Emotions and Vygotsky’s materialist semiotics: reply to Oittinen / Las emociones y la semiótica materialista de Vygotski: respuesta a Oittinen

Abstract

In a recent article on Vygotsky’s reading of Spinoza, Vesa Oittinen argues that Lev Vygotsky took a ‘semantic turn’ late in his career, leading him to dualism and intellectualism. Oittinen characterizes Vygotsky’s interest in sign-meaning as a problematic break from prior interests in material practice. In this paper, I challenge this common view. I argue that Vygotsky has a materialist Marxist theory of sign-meaning, enriched by his engagement with contemporaneous empirical science. I then suggest some ways in which signs play a role in the development of emotions. I elaborate aspects of Vygotsky’s project by drawing on Charles Sanders Peirce, Wilfrid Sellars and related thinkers.

In an illuminating exploration of Spinoza’s philosophy and its appropriation by Vygotsky, Oittinen (2022) brings the discussion onto criticisms of Vygotsky by his student Aleksei Leontiev. Leontiev characterizes Vygotsky’s interest in meaning as a retreat into a mental realm and a divorce from material practice in understanding the development of human consciousness. Oittinen supports these criticisms, suggesting that by the time he wrote Thinking and Speech, Vygotsky had deviated from the key commitments of the cultural-historical psychology he pioneered. Oittinen makes these arguments in the context of a wider consideration of Vygotsky’s late work on emotions. He argues that Vygotsky follows Spinoza into a dead end, creating philosophical problems he does not have the resources to overcome.

As we just saw, an analysis of Spinoza’s doctrine of emotions led Vygotsky to the assertion that the emotions can be explained only when one pays attention to the meanings, which, so to say, trigger them. But this assertion, as justifable as it seems, creates problems for a materialist theory of emotions. After all, meanings are in themselves nothing material but products of the mind. How then are they able to produce emotions, which have their physical (material) side, too? (Oittinen, 2022)

The suggestion is that Vygotsky’s interest in meaning made his understanding of consciousness dualistic and intellectualistic. I believe Oittinen is both mistaken here and mischaracterizes Vygotsky’s views. ¹

As Maidansky (2021) notes, Vygotsky had an interest in the ‘sensory-supersensory’ nature of signs early in his work: ‘As commodity has value, so word has meaning’. In his notebooks he writes, ‘The supersensory part is the … reified, social relationship projected onto a thing (onto the word)’ (Vygotsky, 2018, p. 79). Vygotsky (1987) developed this understanding of meaning throughout his work: his concept of ‘word-meaning’ in Thinking and Speech was an explication of this ‘sensory-supersensory’ character of the sign. I agree with Zavershneva that of central concern for Vygotsky (2018) was working out the systemic relations between the affective-volitional and semantic dynamics that constituted human consciousness. Far from a regression into Cartesian dualism, this project marked a move beyond Spinozism through Vygotsky’s Hegelian-Marxist understanding of normativity.

The natural history of the sign

Shortly after drawing an analogy between the linguistic sign and the commodity, Vygotsky (2018) accuses linguistics of being engaged in a kind of fetishism (p. 74). Vygotsky does not contradict himself here. Just as classical economists assume the self-evident value of commodities and their relations, classical linguists focus on meanings and their relations as givens, i.e., to language as an autonomous realm. Vygotsky, like Marx, is interested in the conditions under which such values emerge. Though the term would not have yet been available to him, Vygotsky’s interest here is not so much in semantics as in semiotics. While Saussurean semiotics dualistically focuses on relations of signifiers and their signifieds, Vygotsky is interested in how signs develop as part of our practices. It is semiotics in Peirce’s sense of a general science of everyday experience (Liszka, 1996).

The ‘semantic turn’ in Vygotsky’s work entails an expansion in his understanding of signs. He no longer sees signs purely instrumentally but as always already embedded in our life activity, and continuously reinterpreted through it. In his notebooks, he criticizes his early work with Leontiev for not being able to distinguish between a handkerchief and the diary of an adolescent in mediating activity (Vygotsky, 2018, p. 275). Both artefacts can help us direct our own actions, but the journal is more entrenched in our practices and personality ² and thus has more power to transform us. A handkerchief has an operational function particular to the current task: remembering the milk. The sense in which the diary is more meaningful than the handkerchief is not well captured by a detached description of the adolescent’s activity.

