Reply To: Minding the gap: on metaphors to the transition from imagination to reality

#4877
Michael Cole
Participant

Francine et al
I believe that the phrase, “minding the gap,” while clever, is misleading because it “brings to mind” the announcements in railroad and subway stations to mind the physical gap created by technical system of transportation. The gap appears and then “the mind fills it in” or “bridges across it.” This fits with the idea that minding the gap is only “filling in information.”
This way of interpreting the metaphor totally neglects the fact that the human eye creates via saccadic movement the resulting gap it must resolve in order to maintain, or regain, coordinated action. We know for sure that if the gaze becomes fixated on an aspect of the external world, the world disappears. Discontinuities are not caused ONLY by external events, but by the organism itself, so does life itself. This view generates as a consequence, what Lenin and Bernard refer to as a zig-zag, Tania refers to as looping, Suvorov refers to as into-image-making, and Vygotsky’s two cases of men caught at one or the opposite side of ‘reality’.

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