2.1 Activity and Motive

The central thesis of cultural-historical psychology is that the development of the human psyche is the result of the conscious vital activity of human beings. Thus, work as a mediated human activity is recognized as a central category in the process of humanization. Work is first and foremost a "creative and productive activity". (^{LEONTIEV, 2004}). An activity mediated by instruments and directed towards an end.

Through their activities, humans do nothing more than adapt to nature. They modify it as their needs evolve. They create the objects to satisfy their needs and the means to produce these objects, from tools to the most complex machines. They build houses and produce their clothes and material goods. Progress in the production of material goods is accompanied by the development of man's culture; his knowledge of the world around him is enriched, and science and art develop. (^{LEONTIEV, 2004}, p. 283)

Work is an activity, but not every activity is work. According to ^{Mesquita (2010}), activity is a "state of action". "We say that a person or an animal is active when it acts, when it does something, when it is not at rest. Activity, in this sense, is simply movement by the force of action" (^{MESQUITA, 2010}, p. 50). Activity is a characteristic of every living being. However, human vital activity is different from the vital activity of other living beings. In other animals, vital activity is organized within the limits of their biological and instinctive relationships with nature.

The activity of the animal can be carried out only in relation to the object of a vital biological need or in relation to stimuli, objects, and their correlations (situations), which give the animal the feeling of what is connected with the satisfaction of a certain biological need (^{LEONTIEV, 2004}, p. 66-67).

Here we emphasize the role of motives in activity. All activity is guided by motives. The motives that guide animal activity are purely biological and instinctive. In turn, "the animal does not manifest new needs, and if from now on, it responds to the conditional signal, it is only because this signal acts on it as an unconditional stimulus" (^{LEONTIEV, 2004}, p. 67). Something different happens in human beings. Since work mediates the relationship between man and nature, it also mediates the response to these natural needs. By acting on nature through work, human beings also act directly on their being, producing a set of specific, inorganic behaviors that make sense only in a given social formation. At the origin of these behaviors, the "instrumental act" will produce a qualitatively new response "because between the response of the person and the stimulus of the environment there is interposed the new element called the sign" (^{MARTINS, 2013}, p. 44). Vygotsky used the analogy of the instrument to explain the use of the sign in mediating human behavior.

In human behavior, a series of artificial devices emerge that are aimed at mastering the psychic processes themselves. By analogy with technology, these devices can rightly be called psychological tools or instruments [...]. Psychological instruments are artificial creations; structurally, they are social devices and not organic or individual ones; they are aimed at mastering one's own processes or those of others, just as technology is aimed at mastering the processes of nature (^{VYGOTSKI, 1997}, p. 65 apud ^{MARTINS, 2013} p.44-45).

In human behavior, a series of artificial devices emerge which are aimed at mastering the psychic processes themselves. By analogy with technology, these devices can rightly be called psychological tools or instruments [...]. Psychological instruments are artificial creations; structurally, they are social devices and not organic or individual ones; they are aimed at mastering one's own processes or those of others, just as technology is aimed at mastering the processes of nature (^{VYGOTSKI, 1997}, p. 65 apud ^{MARTINS, 2013} p.44-45).

Meaning is a reflection of reality, regardless of man's individual or personal relationship to it. Man encounters a ready-made, historically elaborated system of meanings and appropriates it, just as he appropriates an instrument, the material precursor of meaning. The real psychological fact, the fact of my life, is that I appropriate or not, that I assimilate or not a given meaning, to what extent I assimilate it and also what it becomes for me, for my personality; this last element depends on the subjective and personal meaning that this meaning has for me. (^{LEONTIEV, 2004}, p. 102)

As ^{Leontiev (2004}, p. 103) states, "(...) meaning is first and foremost a relationship that is created in life, in the activity of the subject. Meaning makes the subject of activity aware of its motives. Although the motives that drive the activity have a social meaning, their relationship to the subjects of the activity allows for a distinctly personal appropriation.

