In New Ideas in Psychology, 11, pp.379-390, 1993

VYGOTSKY AND BAKHTIN: ON INTERNALIZATION

AS A BOUNDARY PHENOMENON.

John Shotter

Vakgroep Ontwikkeling en Socialisatie,

Rijksuniversiteit Utrecht,

3584 CS Utrecht,

The Netherlands.

Abstract: In this paper I want to introduce two new themes into the study of Vygotsky's account of internalization: both a responsive or rhetorical, as well as an ethical theme. Through an examination of both Vygotsky's and Bakhtin's writings, I want to explore the nature of what is said to be our 'inner' lives. I want to argue that they are neither so private and inner, nor are they as merely logical or as systematic as has been assumed. Indeed, rather than functioning mechanically and systematically, I want to argue that they reflect in their functioning essentially the same ethical and rhetorical considerations influencing the transactions between people, out in the world. And furthermore, instead of being organized at the centre of our being (thus to be given orderly expression or not as required), they are organized peripherally, in a moment by moment process of 'ethically sensitive negotiation' at the boundaries of our being.

"And this chain of ideological creativity and understanding, moving from sign to sign and then to a new sign, is perfectly consistent and continuous... Nowhere is there a break in the chain, nowhere does the chain plunge into inner being, nonmaterial in nature and unembodied in signs" (Volosinov, 1973, p.11).

In this paper I want to explore two new and hitherto ignored themes in the study of Vygotsky's account of what he calls either the internalization of higher psychological functions (1978, p.52) , or the sociogenesis of the higher forms of behaviour (1966, p.45): I want to sound both a responsive or rhetorical, as well as an ethical note . My point in doing this is, through an examination of both Vygotsky's and Bakhtin's writings, to explore the nature of what is said to be our 'inner' lives. And the conclusions for which I want to argue are these: That the process of internalization is not, as the term may seem to suggest, a process in which what is at first outside us simply comes to be incorporated within us. For such a view would assume that we all already possessed a well-developed individuality; that we already knew how to be thoughtful and autonomous members of our society, and faced only the task of gaining information about our surroundings relevant to our goals - whereas, the development of this kind of (practical-moral ) knowledge of how to be an individual is, I think, a major part of what is involved in 'internalization' (Shotter, 1984). Instead, I want to argue that people's private 'inner' lives are neither so private and inner, nor are they as merely logical or as systematic as has been assumed. Indeed, rather than functioning mechanically and systematically, I want to argue that they reflect in their functioning essentially the same ethical and rhetorical considerations influencing the transactions between people, out in the world. And furthermore, instead of being organized at the centre of our being (thus to be given orderly expression or not as required), they are organized peripherally, in a moment by moment process of 'ethically sensitive negotiation' at the boundaries of our being.

What it means to say that our 'inner' life

is a 'boundary phenomenon.

There is no doubt that currently, nothing seems more natural to us as individual adults, that our thought goes on inside our heads; indeed, we take it that it goes in within the neurological networks in the cortex of our brains, doesn't it? Where else could it be located if not there? Well, Wittgenstein voiced his disquiet with this claim in many ways. Here is, perhaps, one of his most dramatic expressions of it:

"No supposition seems to me more natural than that there is no process in the brain correlated with... thinking... I mean this: if I talk or write there is, I assume, a system of impulses going out from my brain and correlated with my spoken or written thoughts. But why should the system continue further in the direction of the centre? Why should this order not proceed, so to speak, out of chaos?..." (Wittgenstein, 1981, no.608).

In other words, rather than issuing mechanically, from already well-formed and orderly cognitions, why shouldn't the expression of a thought or an intention - the saying of a sentence or the doing of a deed, for example - originate in a person's vague and unordered feelings. And their appropriate orderly expression be something that people 'develop' in a complex set of temporally conducted transactions between themselves (or their selves), their feelings, and those to whom they must address themselves? Indeed, why shouldn't the processes 'within' people be similar to the transactions 'between' them, within which orderly expressions are negotiated in a back and forth process in which each tests the other as to the social appropriateness of their attempted expressions, tests which of course evoke sanctions if failed?

              If this seems a strange proposal, then we must say straightaway that Vygotsky's psychology is a strange and surprising psychology, for this is precisely the relation between thought and word that he proposes:

"A speaker often takes several minutes to disclose one thought. In his mind the whole thought is present at once, but in speech it has to be developed successively. A thought may be compared with a cloud shedding a shower of words. Precisely because thought does not have its automatic counterpart in words, the transition of thought to word leads through meaning. In our speech, there is always the hidden thought, the subtext" (1962, p.150).

There is a 'subtext' because every utterance constitutes only an attempt (which is hardly ever completely satisfactory) at its expression - what we try to say, and what we are understood as meaning, are often at odds with one another. Hence the necessity for the expression of a thought to be 'successively developed' (and checked), and for the transition of thought to word to be through meaning. Indeed, what Vygotsky says about the long term relation of thought to language could be said equally well of their short term, momentary relation: "The relation between thought and word is a living process; thought is born through words. A word devoid of thought is a dead thing, and a thought unembodied in words remains a shadow. The connection between them, however, is not a preformed and constant one. It emerges in the course of development, and itself evolves" (1962, p.153).

              If the relation between thought and words is a living process not an automatic one - because it involves at least contemplated if not instituted tests as to its social suitability, if we do not know precisely what our thoughts are until we attempt to formulate them in some way (in actions or in words), where should we 'locate' our mental activities if not at the centre of ourselves? Bakhtin (1984, pp.311-12) answers this question as follows:

"It turns out that every internal experience occurs on the border... The very being of man (both internal and external) is a profound communication. To be means to communicate... To be means to be for the other; and through him, for oneself. Man has no internal sovereign territory; he is all and always on the boundary..."

And indeed (along with Vygotsky and Bakhtin), this is what I want to argue: that our 'inner' lives are structured by us living 'into' and 'through', so to speak, the opportunities or enablements offered us by the 'otherness' both around us, and within us. Thus our mental life is never wholly our own. We live in a way which is both responsive , and in response to, what is both 'within us' in some way, but which is also 'other than' ourselves.

