In New Ideas in Psychology, 7, 185-204, 1989.
VYGOTSKY'S PSYCHOLOGY: JOINT ACTIVITY THE ZONE OF DEVELOPMENT
John Shotter
ABSTRACT: Vygotsky's Thought and Language (Vygotsky, 1962) has been available to us now for nearly a quarter of a century. Yet, his psychology is still not at all well known. Why is this? Why has Vygotsky's psychology been, and why is it still, so difficult for us to assimilate? What I propose to do in the essay below is, in the first part, to discuss the strange and peculiar nature of Vygotsky's psychology, and to show that it is our current individualistic and natural scientific concerns which make it difficult for us to understand here in the west. And in the second part, I want to discuss various selected chapters in Wertsch's (1985a) recent volume of perspectives on Vygotsky which, in refracting his views through different prisms, so to speak, seem to me to reveal yet further important facets of his psychology.
PART I: VYGOTSKY'S ZONAL PSYCHOLOGY
Subverting category boundaries
There are, I think, quite a number of reasons why at the moment we find Vygotsky a curio rather than an inspiration. One, however, seems to me to be primary and quite ineradicable: it is because, like Freud and Marx, he proposes an 'in between' psychology, i.e., a two-faced psychology which is neither wholly fish nor fowl. It is neither wholly a natural scientific, biological psychology, concerned with just happening events and their causes, nor wholly a cultural, hermeneutical enterprise, concerned with the interpretation of meanings and with people's reasons for their actions; but it oscillates between the two. It is the way in which one approach is always apparently 'polluted' by that opposed to it, which makes it so difficult for us to grasp.
But this is not all. Scientific explanation, usually, takes it for granted that activities should be understood in terms of unchanging, underlying entities or things: thus people's activities should be explained by analysing them into a set of (usually inner), more small-scale, constituent processes, and finally in terms of a small set of fixed, context-free principles. Vygotsky reverses every detail of this explanatory scheme: he not only suggests that human activity can itself provide its own explanatory principle (see also Kozulin, 1986), but also that more small-scale activities should be explained by discovering their proper placement within a larger context of activity.
His concern with activities rather than things, with processes rather than with their results, would be sufficiently revolutionary in itself if this was his only innovation, but it isn't: for his central concern is with what happens in a zone at the boundaries between people's activities and the activities of others in their surroundings - and as Mary Douglas (1966) has made clear to us, activities which straddle category boundaries are nothing if not difficult to conceptualize. But these are precisely the activities upon which he focusses: those which cross back and forth between people and their surroundings. For it is in these activities, he feels, that people appropriate what is initially 'other than', 'external to', or 'outside' their selves (in the sense it being 'outside' their control), in order to make use of it in 'informing', 'instructing', or controlling their own actions. He wants to understand how what he calls our 'lower' mental activities (those which are totally and directly determined by our immediate surroundings) can be transformed or developed into 'higher' ones, into activities which we ourselves can perform, apparently free of the immediate press of our circumstances.
While centrally concerned like Freud, with the nature and function of supposed 'inner' mental occurences in the conduct of our actions, Vygotsky was opposed to Freud's 'depth' psychology with its overemphasis on people's biological nature. He proposed, says Luria (1979, p.53), "a psychology from the 'heights' of man's socially organized experiences, which, he maintained, determines the structure of human conscious activity." Whilst most other psychologies are concerned with determining the conditions controlling people's behaviour, Vygotsky is concerned to study how people's own activities can affect their conditions, and how people, by changing their conditions of existence, can also change themselves. Rather than people's behaviour being determined by whatever surroundings there are on hand, so to speak, they can make artificial conditions to determine their actions themselves.
Psychological instruments: prostheses and indicators
Our higher mental functions can be developed, he suggests, by us learning first how to make use of what he calls "psychological instruments," and then how to incorporate (or embody) them within ourselves. This is his central and most important notion. To give an example, he discusses (Vygotsky, 1966, pp.24-27) what people might do in finding themselves in the position of Buridan's ass - apparently unable to decide which of two equally attractive foods to eat. Unlike the ass, they solve the problem by use of an artificial device, by casting lots: the person's behaviour would be determined "not by the stimuli on hand, but by a new or invariably man-made psychological situation" (op.cit, p.27). And later, they may not need to resort to the actual casting of lots, or toss of a coin at all, but could use an imaginary equivalent, making use of it as a "psychological instrument." It is this which sets people apart from animals. Here, Vygotsky was influenced by Engels's Dialectics of Nature: "the animal merely uses external nature," said Engels (quoted in Vygotsky, 1966, p.22), "man, by his changes, makes it serves his ends, masters it," and in mastering it, Vygotsky adds, learns how to master himself.
But such instruments or devices may have for us both a prosthetic and/or an indicative function: (i) they may be like the blind person's stick, for use in actively investigating our situation in ways which would otherwise be inaccessible to us; or (ii), they may be like the pointers on dials, indicating some remote state of the world.
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 do not have any content in themselves, but become 'transparent' - blind people do not feel their sticks vibrating in the palms of their hands, nor do they have to infer as if solving a problem that the terrain ahead of them is rough; they experience it directly as rough, as a result of their stick-assisted 'way' of investigating it in their movement through it. Furthermore, the knowledge they obtain in that way can be complete and not fragmentary, for any 'gaps' in it can be further investigated. In a similar way, by acting prosthetically 'through' our words, e.g., in telling or asking things of other people, we can actively discover things about them. As Polanyi (1958, pp.55-57) describes it, we attend in such activities from ongoing and changing "subsidiary awarenesses" to a "focal awareness" of their organized result - there is a movement from a 'knowing how' to a 'knowing what'. It is only when the flow of activity mediated by such instruments breaks down or is otherwise interrupted in some way - a tool is damaged (to use Heidegger's example), or there is no connection between our activity and the state of the instrument - that we become aware of them as "instruments" as such. They become unsuitable for use as "ready-to-hand" equipment, and become conspicuous as "present-to-hand" things or objects (Heidegger, 1967, pp. 102-103), i.e., from being transparent they become opaque - but they may still function then in an 'indicatory' mode.
