Expanding Vygotsky’s approach to Cultural

Mediation

Anna StetsenkoThe Graduate Center

The City University of New York

The magic of signs. Developmental trajectory of cultural mediation

Igor M. Arievitch & Anna StetsenkoIn A. Yasnitsky, R van der Veer and M.

Ferrari (Eds.), Handbook of Cultural-Historical Theory. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. 2014

• Vygotsky’s cultural-historical theory has opened ways to situate cultural mediation within human meaningful activities, rather than in the functioning of the brain, and thus laid foundations necessary to advance a non-dualist (non-Cartesian) understanding of the human mind.

• Yet, while following with the main spirit of Vygotsky’s approach, the focus needs to be not only on its strengths but also on its contradictions and inconsistencies.

• Critical reflection and constructive elaboration that allow for charting the next steps in developing this approach

Quite paradoxically, Vygotsky did not consistently apply his own, quintessentially developmental approach to this cultural mediation: he did not offer a developmental account of cultural mediation -- how cultural mediation emerges and develops in ontogeny from its early roots in infancy, thus leaving the power of semiotic mediation unexplained and, ultimately, the gap between the external and internal processes wide open.

• This significant oversight has been caused, first, by Vygotsky’s reliance on narrow linguistic interpretations of verbal meanings;

• Second, by his insistence on analyzing development in terms of two distinct and complementary, though interrelated, lines of development – the natural and the cultural lines (even though he himself made implicit steps toward overcoming this dichotomous view).

• Both of these assumptions are associated with Vygotsky essentially working on the cusp of a new paradigm that can potentially overcome various dualistic splits in conceptualizing human development. His emerging views constituted critical breakthroughs and enabled the shift toward this new paradigm. At the same time, his views were still partially (and understandably) grounded in the older naturalistic assumptions inlcuding about early periods of ontogeny being driven by biological processes that only later (with the arrival of speech) become merged with cultural processes.

The power of cultural mediation can be understood through going back to its ontogenetic roots in infancy, that is, by consistently applying the developmental method to the notion of cultural mediation itself.

• From this perspective, mediation does not begin with, but rather develops into, mediation by external signs and later culminates in the ability to guide and self-regulate one’s own activity.

• focus on how mature forms of verbal mediation emerge from ontogenetically earlier, more elementary forms grounded in pre-linguistically mediated meaning making within the initially completely joint and then shared adult–child activities.

The power of semiotic mediation by signs is the abbreviated, highly condensed guiding activity of the other (typically, the adult), which is first enacted in collaborative and embodied joint activities of children and adults. At the earlier, pre-semiotic (or proto-semiotic) stages, the guiding activity of the adult is performed in its fully fledged form, whereby the adult’s actions intertwine (fuse) with those of the child within joint activities providing foundations for collaborative meaning making.

• Later in ontogenesis, the guiding role of others gradually takes on a more distanced and condensed (abbreviated) form represented by activities “crystallized” first in objects (according to their cultural use) and then in symbols and signs.

• At even later stages, children themselves begin to use this condensed and abbreviated guidance embodied in signs for orienting and self-regulating their own activity. It is this latter dynamics, and not the earlier stages in the development of cultural mediation, that has been captured by Vygotsky.

• In this light, the mature forms of sign (semiotic) mediation are preceded by earlier forms of cultural mediation and contain in a condensed form the results of several ontogenetically earlier, transitional forms of mediation.

• Expanding the notion of cultural mediation beyond its traditional semiotic interpretations paves the way for understanding the mind as a continuous process of humans engaging with the world without ontological breaks between the initial forms of culturally mediated, material activity out in the world and its more elaborated forms traditionally understood as taking place ‘inside’ the mind.

• From this standpoint it also follows that, contrary to Vygotsky’s distinction between the lower (unmediated) and the higher (mediated) mental functions, the totality of human development, including all forms of psychological processes, is culturally mediated from the very beginning of child development.

• This interpretation puts emphasis on transformations in human this-worldly (external, outward, practical-material) activities as the source and “fabric” of the human mind, rather than on transfer of phenomena or processes from the outside world into the mysterious “inner” realm of the mind.

Foundations of CHAT

• Activity—material, practical, and always (by necessity) social collaborative processes aimed at transforming the world and human beings themselves with the help of collectively created tools—is the basic form of life.

• This activity, as the principal and primary form of human life and the contradictions brought about in its development, lie at the very foundation and are formative of everything that is human in humans.

Expanding CHAT

• Cf: Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution

Theodosius Dobzhansky

• Nothing is human development makes sense except in the light of humans purposefully transforming their world and through this, coming to be human

• The Vygotskian position can be interpreted as a statement that the roots of consciousness and self are situated in the distributed field of co-being, co-knowing and co-doing and only gradually become differentiated from the initial unity with the adult.

• This initial situation in which infants find themselves is of a profoundly joint character, where individuals are completely merged at the level of being and consciousness, marking uniqueness of human ontogeny as always first shared and then individuated.

• emphasis on social change -- people always contribute to continuously evolving social practices, rather than merely participate in them, places activities through which individuals purposefully transform the world at the very core of both identity and learning.

• identity is constructed via meaningful life agendas oriented toward pursuits of changing something in and about social practices (including in ourselves as agents of these practices).

Vygotsky’s idea of infants’ initial and full relatedness and sociality can be combined with the key notions of activity theory about the roots of psychological processes in human meaningful activities.

The initial experiences are ensuing not from infants’ solitary modes of relating to the world such as looking and touching but, rather, from inherently communal, collaborative, social, and culturally mediated processes of being held and touched, fed and nursed by the other person, with actions of looking, touching, and hearing all being initially performed together with the other, as intricate parts of activities arranged and orchestrated by caregivers.