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TRANSMISSION OF CULTURAL MEDIATORS AND EDUCATIONAL ORDER // ΠΡΑΞΗMΑ. Journal of Visual Semiotics. 2020. Issue 3 (25). P. 118-135

The authors of the article focus on the issue of changes in education. The subject matter is based on treating education as a specific producer of sociocultural reality structures formed as an effect of semiogenesis interactively implanted by individuals. The researchers are mainly concerned with educational reality as a locum of sociostructural actualgenesis, which is symbolically mediated in a complex way and is always problematic. The point is that the forms of the current education, due to the reproduction conditions in place, have been put into the reification processes. This means that changes in education oriented at the reorganization of educational reality are in line with semiotic-symbolic transformation, in the first place. The latter’s main constitutive element is communication mediators, such as oral utterances, written texts, and visual images whose status in this research is considered in terms of instability. The authors determine a specific feature of the current educational situation as a challenge of visual culture that claims to be visually dominant in the procedures of cultural semiosis, building group and individual identities, as well as establishing social order and regime of social control and principles of power execution. The performance of image compared to that of the word is considered as a more direct one, striving for the realization of mechanisms of cultural messages’ simultaneous cohesion. The authors suppose that while cultural relations are being increasingly visualized, educational practices remain verbal- and text-centered. With regard to the participants of educational situations, this is expressed in the dominance of legitimate (metanarrative) ways of message organization and a transmission model of educational knowledge that are structured and tend to be unambiguous, clear, and complete in terms of form of thought, etc. The authors suggest considering the change of the mediation form in the organization of educational interaction as a necessary step of its development. At the initial stage, this is about a transition from a verbal-centered communication order to an ocular-centered one. For this to take place, it is necessary to initiate changes in speech practices of education (communication) and ways of referential linking between the word (speech) and the image (vision). In the former case, this is about re-orienting educational communication from implicit and explicit objectives of accomplishing behavior synchronization and establishing a consensus of meanings to cultivating in interaction forms producing differences: paradoxicality, paralogicality, and incommensurability, which can be achieved due to practicing differences in discursive positioning. In the second case, an educational objective is vision liberalization that occurs in the course of receptive work emancipated from an apriori interpretation of what is apparent, based on a metaphoric order of the utterance organization. Both these occurrences result in the distancing and self-distancing experiences, as well as in an opportunity to look at oneself not as a natural position that is automatically shared by the other interaction participants, but as a specific and relative discursive formation, a position in the processes of educational semiosis. In the final analysis, this enables to create sustainable effects of differentiation and diversification of the worlds of the human continuum.

Keywords: cultural orders, educational orders, semiotic-symbolic mediation of learning relations, educational semiosis, transformation of educational interaction