In their indicative function such devices 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. But it must be constructed from the fragmentary, incomplete data they provide - and, as the misinterpretation of the instruments in the Three-Mile Island nuclear power station disaster illustrates, if the 'hook up' between the instrument and the world is not as it should be, that interpretation can be wrong. Again, we may say that a 'from-to' structure of sense-making is involved, but now, in attending from the fragments of data provided to an overall organized resultant, it is not open to us to investigate the world by their use further to fill in any gaps - indicators are not prostheses; imagination is required to achieve coherency. With prostheses, we are in an embodiment relation to them, while with indicators our relationship to them is an hermeneutical one: and obviously, it is that relation to our language which is most salient to us. And it is from the fragmentary data provided to us in our surroundings, when we stop to reflect upon them, that we construct a new artificial or imaginary context for our activities.
Language as a psychological instrument: tool/text ambiguity
The hermeneutical stance, however, hides from us the equally important prosthetic relation: for mostly, we 'see through' the language we use and are unaware of its prosthetic functioning. Only when the flow of activity between ourselves and or interlocutors breaks down, do we find ourselves confronted, so to speak, by just our utterances: to restart the flow, to clarify their meaning, they then seem to require interpretation - hence the apparent primacy of an hermeneutical account of language. But interpretation in that sense is not required as long as the flow is maintained. One's words are a transparent means through which one can achieve a sensible contact with those around one. Thus clearly, language possesses what one might call a 'tool/text' ambiguity: for as each utterance is used prosthetically in its saying to 'move' another person and thus to reveal in those movements something of their character, so what one has said remains on hand (to use another Heideggerian term) as a text, constituting an aspect of the situation between oneself and one's interlocutor. And often, of course, what is at issue is not so much you getting to know others, as them contesting with you the character of the situation you claim you are both placed (Goffman, 1959).
Here, then, are a whole further set of reasons for the difficulties we currently face in understanding Vygotsky's psychology. In his view, the most important knowledge we possess is not (i) of inner, mental representations of things or states of affairs, nor is it (ii) of inner plans or scripts of how we should do this or that action, but (iii) it is a knowledge of the different ways (and means) in which we might organize and relate our selves to our circumstances. In other words, what children have to learn is not first about the things in their world and what to do with them, but how to be speakers and listeners of a particular kind, how to be observers, rememberers and imaginers, requesters, storytellers, commanders, obeyers, etc., etc., and how to be these in ways which make sense to others. Hence, these are not epistemological matters, but ontological ones; they are to do with 'ontological skills' at being a person of this or that kind. The first two kinds of knowledge listed above are, so to speak, external to ourselves; they are aspects of our knowledge to which we may or may not refer as we choose. But the third, however, is continuous with our existence as the persons we are; it is to do with how we must relate ourselves to our circumstances if we want to be intelligible to the others around us; it is a kind of knowledge which makes us what we are, and we do not know how to choose not to make use it - if we are to be socially competent and to be accounted by others as such.
The historical context
Such knowledge is, then, primarily embodied in our 'ways' of relating ourselves to the others around us, and in the ways in which they already relate themselves to one another; in other words, it inheres in our social practices. The roots of all our higher psychological processes, in Vygotsky's sense of 'higher' - all the artificial devices we eventually to an extent embody and use in mastering, managing, and organizing our selves in relation to our situation - are first to be found outside of us, in our social surroundings. "We might formulate the general genetic law of cultural development as follows," he says (1966, p.44):
"any function in the child's cultural development appears on the stage twice, on two planes, first on the social plane and then on the psychological, first among people as an intermental category and then within the child as an intramental category."
But how does what is at first 'outside' us get 'inside'? That is not at all easy to explain within a single system. It occurs, as we shall see, in a zone - the zone of proximal development - in an equivocation between boundaries. But it is his lack of a nicely structured and bounded, all-visible-at-once system, which makes it so hard to grasp the style and import of his psychology. Each attempt to systematize it as a complete, self-conscious, and self-contained way of proceeding in one's psychological inquiries, is discovered to be 'polluted' or 'infected' by impurities from outside its boundaries. Only if we assign each aspect its own region and moment of expression, can the conflicting tendencies in his psychology be kept from disrupting one another.
The 'way' of his psychology, i.e., the way in which his psychology itself functions, is as a prosthetic intermediary to inform or instruct us in our investigations of ourselves; and that exactly reflects its content: for it is concerned precisely with the prosthetic resources people make available to one another in their transactions with one another. This presents us, however, with another innovation somewhat foreign to our current, natural science influenced, stance in psychology. For he points out that the mental prostheses we come embody are not just arbitrary extensions of ourselves, differently chosen by different individuals; they are all from a very particular collection, communually fashioned by our predecessors. In other words, although we may not all embody precisely the same selection, we all come to embody certain selected results (achievements to date) of our common cultural history; and it is this historical dimension which psychology has until recently ignored (Gergen, 1973; 1985). "Traditional views of the development of the higher mental functions are," he says (Vygotsky, 1966, pp.11-12),
"erroneous and onesided primarily and mainly because they are unable to see facts as facts of historical development, regard them as natural processess and formations, confuse them and fail to differentiate the organic from the cultural, the natural from the historical, the biological from the social in the child's mental development..."
It is all too easy, Vygotsky feels, to divide psychology metaphysically into two quite distinct approaches, into a lower and a higher form,
"into two separate and independent sciences: physiologic, natural-science, explanatory or causal psychology, on the one hand, and conceptual, descriptive, or teleological psychology of the spirit, as the basis of all the humanities, on the other hand" (1966, p.15).
