earlier and later phases of events addresses the problematic focus on things that historically has emerged in the use of activity theory. The transactional perspective is based on the braiding of micro-events into mini-events, mini-events into events, and events into larger events (World War II) and historical periods, up to the level of life as a whole (e.g. Fig. 2.5). In the non-mechanical take of the transactional per- spective, the world (universe) is thought as a singular plural event, a totality of (societal) actions, whereby “reality consists precisely in this particular action and reaction of every individual [part] toward the whole” (Nietzsche 1922b, 66).
Activity theory, whether studies are grounded in the works of L. S. Vygotsky or in those of A. N. Leont’ev, generally is not employed in an evental manner. Instead, having arisen from standard psychological and epistemological approaches, such studies have tried to fit aspects of the cultural-historical approach to standard psy- chology without changing from an object-oriented to an event-based ontology. Thus, standard psychological and epistemological models explain everyday human behav- ior in terms of things: schemas or mental constructions of individuals, who, when there are others, engage in negotiations of their differing individual positions. Some cultural approaches to human psychology do not advance theory much further – e.g.
when they presuppose that humans but not animals have the end result of their actions already in mind (Vygotsky 1997) or when there is a societal object/motive that the participants cooperate in attaining (Leont’ev 1978). Such standard approaches also should be challenged by the simple fact that there are many event forms for which there are no standard practices – Deweyan habits – that could have formed and for which there are no societal object/motives: take the police officer killing an African American holding a cell phone while in his grandmother’s backyard. Human conduct emerges on the spot, or, rather, there is a phenomenon in the making without that the participants know what it is – other than in some abstract way, for example, as a standoff. Any existing habits may actually get in the way with contributing in manner to deescalate rather than further escalate the situation. The required behavior needs to cut across those existing habits, “hence instability, novelty, emergence of unexpected and unpredictable combinations” (Dewey 1929, 281).
Standard ways of approaching activity in the cultural-historical sciences begin by positing things, which are then brought into relation. Thus, during Vygotsky’s lifetime, a common way of thinking about human behavior was in terms of the stimulus-response (S–R) model. This was considered inappropriate, for it did not account for the cultural aspect in human conduct, where new “elements” – e.g. signs (signifiers, to be more accurate) and tools – changed the relationship between indi- viduals and their social and material environment. Signs (signifiers) were presented as intermediaries between subjects or between subjects and their brains (Fig. 2.6a);
and tools were deemed to be the intermediaries between subjects and their material objects (e.g. Vygotsky 1989). The depictions feature things – subjects, signs (signi- fiers), tools, and objects – outside of the events in which they would be constitutive parts and that define their very functions. But does it make sense to theorize activity in this manner? Take the example of a verbal exchange involving words, which are the quintessential signs of human behavior. Words (signifiers), and language more generally, then come to mediate between two subjects, allowing them to overcome
their subjectivities by producing intersubjectivity. The two subjects are thought as different entities, which are brought together into a relation by means of the word (sign) that mediates between them. But is this really what is happening when two people communicate? Do the sound-words not emerge from the mouth of one and ring in the ear of the other? Are these sounds – typical evental phenomena – not common events in the experience of the two persons? Are the two biographies not for a period of time linked in the event of communicating? Are the two subjects things or does it make more sense to think in terms of emergent events that change as their joint history continuously produces novelty? Answers to these questions are provided in greater, case-based detail in Chap. 3.