              In this communicational view of ourselves then, the current view we have of persons, as all equal, self-enclosed, (essentially indistinguishable) atomic individuals, possessing an inner sovereignty, each living their separate lives, all in isolation from each other - the supposed experience of the modern self - is an illusion, maintained by the institution between us of certain special forms of communication. It is an illusion which, besides misleading us about our own nature as human beings, also misleads us about the nature of thought and of language - we have come to think about both as if they are like the closed, unitary systems of signs in mathematics rather than as a heterogeneous set of means or devices for us to link ourselves to our surroundings . It is treating the relation between thoughts and words as a 'developmental' one, rather than as a systematic, mechanical, or logical relation, which leads, as we shall see, both to the introduction of an ethical and rhetorical (justificatory) note into accounts of how people organize and direct their mental activities, as well as to a much less systematic and unified view of language.

Language and thinking: rhetoric, dialogue, and ethics.

To show why dialogical and rhetorical matters might play an important part in understanding thinking as a process, let me first refer to the work of Billig (1987). In discussing the nature of thought, he criticizes the model of thinking currently central in cognitive psychology - of thinking as a process conducted mechanically and systematically, according to a set of rules-of-procedure. It is not that it is in itself incorrect - after all, people do often work as (and like) filing clerks or bureaucrats, following formal rules in deciding what in differing circumstances to do - but it is, he says, an extremely monological, one-sided and in fact essentially thoughtless image of thought. For, as we all know, even the thinking of bureaucrats themselves does not fit this essentially demeaning image. Rather than being unimaginative rule-followers, they are ingenious rule-appliers , often rule-benders, as well as sometimes imaginative rule-creators. And in doing all these things, they must think about how the people around them, and those with whom they must deal, might react to what they do (whether they will understand and try to implement the instructions they receive; whether they will feel pleased and aided, or insulted and impeded; whether they will seek redress or be silenced; and so on) - furthermore, they must also have some contingency plans ready to save their skins if none of their expected plans work.

              In other words, bureaucrats must try to be dialogically responsive in their thought both to their bosses and to their clients. Their linguistic task is not in any way like that depicted in Ferdinand de Saussure's (1974, pp.11-12) classic, paradigmatic account of the communicative situation, in which an immaterial idea or concept in the 'mind' of one person (a speaker or writer) is sent into the mind of another, essentially similar person (but now in the role of a listener or reader), by means of material signs such as vibrations in the air or ink-marks on paper - it is, as we shall see, much more like Vygotsky's process of 'instruction' (to which we shall turn in a moment below), in which one person 'makes' something known to another.

              Before that, however, having mentioned above the reason for the turn to rhetoric in the discussion of internalization, I must mention here also why I want to introduce ethical considerations onto the discussion. I want to do so for three major reasons: Firstly, because Vygotsky himself, in his own talk about internalization, makes a central distinction between things people do spontaneously and those they themselves do, deliberately, and thus himself, if only implicitly, hints at such a concern. My second reason is connected with what I said above about us learning how to be a proper member of our society: Indeed, I want to point out that the consequences of conceptualizing human activities in moral terms have not yet been fully recognized and explored. If we were to treat social relationships ethically rather than causally (which we do not at the moment in social theory do so), this would change their character entirely. As we have already seen, rather than things happening in an input-output, one-pass, causal and systematic manner, all human activities (within a culture) would have to be seen as 'developmental': they would have to be seen as involving in their proper conduct, a socially negotiated or negotiable, dialogically structured process of formation, a process which in its conduct or 'management' must, moment by moment, take into account the changing character of what is morally permitted and what is not. Indeed, even fully 'internalized' (cognitive) processes, taking place wholly 'within' individuals, if they are to be accounted as socially appropriate, i.e., as both intelligible and legitimate, must also honour in their formation certain moral privileges and obligations. And thirdly, as the ethical aspects of interaction only hinted at by Vygotsky are central to both Bakhtin's and Volosinov's accounts of language, it is thus interesting to try to develop some of Vygotsky's notions about the relation of thought and language with the help of the further resources they provide.

Responsibility and internalization.

Whilst most other psychologies are concerned, as we know, with determining the conditions controlling people's behaviour, Vygotsky is concerned to study how, through the use of their own social activities, people by changing their own conditions of existence, socially, can change themselves. Our higher mental functions can be developed, he suggests, not by more fully developing any 'natural' potentials we may contain within ourselves as individuals, but by us first discovering how to make use of what he calls "psychological tools or instruments" - quite artificial aids or devices of our own invention - and then how to incorporate (or embody) the functioning of such devices within ourselves. Where the major 'tool' for influencing people's behaviour is language: this is his central and most important notion. For, in the development of behaviour, says Vygotsky, "the child begins to practise with respect to himself the same forms of behaviour that others formerly practised with respect to him" (1966, pp.39-40). Hence, he continues, "we may say that we become ourselves through others and that this rule applies not only to the personality as a whole, but also to the history of every individual function," he says (1966, p.43) - thus, what at first appears on the social plane as something intermental, between people, later appears as something psychological, as an intramental category within the child (1966, p.44) - where, to repeat, the same ethical concerns which held in the social realm are still of importance in the 'inner', psychological realm of the individual.

              The special nature of this ethical concern, perhaps, becomes more apparent if, in exploring what Vygotsky actually means when he talks of the process of internalization, we ask: 'Is he talking about it as a physical, or a psychological movement inwards?' In other words, is he talking about how what is 'outside' us geometrically or geographically, so to speak, gets 'inside' us; or, is he using to word 'internalize' to characterize something not essentially spatial at all, but to do with a transformation in our responsibility for things? To put it yet another way, is he talking about a merely cognitive process, in which what was at first inside only the adult's head is transferred into the child's head, or, is he talking about a process in which things which at first a child only does spontaneously and unselfconsciously, under the control of an adult, come under the control of their own personal agency? Although, as I said above, Vygotsky never explicitly made the distinction in ethical terms, I think he clearly means the second of these two possibilities. For we must be impressed by his claim, that one it is one of the basic laws governing psychological development "that consciousness and control appear only at a late stage in the development of a function, after it has been used and practiced unconsciously and spontaneously. In order to subject a function to intellectual and volitional control, we must first possess it" (1962, p.90). Clearly, for him, a central criterion in our mastery of a function is us being able to perform it, as he says, consciously rather than unconsciously , as we ourselves rather than as our circumstances require.