And this is what has happened: at the moment, in our concern with separating, demarcating, and systematically purifying our different psychologies, for the purposes of establishing socially orderly and thus justifiable ways of proceeding, the two approaches - causal and hermeneutical - function in contradistinction to one another, and vie for ascendency over each other. Rather than accommodating each other's strengths, they attack each other's weaknesses.
The main weakness in the traditional approach, as Vygotsky saw it, is a onesidedness which meant, in experimental investigations, focussing only upon changing people's conditions of existence and studying the outcome. But such an approach, he said, "forgets that 'man also reacts on nature, changing it and creating new conditions of existence for himself'"(Vygotsky, 1966, p.21, quoting Engels). The hermeneutical approach - my own preferred approach for some time (Shotter, 1975; Gauld and Shotter, 1977) - that too can be equally onesided, and seem to emphasize just people's creativity at the expense of ignoring those aspects of their conditions of existence which are not of their own choosing. Thus the task, if we are to take Vygotsky's psychology seriously, is to formulate a strange and special kind of hybrid psychology, a 'two-way flow' psychology, to do both with (i) a prosthetic outflow of activity, out from people towards their already partially structured surroundings, in which they can 'give' or 'lend' them further structure, thus to investigate them further; and (ii) an inflow of activity in the other direction, back from an already partially structured environment into the people within it, a flow of activity which they must interpret hermeneutically to grasp the nature of the situation within which their current activity is 'grounded'; and (iii) the relations between these two processes.
While the hermeneutical component of such a psychology may not seem so strange to us today, a psychology of prostheses is. But it is made even more strange by the fact that Vygotsky is not so much concerned simply with our relations as individuals to our physical surroundings, but with our social relations - and with how we might make use, not only of physical prostheses, but also use aspects or parts of others (and ourselves) prosthetically. This is what makes his psychology really peculiar. For besides all its other odd features, it also requires that people's actions go on in a context of the activities of the other people with whom they share their lives; their actions are informed or structured by a socio-cultural-historical context. In other words, even their apparently most individual and autonomous actions are 'situated' in a context which must itself be viewed as an active participant in the structuring of their activities, which itself thus needs a psychology.
Instruction.
But this is precisely what Vygotsky says is involved in the process of "instruction," in which others help a person to gain a self-conscious grasp of a structure to be found within their own activities ("a" structure, not "the" structure, for no one structure is definitive). Essentially the instructor reflects back to the performer what the performer is in some incipient form already doing:
"One of [basic laws governing psychological development] is that consciousness and control appear only at a late stage in the development of a function, after it has been used and practised unconsciously and spontaneously. In order to subject a function to intellectual control, we must first possess it" (Vygotsky, 1962, p.90).
But instructors are doing slightly more than merely 'mirroring' performers's actions back to them: where performers are attending through the flow of their activity to its relation to its context, instructors can see its flow simply as a sequence of forms, as having an order in it irrespective of its context, and can reflect back to them that decontextualized order. In other words, instructors can effect the trick of separating out the fixed, context-free, and repeatable parts of our activities (if there are any) from all the variable, context-dependent aspects we exhibit in our performances, and can (by various devices) reflect them back to us for use as an instrumental aspect of our selves.
In conducting their task, however, there are always certain resources which instructors must themselves make use of prosthetically; for what we know hermeneutically as well as what we know objectively, we know only through prosthetically aided investigations, i.e., we may be said to "dwell in" social institutions or historical traditions much as we dwell in our own bodies. There is thus always a body of shared practices, ways of making and noticing differences, shared actions and reactions which remain inaccessible to public description - which mediate all our unproblematic activities together. And as psychologists, we must make use of this embodied, practical knowledge also; quite literally, we do not know how to doubt it; we do know how to formulate an intelligible doubt about it without relying upon it for the intelligibility of our formulation. But, given our commitment to a natural scientific scheme of explanation - in which we feel everything must, basically, be explained causally in terms of fixed, unchanging (i.e., nondeveloping) entities - we feel the need to try to analyse, describe, sytematize and thus unify this background knowledge too. Now it is not that Vygotsky explicitly rejects the need to sytematize, but he does reject a natural scientific explanatory scheme. He proposes a "sociogenesis of the higher forms of [human] behaviour" (Vygotsky, 1966, p.45). In other words, rather than an inter-individualistic psychology, he proposes a truly social developmental psychology, in which social activity, because of its formative nature, is sui generis; it cannot in nay way be explained by being analysed into any small-scale underlying constituent parts.
Joint action: the social construction of social situations.
It is perhaps this - the fact that his psychology entails a psychological account of the social context, as well as of the individual - which is another reason for its apparently intractable nature, as well as its zonal narture. For each attempt to draw a boundary around our subject matter in order to limit what we have to take into consideration, has to be considered 'in its context'; thus every effort we make to place our thought within boundaries, entails us in thinking about what is outside them also - for it too must be seen in its context. Hence our feelings of dissatisfaction with such a psychology: its vague, unstable, ambiguous, unsystematic, and incomplete nature.
This talk of boundaries, and their fluid nature in Vygotsky's psychology, emphasizes another aspect of our lives ignored in our current more traditional approaches: How people respond to those around them and make for themselves in their transactions, by the boundaries they establish, an 'organized setting' or 'situation' into which they must direct their own further activity. What is strange about such an activity, about what might be called 'joint action,' is that any situation which results is experienced as unintended by any of the individuals concerned. Both its occurence (why it happens), and its source (who or what are its orginators) are thus difficult to explain. Being independent of any particular individual's wishes or intentions, it cannot be attributed to an individual author and explained in terms of that author's reasons; it thus seems to require attribution to an 'external' or 'objective' cause. But it cannot, on those grounds alone, be attributed simply to a natural or physical cause, for it seems to have a meaningful structure and is as if it had been authored or designed.