This specific relationship is established in the course of the development of the activity that concretely links animal organisms to their environment; it is initially biological, and the psychic reflection of the external environment by animals is indispensable to this relationship. Later, and for the first time in man, the subject distinguishes this relationship as his own and becomes aware of it. From a concrete psychological perspective, this conscious meaning is created by the objective relationship, reflected in the human brain, between that which causes him to act and that to which his action is directed as a direct result. In other words, conscious meaning translates the relationship between motive and end. (^{LEONTIEV, 2004}, p. 103, our emphasis)

When man's motivated activity loses its meaning, in other words, when there is a split between the meaning and the personal meaning of the activity, there is consequently a change in the structure of the inner consciousness, giving rise to a relationship of alienation between the social meanings and the personal meaning of human activity.

2.2 Motive and personal identity

The motive is part of the structure of the activity. It stimulates the individual to perform a certain activity to satisfy a certain need. In animal activity, the motive coincides directly with the end of the action. In man, motivated activity does not have a direct identification with its end. On the contrary, it gives rise to a series of actions and operations that are necessary to carry out the activity but have no direct relationship to its purpose. When an animal is hungry, its immediate motivation is to hunt or gather food that will satisfy it. Its hunger immediately becomes the reason for its activity. For humans, hunger does not directly motivate their activity. To eat, humans perform a series of actions that are not directly identified with their physiological needs. Thus, to eat, a person living in a commercialized society needs to have money to buy food, to have the objects necessary for its preparation, to have a clean place and adequate furniture to perform the act of eating, and only then to eat. A socialized man's hunger motivates him not only to satisfy a biological need, but also to carry out a complex of actions that precede and follow the act of eating. According to ^{Leontiev (2004}, p. 316), an action is "[...] a process whose motive does not coincide with its object (i.e., with what it aims at) because it belongs to the activity in which the considered action takes place".

Actions have both an intentional aspect (what to do) and an operational aspect (how to do it). They therefore require objective means to be carried out. The means by which actions are carried out are referred to by ^{Leontiev (2004}) as operations. In other words, the motives organize and unify the actions and operations of a given activity. In this process, "emotions and feelings are inextricably linked to needs, on whose satisfaction/unsatisfaction they depend" (^{MARTINS, 2007}, p. 108). As ^{Martins (2007}) points out, human activity transforms needs into motives. With the development of human relationships based on the principle of work, motives become increasingly purely social, that is, increasingly full of meaning. This leads to the emergence of different needs in individuals, which are transformed into new motives. This is how the emotional structure of individuals is formed.

Considering that feelings are the result of emotional generalization and are formed based on personal emotional experience, this structure depends on living conditions, education, and one's own ideological conception. The emotional structure is organized in a kind of hierarchy of feelings, in which some feelings are predominant and influence the individual's behavior largely, others have a subordinate character, and still others have no significance for more than a short period. This organization supports the individual's emotional activity in the face of reality, as well as the emotional charge necessary for what is experienced to be configured as a personal experience or subjective experience (^{MARTINS, 2007}, p. 108).

The emotional structure brings the individual into sensitive contact with the world. As a result, individuals take charge of motives and give them personal meaning. They make social activities "their" individual activities. For this to happen, individuals must identify with the motives behind the activity. Were it not for the class divide, there would be no problem with this. As ^{Leontiev (2004}) explained, in primitive societies, the motives that guided the activities of individuals were directly linked to the collective needs of the community. Although there were different roles for each individual in a given community, there was no inequality among its members. Men and women, children, and the elderly shared proportionately in the necessities of community life. ^{Engels (1975}, p. 107), speaking of the Iroquois tribes, sums this up well when he says: "Everyone is equal and free, including women. There is still no place for slaves, and, as a general rule, foreign tribes are not subjugated". With the emergence of private property and class society, there was also a need to differentiate between private and communal life. The satisfaction of individual needs no longer coincides with the satisfaction of community needs. Community relations give way to relations of submission. The motives that guide activities in class society are obscured by the ideology of the dominant classes. In this way, activities are motivated by goals that are alien to human beings and thus lose their personal meaning.