              As an example of such a process, he discusses the development of the child's ability to pronounce individual speech sounds upon request as a result of the child learning the grammar of his or her native tongue as they learn to write in school. If, before the young pre-school child learns to write, he points out, you ask him or her to produce a combination of separate speech sounds, for example sk, the task is usually to difficult. Yet within the context of a familiar word - such as Moscow - the child finds the task easy. But through learning to write,

"[the child] may not acquire new grammatical or syntactic forms in school but, thanks to instruction in grammar and writing, he does become aware of what he is doing and learns to use his skills consciously. Just as the child realizes for the first time in learning to write that the word Moscow consists of the sounds m-o-s-c-o-w and learns to pronounce each one separately, he also learns to construct sentences, to do consciously what he has been doing unconsciously in speaking" (1962, pp.100-1).

We have here then a process of 'instruction' in which certain invented devices - in this case, certain written forms of language, whose formal significance can be 'visualized' - are made use of, as Vygotsky says, not necessarily to teach the child any new speech skills, but which do none the less function to transform a child's own relation to his or her own acts of speaking. What actually is happening here?

The 'cultural' use of artificial signs in the control

of a function.

Of help here, I think, is a study of the use of artificial signs in the development of self-controlled remembering (1978, pp.38-51). Here, he discusses a game where children had to answer a number of irrelevant questions, among which were interspersed a series of relevant colour-questions, (i.e., 'What colour is...?') - where there were 'rules' as to what colours they were allowed to use in their answers (certain colours being completely forbidden, while others could not be used more than once). The artificial 'signs' made available to the children were simply a set of cards coloured upon one side, cards which the children could, of course use (by turning them over as they said the colours, to indicate to themselves the 'answers' still left available to them at any point in the game). Without going into the details of the different ways in which the cards were actually used (or not), the following comments are relevant.

              Firstly, as Vygotsky notes that there are two forms of remembering, 'elementary' and 'higher': elementary forms of remembering are unmediated and direct - there are some things we do just simply remember - while other, higher forms make use of mediatory aids serving as reminders. Secondly, these two qualitatively different lines of development, one which is biological in origin and the other which is sociocultural, are interwoven: we can make use of what we just remember to control what we in our culture must remember. Whilst thirdly, the process of interweaving is not in any way a 'natural' process - "the child does not suddenly and irrevocably deduce the relation between the sign and the method for using it" (1978, p.45). A number of 'stages' of development seem to be involved: At first, with pre-school children, the performance with and without the cards is the same, they perform badly. The cards do not seem to have any kind of 'instrumental' function at all; only older children are able to use the cards as external aids, as a means for the control of their remembering; without the cards though, they still perform badly. With adults, however, a stage is reached where the performance with or without the cards is similarly high, the presence of the actual cards themselves is unnecessary; now it seems that "the external sign that school children require has been transformed into an internal sign produced by the adult as a means of remembering" (1978, p.45).

              Indeed, we might go a step further and claim that the external signs 'mastered' by the child have, in the adult, become embodied as prostheses (as 'mental organs' - see below) through which to sense, that is, to perceive, the nature of the problem. Thus as socially competent adults, they act as 'the task' requires. Having, as the children of a particular culture, learnt to appropriate capacities both from Nature and from the culture's socio-cultural history appropriate to life in that culture, as adults, these capacities become reincorporated into their being. They come again, to react to their circumstances in a spontaneous and unthinking manner, but now in ways which make sense within the terms of their culture. They find themselves confronting a 'given' but unique situation, a situation which, given what and who they are (as members of and an individuals in their culture), is their situation and no one else's; they cannot wish it away; to act upon it, they must themselves respond to it personally.

              What changes as the child grows up, then, according to Vygotsky, is not just simply a matter of the child being simply able to remember more things, along with a larger number of connections between them. But the child is 'instructed' in the use of various, culturally invented, mediational means, and enabled, in the development of various interfunctional relations between them, to develop capacities in which mediated and nonmediated functions are interwoven. Indeed, he claims, the interfunctional relations involved in learning mediated remembering reverse their direction:

"For the young child, to think means to recall; but for the adolescent, to recall means to think. Her memory is so 'logicalized' that remembering is reduced to establishing and finding logical relations; recognizing consists in discovering that element which the task indicates [my emphasis] has to be found... When a human being ties a knot in her handkerchief as a reminder, she is, in essence, constructing the process of memorizing by forcing an external object to remind her of something; she transforms remembering into an external activity. This fact alone is enough to demonstrate the fundamental characteristic of the higher forms of behaviour. In the elementary form something is remembered; in the higher form humans remember something. In the first case a temporary link is formed owing to the simultaneous occurrence of two stimuli that affect the organism; in the second case humans personally create a temporary link through the artificial combination of stimuli" (1978, p.51).

This, I think, is a very insightful account of the nature of 'instruction' leading to mediated remembering. However, there is still, I think, not only something missing from it, but also something still wrong with it.

              What is missing from it, is what I alluded to above: that when Vygotsky says that human beings create a temporary link personally, he fails to explicate what it means to do things 'personally', i.e., what it is to be and to act as a person within a particular culture. Further, what I think is wrong, is that he claims that the child, in discovering what he or she must do, discovers like the adults I mentioned above, what 'the task indicates' has to be done. How should we react to these deficiencies?