Without intending it, people do seem able to produce between themselves a special kind of entity (neither subjective nor objective), a 'social world,' which not only places 'objective' constraints upon what they can do, but which also contains 'subjective' resources enabling them in the development of their abilities, i.e., which 'invite', 'afford', or motivate the particular form of development they require to live in such a world. Creative or formative activity of this kind is another of the central concepts in Vygotsky's psychology.
Methodology: theory-method.
Methodologically, this all gives rise to Vygotsky's rather peculiar approach to experimentation, at least, as Cole and Scribner (1978, p.14) see it: For when measured against the current claim - that the task of experimentation is more than that of merely providing imaginative hints about new areas of exploration, but is the reliable and systematic charting of all of behaviour's controlling conditions - his "findings may seem merely anecdotal," they say. Vygotsky's experiments are concerned with exploring, not in what a child's actual level of development might consist, but with how something might be done about it, both by others and by the child, with how a change might be made to children's own control of their own behaviour. In the past, he claimed, complex reactions have been studied "postmortem." But, using a now popular archaeological metaphor, this led, he said, to treating all behaviour as if it were "fossilized:" established and well practiced voluntary activities can come to function just like involuntary ones, ones over which we have no personal control, and the distinction between spontaneous and deliberate actions is then lost. As he put it: "The last and highest stage in any process may demonstrate a purely phenotypic similarity with the first and primary stages, and if we take a phenotypic approach, it is impossible to distinguish between higher [i.e., self-controlled] and lower [i.e., automatic] forms of this process" (Vygotsky, 1978, p.64).
Thus, to study human behaviour historically means both (i) going back into the past and studying social history, in order to provide data in warranting one's claims as to what human nature currently 'is,' and, (ii) the experimental study of processes by which, given its current nature, it can be changed - all dialectical approaches involve a 'both-and' rather than an 'either-or' logic. With such a concern, the systematic and reliable charting of the controlling conditions of behaviour is a positivistic irrelevancy; no such statistical data, no matter how extensive and reliable, would serve the required purpose: to make visible the processes which are ordinarily hidden beneath the surface of routine and habitual behaviour. Thus, as Vygotsky says, the purpose of what he called the "experimental-genetic" method is not to measure the child's current level of performance, but the methods by which the performance is achieved. His results are thus qualitative rather than quantitative ones, consisting in "instructions" as to how the instruction of children by adults might be achieved.
While seemingly "merely anecdotal," the Marxian influence in such a mode of experimentation is apparent here: for the task is not just to make the currently hidden methods visible by the provision of a theoretical interpretation, but to go further: all effective interpretation involves making sense of things in practice, and it is in practice (praxis, practical discourse) that Vygotsky's psychology begins and ends. And as all socially effective practices are themselves embedded in the sociohistorical context of the day, effective interpretations must be offered, not from within the controlled conditions of a laboratory setting, specifically isolated from the confounding influences of everyday affairs, but specifically from within the actual hurly-burly of everyday social life at large. Hence, "experimental interventions and observations may often be as well or better executed in play, school, and clinical settings than in the psychologist's laboratory," say Cole and Scribner of Vygotsky's approach (in Vygotsky, 1978, p.14).
Vygotsky's dialectical approach means that strictly he does not so much have a theory as a theory-method, a mode of study in which one's theories, if they are to have any currency at all, must be embedded in the practical sociohistorical context of the day. Thus, not only must "all higher functions originate as actual relations between human individuals," (Vygotsky, 1978, p.57) - a comment upon his now famous "general law of cultural development," but also, that is where all our accounts and theories of such processes must orginate. For our purpose is not just to study people's higher functions as they currently are, but to understand how they may be changed. His method thus is his theory. Experimentally, it is a method, as he calls it (Vygotsky, 1978, p.74), of "double stimulation:" He studies how children, faced with a task beyond their present capabilities, make use of (at first) neutral parts of their circumstances (deliberately provided by investigators). He shows how they are taken up by the children, given a signification, and then drawn into the situation as aids in solving a task - for instance, children may make use of a set of coloured cards in keeping track of forbidden colour names in a verbal game.
And we too, as investigators, faced with tasks beyond our present capabilities - to do with wanting to understand how to instruct our children in certain aspects of their development, in order to decide as to what should be done for the best in their (and in our) future - must act in the same way. That is: we must discover either (i) the signs currently used and practiced, unconsciously and spontaneously, by those who can already achieve the relevant results; or (ii), we must explore the efficacy of new sign usages, new psychological instruments. But in either case, the theory-method is the same: What people at first do instructed by others, they can come to do under their own instructions; the instructions can be 'internalized,' albeit in a transformed form, and then used as mental 'tools' or 'instruments' in the regulation by them of their own further conduct. As Vygotsky (1966, p.42) said, following Engels: "the important step in the evolution of labour is that what the slave driver and the slave do is combined in one person." In learning how to control oneself in ways which make sense in one's society, one must learn how to enslave one's own natural powers according to requirements enshrined in one's society's means of communication - the resonances here also with Freud's dictum, "Where Id was there shall Ego be," are obvious.
The unit of analysis: "word meaning" as a paradigm.
Just these concerns alone - the concern with action emerging from an embeddedness in everyday practical activity, and with practical activity as a self-developed product of sociohistorical processes - would be revolutionary enough. But there is still more to Vygotsky's position than this: Vygotsky was more than an experimentalist and theorist, he was also a metapsychologist (or methodologist, in the sociological sense). That is, he realized that effective research could not begin until one was clear (i) about the fundamental entities or units into which one was researching, (ii) how these might interact with each other and the senses, and (iii) what questions might legitimately be asked about such entities and what techniques employed in seeking answers to them (Kuhn, 1962, pp.4-5). Such preliminaries are necessary because, there are no data which can, in and of themselves, compel us to draw certain conclusions. What is presented to us as data is inseparable from what investigators have already taken to be analytic, i.e., their preempirical assumptions.
