Between Philosophy and Cultural Psychology [1st ed.] 9783030581893, 9783030581909

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xi
Introduction: Linking Philosophy and Cultural Psychology (Robert E. Innis)....Pages 1-8
Beyond the Kodak Fixation: Contexts, Situations, and Backgrounds (Robert E. Innis)....Pages 9-29
Semiotic Framing of Thresholds of Sense (Robert E. Innis)....Pages 31-48
Feeling, Abstraction, Symbolization: Langer’s Aesthetic Model of Minding (Robert E. Innis)....Pages 49-67
Affectivation: Life-Giving Signs (Robert E. Innis)....Pages 69-84
Back Matter ....Pages 85-129

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SPRINGER BRIEFS IN PSYCHOLOGY PSYCHOLOGY AND CULTURAL DEVELOPMENTAL SCIENCE

Robert E. Innis

Between Philosophy and Cultural Psychology

SpringerBriefs in Psychology Psychology and Cultural Developmental Science

Series Editors Giuseppina Marsico, University of Salerno; Centre for Cultural Psychology, Aalborg University, Salerno, Salerno, Italy Jaan Valsiner, Centre for Cultural Psychology, Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark

SpringerBriefs in Psychology and Cultural Developmental Science is an extension and topical completion to IPBS: Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science Journal (Springer, chief editor: Jaan Vasiner) expanding some relevant topics in the form of single (or multiple) authored book. The Series will have a clearly defined international and interdisciplinary focus hosting works on the interconnection between Cultural Psychology and other Developmental Sciences (biology, sociology, anthropology, etc). The Series aims at integrating knowledge from many fields in a synthesis of general science of Cultural Psychology as a new science of the human being. The Series will include books that offer a perspective on the current state of developmental science, addressing contemporary enactments and reflecting on theoretical and empirical directions and providing, also, constructive insights into future pathways. Featuring compact volumes of 100 to 115 pages, each Brief in the Series is meant to provide a clear, visible, and multi-sided recognition of the theoretical efforts of scholars around the world. Both solicited and unsolicited proposals are considered for publication in this series. All proposals will be subject to peer review by external referees.

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/subseries/15388

Robert E. Innis

Between Philosophy and Cultural Psychology

123

Robert E. Innis University of Massachusetts Lowell Lowell, MA, USA

ISSN 2192-8363 ISSN 2192-8371 (electronic) SpringerBriefs in Psychology ISSN 2626-6741 ISSN 2626-675X (electronic) SpringerBriefs in Psychology and Cultural Developmental Science ISBN 978-3-030-58189-3 ISBN 978-3-030-58190-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58190-9 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Series Preface

Deep Humanity Returns Anybody who has encountered Bob Innis—in person or through his writings—has experienced the deep humanism that covers all of his philosophically sophisticated discussions of ideas. Whether he brings to our attention the work of classic kind (e.g., that of Karl Bühler or Susanne Langer) or expands his philosophical Weltanschauung to new efforts in interdisciplinary scholarship—all this is accomplished with deep concern for the triumph of the humanistic existential feeling, even in the contexts of sufferings and uncertainties of living. The present monograph is an excellent example of such explication of humanity in the developing field of cultural psychology. As psychology attempts to preserve its image as science, it has become—over the last century—mechanistic and overlooking of basic human life issues. Cultural psychology emerged in the 1990s as an effort to not reduce the socially embedded selves to the neural networks of the brain or the seemingly solid reduction to genes. In this effort, it has rediscovered the pragmatist philosophical traditions of John Dewey, George Herbert Mead, and William James, not to speak of the existential philosophical traditions of the twentieth century. In this book, Innis weaves an intricate carpet of ideas that link our present day cultural psychology with the contemporary semiotic presentations of the human ways of living. From his deeply humanistic perspective, Innis brings back to psychology—through his contribution to cultural psychology—the centrality of philosophical feeling-through of complex issues of human existence. This has been of inspiration for some young scholars in the field of cultural psychology. This is the case of the commentaries that nicely complement Innis’ monograph and that are the extraordinary results of the fertilizing work that Bob has been doing over decades in different places in the world. There is no linearity in human existence—we are all involved in a dynamic spiraling matrix of feeling as Innis shows, after Susanne Langer. The roots of the idea go further back (Innis, 1982)—Karl Bühler’s organon-model of communication guarantees that always reconstructed spiral (maybe better seen in third dimension— helical) process of understanding through necessary non-understanding is involved v

