(phenomenological) philosophers designate by the term “beings” [Ger. Seiendes].
Conscious awareness thus implies the existence of a distant object permanent across time. Near the end of his life, Vygotsky had come to see in consciousness a more pressing topic for psychology than that of thinking. In his own work, he only got “to the threshold of a problem that is broader, more profound, and still more extraordi- nary than the problem of thinking … to consciousness” (Vygotsky 1987, 285). In an event-oriented transactional approach, consciousness has to be theorized as event rather than as a thing or as the presence of things in awareness. We do not know where the investigation of the problem would have led Vygotsky, but we do know – from the quotations on the last page of his book – that he was taking up some ideas from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. These authors defined consciousness in even- tal terms: “Consciousness never can be anything else but conscious Being, and the Being of humans is their real life process” (Marx and Engels 1978, 26). Although Being is an event, it tends to be treated as a thing. To prevent such treatment, we may resort to the expression Being-event or being-as-event [bytie-sobytie], thereby man- ifesting the need to mark the nature of Being as something alive (Bakhtin 1993).
Thus, consciousness being conscious Being, Being-as-event, we arrive at conscious- ness itself as event. Consciousness is not a thing, not a state, but an event cogredient in the passage that it co-constitutes. It is part of, and reflects, the real life process of human beings.
existing consciousness for other people and the self. But if object permanence arises around the age of 8–9 months, which is considerably prior to the emergence of lan- guage around the age of 2, then the origins of consciousness historically are situated before spoken language appears. But with the object arises true pointing, which, as shown above, consists of the relation between two families of events – one related to the object, the other one related to the subject – that are both intersected in and by the transmitting event taken up in the percipient event. Already in the body of the last chapter, Vygotsky initiated a shift from the previously predominant concern for word-meaning to a recognition of sense, which is a phenomenon both more encom- passing than that of meaning and of greater relevance in the early life of the infant.
In the preceding analyses, I show how “‘true’ pointing” constitutes an event involving two social objects: the thing that serves as vehicle (signifier) and the thing serving as its content (signified). Indeed, that relation is based on a much more fun- damental phenomenon according to which there is a duplication of sense objects, which leads to an association of the hardness or heaviness in the environment and amount of force required from within the organism (Mead 1938; Whitehead 1919).
Both, the body configuration serving as the vehicle and the thing to which the point- ing is directed, have to exist for the participants in the relation. For a communicative act to exist, a double relation has to hold: between two people (as events) and between two material things (as events). The relation between the two things does not exist independent of the relation between the two people, for it is from one to and for the purpose of another. The relationship is motivated, taking form and con- tent that (as a matter of speaking) are intended for the other person all the while making available or indicating something that is novel. There is therefore a reflexive relation, whereby the relationship between people motivates the relationship of things (finger, object), and the relationship between things shapes the relationship between people. Neither relationship is a thing but an event, for, as seen in Chap. 3, pointing toward the configuration on the floor during the lesson does not have one and the same object. Even pointing in the direction of the same mat does not have the same content, as the number of objects on each mat changes, and thus, the sense of the category that the group of objects stands for.
Pointing-as-event in which multiple individuals are involved not only involves another person but also some form of awareness that the material relation will have an effect on the other person. That is, pointing requires the pointing subject to take into account the perspective of the other, who, in a percipient event identifies the social object (existing for two). More so, the person is not doing pointing for its own sake, but pointing is only a phase of a more encompassing event, which might be
“playing a game” or “having a conversation,” or “teaching seeing a blue cone in a biology lab.” In his work on pointing, Vygotsky says nothing about the triple emer- gence described here. Objects initially are not permanent because there is no event making it present in its absence. Passage is not subdivided, and the disappearance of a percipient means it no longer exists – even though adults know that they do (e.g.