These assumptions are usually implicit in what one might called a 'primary narrative,' or paradigm, a preliminary construction of what is to count for them as the focus of their investigations. Vygotsky (1978, p.8) discusses in this respect the subject matter of Marx's theory-method, and its relevance for the understanding of developmental processes:
"The whole of Capitial is written according to the following method: Marx analyses a single living "cell" of capitalist society - for example the nature of value. Within this cell he discovers the structure of the entire system and all its economic institutions... Anyone who could discover what a 'psychological' cell is - the mechanism producing even a single response - would find the key to psychology as a whole."
So, just like Wittgenstein (1953), who at the beginning of Philosophical Investigations takes single word utterances as a paradigm for the understanding of language games, so Vygotsky also takes "word meaning," the "mental function of a word," as the "unitary cell," as a paradigm for representing the nature of those psychological processes which are mediated by the use of historically invented and socially developed aids and devices. "Word meaning" as a unit is a structuring structure; its strength is that it can function as a unity while at the same time allowing for developments in both its structure and functions.
It is thus important to appreciate Vygotsky's reasons for taking word meaning as his basic a unit, especially as some of writers (see, for instance, Silverstein in Wertsch, 1985), now see it as inadequate, and wish to substitute (in the idiom of the day) a unit of a more syntactic kind. For Vygotsky (1962, p.4), the required unit should be "a product of analysis which, unlike elements, retains all the basic properties of the whole and which cannot be further divided without losing them." Like Wittgenstein, he was concerned initially at least, not with forms (which require a 'method' for their appreciation) but with meanings, not with syntax but with what ordinary language philosophers call the 'logical grammar' of certain words. Word meanings can function as paradigmatic of sociohistorical psychological functions in general because:
"In general we may say that the relations between the higher mental functions were at one time real relations among people. I act with respect to myself as people act with respect to me. As verbal thinking is the transfer of speech within, [and] as reflection is the transfer of argumentation within, so can the mental function of the word, as Janet has shown, never be explained other than by using for the explanation a vaster system than man himself. The original psychology of the functions of the word is a social function, and, if we want to trace the function of the word in the behaviour of the personality, we must consider its former function in the social behaviour of people" (Vygotsky, 1966, p.41).
In other words - and here is yet another incommensurability with our own current approach to psychology, concerned as it is with proposing theories and attempting to gather data to prove them true - word meaning is an effective paradigm in practice, in one's concern with its effective extension. It functions as an exemplar in terms of which to compare other proposed units, or as something which can, by being subjected to transformations, substitutions, deletions, etc., be used to make sense of, or in describing more complex activities as being of this of that kind.
We can see now why the choice of a unit in terms of which to study human behaviour is so difficult: word meanings lack any identifiable location, either in time or space, they are neither 'in' people, nor 'between' them. As a "microcosm of human consciousness" (Vygotsky's term), word meaning has a distinctly diffuse, transhistorical, transpersonal quality. Indeed, except for the fact that we seem to possess a strong intuition that words do have meanings distinct from one another, that we do in fact know their meanings, and can draw upon that knowledge in both actually using them and in analyzing our usage of them - except for these facts, we would be hard pressed to say in any tangible, visible, or objective terms, exactly what it was we were talking about in talking about such units. None the less, it can function paradigmically, instructing us practically in what our mental functioning must be like. Furthermore, it has a very useful dual quality: all such functioning must always be situated within a context of sociohistorical activity - but it need not be situated in any particular context for us to conceptualize it. That need only be done in practice. In other words, in selecting word meaning as a unit, Vygotsky achieves something with a paradoxical 'both-and' quality: as a conceptual unity, word meaning is both context-free and contexted. Theoretically, it is as if context-free, while practically, it must be contexted.
PART II: WERTSCH'S VYGOTSKIAN PERSPECTIVES
We have then, in Vygotsky's psychology, an approach which, as Wertsch (1985a) has claimed (with arguable justice) "is unique." For, not only does it unify or merge theory and practice, but it overcomes the disciplinary boundaries between the social sciences, humanities and historical sciences: I know of no other so comprehensive a psychology. It is not before time, then, that Vygotsky's psychology is at last beginning to claim serious and extended attention. Besides Michael Cole's efforts in familiarizing us with Vygotsky's psychology, James Wertsch has also been central in making his work more intelligible to us (Wertsch, 1981, 1985a and 1985b). And here I would like to make use of some of the comments made by some of the contributors to Wertsch's volume on Vygotskian perspectives, as a device for further explicating and elaborating Vygotsky's psychology.
Explicating and extending Vygotsky's psychology.
Representation: As many in the cognitivist camp think that representation is the key to the understanding of all intelligent conduct, an account of its nature is clearly of great importance. It will therefore be interesting to see what Vygotsky had to say about this issue. Lee in chapter three points out, Vygotsky thought that speech forms could be regimented with respect to two major functions: social contact and representation. If language is the primarily medium within which one can get things done, socially, then, being able to represent linguistic forms to oneself within that medium has important consequences. It means that one can not only represent to oneself ways of doing things in a socially intelligible way, i.e., plan socially acceptable actions prior to their execution, etc., but one can also motivate oneself to do them, i.e., cause oneself to act by applying to oneself the same directive force that one's words can have upon others. It is the gradual emergence of the representing function out of the social-communicative function which Lee sees as a central and very important focus in Vygotsky's work.
Its emergence is due to the fact that, as linguistic competency increases, one becomes more adept in constructing a network of intralinguistic references to function as a context into which to direct one's utterances. In other words, there is a transformation from a reliance on meaning, a reliance upon contextual supports, to syntax, to a reliance upon 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'. In other words, it is an increase of reference to an hermeneutically constructed imaginary (or theoretical) world. As a result, what is said requires less and less grounding in an extralinguistic context - for it can find its supports 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, the development of methods for warranting in the course of one's talk (i.e., giving support to) 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, and so on. By the use of such methods and procedures, adults can construct their statements as factual statements, and adult forms of speech can thus come to function with a large degree of independence from their immediate context; the situation is quite different for the child.