              Clearly, what Vygotsky means in saying that people come to remember something 'personally' is that, as their skill at using mediational devices develops, they become able to subject remembering to intellectual and volitional control; they become able to be themselves responsible for the way in which it is done - where an important part of what it is to be responsible for something is, as Winch (1958) following Wittgenstein points out, knowing how to correct oneself if one goes wrong. In other words, what Vygotsky does not make clear is how the child learns in what way a task must be done and in what way mistakes must be corrected. For the task in the cards-experiment is, for the children, not just learning a way of using the cards, but to make use of them in the right way at the right time - according to how the adults (who are teaching them) have arranged the task. Thus at first, it is not 'the task' itself which indicates what children have to do, and which corrects them if they go wrong, but the adults around them to whom they are responsible; they are the one's who can and do judge whether the child is acting correctly or not. They are the 'keepers', so to speak, of the culture which the child must acquire.

              Thus, in learning how to make appropriate use of the coloured cards, children do not simply learn the 'logical' relations between the cards and the questions, in general - for indeed, there are no such relations in general and none as such are taught to the child. Different cards must be used in different ways in different situations, and the children themselves must work out how to apply the cards to the task. It is this which Vygotsky misses when he talks of the child's memory becoming 'logicalized'; he misses the importance of the fact that the children's initial grasp of what the task 'is', is not in itself immediately obvious - it is something culturally defined. The children gain a grasp of it in their conversations with their adult teachers; and both at the start of the experiment and right the way through it, the adults continue to correct the children in their attempts to do the task, until a point comes at which (presumably) no further corrections are necessary. At that point, the children do not just know how 'personally' to create an appropriate 'temporary link', but also how to 'see' what the problem 'is' for which they must create a solution. It is the development of this 'way of seeing' the problem situation which, I think, is almost more important than the development of the personal ability to solve it - it is a paradigm of the kind of 'embodied' learning (see below) involved in becoming the right kind of being to be a member of a culture.

              As I indicated above, the point I want to make here is the point made quite some time ago now by Winch (1958), in his discussion of what is involved in learning to follow not just rules of Logic, but culturally significant rules of any kind. The point hinges upon the important distinction to be drawn between, interpreting someone's actions as if being according rules, and their actions actually being an (attempt by them) of an instance of applying a rule - for the fact that a person's actions can be 'seen as if' being due to the application of a rule by 3rd-person, 'outside' observers is no guarantee that the person themselves, as a 1st-person actor, is doing any such thing. For the actor to be self-consciously acting according to a rule, the actor must not only know the rule, but he or she must be reflexively knowledgeable about its nature, i.e., they must (like even the bureaucrat discussed above) know how to justify their application of it if challenged by others to do so, and how to correct their behaviour to accord with it if shown by others to be wrong. That is, they must possess (embody) certain sensitivities, and be able to make judgments about whether the conditions are such that it is socially acceptable to apply the rule or not - and to be able give the reasons for such judgments . Indeed, if one had to state the major change wrought in recent years by the work of Ryle (1949), Austin (1965), and Wittgenstein (1953) in the philosophy of human action, it is the recognition of the fact that all our talk about human conduct is normative, i.e., that in anything intelligible we say about it, we presuppose judgments as to whether it is right or wrong, fitting or unfitting, appropriate or inappropriate, successful or unsuccessful, etc., judgments which themselves may be grounded in reasons which in turn may be evaluated as good or bad reasons. And only those who have come to embody the ability to make such judgments can be accounted full and proper members of their culture.

              As Wittgenstein (1953, no.242) says in discussing the doing of Logic, or the making of measurements:

"If language is to be a means of communication there must be agreement not only in definitions but also (queer as this may sound) in judgments. This seems to abolish logic, but it does not do so. - It is one thing to describe methods of measurement, and another to obtain and state the results of measurement. But what we call 'measuring' is partly determined by a certain constancy in results of measurement."

In other words, as Winch (1958, p.57) points out, just as in learning how to make measurements, or in learning how to make logical inferences, we are learning how to do something - literally, both how to 'make' something occur according to common ways and means, and, if necessary, to indicate to others the ways and means used. And our task in learning how to act personally, as an autonomous member of our culture, is in learning how to do all the things in our culture, like measuring, inferring, remembering, perceiving, listening, speaking, etc., we must learn how to do them as the others around us do them - we must learn how to be as they are. Indeed, if we do not, then they will sanction us and not accord us the right to act freely.

              The fact that we must act in such a way as to make it possible for others, by reference to socially negotiable criteria, to check our speech and action, is what makes human conduct so special - it is to be conscious of how we can be challenged, even if, by skilfully anticipating such challenges and 'managing' our behaviour accordingly, we can forestall their implementation. But to be able to this, to make our conduct appropriate precisely to the variability in the occasion of its performance, we must be able ourselves to check out its changing appropriateness, moment by moment, on-the-spot, so to speak. It is this which makes it impossible to plan many of our performances ahead of time, and to execute them unaware of the circumstances of their production. But what is the nature of this awareness, the nature of the 'practical-moral' knowledge, as Bernstein (1983) calls it, which makes the performance of the 'higher forms' of human behaviour within a culture possible? "To explain the higher forms of human behaviour," says Vygotsky (1962, p.56), "we must uncover the means by which man learns to organize and direct his behaviour" - we must explore what it is in the 'means' we use, which allows us to act in this way.

Psychological instruments: prostheses, tools, and indicators.

In analyzing the nature of the means used in the mediation of 'higher forms' further, it is important to distinguish prosthetic and indicative functions: The means used may serve a function like the blind person's stick, enabling us in actively investigating our situation through it in ways which would otherwise be inaccessible to us; or, they may be like the pointers on dials, indicating some remote state of the world.