In his later work, Vygotsky is interested in how our volition and personality are shaped through our engagement with a field of affordances ³ :

Objects in the environment are not neutral for us. As Lewin says, they not only create difficulties for us in our actions to a greater or lesser degree or, conversely, facilitate actions, but many things and events that we meet manifest for us a more or less determined will, they stimulate us to certain actions: beautiful weather or a lovely landscape move us to take a walk, the steps of a staircase stimulate a two-year-old to climb and slide. (Vygotsky, 2012, p. 10)

While such ‘determined will’ is assumed fetishistically in Lewin’s system, Vygotsky wants to emphasize the cultural-historical dimension of its development. Lewin’s concept of Aufforderungscharakter needs to be supplemented with an appreciation of reification: of how the things we create and use congeal our practices (Vygotsky, 2018, p. 489).

Speculating on the ‘prehistory’ of children’s writing, Vygotsky explores how the use of objects in play invests those objects with meaning. Vygotsky describes qualitatively different stages in our learning to use and interpret signs. To elaborate Vygotsky’s account, I borrow terms from Peirce’s semiotics. ⁴

Iconic

An icon resembles what it is. A footprint is an icon of the shoe sole. A map is an icon of the city. Icons convey some quality of their object. When a child is developing their ability to use signs, what is important for Vygotsky is not the correlation between signifier and signified but the expression of a move in a broader activity. It is the functional role of the sign that gives it its meaning (Vygotsky, 1997b, p. 130).

[A] child wanted to show in a drawing how it gets dark when the curtains are closed and he made a forceful line down on the board as if he was closing a window shade. The closing movement did not signify a curtain cord, but expressed specifically the movement of drawing a curtain… The child who needs to represent running begins to use his fingers to show this movement and to make separate lines and dots on paper, which he believes represent running. (Vygotsky, 1997b, p. 134)

The movement here is iconic since it bears some spaciotemporal homomorphism with what it is meant to represent. The gesture represents a quality that the object has for the child. The object cannot imprint itself on the mind through its essential properties; instead, these qualities are fixed through its involvement in activity.

Indexical

An index is tied to or points to what it represents. Vygotsky asks us to imagine children who are playing with everyday objects like a wind-up clock, knife and bottle cap. They might say that the bottle cap is a bakery and the clock is a pharmacy. At this stage, the meaning of the sign still depends on some aspect of its physical properties; for example, the child’s own fingers or something very big cannot serve as a pharmacy in this game. A clock can represent a pharmacy for a child not because it looks like a pharmacy but because it is able to embody the child’s intentions in pretend play; for instance, she can walk the doll from the bakery to the pharmacy.

[The child] isolates one of the characteristics of the object that indicates (является для него указанием) [what it] must represent… only the gesture that refers to them imparts this sense to them, indicates this sense… When the clock represents the pharmacy, one child points to the face and says, ‘Here is the medicine and the pharmacy,’ and another points to the ring and says, ‘This is the entry, it’s the door to the pharmacy’… (Vygotsky, 1997b, p. 136)

When the same object becomes involved in a new course of action (ход действия), it keeps its index but loses its broader meaning. There is nothing else the child means in tying the clockface to medicine, no additional consequences committed to in using this sign. She might know that aspirin treats headaches, but if her playmate said he has a headache in the game, she would not reliably point to the clockface to indicate there’s aspirin there.

Symbolic

Symbols represent types/universals. They do not depend on the physical properties of what they represent, only its social recognition.

A course of action (ход действия) can now transfer to new situations. In a new game, the child can go to the clock to mean ‘pharmacy’ if her friend says she is ill. This allows a lot in the activity to be taken as given. In another game the child can shout, ‘The cowboy is getting away,’ without telling her friends that the stick is a horse and the boy is riding the horse away from them. This is the process Vygotsky calls internalization. In internalization the sign reifies a course of action into a habit which I can then appropriate. Though non-human animals can learn words, these words are indexical (Vygotsky, 1997b, p. 124). It is symbolic sign use that makes humans unique. ⁵ Sharing signs allows humans to teach others, by orienting a learner symbolically to a sign they can already grasp indexically, e.g., ‘It’s like this.’

Play involves dynamics of repetition and spontaneity which reproduce the conditions for properties of the object (like the shape and sturdiness but not the colour or grain pattern of the stick) to have the affordances it has in the game situation. But for the stick to be a horse in the game involves normative commitments unrelated to its properties as a stick. For example, the horse could be fast, brave or in need of feeding. This symbolic meaning functions in a system of social relations that is distinct from the iconic and indexical systems on which it relies.