As Lee point out, Vygotsky was quite clear on this point: "Modern linguistics distinguishes between the meaning of a word, or an expression, and its referent, i.e., the object it designates... Using this terminology, we might say that the child's and the adult's world coincide in their referents but not in their meanings" (Vygotsky, 1962, p.73). Thus, while children may gain an entry into the semiotically mediated world of adult relations through an agreement of reference alone (i.e., without an agreement on meaning), in mastering the speech of the surrounding adults, they too can gradually learn to formulate their experience in socially acceptable, intralinguistic terms.
But in their transactions with adults, they cannot themselves freely construct a context for their own actions; they find them already constructed in the ways of speaking used by the adults around them. To find a prototype for such a development - the creation of an imaginary context for one's actions - one must look to their play; as Lee points out:
"Play becomes the 'leading edge' of the child's psychological development because it allows the child a 'zone of proximal development' through which both...new motivations and a new kind of attitude toward reality are created. The critical point is that in play, the child creates an imaginary situation to guide his actions - a world of meaning is created that then has motivational force. These meanings, however, are not random, but have both a social and a linguistic origin" (Lee in Wertsch, p.90).
This is a most important elucidation of Vygotsky's ideas, and I shall be returning to the idea of imaginary situations again.
Discontinuities: The development of an ability to make use of one's own (already developed) capacities to represent situations not at the moment present to oneself, not only functions to disconnect one from one's immediate circumstances, but also seems to disconnect one from the origins of that ability. This, as Scribner points out in her contribution in chapter five, seems to be a major characteristic of all historical processes: unlike natural processes, in which there seem to be continuities, they can exhibit discontinuities - and this is yet another peculiarity which puzzles us in attempting to formulate an alternative scheme of explanation for psychological phenomena. It means that there is not a unitary unchanging structure to to be empirically discovered in human psychological processes. Cognitive processes such as memory, abstraction and generalization, reasoning and problem-solving are not self-contained and unchanging functions, but are processes which are formed in different ways as required in different concrete, practical activities - even though, conceptually at least, they can become disconnected from their origins. Thus they do not originate in biological evolution, nor can they be explained as the functioning of natural laws.
A good example to consider here is the historical effect of the invention of writing and print (and the learning of writing) upon one's understanding of speech. It clearly produces (see Vygotsky, 1962, pp.98-101) a radical and irreversible difference in what a language 'is' for those who belong to a literate society, in which writing is a major form of communication - to such an extent that it is quite impossible for us, as members of a literate culture, to imagine quite what speech is for members of an oral culture. For instance, to take just one of the points Vygotsky (1962, p.98) makes:
"[Writing] is speech in thought and image only, lacking the musical, expressive, intonational qualities of oral speech. In learning to write, the child must disengage himself from the sensory aspect of speech and replace words by images of words."
In other words, writing transforms speech utterly, in a way which seemingly 'disconnects' it from its origins. In writing, "we are obliged to create the situation, to represent it to ourselves. This demands detachment from the actual situation" (Vygotsky, 1962, p.99). This is our ability too in literate speech. The point is: no amount of investigation in biological or naturalistic terms will uncover the nature of our current linguistic abilities to talk in such a detached manner; only a historical (developmental transformational) analysis is adequate. But the point is also, that such discontinuities are only apparent; the disconnections are functional; at each stage, what is transformed is the imaginary intralinguistic context in terms of which we represent ourselves to ourselves.
Hence our difficulties in attempting to understand Vygotsky's claims (especially about prosthetic devices) by the use of analogies, by reference to things and activities currently out in the world for us all to see - the example of tools and texts, for instance. For external activities are transformed in the creation of internal ones, in becoming 'internalized.' To put the matter in Leont'ev's words: "the process of internalization is not the transferal of an external activity to a preexisting, internal 'plane of consciousness': it is the process in which this plane is formed" (1981, p57, quoted by Wertsch, 1985a, p.163). In other words, it is something entirely new; there is nothing in history like it. Cultural inventions act back upon the processes they supplement and extend, to reorganize their forms of expression completely. They provide them with a new overlay. Hence, Vygotsky would account all current cognitivist dreams of representing the 'plane of consciousness' to ourselves in terms of external activities as quite forelorn.
Sensuousness: As I said above, what psychologically is transformed in the history of our development, besides the material conditions of our lives, is our ways of making sense together, our forms of social order. But, besides making new aspects of our lives rationally-visible to us, so to speak, they also (due to the discontinuous nature of such transformations) make others rationally-invisible to us. I have already mentioned the central case in point: our apparent disconnection (as adults) from social and developmental contexts. Here, I must mention another aspect. In the course of an illuminating account of the Marxian origins of Vygotsky's concept of activity, Zinchenko in chapter four points out its derivation from a single base, a basis in "sensuous human activity," in "material social practices." It can provide the cell or unit Vygotsky requires because it can be a paradigm of integrated mental activity, drawing together from the very beginning, cognitive, executive, and emotional-evaluative components. They should be brought into the analysis from the very outset, he says, "not in their relationship to reality, but in their relationship in reality" (p.109). Indeed, as Vygotsky (1962, p.8) saw it:
"Their separation as subjects of study is a major weakness of traditional psychology since it makes the thought process appear as an autonomous flow of 'thoughts thinking themselves', segregated from the fullness of life, from the personal needs and interests, the inclinations and impulses, of the thinker...By the same token, the old process precludes any fruitful study of the reverse process, the influence of thought on affect and volition. Unit analysis points the way to the solution of these vitally important problems. It demonstrates the existence of a dynamic system of meaning in which the affective and the intellectual unite" (Vygotsky, 1962, p.8).