              To explore these two distinct functions in turn: Prosthetic devices, we might say, reside 'on the side of the agent'; we may come to "dwell in" them (Polanyi, 1958), and learn how to embody them as an instrumental means through which to achieve our ends. As such, they are 'transparent' - blind people do not feel their sticks vibrating in the palms of their hands, they experience the terrain ahead of them directly as rough, as a result of their stick-assisted 'way' of investigating it in their movement through it; just as the carpenter 'feels' the hardness of the wood, and adjusts the blows of the hammer accordingly as she or he hammers a nail home. Two distinct processes of 'sense making' seem to be at work in such mediated investigations or activities as these: Firstly, following Bohm (1965, pp.223-4), we can note that in actively probing or acting upon one's surroundings through an instrument, there is always a response to one's testing and acting, and "it is the relationship of variations in this response to the known variations in the state of the instruments that constitutes the relevant information in what is observed (just as happens directly with the sense organs)," he says. It is in the relation between the outflow of activity for which one is oneself responsible, and the inflow for which one is not, that one makes available information about 'the other' to oneself - with each sweep of the stick, each blow of the hammer, each test, more information is revealed. Here, we must turn to the second stage of the process: As Polanyi (1958, pp.55-57) describes it, we attend in such activities from an ongoing and changing "subsidiary awareness" of the information(s) provided us by the instruments we use, to a "focal awareness" of their organized result - for example, from the vibrations occasioned by our movements of a stick to the roughness or smoothness of the surfaces it is over which it is moved; from the felt movement of the nail in hammer blows to the hardness of the wood; from the disparate 2-D views given by the movements of our two eyes over a visual scene to a unified 3-D view; and so on.

              In their indicative function, however, mediatory devices (like the petrol gauges of cars), may be said to be 'on the side of world', and we confront them as having a meaning which we must interpret. In this mode, they do have a content: they indicate a state of the world. Here too, we may say that a 'from-to' structure of sense-making is involved, but now we must attend from all the fragments of data provided to an overall organized resultant. But as it is not now open to us to investigate the world by their use further, to fill in any gaps - for indicators are not prostheses - imaginative completion is required if we are to achieve coherency. While prostheses, to the extent that we come to embody them, may be accounted as a part of ourselves, our relation to indicators is different; they remain 'other then' or 'outside' of us. Rather than as a means for our use, our relationship to them is an hermeneutical one; if we can interpret the information they provide - by placing all its parts suitably within a larger whole - then they present us with a meaning, a state of affairs to which we might need or want to react.

              It is in terms of this two-sided nature of mediational devices - 'our' side and the 'other's' side - that we can begin to make sense of Bakhtin's claim above, that "man has no internal sovereign territory; he is all and always on the boundary..," for as we shall find when we turn to the nature of words as mediational devices, they exhibit this two-sidedness in an acute form. But before we do so, I must point out that so far, in discussing mediational devices, I have not yet made any clear distinction between 'tools', 'prostheses', and linguistic 'signs' . Here again, we shall find it useful to refer to Vygotsky's account before suggesting modifications to it. In discussing the development of two different lines of mediated activity, he distinguishes between signs and tools, saying:

"A most essential difference between a sign and a tool, and the basis for a real divergence of the two lines, is the different ways that they orient human behaviour. The tool's function is to serve as the conductor of human influence on the object of activity; it is externally oriented; it must lead to change in objects. It is a means by which human external activity is aimed at mastering, and triumphing over, nature. The sign, on the other hand, changes nothing in the object of a psychological operation. it is a means of internal activity aimed at mastering oneself; the sign is internally oriented" (1978, p.57).

But what we must add to Vygotsky's account is, that linguistic signs themselves can also have both a 'tool' and a 'prosthetic' functions , as well as sign functions (in the sense of these terms outlined above). Indeed, with regard to the 'tool' function of language, Vygotsky himself remarks that, for instance, in concept formation, the mediating sign is the word, "which at first plays the role of means in forming a concept and later becomes its symbol" (1962, p.56). At first, the child may be influenced by the externally oriented language of others; they can use it in a 'tool'-like way to influence his or her activity, to 'move' the child to certain actions. Later, this interpersonal function of language can be transformed into an intrapersonal one: children may come to use the words used by others to control them, to control themselves. What they learn in the course of being 'instructed' by adults becomes incorporated into their very being as members of their society.

              Having made these three distinctions above, the point to emphasize here, is that all these three functions are in play at once in our speaking. Usually, if asked to reflect upon the process of speaking, we 'see through' the speech we use, i.e., we see 'from' what we say 'to' either its effects, or 'to' its meanings; its prosthetic functioning remains 'invisible' to us. We fail to notice it because, in speaking, we act 'through' our utterances in 'making sense'. But clearly, if this account is correct, as a very special form of "psychological instrument", linguistic signs possess what might be called, a 'prosthetic-(tool)/text ambiguity', the three different aspects each becoming visible according to the different 'direction' of our view: Acting towards the future, prospectively and creatively, in the saying of an utterance, we attempt to use it both prosthetically, as a device 'through' which to begin to express our meanings, and, as a tool-like means to 'move' other people. Indeed, we can go so far here as to say that this prosthetic-(tool) function of speech works on one's surroundings formatively, to specify them further (see Shotter, 1984). Retrospectively, however, what we (and others) have already said remains 'on hand', so to speak, as like a 'text', constituting a given aspect of the situation between oneself and one's interlocutors, into which they (as well as oneself) must direct their speech. Indeed, it is in the tensions between the retrospective and the prospective, the given and the created, between 'finding' and 'making', in the expression of an utterance, that the 'mental movements' it represents can be shaped.

              It is the socio-cultural, socio-historical nature of this intralinguistically created textual-context, as it is temporally (and spatially) developed by what is said, that everyone involved must take into account (when it is their turn to speak or act) - if, that is, their actions are to be judged as appropriate to it. It is this, the realization that, as one speaks, a temporal-spatial network of intralinguistic references is constructed into which one's future speech must be directed, a network which carries in it the traces of one's socio-cultural history, which I think is the key to the further understanding of the nature of our mental processes - this is where Bakhtin's concept of speech genres becomes relevant.

Speech genres, texts, and contexts.