These relations are decisive at the psychological level. What happens is that for the subject himself, the apprehension and realization of concrete goals, the mastery of the means and operations of action, is a way of affirming his life, of satisfying and developing his material and spiritual needs, which are objectified and transformed into the motives of his activity. [...]. Under certain conditions, the lack of coincidence between meanings and meanings in the individual consciousness can take on the character of a real estrangement between them, and even antagonism. (^{LEONTIEV, 2004}, p. 118)

The loss of meaning in human activity is filled with a "false consciousness" of reality imposed by the ruling classes. We only have to remember the enslaved people who were considered objects of labor, the assumptions of the superiority of the Aryan race, or even today the arguments against homosexuals, indigenous people, blacks, and women, which are nourished by religious prejudices and superficial and false considerations of reality.

Under these conditions, personal meanings that reflect the motives generated by man's vital relations may not find objective meanings that adequately embody them, and so they begin to live as if they were wearing someone else's clothes. It is necessary to imagine the essential contradiction that produces this phenomenon. Because, unlike the being of society, the being of the individual is not "self-speaking", that is, the individual has no language of his own and no meanings elaborated by himself; his awareness of the phenomena of reality can only function through "finished" meanings that he assimilates from the outside, that is, knowledge, concepts, and opinions that he receives through communication, in one form or another of individual or mass communication. This creates the possibility of introducing into their consciousness imposing, tergiversated, or fantastic representations and ideas, including those that have no basis whatsoever in their real, vital experience (LEONTIEV, 1978, p. 121).

We can say that the non-identity between motives and ends of activity has been an advantage of the human species over other animal species. Because of this, man was able to decompose and reorganize his actions, adapting them infinitely to achieve a certain goal. However, this was only possible because of the social nature of work. In other words, "activity suited to an end" (^{MARX, 2010}, 2012), and the ultimate end of work is the transformation of nature according to its specifically human needs. Thus, it is in work that human beings identify their humanity. However, while the development of alienated forms of work in class societies has allowed an exponential development of the capacity to transform nature, it has also created a distance between work and the humanization of men. From a psychological standpoint, alienated work has transformed the vital activity of men into a meaningless activity for the lives of the individuals who work. It's not for nothing that ^{Marx (2006}, p. 37) states that the working hours of the workers have no meaning for them and that their lives begin only at the end of their activities, "[...] at the table, in the bar, in bed". Nevertheless, what keeps men engaged in their activities, even if they are meaningless to them?

If we can say that an individual cannot exist as a human being outside of life in society, we can also say that there is no individual consciousness apart from social consciousness. The appearance of the sign as an instrument of human consciousness has helped to establish certain ideological positions in the continuity of social being - which aim both to transform nature and to mobilize people for this purpose - and in the process has also helped to create a social consciousness of human existence. Individual consciousness is formed in contact with social consciousness. When society is divided into antagonistic classes, it is the social consciousness that prevails over the forms of social production. This means that the social consciousness of the slave mode is slavery, that of the serf mode is serfdom, and that of the capitalist mode is wage labor. Wage labor makes sense only for the social consciousness created by the capitalist system. Even if it is produced for inauthentic reasons, it is from a social consciousness that individuals are bound to their alienated activity. It is in this direction that we draw attention to the concept of identity.

The identity of the individual emerges from the relationship between social consciousness and individual consciousness; it is the moment when the individual finds meaning in the meanings created by the historical and social activity of human beings. Thus, when we are born into a particular social formation, we are confronted with the language, symbols, and laws that have already been established and consolidated by the historical development of that particular society. At this point, we identify with a particular culture, with certain values that give personal meaning to our activity and to our lives. But until then, what we have is the formation of an immediate awareness of individuals, an awareness of the elements necessary for coexistence in society.

