Activity and Narrative as Building-block of Human Experience

by Eric Santosa

This is an Introduction to Cultural Psychology Part 2. Click here to go to part_1, part_3, part_4, part_5

My hobby may seem strange for some people. One of the things I like doing is just having a seat with cigarettes and a bottle of beer at the corner of cafés on weekends while people hanging out and spending times together with friends and families. I'm myself off course alone with my own imaginations with books or observations on people around me. Yes I'm like people diagnosed with autism, and I like being in my autistic world.

In my imaginations I'm always fascinated by questions how meeting of minds possible. We usually tend to consider human experience as purely subjective like me myself in my own imaginations. Often times It's difficult to make ourselves intelligible for other people. Nobody seem to be able to understand what's inside my subjectivity. If human experience is purely subjective then the question is how meeting of minds possible? In contrast, my observations on people at the cafés show at times that people do not seem to have difficulties to understand other people's mind. People seem to be able to have easy access to other people's subjective experience.

In several extreme cases it may even be possible that two complete strangers could go together like old friends who haven't seen each other in very long time. I remember the scene for example when Karl Marx first met Friedrich Engels. The two met the first time on August 28, 1844, at the Café de la Régence near Louvre at the very heart of Paris. It is said that they talked for ten straight days and as many nights after that date. The two seemed to live in the same world of imaginations that would later changed the world, engaged heavily with each other from the very first time they met throughout life time.

Similar fascinations also captures me when I observe meeting of minds that may seem mundane in our social world. At Starbucks for example I'm fascinated by how easy people make transactions, buying hot cappuccinos, exchanging gossips, making business deals. It may seem easy how Starbucks can sell hot cappuccinos worth more than thirty thousands rupiah, and people do not seem to mind with the price or question why the price is that high. Everything seems to be taken for granted. It seems like Starbucks can read other people's mind that they are willing to buy that kind of drink and  turns the reading into business opportunities.

In my cultural psychology course I usually make use of two important concepts to elucidate the cultural contexts that enable human to experience the world, to understand self and make him or herself intelligible in the world: activity and narrative. The first concept I derive from marxist psychology of Vygotsky and his followers which roots back to Hegel and Feuerbach. There are two articles of mine on this topic (one on the story of Vygotsky, and the other on Leontiev's and Engestrom's cultural historical activity theory) which can be found in my blog. The second, I owe it from Jerome Bruner's cultural psychology, literary theory of Roland Barthes and semiotics of Saussure and Peirce.


Activity System

Alexei N. Leontiev which may be said as the main theorist that develops Vygotsky’s ideas considers activity as the appropriate unit of analysis that Vygotsky has searched for before his death of Tuberculosis. Leontiev defines activity as:

“..the non-additive, molar unit of life for material, corporeal subject…. It is the unit of life that is mediated by mental reflection. The real function of this unit is to orient the subject in the world of objects. In other words, activity is not reaction or aggregate of reactions, but a system with its own structure, its own internal transformations, and its own development.” (Leontiev, 1981: p.46)

This definition may be difficult for more western-influenced readers to digest. To put it in more simple way activity is a system that functions as the building block of meaningful human life that orients how people interprets and responds to him or herself or other minds. For example, the classroom teaching activity is a system that allows the act of raising hand to become intelligible. Cultural scripts that direct how people respond to the act are also made possible through the activity as a system. Even human self is determined as well by the roles they play in those activities. Participations in classroom activities would define the teacher's and the students' self concept and esteem.

It's not that the activity as a molar unit cannot be broken down, but if we would like to construct meaningful social life any smaller elements should be organized in activity contexts. To elucidate this, Leontiev make use of levels of unit of analysis as in figure below.

In our example of the act of raising hand in classroom, the activity is the classroom activity whose motive is teaching and learning. The operation is the tangible gesture of raising hand by the participant which is determined by the condition. For example when the participant is a disabled who does not have hands he would not be able to make the gesture. The action is what is understood of the intentions behind the raising-hand, for example to ask a question or to make comments on what is being talked about in the classroom. The action is driven by the participant's goal. The operation of raising hand would be meaningless if it is decontextualized from the activity of classroom teaching. The reading of other people's mind is possible only when the gestures are understood within their contexts.

