitute the event intersecting both the mother- and child-related evental strands. The sound waves bring the two into resonance. The mother picks up the toy, presses it repeatedly thus producing a squeaking sound, accompanied by a change in the facial expression of the infant (turn 5). The toy is offered up to the infant, who
is accepting the offer in and by grabbing hold of it. We then observe again a move- ment into a new phase marked by the facial expression of contentment (turn 11), a movement already commented upon by turn 9. What we therefore see here is the emergence of an evental sequence that constitutes a field that gives sense to particu- lar actions or expressions. Already in this phase of the life of the infant, its vital activities initiate what come to recurrent sequential events that find in speaking only their apotheosis – i.e. the sequentially ordered pairs phases of a social act. It is in such sequences that the dispositions are awakened in the individual “not simply the tendency to the response which it calls forth in the other … but primarily the social rôle which the other plays in the coöperative act” (Mead 1932, 168). Readers will have many examples of their own, where an infant’s crying is initiating other events that are affecting the infant’s sensations (rocking, on shoulder or in crib, feeding, caressing, etc.). Indeed, it will turn out that this sequencing is the reason for the individual to become an other to itself – as in the French poet Arthur Rimbaud’s famous exclamation Je est un autre [I is an other] – even before it is becoming a self.
As a result, the sense of self will emerge in experience, that is, when the individual is addressing herself as another.
In this event, we observe vital activities on the part of the infant that come to take their place in identifiable consequences of parent forms. The fragment is an illustra- tion of such relations: “the stimulating cry, the answering tone on the part of the parent-form, and the consequent change in the cry of the infant-form” (Mead 1972, 44). The two evental forms evolve to be part of a social event, which becomes a frame within which the evental forms adjust themselves in the way the fibers and threads do in the analogy provided in Chap. 2. There is therefore a transactional relation, where the whole shapes the constitutive parts that give shape to the whole.
The social act is evolving out of the “adjustment of the two forms carrying out a common social act involved in the care of the child” (44). We note that the mother is continuously talking, and directly responding to the (vital) actions of the infant, its crying, moving, and dropping of the toy. These are the kind of stimuli that a hear- ing infant typically encounters from early on in its life and to which it responds – in the sense developed in Chap. 3, whereby its own vital activity-as-event arises in and from the immediately preceding situation-as-event. The infant’s cries are condition- ing events, the mother is responding in speaking (turn 3), in picking up and squeak- ing (turn 5), and returning the toy into the hands of the infant (turn 6) who is grabbing hold of it (as seen in the image related to turn 11). It is precisely such kinds of events that led to the conclusion that “the earliest behavior of the human infant is social, that is, it is called out by behavior of other organisms in answer to inner impulses … and especially to the movement of these other organisms” (Mead 1938, 199). It is an emergent association between the infant-initiated own sounds that the parent-related events in and of the situation. In those earliest phases of the infant’s life, there is neither a permanent social object nor a (social) self: “The two appear together, and they emerge from a behavior that antedates them” (200).
In the fragment, the infant holds – or perhaps more accurately, it is holding onto – the toy. There is no evidence that it acts toward the toy in ways that anticipate future experiences. “Surfaces are, in the experience of the infant, the experiences
out of which the outsides and insides of things arise” (Mead 1932, 119). That sense of its own bodily surface can only emerge in contact experiences arising in events involving things that ultimately will lie outside the self. Anticipating contact experi- ence means anticipating how the object will act back: the stove will burn it, the ball will roll, the furniture will be stable to hold onto, and the giraffe will squeak in the event of pressing its surface. In such events emerges a sense (not initially conscious- ness) of the infant’s own body, so that development describes a movement from the infant’s periphery (things) to its own body, which in some later phase of life will become a thing against another thing. The sense-experience associated with the resistance an object provides to the infant’s own movement is a condition for the evolution of a bodily sense.