Fig. 4.1). Similarly, the object does not reappear as such but constitutes a new percipient event of the type “here again” but not reappearance of the same. The dis- appearance and reappearance of some self-same object requires the event of being
present in absence. When it eventually does appear, the object is social through and through. Simultaneously emerges the self as social, for in pointing, the other is implied as recipient and as agent of an event of replying, which satisfies some need for the infant that initiates pointing by producing its first phase.
True pointing involves (requires) an object. This object is not something that shows itself from itself. Instead, the object as thing over against the infant emerges in course of its life and following many exchanges where some of its vital activities initiate recurrences in what will be jointly achieved social acts. This understanding arises when we take an event-oriented transactional take, which approaches indi- vidual and social life as families of events rather than structures of things. The same kind of understanding arises in a phenomenological analysis that takes the same starting point as Mead had taken in giving primacy to role of contact experience.
Contact experience is based on sensation and immediacy that precedes acts of ori- enting to and seeing from a distance (Levinas 1978). Objects as permanent things emerge in activity with others so that before an object can be true or false for the individual, it was already possessed by another. The object specifically and the whole world-as-event generally is human, objective, and intersubjective before it is something for the individual self. This is particularly apparent in the case of con- genitally deaf-blind children, where vision does not blur our investigation. Just as for Mead, the qualities of space, time, and spatiotemporal experience arises for Levinas in contact experience.
Contact experience can be thought only in evental terms, avoiding the fallacious acceptance of instantaneous apperception of objects that characterize object- oriented approaches. Distance experience – in the form of seeing, hearing, and smelling – “is the promise of contact experience” (Mead 1932, 37). In other words,
“in every vision contact is announced: sight and hearing caress the visible and the audible” (Levinas 1978, 128). We do not feel surface characteristics by simply touching but we have to move and caress the surface. Contact experience thus is not an opening onto Being but constitutes an exposure and manifestation of Being.
Contact as caress is an event that is possible only in proximity; contact and caress are events of proximity rather than the contents of experiences of proximity. As the example of the research with kittens shows, contact and movement is the prerequi- site for distant objects in and characters of the world. The object and the subject are not independent elements of experience but are cogredient events in the same dura- tion. Experience is the quality of an event that includes organism and environment among its mutually constitutive parts.
In the opening part of this section, I note that consciousness emerges when pre- ceding experience becomes an object of new experience. When a present thing also is experienced as having been experienced before that a persistent (permanent) object becomes possible. That possibility emerges in and from joint activity. In a first phase, contact experience is associated with percipient events such that the former becomes part of the imagery while gazing at a distant object. As the above- cited research with the kittens shows, this object or character does not arise unless the organism is in contact with the world, that is, unless there is a unity/identity of
organism and the world in which the organisms is integral and constitutive part.5 That is, there is not just a visual experience arising from something from a percipi- ent event that involves light falling on specific spots of the retina. Rather, distance experience is associated with contact experience: seeing an object is associated with what the organism will experience as subjective form once close and feeling out the object. These events are part of the active kittens’ sensuous experience, for which the feeling of their own actions is correlated with the changes in the percipient events that arise in and from these actions. As a result of “the various contact experi- ences we have had of such objects,” these “enter in our perception to make the physical thing what it is in experience” (Mead 1938, 431).
In the case of humans (and likely of some other organisms as well, as evidenced in the use of “tools” on the part of chimpanzees and Caledonian crows), there are further developments. The physical object becomes an object of consciousness when, in social conduct, an individual comes to act toward itself in the same way as the physical object acts on (e.g. by offering resistance). Thus, when an infant attempts to push or pull some thing, the latter may offer resistance. That resistance cannot be be perceived until it is felt in response to some action. This gives to the thing an inside that is hidden beneath its surface; and this experience also is the origin of the distinction between inside and outside for the individual (Mead 1938).
The reality of the thing derives from the resistance that it offers to the initial vital activities of the infant. The object and the infant are not separate, as there is a coop- erative relation in which pushing or pulling are correlated with opposing forces.
Simultaneously, in those events the individual eventually becomes aware of its own body as physical thing over against physical things. Thus, “external perception and the perception of one’s own body vary in conjunction because they are the two fac- ets of one and the same act” (Merleau-Ponty 1945, 237). That is, the capacity to take the position of the physical thing or its own physical body is what generally is called consciousness – of the thing and of the bodily self. There is then the origin of the individual act as a phase of the social act that it initiates; but as phase of the social act it is itself social through and through. The above-noted threefold relationship – gesture to first person, second person, and future phases of collective activity – gives rise to sense. Initially, as in the life of chimpanzees and human infants, no conscious awareness is required. Conscious awareness, as manifested in the appearance of object permanence, is a consequence of repeated occurrences of event sequences where these objects mark recurrence across situations. This sense thus is present prior to the emergence of consciousness, awareness, and meaning – which is pre- cisely the position taken by the late Vygotsky. Thus, the infant girl with the giraffe and green-faced doll (Fragment 4.3, Fig. 4.3) is much younger than those infants where the appearance of object permanence is observed (e.g. Fig. 4.2). In this phase of the life of an individual, objects are not yet present when absent.
5 Readers who have a hard time with this formulation may think of perceptual puzzles existing of black and white colored areas. Initially we may see just that. But we all of a sudden see a Holstein cow or a Dalmatian dog standing against a more indistinct ground. Here, figure and ground arise together and are mutually constitutive – a different figure means a different ground.
The foregoing shows that preceding the existence of objects and bodies, there is an effective occupation of space when future, anticipated contact experience comes to accompany vision. A field is thus opening up where the individual, in arriving at the seen thing, would or should find those resistances that announced themselves in and with the visual perception. The contact experience projected into the future is the result of prior contact experience. The content of this contact experience, which is in the individual, is associated with the current visual experience of an object outside the individual. In the completion pase of the cooperative act, the anticipated contact experience becomes actual contact experience. At that time, what has been inside the organism has the same content as what has been in the distant object and thus outside. Thus, consciousness begins, as it “connotes here the identifying of the effects of resistances and movements of things with the efforts made in our organ- isms in dealing with these things” (Mead 1938, 431). This effective transactional relation of an event extended in space – which brings the organism closer to the distant object – is a character of the relation of individual and physical thing, that is, of the {organism | environment} unit. Even though generally regarded to be subjec- tive, relational qualities, color, sound, or odor come to be attributed to the things. It is by means of the same kind of abstractions that other aspects of transactional rela- tions come to be attributed to a subject. Thus, for example, individuals are attributed characteristics such as dependency, aggressiveness, and pride. But in the transac- tional approach, they are all characteristics of relations between people (Bateson 1979) and thus always of events.
The appearance of the physical self over against a material object involves a second form of mechanism: the emergence of the generalized other. The general- ized other is born when the individual, as part of cooperative activities, comes to take the roles of different members of the group and thus evolves a sense of itself as an other to many others. The individual comes to act upon itself as others act upon it and, in its own actions, it anticipates the actions of others in cooperative activity.
Role taking becomes the paradigm case for the relation to the object. The physical thing as a permanent object arises at the same time as the self, which is a material thing object over against the physical object. But that development is modeled on the relationship with other persons, “for it is primarily in social conduct that we stimulate ourselves to act toward ourselves as others act toward us and thus identify ourselves with others and become objects to ourselves” (Mead 1938, 428). A more elaborate description of the relation has the self emerge from the pointing gesture:
“the self appears in the social act and is a derivative of the gesture, that is, the indica- tion by one individual in a co-operative act to another of some thing or character which is of mutual interest” and “when the memory of the indication associates itself with this object, the self has appeared” (75). Prior to the object’s appearance in memory – i.e. prior to object permanence – there is no self. This is so because
“the self is an object on the same level of reality as that of the others” (199, empha- sis added). Thus once the infant begins to point, a bifurcation has occurred because the infant is characterized by a dual attitude toward the object – that of the recipient of the pointing gesture and its own. At that point the condition for a self that has a world have come into existence.
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