The claim by such linguists as Saussure (followed by Chomsky, of course) that the single sentence, with all its individuality and creativity, can be regarded as a completely free combination of forms of language, is not, Bakhtin (1986, p.81) feels, true of utterances. Actual utterances must take into account the (already linguistically shaped) context into which they are directed. For him:

"Any concrete utterance is a link in the chain of speech communication of a particular sphere. The very boundaries of the utterance are determined by a change of speech subjects. Utterances are not indifferent to one another, and are not self-sufficient; they are aware of and mutually reflect one another... Every utterance must be regarded as primarily a response to preceding utterances of the given sphere (we understand the word 'response' here in the broadest sense). Each utterance refutes affirms, supplements, and relies upon the others, presupposes them to be known, and somehow takes them into account... Therefore, each kind of utterance is filled with various kinds of responsive reactions to other utterances of the given sphere of speech communication" (Bakhtin, 1986, p.91).

Where, by the different spheres in which we communicate, Bakhtin means nothing more than, say, our family, our work, in banks and post offices, in official documents, our intimate relations, and so on. All the spheres which, even before we come on the scene, are maintained in existence by an ongoing communicative process of a particular kind - that is what gives them their particular character as the spheres they are. Thus, if we also are to participate in them, then we must use the appropriate speech genre, the appropriate ways of talking, else those who are already members will not treat us as competent participants, as people able to maintain such institutions by reproducing them in our actions .

              What is constituted in the use of a particular speech genre is, among many other aspects of a ongoing social 'world', a particular set of interdependently related, but continually changing speech 'positions', positions which on the one hand allow the use of various voices - in which we are answerable for the our 'position' - and on the other, which permit speakers certain forms of addressivity, aimed at certain addressees - it is in their allowing and permitting of some speech forms and their sanctioning of others, that institutions constituted by particular speech genres are repaired and maintained. For example, in an educational institution, I may speak with the voice of a teacher, a pupil, a researcher, a librarian, an administrator, and so on - and neither administrators, nor librarians, nor pupils, are not supposed to tell teachers how or what to teach; within each department, among the teachers within it, a particular speech genre will have currency also, and so on. Where the point to emphasize is how, in the never ending flow of communication in which this form of life is sustained, every utterance is a rejoinder in some way to previous utterances.

              As such, besides satisfying criteria - to do with the issues of answerability and addressivity mentioned above - utterances must be related as responses to one another: as question to answer; as assertion to objection, or to agreement; as suggestion to acceptance; order to execution, etc. . Listening too must be responsive, in that listeners must be preparing themselves to respond to what they are hearing. Indeed, the speaker does not expect passive understanding that, so to speak, only duplicates his or her own idea in someone else's mind (as in Saussure's model of linguistic communication mentioned above). Rather, the speaker talks with an expectation of a response, agreement, sympathy, objection, execution, and so forth (with various speech genres presupposing various integral orientations and speech plans on the part of speakers or writers)" (Bakhtin, 1986, p.69). In other words, the utterance is not a conventional unit, like the sentence (in Saussure's or Chomsky's syntactical sense), but a real unit, in the sense that it marks out the boundaries of in the speech flow between different 'voices'. This is not the case with sentences: "...the boundaries of the sentence as a unit of language are never determined by a change of speaking subjects" (Bakhtin, 1986, p.72).

"The first and foremost criterion for the finalization of an utterance is the possibility of responding to it or, more precisely and broadly, of assuming a responsive attitude to it (for example, executing an order)" (Bakhtin, 1986, p.76).

The trouble with the sentence is that has no capacity to determine directly the responsive position of the other speaker; that is, it cannot evoke a response. The sentence as a language unit is only grammatical, not ethical in nature" (Bakhtin, 1986, p.74).

              As we become more and more adept, then, at the use of various speech genres, at participating in already constructed networks of intralinguistic references to function as a context into which to direct our own further utterances - as well as adept at constructing our own - then we become increasingly capable of acting independently of our immediate context. In such a development, there is a transformation from being 'answerable' for our own immediate context, to being answerable for our 'position' in an intralinguistically constructed context, a reliance upon a network of links within what has already been, or with what might be said. In essence, it is a decrease of reference to what 'is' with a consequent increase of reference to what 'might be' - an increase of reference to an hermeneutically constructed imaginary world (see the account above of the 'from-to' imaginary nature of hermeneutical constructions). As a result, what is said requires less and less grounding in an extralinguistic context - for it can find its 'roots' almost wholly within the new, linguistically constructed context. Thus one can tell people about (represent to them or give them an account of) situations not actually at the moment present.

              Such a consequence requires, however, especially in the light of the expected responsiveness of listeners, the development of methods for warranting in the course of one's talk (i.e., giving good reasons for) one's claims about what 'might be' as what being what 'is' - one must learn to say, for instance, when making a claim about a state of affairs, that others saw it that way too, that it was based on direct observation, in the 'nature' of things, independent of one's wish, and so on. But primarily, one must try to avoid the need for such warranting by learning to speak authoritatively, i.e., within the accepted idiom or genre of the social order within which one is acting. By the use of such methods and procedures, adults can construct their statements as avowals, as factual statements which others will take seriously, without question, and adults can learn to speak with a large degree of independence from their immediate context .

              This is not to say, however, that when one talks in this way, one's speech is wholly one's own, for, in the very nature of speech genres, they preexist the individual; furthermore, not all are equally conducive to reflecting the individuality of the speaker. As Bakhtin points out, there are no 'neutral' words and forms; they have all at one time or another belonged to, and been used by others, and carry with them the traces of those uses:

"A word (or in general any sign) is interindividual. Everything that is said, expressed, is located outside the 'soul' of the speaker and does not belong only to him [or her]. The word cannot be assigned to a single speaker. The author (speaker) has his own inalienable right to the word, but the listener has his rights, and those whose voices are heard in the word before the author comes upon it also have their rights (after all, there are no words that belong to no one)" (Bakhtin, 1986, pp.121-122).

Indeed, as he adds later, a word becomes 'one's own':

"... only when the speaker populates it with his own intentions, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention. Prior to this moment of appropriation, the word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language (it is not, after all, out of a dictionary that the speaker gets his words!), but rather it exists in other people's mouths, in other people's contexts, serving other people's intentions: it is from there that one must take the word, and make it one's own" (pp.293-4).