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Series Preface

in the communication process. The use of the Cannon-Weaver model of communication—that fits perfectly in the case of technical communications—does not fit in the case of any social, aesthetic, or psychological case where innovation is the name of the game. Our human placeways are filled with constant innovation—ranging from minimal altering of our immediate living environments to the solving of scientific problems that have been unsuccessfully attempted over centuries. We are the benefactors of the bottomless lake of consciousness (the expression by Charles Sanders Peirce that Innis creatively builds upon in this book). Cultural psychology is like a boat in which we paddle along that lake—fearful to take a dive to explore the horizon of its bottomless nature. Innis’ philosophical emphasis in this book encourages us to try. This is an important message that—if taken as a guideline—could keep cultural psychology from vanishing into the history of psychology as yet one more effort to understand the human psyche that, like others, has failed. The innovation that cultural psychology has brought into scientific discourse is that of affectivation—creating the feelings-full context to our actions and meanings (Cornejo, Marsico, and Valsiner, 2018). That concept helps us to maintain the primacy of affect over cognition in human meaning-making. The role of Susanne Langer—a recurrent intellectual interlocutor for Innis over decades (Innis, 2009)— is the crucial connection point between philosophy and cultural psychology. The affectivating feature of signs unites speech and music with imageful art and imageless thought—thus making it possible to develop psychology as a science of human ways of subjectivity in society (Valsiner, Marsico, Chaudhary, Sato, and Dazzani, 2016). The playful complexity of the human psyche becomes the target of serious human science that treats the subjective realities with respect. Innis’ final point in the book is worth re-emphasizing here: It is this dynamic multiform milieu in all its breadth and depth and its spiraling and ramifying differentiations of felt meanings and their material embodiments that is the focal concern that joins philosophy and cultural psychology together. In this sense, affectivation —in all its conceptual dimensions—describes not just a research topic of cultural psychology and philosophy but their existential goal (p. LAST).

Lowell, MA, USA July 2020

Aalborg-Salerno Jaan Valsiner Giuseppina Marsico

References Cornejo, C., Marsico, G., and Valsiner, J. (Eds) (2018). I activate you to affect me. Vol 2. In Annals of Cultural Psychology series. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishers. Innis, R. E. (1982). Karl Bühler: Semiotic Foundations of Language Theory. New York: Springer Innis, R. E. (2009). Susanne Langer in Focus: The Symbolic Mind. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Valsiner, J., Marsico, G., Chaudhary, N., Sato, T., and Dazzani, V. (Eds.) (2016). Psychology as the science of human being. Cham: Springer.

Preface

I have previously discussed both the background and foreground themes of this book in long and short formats (Innis 1982, 1994, 2002, 2009, 2012a, b, 2014, 2016a, c, d). They, among others, bear witness to winding and intersecting paths of reflections on human meaning-making. The present small book in the SpringerBriefs format, practicing a kind of method of rotation, takes them up, reconfigures, integrates, refocuses, and at times expands them in light of topics addressed in seminars and workshops during the 5 years, 2015–2019, of my appointment as Obel Foundation Visiting Professor at the Niels Bohr Center for Cultural Psychology at Aalborg University. The book is not a survey of various possible philosophical dimensions of cultural psychology. It keeps its focus resolutely on the links between a specific set of fundamental analytical resources for the framing of issues bearing on how we are to understand ourselves as encultured organisms operating at multiple levels of meaning-making at the thresholds of sense. I am indebted to Jaan Valsiner for many years of stimulating discussions and work on common projects. I have found in him as a person a true and generous philosophical friend and in his work a wealth of insight. I wish also to thank Giuseppina Marsico for her intellectual enthusiasm and collegial support for a book that straddles the non-secured fences between philosophy, semiotics, and cultural psychology. I want to acknowledge the intellectual generosity of my colleagues in Norway, Brazil, and Italy, Line Joranger, Marina Assis Pinheiro, and Raffaele de Luca Picione, for their stimulating commentaries that extend and frame in novel ways the themes of this book. Lowell, MA, USA

Robert E. Innis

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Contents

1 Introduction: Linking Philosophy and Cultural Psychology . . . . . . . 2 Beyond the Kodak Fixation: Contexts, Situations, and Backgrounds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Situations and Contexts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Scope and Relevance of Scharfstein’s Schematization of Contexts . On Selective Interests and the Expanding Spheres of Context . . . . On the Betweenness of Atmospheres . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Between Force and Meaning: Turning to the Semiotic Dimension .