The sensory-supersensory nature of the sign

Though Vygotsky saw himself as a scientist, he was critical of crude empiricism, as well as most of the scientific paradigms of his contemporaries in psychology. He advocates William James’s approach here:

When, then, we talk of ‘psychology as a natural science’ we must not assume that that means a sort of psychology that stands at last on solid ground. It means just the reverse; it means a psychology particularly fragile, and into which the waters of metaphysical criticism leak at every joint, a psychology all of whose elementary assumptions and data must be reconsidered in wider connections and translated into our terms. (James, in Vygotsky, 1997a, p. 335)

As Derry (2013) has argued, this anti-foundationalism underpinned much of Vygotsky’s work (p. 100). Vygotsky (1999) saw James & Lange’s theory of emotions as erring from this anti-foundationalism: reducing emotions to the bodily responses of an individual and separating off our conceptual capacities, creating a kind of dualism (p. 210). ⁶

Vygotsky was critical of psychologists who divided the mind into two floors, with higher functions built directly on top of lower ones (such as Dilthey: Vygotsky, 1997b, p. 7). Why then does Vygotsky talk about ‘dynamic-semantic systems’? Does doing so make him a dualist as Oittinen suggests? In short — no: the dash in ‘dynamic-semantic’ suggests their unity. As the previous section attempted to illustrate, the semantic value of the sign is reification of its dynamic uses. It is a dialectic of plasticity and fossilization (Vygotsky, 1997b, p. 44).

Vygotsky’s strategy for uniting the dynamic (he also calls this affective-volitional and sensorimotor) plane and the semantic plane (or field of meanings) is similar to Sellars’s synthesis of what he calls picturing and signifying (Huebner, 2018). ⁷

In his notebooks, Vygotsky plays Bergson and Hegel off against each other to explore these dimensions of the sign. I do not have space here to discuss Bergson’s philosophy, so, in Bergsonian fashion, I will instead provide an image. A cliff face embodies memories of the sea. As each wave hits the cliff, the cliff face as an image of the sea is altered. It represents the sea not in linear sequence but in intensity. As each new wave rushes into the crevices of the cliff, the past and future exist as one in the form actualized in every collision.

If some aspects of Bergson’s idealism were inverted, Vygotsky thinks one could appreciate his attempts to naturalize concepts. He agrees with Bergson that ‘word organizes a number of motor processes’ (Vygotsky, 2018, p. 135) but criticizes him for limiting his account to this kind of habituation. For Vygotsky (2018), Bergson cannot distinguish between the effect of a word on thinking and the effect of hydrochloric acid on limestone (p. 147); Bergson does not appreciate the Hegelian dimensions of words as interpersonal cultural-historical functions: logos. To illustrate this Hegelian criticism, Vygotsky uses a psychoanalytic example. A traumatic event can alter one’s mind at the level of the unconscious and motor habits, in ways that can perhaps account for the repetition of the trauma in neurosis, but for me to experience ‘this’ as an image of that traumatic event, Vygotsky suggests we need language in its discursive form. Additionally, Vygotsky thinks that Bergson is wrong to assume we intuit multiplicities of particulars and then generalize from them. For Vygotsky, generalization is always involved in the grasp of any particular. ⁸

Vygotsky wants to see words as both natural objects in the world, embedded in habits and causes, and as a part of our social practice and rationality. Words as natural objects reify affective-volitional relations to our environment, but as discursive functions they allow us to find meaning, offer reasons and imagine alternatives. Sellars (1979) calls this the ‘Janus-faced character of languagings as belonging to both the causal order and the order of reasons’. This is why meanings can rely on icons and indices while functioning independently of them. Sellars and Vygotsky see meaning as produced through sensorimotor activity but as not reducible to it.

There is a genetic, but not a logical, contradiction between the claim that higher mental functions, an inseparable part of which is the use of signs, arise in the process of cooperation and social intercourse, and the other claim that these functions develop from primitive roots on a base of lower or elementary functions, that is, a contradiction between the sociogenesis of higher functions and their natural history (Vygotsky, 1999, p. 10).

Our sign use relies on automatic responses as well as active reasoning. It is thanks to the reification of our habits in language that much of what we are doing in speaking to others can remain fluent and unconscious — responding to the affordances of the situation.

Our words can be substituted for the situation; however, the words of autonomous speech do not have this function but have only the mission of indicating this one or that in a situation. They have an indexical function, and a nominating function, but they do not have the signifying function, which can represent non-present objects and meanings (Vygotsky, 2021, p. 143).

Seibt (2009), reading Sellars, describes this as a gradient of levels from causes to reasons. Both poles here are part of the same process of plasticity and fossilization and do not imply a separate realm of the mental. Discourse restructures affective-volitional schemas and is structured by them. This dynamic is not limited to linguistic signs: grasp of the decimal system may be embodied in activity, giving the learner the freedom to use more complex mathematical systems, without any system forming an ultimate or static foundation (Vygotsky, 1987, p. 251).