And if, as Vygotsky says, the relations between the higher mental functions were at one time real relations among people, then at that moment of appropriation, what precisely these relations were, or still are, is important. In particular, we can ask, what were or are the ethical proprieties which must be negotiated moment by moment in sustaining them; and how is it possible for words to have, so to speak, ethical currency?

The ethics speaking and thinking: the utterance.

In their biography of Bakhtin, Clark and Holquist (1984) discuss a number of early, incomplete texts of Bakhtin's - written between 1918 and 1924 - to which they assign the title The Architectonics of Answerability. As they see it, in these early texts, Bakhtin outlined a concern with the ethics of everyday life activities which he never ceased to pursue throughout his whole career: His concern was not with the end product of an action, with what it results in, but with the "ethical deed in its making" (p.63), with how in the process of authoring, i.e., in crafting the complex, time-space relations between self and others, the self is also crafted. Where, what it is which makes a person as a 'me' unique, is the unique place or position I occupy in existence, and the degree to which, as already mentioned above, I am answerable for that position to the others around me. As Clark and Holquist (1984, pp.67-8) put it:

"In Bakhtin, the difference between humans and other forms of life is a form of authorship, since the means by which a specific ratio of self-to-other responsibility is achieved in any given action - a deed being understood as an answer - comes about as the result of efforts by the self to shape a meaning out of the encounter between them. What the self is answerable to is the social environment; what the self is answerable for is the authorship of its responses. The self creates itself in crafting an architectonic relation between the unique locus of life activity and the constantly changing natural and social environment which surrounds it. This is the meaning of Bakhtin's dictum that the self is an act of grace, a gift of the other."

But, it must be added that (as we have seen above), if we owe our being to how we are addressed, how I address the others around me in my 'authoring' of myself also raises ethical questions - for it is a part of the ethics of authoring that I must not in making my own being violate the being of others. How, if the others around me are unique beings whose nature cannot be predicted, can this be managed?

              It can only be managed at the point of action, so to speak, during the actual execution of the communicative act, the fashioning of an utterance. Hence, the centrality of the theory of the utterance in Bakhtin's work. As commentators remark (e.g. Todorov, 1984), Bakhtin formulated his theory of the utterance twice, both in the texts of the late twenties signed almost exclusively by Volosinov (here only the 1973 writings are referred to), and in some writing from the late 1950's (mainly those in Bakhtin, 1986) - though the differences between them are not major. Central to them both, as we have already seen above, is the rejection of formal, linguistic analyses in terms of sentences - an approach which seems to suggest that there must be a stage of passive, formal, nonresponsive understanding in the life of utterances (in terms of the sentence-syntax), before they are perceived as being in a context. Whereas, what matters for actual speakers, Bakhtin feels, is not that normatively identical forms exist in the 'tool-box' of language - just as normatively identical tools exist in the actual tool-boxes of carpenters, say - but that in different particular contexts (like the carpenter's tools), such forms can be put to use in creative and novel ways. Thus:

"What the speaker values is not that aspect of the form which is invariably identical in all instances of its usage, despite the nature of those instances, but that aspect of the linguistic form because of which it can figure in the given, concrete context, because of which it becomes a sign adequate to the conditions of the given, concrete situation. We can express it this way: what is important for the speaker about the linguistic form is not that it is a stable and always self-equivalent signal, but that it is an always changeable and adaptable sign" (Volosinov, 1973, p.68).

But if this is the case, how is a listener to understand what the speaker means? Doesn't the listener first have to recognize the form used in order to understand its meaning?

              No, not at all. As we saw above, in Vygotsky's discussion of children's use of language before learning to write, (perhaps surprisingly to cognitive scientists) the actual learning of grammatical forms need play no part in learning to speak and to understand one's mother tongue. For the child - who must, says Vygotsky, in learning to write "disengage himself from the sensory aspect of speech and replace words by images of words" (1962, p.98 - see note 11) - can still grasp the 'sensory' aspect of words. This is Vygotsky's (1962) point in taking word meaning as the 'unit' of analysis: it is still a dynamic unity of intellectual and affective factors. Where clearly, from a practical-moral point of view, what is involved in 'making sense' of words used in particular concrete communicative contexts, amounts, says Volosinov (1973, p.68), "to understanding [a word's] novelty and not to recognizing its identity."

              Indeed, if we go along with Bakhtin and regard every utterance as primarily a response to preceding utterances, then the listener's task (in understanding) is that of formulating what his or her response to a speaker's utterance should be - they must decide whether they agree with it or want to reject it; whether they must comply with it; act upon it; or are insulted by it; and so on. In short: The listener's two-part task is i) to grasp how the speaker's ('tool'-like) use of words has, so to speak, 'moved' or 'repositioned' him or her in the changing, intralinguistically specified situation between them, in order next ii) to 'answer' for their new position within it. In this view then, the psychological 'flow' or 'movement' of dialogic speech consists in a sequence of utterances, where the boundaries of each particular utterance are determined by a change of speakers. And where each speaker in their utterances, in the 'movement' between their sense of what they want to achieve in their utterance and their use of particular words, attempts to 'successively develop' (Vygotsky) suitable expressions. But how is this possible? How can an expression be developmentally formulated in a more or less routine way, word by word, and checked in the course of its 'construction' for its appropriateness?

              Because, argues Bakhtin (1986, p.88):

"Neutral dictionary definitions of the words of a language ensure their common features and guarantee that all speakers of a given language will understand one another, but the use of words in live speech communication is always individual and contextual in nature. Therefore, one can say that any word exists for the speaker in three aspects: as a neutral word of a language, belonging to nobody; as an other's word, which belongs to another person and is filled with echoes of the other's utterance; and finally, as my word, for, since I am dealing with it in a particular situation, with a particular speech plan, it is already imbued with my expression. In both the latter aspects, the word is expressive, but, we repeat, this expression does not inhere in the word itself. It originates at the point of contact between the word and actual reality, under the conditions of that real situation articulated by the individual utterance. In this case the word appears as an expression of some evaluative position of an individual person..."