Other parts of the cultural-historical sciences gather around and identify them- selves with cultural-historical activity theory, originally developed by Leont’ev and subsequently popularized in terms suitable for Anglo-Saxon tastes that quite often differ from the theory originally conceived (e.g. Spinuzzi 2019). In the associated literature, it is common to identify the different parts of an activity system – often represented in terms of a mediational triangle with six elements or parts (subject, tool, object, rules, community, and division of labor) and a seventh (outcome) some- what separate but linked to the object by means of an arrow (Fig. 2.6b). When things go awry, the notion of (primary to quaternary) inner contradiction – exemplified in
Fig. 2.6 Common examples of “mediational triangles.” (a) For Vygotsky (1989), signs and tools are things that stand, respectively, (i) between two subjects or between subjects and their brains or (ii) between subject and object. (b) For Engeström (1987) he extended triangle characteristic of many studies employing cultural-historical activity theory features seven “elements” that together make for the structure of an activity. Both forms of representation orient toward stable entities, things, rather than toward events
conflict, resistance, or breakdown – is invoked to explain trouble. Many studies are based on the identification of the parts (often referred to as the “elements” of the triangle) and are characterized by the attempt to reconstitute the activity based on some forces and processes (e.g. negotiation, scaffolding, mediation).
There is something wrong in the going use of activity theory. This is so because the category of activity really was defined in terms of events rather than in terms of things, as a unit of personal and societal life: “activity is not a reaction and not a totality of reactions but a system that has structure, its own internal transitions and transformations, its own development” (Leont’ev 1978, 50). The system is an orga- nization of micro-events (“reactions”), each of which a phase in transitions, trans- formations, and development. Each activity then is an event that functions as integral and constitutive part of the “life of society,” which only exists in and through the relations between its subjects. Just as in transactional approaches in philosophy, subjects are thus presented in terms of the entirety of a historically unfolding activ- ity rather than as an element in or end product of it. The subject is not merely the agent of the activity; it also is the result of activity. All the other aspects of activity theory as represented in the triangle also have to be understood in terms of events.
Thus, for example, it is only when we think some tool in terms of an event that we grasp its invention, its changing use, and its evental demise. Take the slide rule. We learned to use it in high school mathematics. When I did my Masters degree in phys- ics, mastery of this tool was an obligatory point of passage. Those who did not pass the slide rule test – something like 30 multiplication/division problems involving up to six numbers to be completed in 30 minutes – were not allowed to continue in the program. Only a few semesters later, the first handheld scientific calculators became available and the slide rule disappeared from use in the physics department. Today, most (young) people do not even know what a slide rule is. Thus, being invented around 1625 it fell out of use in engineering and science during the 1970s to be all but forgotten today.
A critical reader attempting to save cultural-activity theory in the form it is cur- rently used might say that for the purpose of understanding some event in limited time, the tool, as any other “object,” does not change. But attempting to build an activity from pieces (i.e. elements) to yield an event makes no sense, which is why activity theorists have moved to unit analysis in the first place, as opposed to analy- sis in terms of elements (cf. Vygotsky 1987). The very notion of societal activity as the smallest unit that maintains all characteristics of the societal life process was at the heart of proposing what came to be termed cultural-historical activity theory.
Objects may thus be understood as ingredients in events, that is, as things that enter (Lat. ingredī, to enter) events; and it is because of theses slowly changing ingredi- ents that events become comparable (Whitehead 1920). The particular ways in which objects enter in an event – i.e. its modes of ingression – has to be determined through analysis. We know that objects are ingredient in the neighborhoods of their occurrences, but this neighborhood is indefinite. Indeed, any object is an aspect of the occurrence of life on earth specifically and the entire universe more generally.
In the triangular representation of activity theory (Fig. 2.6b), the subject appears in the same manner as the object. Yet, as living organisms, human beings are not
constant. We have to understand the individual in terms of a family (society, nexus) of events, the relation of which allows us to understand the relationship between feelings (affect) and thinking (intellect), two forms of events that most apparently mark the modes of our participation in everyday life. We thus theorize a person as
“a society of the ‘personal’ type,” which then allows us to view a person as the con- tinuously emergent result of “a linear succession of actual occasions forming a his- torical route in which some defining characteristic is inherited by each occasion from its predecessors. A society of this sort is an enduring object’” (Whitehead 1929/1978, 198). This then also allows us to understand that even intellectual work is associated with to physical fatigue, something difficult to impossible to theorize in traditional theories of cognition that have currency not only in educational psy- chology generally but also in educational psychology with a cultural-historical bent.