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9 13 18 21 25 28

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31 31 33

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3 Semiotic Framing of Thresholds of Sense . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Turning to Semiotics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Peirce’s Semiotic Triads and the Bottomless Lake of Consciousness Language, Abstraction, and Diacrisis: Bühler’s Analytical Exemplifications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sense Functions and the Vortices of Consciousness: The Case for Cassirer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Between Signs and Forms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Transition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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44 46 48

4 Feeling, Abstraction, Symbolization: Langer’s Aesthetic Model of Minding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Interpretive Disciplines . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Abstraction: Generalizing and Presentational . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Art Image as Image of Mind . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Contours of Experiencing: Some Analytical Lessons . . . . . . . . . . A Normative Pointer: Aesthetic Rationality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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49 49 52 57 61 66

5 Affectivation: Life-Giving Signs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . On the Notion of Affectivation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . On Interruption, Resistances, and Reflection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

69 69 71

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Contents

Semiotic Embodiment and Affectivation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Existential Dimensions of Symbolic Affectivation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion: The Continuum of Affectivation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

76 78 82

Extensions and Continuations: On Power and the Limits of Logocentrism. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Body, Affectivity and Language: The Affective Semiosis of the Emergence of the New . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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The Double Faces of Each Semiotic Process. The Multiple Dynamics of the Mind Between Form and Text . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127

About the Author

Robert E. Innis is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, USA, where he had been named University Professor. During the period 2015–2019, he was Obel Foundation Visiting Professor at the Niels Bohr Center for Cultural Psychology at Aalborg University, Denmark. He has been Fulbright Professor of Philosophy at the University of Copenhagen, visiting professor in the Department of Semiotics at the University of Tartu and in the Department of Philosophy at the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo. He has also been Humboldt Foundation Fellow at the University of Cologne. He has published many articles, monographs, and books on the intersections between philosophy, semiotics, and the human sciences. His books include Karl Bühler: Semiotic Foundations of Language Theory, Consciousness and the Play of Signs, Pragmatism and the Forms of Sense, and Susanne Langer in Focus: The Symbolic Mind.

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Chapter 1

Introduction: Linking Philosophy and Cultural Psychology

Abstract Cultural psychology has multiple points of intersection with central themes and issues of philosophy, especially a philosophy informed by a broad-based semiotics. The shared problems of philosophy and of cultural psychology are our problems, vitally important issues embedded in what John Dewey called the ‘problematic situations’ that are the defining matrices for the conduct of life. This chapter foregrounds the links and themes taken up in the following chapters: (a) human beings as multileveled embodied agents and sign-users; (b) the relations between descriptive analyses and normative reflection; and (c) the diverse analytical resources, taken from different traditions, that philosophy can put at cultural psychology’s disposal in determining the thresholds and frames of meaning-making and self-formation that make up the cultural world and their effects upon the felt qualities of our lives. Keywords Thresholds of sense · Embodiment · Normative and descriptive analysis · Frames of meaning-making · Self-formation · Philosophical semiotics · Felt qualities of life · Philosophy and cultural psychology Cultural psychology has multiple points of intersection with central themes and issues of philosophy, especially a philosophy that is not self-absorbed with problems purely of its own making or over which it claims exclusive rights even if they clearly need multiple analytical approaches. The shared problems of philosophy and of cultural psychology should be, and are, our problems, vitally important issues embedded in what John Dewey called ‘problematic situations’ that bear upon what for the pragmatist tradition are the defining matrices for the conduct of life. These situations are not just to be described and explained. They are, as Dewey wrote, to be subjected to criticism: … criticism of the influential beliefs that underlie culture; a criticism which traces the beliefs to their generating conditions as far as may be, which tracks them to their results, which considers the mutual compatibility of the elements of the total structure of beliefs. Such an examination terminates, whether intended or not, in a projection of them into a new perspective which leads to new surveys of possibilities. (1931b, 215).

