Creativity in the Making - Vygotsky’s Contemporary Contribution to Crativity

Moran & John-Steiner / 26 our current tools and symbols do not serve our current needs, we can develop new ones: such “created stimuli” help us to make decisions (Vygotsky, 1997b). We are all connected through the creation and propagation of these aids over time. Eventually, through the mastery of tools and signs, we come to recognize ourselves – the “‘I’ of personality” (Vygotsky, 1997b, p. 242).

“The sign and methods of its use are the functional, determining whole or focus of the whole process” of creativity and other higher psychological systems (Vygotsky, 1997b, p. 84). For example, art assign or transform basic sensory processes (sight, movement, etc.) into symbolic meaning; it makes them significant. This significance is first idiosyncratic, then it becomes more common as it is shared (see also Feldman, 1980, 1994). Artifacts crystallize subjective experience for others to experience. These products – physical or mental – extend what we can know: “The application of psychological tools enhances and immensely extends the possibilities of behavior by making the results of the work of geniuses available to everyone” (Vygotsky, 1997a, p. 87). A recent study by Hatano and Osawa (1983) gives a concrete example of this: Japanese abacus experts can do calculations based on an image representation of the abacus; they have internalized computation based on the social tool available to them. In addition, John-Steiner (2000) notes how certain innovations within a domain, such as music, cannot occur until the tools (in this case, instruments) are available to allow it, and how changes in tools can dramatically alter how a domain progresses.

How might domain-transforming creativity operate? “[N]ew systems are not just linked with social signs but also with ideology and the meanings which some function acquires in the consciousness of people.”17 A society at a given historical period includes concepts that coordinate how members of that society understand their world, how they make meaning of their experience. These concepts incorporate a certain fuzziness that allows “wiggle room” for people to “make them their own”: as Vygotsky (1997a) put it, “new forms of behavior develop from the new content picked up by the person from the ideology of the surrounding environment” (p. 98). Mental life is polysemous and requires interpretation; understanding is “the clarification of meanings and the establishment of values” (Vygotsky, 1997a, p. 111). In other words, cultural and idiosyncratic meanings are not static but develop to allow for both stability and variability in the culture and the individual’s mind (Van der Veer & Valsiner, 1991).

Late in his career, Vygotsky switched his emphasis from sign mediation to meaning making. Meaning is the socially agreed-upon definition of something – the dictionary definition for a word, for example. It is “generalized reality” (Vygotsky, 1997a) and often considered a property of the object or sign. Sense incorporates the variations of