Like Lee, then, Zinchenko emphasizes Vygotsky's concern with emotional and motivational phenomena - something which our more cognitive approaches in the west still find difficult to integrate.
The zone of proximal development: What exists between the boundaries of two powers, two agencies? A zone, a no man's land, a puzzling limbo in which no one quite knows what can happen. As Bruner in chapter one makes clear, the zone of proximal development (ZPD) is one of the most central of all Vygotsky's concepts: it is the zone in which the activity responsible for the creation of mental products occurs. It is measured by the difference between a child's "actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers" (Vygotsky, 1978, p.86). It is the zone in which "culture and cognition create each other" - as Cole says in the subtitle to his chapter (p.146). And he generalizes the notion as "any joint activity in any context where there are participants who exercise differential responsibility by virtue of differential expertise" (p.155). This enables him to apply the concept of ZPD in understanding forms of instruction quite different from our own understanding of it as 'teaching'.
He shows, for instance, how in some cultures the learning of certain forms of speech, of which children must later learn the meanings, are 'arranged for' in the games played by the younger children. Or again: how children who must later learn to do an activity, are made to spend a great deal of time watching it, so that later, they will begin "to practice what they already know" (p.157). What is important in these techniques of informal, on-the-job modes of instruction, is the carefully graduated way in which the adults concerned, order their verbal instructions, their novices's exposure to, and their practice in, the activities they must learn.
Wertsch and Stone in chapter seven also offer an interesting example of graduated 'instruction' in the proximal zone, and of how the meaning systems used by adults are more than just ways of transmitting information: they constitute contexts 'into' which children must develop. The problem is to chart what is happening along the way: the child's increasing grasp of the significance in practice of the utterances of those around them, and of their own. They illustrate this with the case of a little two and a half year old girl, who trys to copy a model jig-saw puzzle with the help of her mother. At first, while she glances at the model, she does not seem to grasp how to relate what she sees with what she must do. And although she talks to her mother about how the pieces of the puzzle are related, she treats her mother's answers only as responses to her questions; not as possible directives for herself. It is only on being explicitly directed by her mother, that she consults the model for some clear purpose - her effective action being in this case being inter-psychologically controlled. Later, however, after having learned how to direct herself as her mother had directed her, her actions become intra-psychologically controlled, and she is then able to make self-directive use of her mother's talk in general. And then later on, her mother needs only to offer confirmation of her actions. "The child is the last," say Wertsch and Stone (p.177), "to become conscious of the full significance of the sign."
The process going on here Bruner in chapter one, in the course of a sophisticated conceptual and historical overview of Vygotsky's whole approach, calls "scaffolding." For all mental functioning is surrounded by some other activity, and thus the 'trick', so to speak, in getting someone to do what they cannot yet do, is to involve them in some more complex activity in which the function to be taught occurs inadvertently, 'invited' or 'motivated' by the surrounding context. And it is the provision of this surrounding context that Bruner sees as a temporary structure erected by the tutor, or aiding peer, to serve the learner as a "vicarious form of consciousness until such a time as the learner is able to master his own consciousness and control," he says (p.24). But if this is what he means by it, is "scaffolding" quite the right term to use here? For Bruner himself quotes Vygotsky (1978, p.88) as saying: "Human learning presupposes a specific social nature and a process by which children grow into the intellectual life of those around them" (p.24, my emphasis). And I take that to mean, not that the consciousness of the instructor and of the child can be located and defined independently of one another, but that instruction is an activity in which they are both involved and in which the consciousnesses of each are formed within the activity. In other words, the adult being an instructor is 'invited' by the child being amenable to instruction, and vise-versa; both act into the situation between them.
In other words, Bruner seems to me still to offer a far too inter-individualistic view of instruction, in which language seems to function solely as a medium of communication between two people who are already individuals - except that one possesses a much less well articulated consciousness than the other. Such a view also draws our attention away from the character of the vast, sociohistorical nature of the surrounding everyday context; and it also ignores the affective (motivational) nature of that context in 'inviting' so to speak, not only the child but also the adult instructor, to act 'into' it. It is the socio-historical-psychological character of that context, the fact that it must be accounted itself as a developmental process, a large-scale developmental process which is productive of individual, localized subjectivities, but is itself "without a knowing subject" (Popper, 1972), which we find difficult to assimilate to our individualistic ways at the moment.
The nature of privilege in the social world: Rommetveit in chapter eight does concern himself with the strange nature of what it is we find ourselves 'rooted' in: as Rommetveit sees it, "human discourse takes place in and deals with a pluralistic, only fragmentarily known, and only partially shared social world" (p.183) - and I for one could not agree more. This means that "vagueness, ambiguity, and incompleteness - but hence also versatility, flexibility, and negotiability - must for that reason be dealt with as inherent and theoretically essential characteristics of ordinary language," he says (p.183). Hence, "the problem of what is meant by what is said cannot any longer be pursued in terms of stipulated unequivocal 'literal' meanings of expressions" (p.187). "There is hardly any more efficient way of evading the complexities of ordinary language," says Rommetveit about Piaget's peculiarly narrow use of the term 'language', "than to disassociate it from actual use and explicate its syntactic and semantic rules under stipulated 'ideal' conditions" (p.185). In fact, the actual process of communication itself must be studied as a microgenetic developmental process - not for what is immediately meant by what is said - but for what is being meant (i.e., in the process of being formulated) as a result of what is being said. However, what is being meant by the participants in a dialogue is not immediately clear. Its interpretation is a matter of the speaker's rights and privileges, and the listener's duties and obligations: while the speaker has the privilege to determine what should jointly be referred to, the listener ought to be attempting to make sense of (constructing the meaning of) what is said, by temporarily adopting the speaker's perspective. At least, this is what has to be taken for granted in normal symmetric dyadic interactions.