In one of his last lectures, Vygotsky describes a patient with encephalitis. The patient had lost the ability to close his eyes at will, until he came into the clinic and was asked to do what he would do if he were going to sleep. In this way he can be said to have rewired this biological function (Vygotsky, 2019, p. 138). In this way the ‘semantic’ transformed the ‘affective-volitional’, making it hard to separate one from the other: ‘As lower psychological functions are restructured by higher they are tied into wider networks of interfunctional relations’ (Vygotsky, 2019, p. 131). ⁹ It is not a lower and higher floor but the tectonics of precarious layers developing through fossilization and plasticity (Vygotsky, 1997b, p. 222).

Vygotsky is not making the strong constructivist claim that we can create our own experience through our thoughts. He is claiming that we can form concepts about any of our embodied functions, and that doing so alters the wider network in which those functions are active, thus changing the function itself as a network effect. This means that social mediation through the use of signs and concepts can extend our agency over material conditions that might otherwise limit us.

For us, central in localization are the extracerebral connections… Mediation creates fundamentally new types of connections in the nervous system. What is impossible for one person is possible for two. Regulation via the periphery is a frequent principle in the organization of the nervous system. (Vygotsky, 2018, p. 421)

The role of sign-meaning in our emotions

Oittinen argues that the problem for Vygotsky is in explaining how emotions can be ‘triggered’ by meanings. Citing Spinoza, Vygotsky explains, ‘Knowledge of our affect changes it and modifies it from a passive state to an active one… our affects act in a complex system with our concepts’. We will never feel the jealousy of Othello because we do not possess the same cultural-historical understandings of infidelity (Vygotsky, 1997a, p. 103).

Vygotsky (2018) suggests that human emotions develop through enculturation (p. 211). In his late lecture ‘The Problem of the Environment’, he gives the example of children going through a divorce. Though there is a personally unique lived experience of going through a divorce, it is to a large extent determined by the child’s concepts of what divorce is (Vygotsky, 2019). Sellars gives the example of mourning at a funeral. We do not decide on reflection to feel sympathy for the bereaved, rather it seems like an immediate response to our environment. But this response was nonetheless formed through a process of enculturation involving social activity in which salient concepts were enacted between competent interlocutors before they could be internalized by a novice (Sellars, 1967, p. 178).

[For a child] what comes first, before being able to understand bereavement as bereavement is mere conformity with the relevant ought-to-be rule. The trainers (her parents), slowly mold and orient her behavior so that it conforms to the uniformities of performance that are expected from a member of the community, without the child being actually aware of the complicated inferential structure that comes with the full possession of the concept of bereavement and the associated rules of action. (Rey, 2020) ¹⁰

Similarly, when we learn the word ‘nervous’, we are able to use it to express our own emotions. We are then able to directly spot our own nervousness (DeVries et al., 2000, p. 134). A key part of cognitive-behavioural therapy for anxiety is collaboratively learning to recognize it via a range of conceptual schemes (Kuyken et al., 2011). ‘Nervousness’ and ‘anxiety’ are interactive kinds: they develop iteratively through cultural-historical recognition as well as being physically embodied (Hacking, 1999). ¹¹

Again, the claim that our emotions are always mediated by concepts does not mean that they are reducible to concepts. ¹² Consider a poem as a system of signs. On some level, poems ‘move us’ because reading them is not a purely logical affair. Poems ‘reify affects’ (Vygotsky, 2018, p. 489) which we then reappropriate and embody in reading them: this is an inextricably dynamic-semantic process. Waiting for the train on Tuesday morning, I feel overwhelmed, and a line from Mandelstam’s ‘Concert at the Station’ comes to mind, and I think, ‘It’s like this.’

Conclusion

Drawing on Spinoza in The Teaching about Emotions, Vygotsky points to this orienting function of our emotions:

Regardless of the ability to think (reflect) on the benefit or harm, emotions as states generated by the body orient it in the surrounding world, directing it toward some objects and diverting it from others according to requirements of self-preservation. (Vygotsky, 1999, p. 260)

Vygotsky goes beyond Spinoza in charting the development of this orienting function at multiple levels, to the symbolic sign (Vygotsky, 1999, p. 32). Signs structure our affective volition as well as our rational reflection. Following Peirce, we can say that the effects of a sign are emotional, logical and volitional. ¹³ Signs have an amphibious sensory-supersensory character, letting them traverse across these domains and undermining the apparent dualism therein.

Consciousness is not a mental space, not [a] scene on which the actors play the drama, but the drama itself, which by its course determines each movement of every actor. (Vygotsky, 2018, p. 293)