Culture, Language and the Emergence of Subjectivity

In this commentary I focus initially on the shared critical perspective of de Lemos (2000) and Nelson (2000) upon developmental psychology’s construction of the developing subject. I suggest that the plurality of temporalities which underpin the human self and human culture is reduced, in most theories of development, to a unitary and deterministic ‘chronotype’ of pure, universal sequence. As against the dominant approach in developmental psychology, which views the subject as a ‘Mind/Brain’ analysing ‘input data’ with respect to an innately constrained ‘hypothesis-space’, de Lemos and Nelson view the developing subject as an embodied and interested participant, in an intersubjectively and communicatively constituted arena of interpretation. While sharing this general perspective with de Lemos and Nelson, I draw attention to the differences between their theoretical formulations, and suggest that both of them lack a certain level of analytic specificity, especially with respect to analysing language itself. I propose that a serious theoretical and methodological encounter between socio-cultural approaches to human development and cognitive and cultural linguistics needs to be put on the agenda. I conclude with a brief discussion of the papers on phylogeny, and offer a schematic rendering of the difference between ‘traditional’ and ‘alternative’ views of the dependency relations between sociogenesis, ontogenesis and phylogenesis.