For ^{Castells (2013}, p. 22), identity is a "process of constructing meaning based on a cultural attribute, or even a set of interrelated cultural attributes, that prevails over other sources of meaning". This statement seems correct to us, but it forgets that meanings are not solely an individual construction. On the contrary, as we have already pointed out, individuals are always compelled to appropriate a certain system of meanings, and only from this appropriation can it be said that it is possible to create new meanings. As ^{Leontiev (2004}) points out

The same system of verbal meanings is therefore capable of expressing different and even contradictory contents. Therefore, there is no need for different languages, different systems of meaning to express the radical differences in representation and thought that inevitably arise in class society. Of course, the slave and the slave-owner, the peasant and the landlord, the worker and the capitalist have different and even contradictory ways of representing the world, but these differences in no way require the same difference in their language, in the verbal meanings they possess, and are not reduced to them. (^{LEONTIEV, 2004}, p.137)

Identity does not create meanings; these are present in the "cultural attributes" of a given social formation. It attempts to give a "unique meaning" to the actions of individuals by coating them with a new and very particular content. The pleasure of effort for the bourgeoisie and the middle classes has an entirely unique content from the same pleasure for the working class. A bourgeois can try to expand his business and take pleasure in it, just as a middle-class individual can make an effort to graduate from school, just as a worker tries and takes pleasure in being able to feed his family. In both cases, pleasure and effort appear as elements of action and have the same meaning that guides the subjects' actions, although the contents of pleasure and effort are different for different social classes. To illustrate what we're trying to show, let's take an example from literature. In the historical novel by Howard ^{Fast (1960}), the hero Spartacus discovers this difference in the content of bodies designed for death and those designed only to produce death, and from this, he derives a personal meaning for his hatred of the Romans.

The hot water was an endless wonder to him. Never had the dry death of Nubia washed him completely clean, and he could never enter the bathhouse without thinking of the care given to the bodies of those who were created to die and trained only to produce death. When he had produced the things of life-wheat, barley, gold-his body had been a useless, dirty thing, a thing of trash and shame, to be beaten, kicked, whipped, starved-but now he had become a creature of death, his body as precious as the yellow metal he had dug up in Africa. And, strangely, it was only now that the hate began to flow. There had been no place for it before; hatred is a luxury that needs to be fed and nourished, and even given time for a certain amount of reflection. (^{FAST, 1960}, p. 83, our translation, emphasis added)

In the plot created by ^{Fast (1960}), Spartacus' identity as a peasant, Thracian, slave, and gladiator helps him to become aware of his real situation of oppression by the Roman Empire. In a way, this reorients his actions and gives them new meaning. Of course, we cannot exaggerate the example, but it is not identity itself that transforms Spartacus' actions, but rather the extension of his class-consciousness, the product of "a certain reflection" that he was able to make during his training period for the fights in the arena. Ultimately, identity does not create meaning, but it does guide the meaning of action and can help develop an individual's class-consciousness.

2.3 Identity that shapes meaning

Connecting the dots between activity, motive, and personal identity, we can say that identity functions as a meaning-making element. In other words, it establishes relationships between subjects' activities and motives, which can be authentic and lead them to a process of awareness, or they can be inauthentic and deepen the processes of alienation. In the first case, memory plays a fundamental role. Without memory, it is not possible to record the personal experiences that shape the structure of each individual's personality. To the same extent, memory constitutes the social consciousness through which individuals are linked in their relationships. The personality of each individual contains, in general terms, aspects that are rooted in their family, fraternal, professional, etc. relationships. The more they are surrounded by social institutions, the more varied and extensive are their activities and motivations. The social institutions to which individuals belong inevitably produce, by imposition or free association, a myriad of memories that persist even before the individual is born and often continue after death. In the average family, for example, photographs, the "stories" told by grandparents, and everyday objects are part of the family's social memory, which the individuals who are its must appropriate, transforming them into their personal memories and continuing them, producing new memories through their activity in the social world. In the family, this production of memory takes place almost "spontaneously,"⁵ thanks to the ties of consanguinity that tend to unite individuals in the same circle of meaning, even under conditions of extreme deprivation.