It is in a speaker's particular use of a particular word at a particular point in time - like, say, the carpenter's particular use of a chisel stroke to slice off a wood sliver at a particular point in a piece of joinery - that the speaker can sense what its use achieves in the construction desired. To repeat Bakhtin's comments above, a word's meaning does not inhere in the word itself, but originates at the point of contact between the words used, and the 'movements' they achieve in the conditions of their use.

              Thus also, it is precisely here, in this zone of uncertainty as to who can do what in the construction of a word's significance, at the point of contact between my creative use of it in an attempt to reshape the social reality between myself and another, that I can exert my power, and the other can exert theirs. It is in what Holquist (1983, p.307) very aptly calls "the combat zone of the word," that the struggle over the question of the speaker's rights and privileges compared with those of the listener takes place. And the importance of these rights and duties should not be underestimated, for even apparently simple situations, objects, events, states of affairs, remain in principle enigmatic and undetermined as social realities until they are talked about - where what is enigmatic is essentially the question: who should live in whose reality?

Conclusions: 'inner life' on the boundaries.

We are now in a position to turn to an exploration of the nature of our supposed 'inner' lives. As I said at the outset, what I have wanted to argue, is that people's 'inner' lives are neither so private, nor so inner, nor so merely orderly or logical, as has been assumed. Instead, I have claimed that the 'movement of the mind' reflects essentially the same ethical and rhetorical considerations as those influencing the transactions between people, out in the world. This is because, as Vygotsky claims, it is only through the semiotic mediation of signs - with all their prosthetic-(tool)/text ambiguity - that 'the mind' as such comes into existence at all. Thus our thoughts, instead of being first organized at the inner centre of our being (in a nonmaterial 'soul', or a physiological 'lingua mentis'), thus later to be given outer orderly expression or not in words, only become organized, in a moment by moment, process at the boundaries of our being, involving similar 'linguistically mediated ethical negotiations' as those we conduct in our everyday dialogues with others. Furthermore, such dialogues do not take place within a Saussurian, unified system of linguistic signs, allowing the unrestricted creation of sentences, but (mostly) within one or another speech genre, sustaining a particular, organized social group, and in which all the utterances within the genre must be responsive in some way to others if the group is to be maintained.

              Thus, in this view, the process of internalization, as we have seen, is not the transferral of something (some already existing 'thing') from an external to an inner plane of activity, but the actual linguistic constitution of a distinctly socio-ethical mode of psychological being - one learns how to be a responsible member of certain social groups: how to perceive, think, talk, act, and to experience one's surroundings in ways which make sense to the others around one. Indeed, as Volosinov (1973, p.28) says:

"Let us emphasize this point: not only can experience be outwardly expressed through the agency of the sign..., but also, aside from this outward expression (for others), experience exists even for the person undergoing it only in the material of signs. Outside that material there is no experience as such... Thus there is no leap involved between inner experience and its expression, no crossing over from one qualitative realm of reality to another."

Internalization is not a special geographical movement inwards, from a realm of bodily activity into nonmaterial realm of 'the mind', but a socio-practical-ethical movement, in the sense that the child learns the socio-practical means to bring other people (and their mental resources) within his or her own personal agency to control. Hence, in becoming an autonomous adult within a group, one learns a grasp of what might be called the 'ethical logistics' involved in the management of personal transactions within that group, the means to coordinate the different responsibilities involved in negotiating the social construction of meanings.

              But, if it is true that the individual consciousness only takes on its shape and being within the material of mediatory signs; and if, as Volosinov (1973, p.12) says, "signs do not arise between any two members of the species Homo Sapiens; it is essential that the two individuals be organized socially, that they compose a group (a social unit); only then can the medium of signs take shape between them," then, not only must we take account of their temporal two-sidedness in their prosthetic-(tool)/text ambiguity, but also a second, 'spatial' two-sideness due to their ineradicably social nature. All our signs are 'our' signs. Thus I alone cannot determine a sign's significance; it must be arrived at as a result of the joint action (Shotter, 1984) between my self and an other, between myself as an 'author' or 'creator', and another aspect of me functioning as a 'responder' (as a critic, servant, pupil, master, etc.). And as in an utterance, there will be a 'zone of uncertainty' surrounding the extent to which its sense is determined by that aspect of me in control of its use, 'I', or, by what is 'other' in me out of my control. Hence, the content of our thought is to be found, not only in the tensions between the retrospective and the prospective, but also in the socio-culturally given and the individually created, between the 'I do' and 'what you are', for it is in the movements motivated by these tensions that our thought is given its form (later to be expressed and responded to by others). Because of this, as Bakhtin points out, there are no 'neutral' words or forms, and every word (or in general any sign) is interindividual; thus: i) all our thought is located outside the 'soul' of the thinker, and ii) does not belong exclusively to him or her.

              This is the conclusion that we arrive at then, in reformulating our approach to the understanding of our 'inner' lives in terms of processes, semiotically mediated in terms of ethically responsive (rhetorical), socio-culturally developed signs. For Vygotsky, such signs play the role of psychological instruments, and make an 'inner' life possible; for Bakhtin, the social nature of these signs makes it impossible for me to know whose side 'I' am on. The 'movement' of my 'inner' life is motivated and structured through and through by my continual crossing of boundaries; by what happens in those zones of uncertainty where 'I' (speaking in one of my 'voices' from a 'position' in a discourse) am in communication with another 'self' in another position within the discourse, where it is at first unclear as to which side of the boundary I should be on. Where I come to know myself as who and what I am in terms of how, till now, I have resolved all the 'differences' that have arisen in me - the differences between me (as I have become) what I experience as 'other than' me. All of this, however, is to introduce into modern psychology issues of quite a revolutionary kind, ones which would completely undermine the currently popular conceptualizations of cognitive psychology - as concerned as it is to model all our supposedly 'inner mental processes' upon what might be called 'unquestioned routine processes of information communication'. If we were to take it seriously, we would have to develop a wholly different approach to the study of cognition. One must more concerned with the social and historical conditions within a social group which make various routines possible and gives them their warrant.

Notes: