Taking the sign as thing characterizes not only classical psychological investiga- tions but also those inquiries that pledge allegiance to some form of sociocultural and cultural-historical theory. Investigations of learning pledging allegiance to these theories often draw on the work of Vygotsky in support of descriptions in which the sign functions as a mediator. For example, in studies of mathematical learning, the letters x or n that appear in algebraic equations are said to be signs (e.g. Radford 2003). Another example of a sign is when, while scrutinizing a bookshelf, “we decide to put a mark, or a sign of some sort, on the shelf so that the next time we enter the room the sign will mean something like, ‘Here is the book!’” (39). In this example, the sign is some material entity that allows the person to remember a par- ticular book to be read or used in writing an article. The situation has the same structure as the proverbial knot in the handkerchief that is to remind the subject of something to be done. We thus have three entities involved: the subject and its mem- ory, the sign, and the book. The sign is theorized as a thing that stands between the person and the book. It is apparent that the theory is based on entities that have some supposed relation.
This approach to theorizing the sign has a history in educational psychology, having played a central role in the experiments that Vygotsky and his collaborators conducted. Thus, for example, the psychologist was interested in investigating “the connection between sign and meaning,” “between word and object,” “why a given object is signified by a given word” (Vygotsky 1999, 52). In a typical experiment, one of the researchers from the laboratory (Alexei N. Leont’ev) asked children to name the color of various objects that appeared in the questions he posed. The chil- dren were not allowed to use two color names, and, once the experiment had started, they were not allowed to repeat a name that they had already used. The experiment showed that seven- to eight-year-old children were failing to complete the task suc- cessfully. However, the same children succeeded when given a deck of colored cards that they were allowed to use. Once they had the cards and instructions, these children would then design some strategy that led to a successful completion of the task. For example, a child might pull from the stack cards with the two forbidden colors and then add the card with the color already named. Because “always answer- ing through the mediated auxiliary stimuli, the signs, the child organized his active attention from outside and adapted to the problems that he could not solve by direct, elementary forms of behavior” (Vygotsky 1999, 49). The psychologist used a num- ber of diagrams to express how the position of the sign in relation to other things
(Vygotskij 2005). These show that two subjects (S1, S2) do not relate directly, as in stimulus response theory: a sign stands and makes connections between them in the form subject1 – sign – subject2 (Fig. 5.1a). During development, the brain takes the place of the second subject giving the form subject1 – sign – brain, which is an instance of auto-stimulation (Fig. 5.1b). A further development included the psy- chological task, which added a third thing to the two earlier ways of visualizing the relation between the subject, sign, and some other thing. The subject relates to the task by means of the sign, and it also relates either to another subject (e.g. the researcher) or its brain in the form subject1 – sign – subject2 – object (Fig. 5.1c).
It is apparent that in Radford’s book-related memory example, the situation is the one between a subject and his brain (Fig. 5.1b). Psychologists, including those who take a self-actional approach to situated cognition, often refer to this as external memory. In the case of Vygotsky’s experiment with the colors and colored cards, the psychological task is the object of the activity and the sign further mediates between the child-subjects and their brains (Fig. 5.1c). The first type of situations (Fig. 5.1a) is typical of conversations, where language or words are said to mediate between the participants: the sign bridges between the two spatially separate and self-identical subject-things. It is apparent that in all of these examples and illustra- tions the sign is theorized as a thing: characteristically, Vygotsky drew boxes above which he wrote the Russian equivalent word for sign (i.e. znak).