Similarly the billboard is a gesture like the raising hand in the classroom. Billboard as a gesture becomes an act of showing or telling something in the context of brand promotion activities. In the first version of the mosquito repellent billboard where there are no visual cues other than the picture and the name of the product the audience will use the promotion activity as the context to figure out the meaning of the gesture. It's like a salesman is trying to offer the audience a mosquito repellent. Unless the product is really innovative and disrupting what people know about mosquito repellent the billboard will not get any attention from the audience.

In the billboard with the two additional set of visual cues the audience is given another layer of contexts. The context of promotion activity will be pushed to sub-consciousness as background. In these two alternative versions the audience is presented with a mother doing care-giving activities, and the other a mother doing fighting activities like a warrior. These layers of context then are positioned in the foreground at discursive consciousness level. These activity contexts are presented through two different sets of meaningfully interrelated gestures which include the act of the mother, the setting of bedrooms and cultural artifacts such as nightgown and bed, or army-look apparel and hand-gun. The existence of the mosquito repellent brand will be meaningful differently in these two different contexts although its function to kill the mosquitoes maybe exactly the same. In marketing communication jargons these two activity contexts communicate similar functional benefit, but they will induce different emotional benefits to the audience.

Narrative Mode of Experience

To deliver such emotional benefit however the presented activity contexts should be able to induce relevant and appealing narratives in the mind of the audience. Narrative is simply a meaningful sequence of activities or events. Jerome Bruner explains narrative as follows:

“a narrative is composed of a unique sequence of events, mental states, happenings involving human beings as characters or actors. These are its constituents. But these constituents do not, as it were, have a life or meaning of their own. Their meaning is given by their place in the overall configuration of the sequence as a whole-its plot or fabula.”  Bruner (1990: 43)

These constituents are elements of the dramatic quality, what in Kenneth Burke's dramatism is termed as the narrative pentad which consists of actors, action, intention, instrument and scene. Just like gestures and visual cues in activity contexts, this dramatic pentad would be meaningless when they are not put into certain narrative contexts. Narrative with its timeless fabula and timely sjuzet functions to glue the pentad in various activities together into a sequence that delivers meaningful experience. Like cultural scripts it dictates what the actors and interlocutors anticipate, their inter-subjective experience, the kind of worlds possible for them and how they would respond to each other in a given situation.

For example in the first set of visual cues the image of a young mother making her kids asleep comfortably may induce the audience to reconstruct a narrative of a mother who has problems with her nagging kids who could not fall asleep because of mosquitoes. Killing mosquitoes with the repellent tube becomes the solution to her problem which at the end allows her to restore her paradise of being a good mother. In this example, being a good mother is the fabula, the timeless subject of the story that helps to make sense of the timely organizational plot of the sequence (sjuzet) and the pentad which is present in the image. The second set of visual cues in the billboard offers yet another dramatic pentad, another fabula and sjuzet, that is, being a courageous warrior which dictates another kind of meaningful sequence of activities. These two sets of visual cues with their own narratives will deliver different emotional benefit to different audience. Which of the two narratives is relevant and appealing will depend on its fit with the psychography of the target audience.

How can those sets of visual cues or gestures be able to induce certain kinds of narratives? Here Peirce’s semiotic is very much of help to explicate the workings of how visual or verbal cues or gestures may become signs that dictate people’s awareness of certain narratives, and at the end inducing emotional benefits to the audience. The visual cues are the signifier or in Peirce’s term, the representamen; and the narratives induced in the audience’s mind are the signified. In Peircean triadic scheme the signified has two elements, that is, the interpretant (the sense that comes from interpretation process) in the audience mind, and the object or referent. In this triadic scheme the narrative with its fabula and sjuzet is the interpretant, the sense while its dramatic pentad elements are the referents.

For Peirce interpretation is an on-going process where interpretants can function as representamen that induce another more advance interpretants. This iterative interpretation process can go ad infinitum to construct or reconstruct newer sense. Narrative as interpretant must be a result of more advance and complex iterations. I shall have to say more on this topic in other article since it’s a complex subject that cannot be put in one or two paragraphs. Here I just would like to point on one important merit of semiotic. It is that Peircean triadic scheme can help us to be aware of our own interpretations, our relations (or conflicts) with other minds and to reconstruct a targeted communication that is able to induce emotional benefits to our audience in more strategic way. The backward process is important as well. It enables us to deconstruct our own interpretation and communication process, to evaluate the impacts for our social worlds.

