[Xmca-l] sense and emotion

[Peter Smagorinsky]

I had an opportunity to read the article by Rene van der Veer and colleague on the last few chapters of Thinking and Speech, and found it interesting for a number of reasons. First, he does some historical work to argue that it was more a compilation of earlier work and ideas borrowed heavily from other sources than an original culminating statement on human development, an issue obscured by editors who removed quotation marks from appropriated material. The ways in which Vygotsky as we now know him was shaped by those who produced the volume is interesting in and of itself.

I can't say exactly how I came to what follows, but it was something that occurred to me throughout the article's discussion of meaning and sense. Below, I'll paste in something I wrote nearly 20 years ago on this smysl/znachenie distinction, and I think I still believe what I wrote then. What struck me this time around is how smysl:sense has a deeply emotional foundation, consistent with LSV's insistence that cognition and affect can't be separated. This was the first time I ever saw how that process might work. Emotion, as I'm thinking about it right now, produces the material through which ideas/thoughts take shape on their way to articulation via speech (or other mediational tool).

[as an aside, I recently reviewed Mind in Society prior to using it in a class I taught in Mexico, and was struck by the quote about how "the tongue is the tool of tools"....I'd forgotten the "tongue" part because I typically see this phrasing accorded to speech, not the more alliterative tongue. Very nice.]

In any case, I posted Rene's article, so feel some obligation to follow up with the group, and so am offering this notion, which I find interesting. Am I on the right trail?

http://www.petersmagorinsky.net/About/PDF/RER/RER2001.pdf
The Russian term smysl has been translated as sense (i.e., unarticulated inner speech), while the term znachenie has been translated as meaning (i.e., the articulation of thought through a sign system such as words). Vygotsky, however, viewed both smysl and znachenie as constituents of the meaningful whole. I next explain each of these two zones of meaning in greater detail.
            Smysl is the set of images and associations one makes with a sign such as a word in the area of consciousness Vygotsky (1987) called inner speech, that is, the abbreviated syntax and stream-of-consciousness properties of unarticulated, inchoate thought. Smysl corresponds to what Rosenblatt (1978) refers to as the initial zone of meaning in a reader's evocation, or what Gallas (2001) refers to as imagination. Rosenblatt describes this experience as

a penumbra of "memories" of what has preceded, ready to be activated by what follows, and providing the context from which further meaning will be derived. Awareness-more or less explicit-of repetitions, echoes, resonances, repercussions, linkages, cumulative effects, contrasts, or surprises is the mnemonic matrix for the structuring of emotion, idea, situation, character, plot-in short, for the evocation of a work of art. (pp. 57-58)

            Smysl is as yet unarticulated, being instead the storm cloud of thought that produces the shower of words, to use Vygotsky's (1987) metaphor. One great limitation of the concept of smysl is that it cannot be empirically demonstrated, only inferred. Vygotsky's formulation of inner speech came from his observations of egocentric speech in young children, which he theorized became internalized as inner speech. Once speech (or another tool) is articulated and thus observable, it appears in the zone of meaning that is the shower of words (or other signs) that Vygotsky calls znachenie. Znachenie, then, is the zone of meaning available in represented form, corresponding to the notion of a sign, regardless of modality.
            Because these two zones compose a meaningful whole, referring to znachenie as "meaning" can be misleading. I retain the translation of sense for smysl: "the aggregate of all the psychological facts that arise in our consciousness as the result of the word. Sense is a dynamic, fluid, and complex formation which has several zones that vary in their stability" (Vygotsky, 1987, p. 275). For znachenie, I use articulation:

It is the most stable, unified, and precise of these zones. In different contexts, a word's sense changes. In contrast, [articulation] is a comparatively fixed and stable point, one that remains constant with all the exchanges of the word's sense that are associated with its use in various contexts. (p. 275)