The sign also has been defined differently: as relation. For example, early in the history of semiotics (semiology) as a field, it was defined as the relation (in mind) between a signifier and a signified (de Saussure 1995). For example, a sign might exist as the relation between the concept tree and a (mental) image of a tree. Other ways of conceptualizing the relationship is between a word and the thing in the world that it denotes. In this way, the relation can, but does not have to be between the psychological images of two material things. This is the way in which some semioticians define the sign in its broadest terms: as one “portion of continuum which serves as its vehicle in its relationship with the other portions of the contin- uum derived from its global segmentation by the content” (Eco 1986, 44). In essence, then, the sign is a relation between two segmentations of the material
Fig. 5.1 Some of the ways in which Vygotsky conceived of the sign, all of which presuppose it to be a thing standing between the subject (S1) and something else. (a) The sign mediates between two subjects. (b) In auto-stimulation, the sign mediates between the subject and its brain. (c) In a psychological task, the sign mediates between child, experimenter, and task or between child, its brain, and the psychological task (based on Vygotskij 2005)
continuum, that is, between two clumps of matter. It is in this manner that the sign also has found entry into the social studies of science, where the entire trajectory of translations from the complex world to the abstract knowledge (discourse) of sci- ence is conceived of as a chain of signification, where each link consists of some external material thing of a particular form (Latour 1993). Important in this latter conceptualization, the connection between any two matter-form segmentations does not have a “natural” relation but instead is related through work (i.e. an event).
The relationship between two segmentations is arbitrary, and any relation that does exist is subject to shared conventions. Absent in this account is the fact that signs are recurrent patterns of communicative events that are cogredient in some more encompassing event (e.g. publishing knowledge in science journals).
In Chap. 4, I note that an object as a thing is but an abstraction, marking the recurrence of similarities between events. The sign – whether conceived of in the (inappropriate) manner characteristic in the diagrams that Vygotsky used or in the manner that derives from the view of the sign as a relation – has the same problem when conceived as entity-thing. An alternative is to theorize situations where sign- use is currently investigated in terms of events. Chapter 3 already accomplishes this in the case of the word, which is the most distinguished of signs. Rather than focus- ing on word-things, we investigate communicating-as-event. In Chap. 3, this event provides for the intersection between two or more persons, each of which we think of as a family of events. This then constitutes a transactional approach to the relation between people, which, as the introductory quotation to this chapter shows, is one part of characteristically human relations. That still leaves out the second part, which is the relation of people to their (natural, material) environment, in other words, the conduct of people toward their surroundings. The unity/identity of humans and environment – the quotation states “identity of man and nature” – means that any study of conduct requires investigating the double relation and the relation between the relations. It thus behooves us to provide evidence not only for the role of the speaking event in bringing about the relation between people and between people and things but also for the reflexive relation between the two rela- tions articulated in the introductory quotation. It is only in this way that we can work out what is specifically human. In the case of humans, “where there exists a relation, it exists for me, the animal ‘relates to/behaves itself toward [verhält]’
nothing and not at all. For the animal the relation with others does not exist as rela- tion” (Marx and Engels 1978, 30). The authors italicize and place in parentheses a German reflexive verb (verhält, third-person singular of verhalten) that is defined both as (a) behaving toward others and things and (b) relating. The emphasis in their text invites us to read and hear both of these ways of using the verb.
In the academic literature, the existence of the sign as thing-in-itself is presup- posed much in the way common sense would take it. This may be one key reason why it is so difficult to move away from the common conception of signs (words) that has its origin in the Augustine conceptualizations of words – which pragmatic language philosophy considers to be “a primitive idea of the way language func- tions” (Wittgenstein 1953/1997, 3). The question posed in research tends to be with how people make meaning or interpret sign-things (signifiers). But how do signs-
as- relations come into existence? Unless we have some viable description of the birth of signs, we have no way of deciding whether a theory of signs is sound on phylogenetic (evolutionary) or ontogenetic (developmental) grounds. Otherwise we get stuck, as constructivist approaches are stuck because they presuppose the very capacities – e.g. interpreting, making/constructing meaning – that require explana- tion. That is, we have to overcome the existing ideologies of the nature of the sign.2 With respect to the attempt of explaining the emergence of language – one form of sign use – there are three main classes of theories, two of which presuppose the existence of symbolic forms that are discrete and unrelated to bodily processes, that is, unrelated to events. In the third class of models, communicative forms and their meanings are treated as “embodied,” where the “meanings are modeled as the sensed states of the world” (Hutchins and Johnson 2009, 531). That is, even here where there is an emphasis on the body, the focus is on the emergence of things that are somehow embodied – with all the dangers that such discourses come with – rather than on the functional relation of events.