The Interplay between Activity System and Narrative Mode

Let’s go back to how activity system and narrative becomes the building block of human lives. In everyday life narrative plays a very important role of helping people to make sense of themselves and their world. Activity system alone as context is not sufficient to help people orient themselves in the world.  From the point of view of activity system human self is determined by timely experience delivered in certain concrete activity. It is as if human self would change from one activity to the other, oblivious of the past activities he or she has got involved in, and ignorant of the future possible activities that he or she may involve him or herself. In reality people have a sense of continuity that define the timeless self and determine how he or she will experience current activities and their sequence. Narrative as context with its timeless fabula and timely sjuzet helps people to experience their various activities as meaningful part of their self. Using Bruner’s term, narrative with its fabula, sjuzet and the dramatic pentad allows people to have narrative mode of experience while activity system a paradigmatic one.

Let's take a look back to our classroom. There we find a young woman in her mid twenty who acts as a teacher, and some kids who sit in circles circling some tables. It's in the morning around nine AM. They are in a classroom in a kindergarten that is located in Pondok Indah, a place where many more upscale middle class of Jakarta live. Indah, her name, has worked there as kindergarten teacher since her graduation from a well-known university in Jakarta three years ago.

Eleven AM the class is dismissed. Behind the door there’s a good-looking young woman around her age waiting. She is the mother of Raka, one of Indah’s pupils, asking to have a talk with her. After having a seat in the empty classroom Indah asks her how she can help. Martha, the young mother starts to tell her story how she got divorced with her husband after three years of marriage, not long after her second baby was born; and how she has difficulties now raising two kids as a single parent while she’s got to work full-time. Raka, her elder of the two, now five years old is refusing to go to school the last three days. Martha is asking Indah for help.

Two hours has passed. Indah suddenly realize that she has missed a lunch appointment with her close friend at Pondok Indah Mall. The story of Martha is absorbing her very much. Looking at her Blackberry there are three missed calls and pings already from her friend. She hurry herself, answering her friend's pings, calling her chauffeur to take her car to school lobby. Inside the car on the way to the mall her eyes are wandering for a moment before a billboard catches her attention. The billboard pictures a young mother wearing a nightgown in her kids bedroom holding a mosquito repellent tube. Before she can recognize the brand name the car has passed the billboard. The picture reminds her of the paradise at home when she is with her two-years old.

These simple scenes may be found in our cheap local TV series, but it serves us here to illustrate how human experience a glimpse of their life, and at the same time show us the kind of life forms human may possibly have. From paradigmatic mode point of view the activity systems which Indah may get involved in her life are: work activity in an early education institution where her role is teaching; domestic activity in a middle class family where she acts as mother; and social-leisure activity where she can find a rather loosely-defined role as a friend. This paradigmatic mode helps her to manage her life in more strategic ways into several fields of life. Each activity systems may have their own rules. Together they may compete with each other in using up resources, like time, energy and money available for Indah.

From narrative mode point of view these activity systems are experienced seamlessly as part of Indah's self whose main motive or fabula is being a good caregiver. Fabula is the key element that defines how Indah may experience herself. She may conceive of herself mainly as a caregiver who strive to become a good one. In family setting it fits perfectly well with her role as a mother of a two years old. Similarly it may fit with her role as kindergarten teacher in her work activity as well. Listening to the story of Martha she may interpret it as a paradise-lost sjuzet where divorce prevents Martha from realizing her own paradise as a mother. Listening to the story of Martha, it's like she is presented with the kind of world she may possibly experience in the future, which may be the main reason why the story is quite absorbing for her. The picture of a young mother in nightgown on the billboard may reminds her of the paradise she may possibly be prevented from as well.

Martha on the other hand may not experience her own life the way Indah understands it as a story. Martha may have experienced a paradise-lost plot when the divorce happened several years ago. Now since she has been able to deal with it she may understand herself and her situation more like a female warrior who feel challenged to survive and overcome the problems. From narrative point of view her fabula is being warrior whose paradise is when she could strategically beat the enemies. She may see herself as undergoing transformations from a nice but fragile little girl who feel hurt because of the divorce into becoming a tough single mother who could stand the pain. That may be her sjuzet. If she were presented with the two alternative billboards, she might see the second set of visual cues more interesting than the first.