When infants grab onto a toy, the latter does not give way but in a sense pushes back thus providing the very substance in the hand. Paraphrasing Mead for the pur- pose of the present analysis, we may say that the object arouses in the infant the action of the object upon the infant. In the particular case considered here, the infant is grabbing hold of something rather than ending up empty handed when the fingers are curling. The toy ultimately comes to be endowed with an inner nature, the pres- sure against the grabbing hand. It is this experience that in the end constitutes the inside of the toy as a physical thing – the thing offers resistance. We notice in the fragment that the event has the mother place the toy in the hands of the infant.
Although toys may lie in close proximity (Fig. 4.3a), the infant does not reach out (Fig. 4.3b); and when the toys have been brought close and within reach, the hand may move over them without treating them as things to be held, brought closer, etc.
The infant’s sense can identify an effort as coming from within itself only with or after placing resistance within the object: “the grasping of his hands have to localize things from an inside attitude, and he finally reaches himself as a thing through the action of other things upon him” (Mead 1938, 122). The infant does not only push against a thing, but also has experiences in which it pushes against its own hand in the way that it pushes against the thing. Thus, again paraphrasing Mead with respect to the present context, the toy arouses in the infant the disposition to respond as the toy responds to the infant. As a result, the “embodiment of the object in the responses
Fig. 4.3 The distant object first exists as social relation, making the emergent object an irreducible social object. (a) The infant’s gaze moves over the scene. (b) The infant looks at the mother, who brings the future objects (toys) within the reach of the infant. (c) The infant touches the future object, and then gazes back at the mother
of the organism is the essential factor in the emergence of the physical thing” (Mead 1932, 125).
Sense and the meanings that develop later in life are not additions to some (social) act. Instead, from the earliest phases of the life of the person (i.e. as infant), we observe the emergence of sense-giving fields. Any object that eventually emerges is a recurrent feature across different situation specific events (e.g. those preceding and those succeeding the mother’s covering of a toy in Figs. 4.1 and Fig. 4.2).
Objects, as recurrences in perception, index and mark commonalities among events, commonalities or rather recurrences that manifest themselves in object permanence.
This emergence is conditioned by (becomes possible in) some form of gesture on the part of the infant, here the manifestation of a change in affect (from turn 1 to turn 3). The resultant of the conduct will be a joint social act (as event) in which the infant’s gesture was an early phase that led into the reply to the gesture on the part of the mother. These phases “are the relata in a triple or threefold relationship of gesture to first organism, of gesture to second organism, and of gesture to subse- quent phases of the social act” (Mead 1972, 76). The sense of the partial act derives from its relationship to the social act as a whole, which gives a specific place to the different phases that unfold and stand against concurrent surrounding events that form the relevant ground. There is no figure without ground, and no ground without figure. A social act makes sense precisely when its different phases unfold and lead into each other in specific patterned ways against a background of other events that are part of the conditions of the event as a whole (Schütz 1932). Whatever the infant is feeling as the situation unfolds – in other words, the subjective form of the feeling experienced by the occasion (Whitehead 1933) – itself becomes part of a generally nonthematic ground that sets up the conditions for specific social acts (events) to follow. The fits of older children – e.g. at the supermarket checkout next to the candy shelf – display the same kind of pattern observed here, though in these older children the fits are associated with some deliberation and experience-based antici- pation. Important here is that even prior to the appearance of deliberately conduct that is understood as having produced a sign, there is an affectively charged, sense- giving occasion in which the relation as a whole – existing by means of an event that intersects both infant and mother – constitutes the context for its phases.
From Initiating Social Events to Pointing
The two episodes from the early phase in the life of a child exemplify how parents hand toys in situations when the child does not reach for them but “in response” to other aspects of the occasion (the doll having fallen from the hands, a doll being too far away and the child’s repeated change of gaze toward the parent). The seed of the pointing gesture has been said to exist in the child’s attempt to grasp a distant
“object”; and when this movement ends, the fingers hang in the air and thus indicate the object (Vygotsky 1997b). This description fails to differentiate between two situations: (a) one in which the object does not exist separate from the situation and