However, in our pluralistic world, the actual settings of conversations, especially those between adults and children, are constrained by an asymmetric distribution of knowledge, power, and prestige. What this means is that, from the point of view of an adult asking a question about an object, the adult way of asking such a question is privileged: other competent adults ought to be listening to it with a certain commitment, namely, to attend to the object meant and only that object. The difficulty for the child, however, is the one we have already met with above: for the child, there is the competition between an indicative use of language (supported by the child's perception of his or her extralinguistic circumstances), and an almost wholly linguistically constructed referential setting (the adult's 'situation') - the child is not yet a party to the methods used by adults in their 'situated' way of talking.
The outcome of this incommensurability is misunderstanding, often interpreted as a Piagetian failure: the child is apparently unable to attend to what adults think they ought to be attending to. What Rommetveit feels such 'failures' indicate, however, is simply that children have a problem making sense of 'difficult adult talk.' Hundeide, also from Oslo and obviously influenced by Rommetveit's views, provides in chapter thirteen essentially an extension of them. He begins with the by now familiar point that (i) things, actions, or utterances are all made sense of within a superordinate setting, within some more overarching activity. It follows from this that (ii) if an action is embedded in different settings or activities, then it will have a quite different sense. What Hundeide does with these insights is to show how the questions children are asked by the adults investigating them, work both to construct a particular 'problem setting', and then to 'invite' the child to take up a particular 'position' regarding the problem within it - a position from which a correct solution to the problem is unlikely.
For example: if a child is first presented with a picture of four tulips and one rose and asked, 'Can you tell me, are there more tulips or more flowers?,' the initial presentation of the picture, it seems, 'invites' the child to focus upon the details and differences between the two kinds of flowers, and, so to speak, to miss 'seeing' the superordinate class of 'flowers'. Hence, they answer: 'More tulips.' More children get the answer correct, however, if the question is presented first, and the drawing afterwards - because, suggests Hundeide, the initial salience of the difference between the two classes is reduced, and the child adopts more easily the (intralinguistic) perspective required by the question, from within which the class of flowers is 'visible'. Hundeide further investigated 'the power of the question' to to induce a particular interpretative position in the child, by asking children apparently perfectly serious and well formulated (but false) questions. For example, instead of asking the familiar Piagetian conservation question 'Are there more there, the same amount in both, or more here?' about two equal number rows of counters, with one row stretched out, he simply asked, for instance, 'Why is there more here?' (pointing at a row). Despite the fact that about 90% of the (9 to 10 years old) children had been diagnosed as conservers, about 57% accepted the question and gave nonconserving replies. Not only did most children accept the premise of the question, they seemed unaware of having been deceived. Hundeide suggests that in these experiments, children are responding neither to authority, nor to Piagetian structures, but according to the position or status assigned them in the functional setting created by the instructional transaction.
CONCLUSIONS
It is not in the nature of a Vygotskian psychology to be rounded, polished, and finished; by its very nature, it is both a global and a detailed psychology, touching upon some of the lowest, simplest mental activities as well as the highest and most complex, connecting the results of human activities in the past with our abilities now. And the articles in the Wertsch volume illustrate that quality too; they all in their own way, without exception, open up new areas for yet more and more detailed practical research.
Are there any aspects of Vygotsky's psychology that it fails to explicate? I would like to have seen more discussion about the historical effect of the adoption of first written and then of printed communications in the conduct of our everyday social life, and the effects of that upon the structure and functioning of our mental processes (see, for instance, Ong, 1958; 1984) - especially as Vygotsky (1962, pp.98-101) at least outlined in general an approach to this problem. Clearly, many of our current theories of language take printed forms of it as if basic, as if in speaking we drew tokens like a type-setter from a fount of moveable types stored somewhere in our heads. But as Vygotsky (1962, p.98) says, "written speech is a separate linguistic function, differing from oral speech in both structure and mode of functioning." Rather than attempting to understanding the "sensory aspect" of words, as he put it, as psychologists we are like the child who has learned to write, we have "replace[d] words by the images of words" in our theories, and those images are of words as if written. That is what we think about when we think about words in general and attempt to theorize about the nature of language: but it is their sensory aspect (how they feel to ourselves and others) that we must understand if we want to understand their social and their psychological functioning.
Is there anything at all one would want to criticize about Vygotsky? Very little. Only Freud, I feel, is as complete a psychologist as Vygotsky, with as much to say about what is involved at every stage in the process of doing psychology. For my own part, although Vygotsky's psychology has more scope and integrative power then almost any other psychology in existence today, I think its scope is limited in one major respect: it fails to distinguish between two kinds of practical concern - a concern with simply productive activity and with activity of a moral kind (Shotter, 1984). Its concept of practice is limited to instrumental action or labour activity by individuals and ignores both what Aristotle called phronesis, i.e., ethical know-how or judgment, the making of decisions in accord with one's social responsibilities, as well as praxis, i.e., practical social activity informed by phronesis. Its concept of knowledge is thus is limited to technical knowledge (to knowledge like tool using knowledge), and ignores self-knowledge; i.e., knowledge of one's social identity, of how one is 'placed' and what one's 'status' is in relation to others, and hence, one's rights and duties in relating oneself to them. In other words, it ignores both the moral nature of the social world in which developing children are embedded, and the morally precarious nature of one's social identity (Goffman, 1959). This issue relates to Rommetveit's and Hundeide's concerns above, for it is a matter of understanding how, as a result of activities in one's social circumstances, one's status can change, moment by moment, and with it one's rights and duties, the privileges and commitments, that one ought to be following in respecting the needs and requirements of those around one. Vygotsky's psychology is congenial to such an extension as their work shows. Is the time now ripe for such a development: for a psychology as a moral science of action?
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