Thus, the individual or collective subject is continuously changing in the course of any concrete activity (Marx and Engels 1983). But the object also is not constant, for in the course of the activity it changes from what it initially was, a collection of materials, into the product. This is why Marx and Engels speak of the objective and subjective consumption that occurs during production. The fundamental idea under- lying the original conception of activity theory is to make the entire process of production part of the same conceptual category: productive activity, which is an event. The event of the changing object to the completion of the product is inter- twined with the event of the changing subject.
An activity is a recurrent form of event. Recurrence is recognized because of all the things that ingress in an event. But this must not lead us to think activity in terms of the triangular structure of things. This structure is like a cross-section through an event at a particular instant in time – an abstraction as shown above – can be thought of as a family of events (Fig. 2.7). Analyzing the cross-sectional structure does not allow us to understand the whole event or any one of the evental strands that are integral and constitutive part of it (Whitehead 1920). Moreover, looking at the initial
Fig. 2.7 This revised version of the minimum (fundamental) unit and category of activity orients analysts toward the various constitutive events that make activity as a whole. Because subject, object, tool, division of labor, community, and rules are ingredients in the event (i.e. activity) they and their modes of ingression change while the activity happens. Thinking these ingredients as things constitutes pure and mere abstraction that has nothing to do with the ways in which they actually enter experience. An activity thus is a family of ingredient events
and endpoints to derive the forces that get us from beginning to end is like going from the first to the last image in a film (video) reel thinking in the belief that we could get the event back. We would then seek the forces that somehow get us from one point in time (B) to another point in time (E). This way of thinking is fundamen- tally Newtonian, which fails to explain why there is any connection between bodies and the changes they undergo (Bergson 1908). To explain motion, Newton required stresses, forces, as factors that somehow acted on material things; but the connec- tion between those things that appeared in his theory remained “detached facts devoid of any reason for their compresence” (Whitehead 1938, 135). Not only are there no reasons for change in the Newtonian view, but also this approach funda- mentally left us without life. Newton’s nature is dead, and a dead nature cannot provide reasons.
The revised version of the smallest unit to be used in analysis (Fig. 2.7) still is deceiving, for it may lead to the belief that there are precise beginnings and ends to the activity. As suggested above, the beginnings and endings of events are blurred (see Fig. 2.4d), the former having arisen in and from an antecedent event and the latter constituting the beginning of a consequent event. Instead of thinking in terms of precise beginnings and endpoints, those events (dotted lines) need to be seen as reaching into the past as much as projecting themselves into the future. Beginnings and endings are inherently indeterminate, for the beginning of any event only is the termination of some preceding event (see above); and the endpoint of the specific activity is only the beginning of another event – e.g. related to the activity of exchange (sale) and the subsequent activity of consumption (use) on the part of the buyer of the product. Indeed, the productive activity already is oriented toward the future activities (events), both in terms of the returns for their investment that the producer will reap and of the ultimate use. Products are made in ways specifically designed for the user; and this ultimate purpose already enters as ingredient in the activity.
One educational psychologist whose work shows a step toward the present con- ception was Richard E. Snow. Attempting to theorize the concept of aptitude, he ultimately thought he had stated it in transactional terms without nevertheless taking the final step to conceive of it in evental terms. He suggested that an understanding of the effect that personal characteristics have on performance requires knowing the environmental characteristics at work, in which we have to include characteristics of the task (Snow 1992). But understanding the effect of environmental characteris- tics on performance requires knowing the characteristics of the person. Thus, in performance-as-event, person and (task) environment cannot be separated. That is, the performative event and its product cannot be predicted on the basis of some abstract characteristics identified prior to the event. Whereas Snow did not conceive of performance or its ingredients in evental terms, he did emphasize the relational nature of the (external) characters of subject and its object. But his project would have ultimately failed, because the relations are external – between thingified sub- ject and thingified object – rather than relations internal to the event, of which sub- ject and object are but abstractions.