However, when it comes to professional categories such as professors, this memory has to be consciously produced. First, because the bonds of biological determinations do not exist in a professional category. It is only the social determinations historically imposed by the social division of labor that direct the specific development process of a professional category. Secondly, the class struggle in the professional field is more direct and fierce, determining the appearance, disappearance, valorization, and devaluation of entire categories in accordance with the mode of production of society. In this sense, the production of the memory of the professional field is much more complex than that of the family. This is because the economic aspects that determine the discontinuity and the rupture in the generational development of the professional layers as a whole come into play with greater expression.

We can say that professors belong to a professional category that has achieved and consolidated a certain prestige and has therefore managed to produce a positive social memory that reflects, to a certain extent, its importance in society as a whole. However, a discourse on the obsolescence of the teaching profession has emerged, supported by academic circles and the media. This discourse, based on the present report, seeks to dissociate the identity of the teacher from teaching and to emphasize the role of communication and information technologies in student learning. The influence of technology on people's learning is undeniable, but it has its limits and at the same time requires a set of intellectual skills that are acquired through schooling in the strict sense of teaching. In fact, this discourse is used to delegitimize the work of teaching and, more generally, to justify the adjustments and dismantling of careers that have been carried out to the satisfaction of neoliberal policies in recent decades. In particular, this deconstruction of teaching goes hand in hand with the suppression of its social and collective memory. The technical, scientific, and political achievements of the category have been replaced by a propaganda of process innovation in which teachers must identify themselves as professional actors. In particular, the labor achievements of teachers, the construction of their class entities, and the consolidation of their technical and political specificities have been systematically disqualified in the present.

The manipulation of the social and collective memory of the teaching profession leads to serious problems in the constitution of individual memory and, consequently, in the constitution of teacher identity. Individual memory, as described by ^{Luria (1991}, p. 39), is constituted by the record of experience, "[...] a record that gives man the possibility of accumulating information and operating with the traces of previous experience after the disappearance of the phenomena that provoked those traces". It is not our intention here to discuss the development of mnemonic activity, but it is important to report on the relationship between memory and other aspects of the individual's personality and even his (in) ability to generate meaning for the world⁶. When the elements that constitute the marks of experience of a professional category are continuously eroded, their connections with individual experience lose their meaning and are guided by inauthentic motives. In the teaching profession, the reality of restructured capital has subjected its activity to external evaluation parameters that impose on it the achievement of indices and objectives. In this way, we understand that the core of the loss of teaching identity lies not in the modification of the teaching-learning processes, but in the change of the motives of teaching activity imposed by capitalist restructuring. Teaching is no longer a teaching activity but a market activity. The measurement of student scores, teacher performance, and school rankings is mirrored in the market evaluation model, in which speculators abstractly decide which company, brand, or market niche to invest in. The meritocratic logic is exponentially distanced from school life, and this has had a direct impact on the teaching profession, which has lost the meaning of its action and, consequently, its identity.

If we consider the loss of identity as the disjunction between the motive and the goal of the activity, in other words, the breakdown of its personal meaning for the individual, we can say that the identity of the teacher has been deconstructed and labeled by neoliberal policies that have tried to give it a new meaning. This new meaning is distant from the primary function of teaching and resembles the logic of the market, whose regulation of teaching, teaching careers, and investment in education is being transferred from the state to the market. In the state, although the rules of the political game are constructed in such a way as to be unfavorable to the interests of the working class, occasionally, due to the advance of class political organization, it has become possible to achieve some conquests, mainly in the field of human and labor rights. In the market, the only acceptable logic is to increase profitability. This has only been possible at the expense of the intensification and precarization of wage labor. Accepting the regulation of teaching by the market means entering a field that is aggressive and inhospitable to work, where the realization of capital reigns, regardless of the circumstances. In this way, a new meaning for teaching activity essentially requires the identification of elements that make its activity conscious. At this point, a process of fetishization of educational activity to the extreme comes into play, immediately linking it to the economic growth of countries. At the same time, the need to modernize teaching is argued, placing the burden of backwardness and anachronism on the shoulders of professors.

