Note
Chapter 3 Cultural Historical Activity Theory
4.1 Mediation
Engeström (1987, p. 40) argues that Vygotsky’s focus on mediation as the central feature of human activity is the key concept that “profoundly differentiates activity theory theoretically from other theories of human behaviour”. This concept plays a significant role in addressing dualistic conceptions of individual and society or, in Vygotsky’s terms, ‘mind and society’.
Evidencing the Marxian ideas presented above, Vygotsky (1978) identified two main, interconnected features that define the nature of human psychological processes, and which
are therefore fundamental for psychology. These were, firstly, its tool-like (‘instrumental’) structure, and secondly, its inclusion in a system of interrelations with other people.
Vygotsky’s (1978) theory emerged in response to the assumption of a direct relationship between a stimulus and a response (S-R). He argued that the relationship between the human subject and an object is never direct, but always mediated by cultural means or artefacts (tools and signs). This is the essence of ‘mediation’ which is embodied in the triangular
representation of the mediated act (see Figure 10 below). The diagram on the left represents the classic S-R relationship. Here the stimulus is mediated by X to become R. In the
commonly used reformulation of this model (diagram on the right), the interaction between subject and object is mediated by the auxiliary means of tools and signs. In this model actors and their intentions are related to particular outcomes achieved using certain tools (Daniels, 2001).
Figure 10. Vygotsky's model of a mediate act and its common reformulation (from Engeström, 2001, p. 152)
This ‘mediation’ of human activity has particular effects. Vygotsky (1978, p. 40) argues that
“the use of signs leads humans to a specific structure of behaviour that breaks away from biological development and creates new forms of a culturally-based psychological process”.
That is, it is not just that tools in symbolic or practical form mediate activity, but this mediation of activity in turn mediates mental functions. The mediational means (tools and signs), transforms the psychological operation to higher and qualitatively new forms (Vygotsky, 1978).
Cole (1996) elaborates on the way in which the use and creation of tools (or artefacts) played a significant role in the development of the human species (phylogenesis), and in the
development of the human mind (ontogenesis). He argues that “human psychological processes emerged simultaneously with a new form of behaviour in which humans modified material objects as a means of regulating their interactions with the world and one another”
(Cole, 1996, p. 108). For example, through the development of language (a particular kind of
‘tool’), humans experience a qualitatively new form of mediation (symbolic mediation), which changes the nature of being human. Through the use of these artefacts, the
development of humans moved away from a dependence on what Cole (1996) refers to as natural, unmediated, lower mental functions, to cultural, mediated, higher mental functions.
Writing and technology are further examples of significant new forms of mediation which create new forms of ‘mind’ and facilitate new forms of human interaction.
Vygotsky suggested three classes of mediators: mediation through the activities of, and with, other people in sociocultural settings (for example, another individual acting as a mediator of meaning); technical/material tools which are used to bring about changes in other objects (for example, a saw cutting through wood, a pen making marks on a paper, or a computer
keyboard recording the writing of text); and psychological tools, devices for mastering mental processes which have a social origin (for example, tying a knot in a handkerchief as a
reminder, or using language to create an understanding of HIV as a virus). These
psychological tools create links through an “artificial combination of stimuli” (Vygotsky, 1978, p. 51) thus affecting ‘mind’ and behaviour. As Vygotsky explains, in the process of tying a knot in a handkerchief as a reminder, the person constructs the process of memorizing.
By forcing “an external object to remind her of something; she transforms remembering into an external activity” (Vygotsky, 1978, p. 51). What is critical about this perspective is that the nature of being human is seen as constructed through, and dependent on, this ability to act through the means of artefacts.
There is an additional significance in the concept of mediation. The mediating tools/artefacts are not original but are the social products of human cultural historical activity. Daniels (2001, p. 17) argues there is a “sedimentation of cultural historical legacies” in psychological tools. For example, the word iqoks in isiZulu is a reference to something being ‘thin’. It is most commonly used as a colloquial and derogatory reference to HIV. The socio-cultural and historical context of the disease links the prejudice and discrimination of the activity of sex work, the fact that sex workers sometimes wear shoes with high, ‘thin’ heels, and the fact that one becomes very thin in the last stages of the AIDS illness. Through the mediation of activity artefacts such as language connect humans not only with the world of objects, but also with other people. The social nature of artefacts thus has the effect of making mind
‘social’. For example, for an infant, pointing is initially a meaningless grasping motion.
However, as people react to the gesture, the movement assumes a meaning. The origin of this meaning is thus not within the infant, but emerges through a social mediation. In Vygotsky’s terms, inter-psychological processes (such as the use of language between people), become internalised through the process of mediation in activity, to form the basis of intra-
psychological processes (the child’s awareness that to point is to potentially make things happen in the world). This is the basis of Vygotsky’s (1978, p. 57) claim that “all higher functions originate as actual relations between human individuals”. Human nature is thus not merely ‘affected’ by, or impacted upon, by social or contextual forces as in a dualistic
conception. In a much quoted phrase, “humans’ psychological nature represents the aggregate of internalised social relations that have become functions for the individual and forms of the individual’s structure” (Vygotsky, 1981, p. 164). Human nature is essentially social.
The concept of mediation thus invalidates the notion of a human nature determined through external forces, or determined by internal biological processes, and these are critical issues which counter the theoretical stance within the dominant behaviour change theories. As Engeström (1999, p. 29) argues, inherent in the notion of mediation is the view that humans can “control their own behaviour not ‘from the inside’, on the basis of biological urges, but
‘from the outside’, using and creating artefacts”. In contrast to a determinist argument, human beings master themselves, and are active agents in their own development, through the use of external symbolic, cultural systems rather than being subjugated by, and in, them (Daniels, 2001). However, in contrast to the assumption in many of the behaviour change theories, this is not the presumption of free will or volitional control. Humans are not individually agentive separate from context. In this framework their action is interdependent with context. As Daniels (2001) argues, through the process of mediation, the individual acts on, and is acted upon, by social, cultural and historical factors. This is a significantly different
conceptualisation of the relationship between ‘external’ factors and ‘individual’ behaviour which is found in the HIV and AIDS literature. Vygotsky’s theory thus makes a specific contribution to reconceptualising theories of behaviour change.