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 R. E. Innis, Between Philosophy and Cultural Psychology, SpringerBriefs in Psychology and Cultural Developmental Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58190-9_1

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Like such a pragmatist philosophy and other traditions that look outward over the broad landscape of life, cultural psychology is concerned with the manifold ways of knowing, acting, and feeling that mark the intentional bonds and webs of transactions between us and what we call ‘the world.’ It recognizes a plurality of exemplifications of affectively charged forms of apprehension and patterns of meaningful action, especially in their social contexts and conditions. It further recognizes, in line with a broadly conceived semiotic turn in philosophy, that the defining feature of human beings is rooted (a) in differentiated processes of the production and interpretation of signs, a range of meaning-making powers unmatched in nature that unfolds at both the upper and lower thresholds of what Michael Polanyi (1969) called sense-giving and sense-reading, (b) in the systematic production and use of tools, instruments, and objects to modify the environment and the producers themselves and which materially embody existential stances, values, and ends-in-view, and (c) in the affectladen patterns of actions embedded in habits and institutions and other cultural orders. As language animals, to use Charles Taylor’s term (Taylor 2016). we can admit that the key exemplar and condition of possibility of this semiotic, materially productive, and affective-behavioral power is language, a characteristic already noted by Greek philosophy’s genial description of humans as those animals that ‘divide their voice,’ turning it into speech. Systematic tool use—and its extension into the technological sphere—is parasitic on human semiosis, as are the properly human ‘sentiments.’ Cultural psychology, and a philosophically informed semiotics, sees this semiotic power as dividing the whole sensory continuum and the domains of human meaningful action at their significant joints and recombining them into stable forms that embody meanings that cannot also be captured in discourse. Such are the meanings presented or embodied in the pregnant symbolic configurations of art, myth, religion, and sacramental acts and rituals. A philosophical semiotics and cultural psychology, while clearly discursive disciplines, are not, indeed cannot be, logocentric. Following Cassirer (1944), we can say that the language animal is also essentially in the broadest sense animal symbolicum. That human beings are not just sign-users and sign-interpreters, but also material agents that engage the material world and transform it for use, highlights the need to attend to artifacts, including institutions, of all sorts that satisfy their needs on many levels, adding a ‘second nature’ to the ‘first nature’ out of which they have emerged. This second nature, the human cultural world, is what we can call an exosomatic body, infused with meaning and indwelt by us. We are assimilated to it, and it is assimilated to us, the way the blind person’s stick or the dentist’s drill is fused with their users. Our assimilation into, or fusion with, a linguistic ‘idiom’ is isomorphic with the fusion of body and tool, or system of tools, in skillful or pragmatic action. We are subject to their various ‘logics’ even as we are enabled by them by reason of their potencies. The circuit of perception and action out of which we construct our worlds of meaning is an open-ended, but not materially or semiotically unconstrained, spiral. Such a circuit of perception and action is sketched in Dewey’s indispensable 1896 article on the reflex arc. This article, as I will point out, has high and permanent heuristic import for sketching essential components of the lower