At the same time, it is necessary to create a different identity for professors, relating them as professionals who frequently evaluate themselves and act searching for constant improvement, adapting to the circumstances. The rigorous support of these false ideas in education in some way justifies and explains the deconstruction of the identity of the teacher and the attack on the class-consciousness of the category. The need for this ideological construction hides the imposition of a new level of exploitation, under which a certain consciousness must be based, integrating the individual into the new order of capitalism in crisis.

2.4 Teacher Identity and Class Consciousness

^{Leontiev (2004}) insists that consciousness is a necessary condition of life, which means that human relationships in general only make sense to individuals if they have some awareness of them. Consciousness does not always truly reflect the relationships by which humanity is organized. In class societies, the exploitation of labor is sustained by a "false consciousness" of reality that is capable of keeping exploiters and exploited integrated, however precariously. It is true that violence plays an important role in maintaining this integration, but even its use must be justified in some way by some kind of consciousness. Capitalism is undoubtedly the most developed class society, which seeks to maximize its productive forces, and for this, it needs the consensus of its superiority as a form of production. The workers know deep down that they are exploited by their bosses, but due to a dull awareness of the totality of social relations, they consent to domination as if it were the result of a common goal between capital and labor. But the first step in becoming aware of something is to identify it. Identity is in itself a form of consciousness for individuals who, by identifying with their jobs and occupations, become aware of what they have to do. It is the immediate form of consciousness and therefore the most susceptible to false considerations about reality. For this reason, each professional identity represents the functionality of capital in the subjectivity of the individual. A positive representation of this functionality, which inevitably produces its opposite, is expressed in the subordination of all professional activity to the alien desiderata of capitalism.

Of course, a meaningful discussion of professors' identities cannot fail to address issues related to professors' class-consciousness. Of course, these issues are obscured when the professional identity of professors is presented as an alternative to the identity crisis. From this perspective, class problems become personal procedural vices that can be corrected through processes of reflection on practice and "reflection-in-action" (^{Schön, 2000}). But, one might ask, class is not an economic category, so what can its consciousness change about the professor's activity? If we understand class-consciousness only as an epiphenomenon of economic relations, there certainly won't be much to add to teaching practice. However, class-consciousness goes beyond economic determinations and constitutes the very being of the subjects of practice. ^{Lukács (2003}) believes this:

[The class-consciousness of the proletariat, the truth of the process as a "subject," is far from being stable or progressing according to mechanical laws. It is the consciousness of the dialectical process itself; it is also a dialectical concept. The practical and active aspect of class-consciousness, its true essence, can only become visible in its authentic form when the historical process imperiously demands its entry into force, when an acute crisis in the economy drives it into action. Otherwise, corresponding to the permanent and latent crisis, it remains theoretical and latent: it confronts the individual questions and conflicts of today with its demands as a 'mere' consciousness, as an 'ideal sum', in the words of Rosa Luxemburg". (^{LUKÁCS, 2003}, p.127)

When Marx states that the working class cannot liberate itself without liberating all classes, and that its goal would be the elimination of all class society, he is affirming the purpose of class-consciousness. In other words, the project of working-class society. In the slave world, the struggle of the slaves against the domination of their masters was in no way aimed at organizing a different social system. The class-consciousness of the workers, on the other hand, has as its task the constitution of a "class for itself" capable of dissolving political power and the political form that gives rise to the struggle between antagonistic classes. Because the identity of the professors, their identification with the elements of the complex social structure inherent in the capitalist social division of labor, brings them into conformity with the contradictions of the system. It is obvious that overcoming this situation of destruction of the formality of work and the subordination of working individuals to the imperatives of employability cannot come from the realization of a professorial identity, nor from a professional identity that is anodyne to the misrepresentation of teaching work. It will have to come from the political struggle waged between the poles of labor and capital.