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threshold of signification that cultural psychology seeks in a general psychology that has relevance for its tasks, as Jaan Valsiner has strongly emphasized. Indeed, Dewey’s article, which Gordon Allport found of profound importance, anticipates in substantial ways Jakób von Uexküll’s functional circle elaborated primarily in his Bedeutungtheorie (1942), a schema whose philosophical importance was recognized by Ernst Cassirer and Susanne Langer in their projected laying of the foundations of a semiotic philosophy of culture. Cultural psychology stands in a relationship of mutual enrichment or codependence with philosophy, especially a form of philosophy such as a semiotically aware phenomenology that ‘pushes meaning down’ to the lower levels of sensibility and affectivity and ‘pushes meaning up’ to levels beyond and even within discourse (Innis 1994). But both levels are marked by ‘liminality’ of various sorts (Crosby 2014; Stenner 2017; Corrington 2013; Innis 2008a, b). Pushing meaning ‘down’ toward the body as locus of meaning-making points to and foregrounds the phenomenon of embodiment or embodied tacit knowing. Pushing meaning ‘up’ points toward another kind of embodiment, what I would call semiotic or technological embodiment or, from a cultural or social psychological angle, institutional embodiment. These forms of embodiment extend the concept of embodiment and indwelling developed, in dialogue with psychology, by the phenomenological tradition’s reflections on the lived body (Merleau-Ponty 1945, Todes 2001) and by Michael Polanyi’s (1958; 1966) cognate reflections on the tacit dimension and the ‘logical’ structure of skills, grounded in what Harry Collins (2010) calls ‘somatic tacit knowing.’ Cultural psychology is of special interest for a philosopher (or for philosophical semiotics) by reason of its focus on the embodied frames of meaning-making and their forms of ingression into our life worlds. Cultural psychology faces interpretive tasks on many levels, just as philosophy does. Along with a broadly conceived philosophical semiotics, it wants to determine how human beings make sense of themselves and the world and the psychic matrices and effects of the mediating tools and instruments employed, no matter what their modality (Vygotsky 1986; Brown and Stenner 2009). It is concerned not just with the diverse origins or ‘psychic locations’ of meanings of all sorts, a genetic side, but with their structures and contents. It wants to uncover the actual experienced impacts and variable consequences of assimilating or accomodating oneself to the vast array of possible ways of taking up an existential stance, individually and socially, in the various spheres of meaning that range from the most private and idiosyncratic to the most public and long-term contexts in which we live out our lives. Cultural psychology is no disengaged inquiry, a reflection on human oddities that do not touch us, and no more than philosophy is it a mere play with abstruse abstractions. Both are thoroughly treading in what Kant called the “fertile lowlands of experience,” the realm of ‘stamped form.’ Looked at with a philosophical eye, cultural psychology has a semiotic and phenomenological descriptive task. It can be seen as an empirical or material phenomenology that does not look for or attempt to construct ideal types but to map or chart the great varieties of ways in which meaning-systems, which are real in that they stand over against us and cannot be dispersed by a wave of the hand, take on life in experience, shaping and enabling it, opening it out, and constraining it within

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limits, whether, from a philosophical point of view, they are true or not. Cultural psychology and social semiotics in the philosophical mode share a common task, although each has a different focus. Cultural psychology is, as Jaan Valsiner (2007, 2014, 2017) has likewise pointed out, a specific kind of material phenomenology, not just ‘placing’ culture in minds but also placing minds in culture. Institutions such as marriage, political orders, prisons, hospitals and healthcare institutions, mental illness and asylums, public parks with their art works, and so forth are social facts with a psychological reality, although the relations are not baldly causal but symbiotic and dynamically reciprocating. Philosophy needs to recognize this, too, as has been forcefully shown, with practical intent, by Line Joranger in a wide ranging set of studies with rich examples from the history of thought (2010, 2013, 2015, 2019). We are ‘in’ these institutional orders just as much as they are ‘in’ us. The lines between a philosophically aware descriptive social semiotics, a material archeology of institutions, and cultural psychology are not clear-cut, although it appears to me that cultural psychology is in some sense ‘richer’ in that it is closer to the lived world and not focused just on explicit contents but also on the lived contexts, in Dewey’s sense, in which contents function and are framed. While, to be sure, as the Latin adage puts it, individuum est ineffabile, that is, there is something ‘unsayable’ about the felt quality of each person’s life, still the individual is a locus or point of intersection of multiple systems of meanings that are in important respects, but not totally, publicly accessible. They shape and form the distinctive feel of life as lived in each individual instance and in each collective or social psychological instance (Stenner), although such a feel can only be gestured at or triangulated by means of discourse. It is able, however, to be presented in other ways. A descriptive phenomenology of meanings and a descriptive phenomenology of lived values, whether in the philosophical and more abstract mode or the more concrete mode of cultural psychology, go hand in hand. Values are likewise embodied, rooted in objects as reservoirs of memory, attachment, and ultimate concern. Walter (1998) writes: Our perceptions are inherently expressive, and the core of every phenomenon holds a kernel of expressive energy. Perception remains alive and vibrant—not a dead record of things— because phenomena live and vibrate. The energy of phenomena moves people to feel, think, and imagine. The world of experience trembles with excitement. (170)

For Walter (131), “the totality of what people do, think, and feel in a specific location gives identity to a place, and through its physique and morale shapes a reality which is unique to places—different from the reality of an object or a person,” with which, nevertheless, it is inextricably linked. A place, on his conception, including, I would add, a ‘semiotic place’ where the meanings of life are played out, is a “location of mutual immanence, a unity of effective presences dwelling together”—or being ripped apart by irreconciliable differences, both personal and social. “Human experience makes a place, but a place lives in its own way. Its form of experience occupies persons—the place locates experience in people. A place is a matrix of energies, generating representations and causing changes in awareness” (p. 12). The idea of a

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place “locating” experience in people is a provocative one, as is the contention that “the energies of a place flow through its meanings.” The pursuit of meanings and values, rooted in the spectrum of desires that push human activity from behind and as lures pull it from the front, has psychological consequences and effects resulting from the various kinds of choices and forms of action that transform the physical world and social world alike. The physical world is transformed by being turned into systems of artifacts and tools and objects of use as well as objects of contemplation, self-display, and ornamentation (Valsiner 2018). Tools, machines, irrigation systems, housing materials, cities, temples and churches, monasteries, and schools have material reality and are experienced as loci of embodied meanings and reservoirs and exemplars of value or at least of what is valued, a positive fact. Cultural psychology, like philosophy, takes as object of inquiry norms and the various ends-in-view that humans pursue and attempt not just to realize but also to stabilize. Its focus on the background conditions, rooted in lived experience and its contexts, that incline us to establish these norms and effect these ends are of great philosophical relevance. One point of deep connection is with ‘moral psychology,’ in some to-be-determined meaning of that term, with its fusion of philosophical and psychological dimensions, including the all-important social and cultural ones. Cultural psychology shares a descriptive role with phenomenology and semiotics. It focuses on the multiform psychological reality and consequences of the world pictures and meaning frames which shape and form our self-conceptions, our institutions, and our patterns of action and feeling. The cultural psychologist as inquirer, like the philosopher, is also informed by a world picture and a schema of values. These need to be raised to explicitness in order for both philosopher and cultural psychologist to grasp where they stand and how such informing has psychological reality and force. Here is a critical link of cultural psychology with philosophy, and its concern with self-understanding as an existential task, such as is illustrated in Sven Hroar Klempe’s (2014) and Vincent McCarthy’s (2015) discussions of Kierkegaard and the rise of modern psychology. But the point is quite general. Every researcher is already embodied in sets of fore-structures or operative premises and needs to achieve self-understanding and not just explore the self-understandings of others. There are many helpful ways of schematizing the ‘livingness’ of premises and their bearing upon the criticism and reconstruction of the contexts of beliefs. Heidegger’s schema, for instance, has, in spite of its etiology, general import for the pragmatist criticism of cultures envisaged by Dewey and others in their different ways. Heidegger distinguished three pivotal fore-structures: Vorhabe, Vorsicht, and Vorgriff . We can interpret these terms for our use in the following way. Vorhabe (a ‘fore-having’) is also a ‘being-had,’ a kind of affectively charged Deweyan ‘disposition’ that marks a fundamental ‘feeling tone’ that accompanies and conditions all our access structures to the world. Vorsicht (a ‘fore-seeing’) encompasses embedded perceptual habits and skills, modes of attending to and into ‘the given’ that progressively becomes discriminated and divided up into terms and relations. Vorgriff (a ‘pre-grasping’) refers to the antecedent conceptual structures and systems of signs that represent and articulate symbolically the ‘meanings’ or ‘significations’ of the experiential flow.

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These fore-structures mark the cultural psychologist just as much as they frame the ultimate contours of the encultured beings the psychologist is trying to undercover in their detailed psychic reality. The point of cultural psychology, and of a great part of philosophy, is not purely theoretical or objectifying. And it is definitely not value-free. The variety of meaningsystems and value-systems in which people live, the variety of material contexts of their lives, and their cultural and ecological niches elicit from us more than mere curiosity. They show the incredible diversity of things that matter or have import for humans. What matters for most, presupposing of course a sufficient material base of life, is their self-conception and the meanings and concepts they have available to make sense of their lives. Such ‘mattering’ also entails a demand, with different levels of explicitness, for recognition and acceptance, a theme developed extensively in the Hegelian tradition and in the pragmatist reflections of G. H. Mead (Mead 2015; Joas 1997). Encultured beings do not just interact with their meaning-systems and institutions, they also interact with one another in multiple ways in vast intertwined communicative networks. Cultural psychology studies in a systematic manner what Wittgenstein, in another context, called “bits and pieces of natural history,” that is, the natural history of human practices as experienced and as self-interpreting, even if the interpretations radically diverge. It strives to do so within a methodological and theoretical framework (Valsiner 2017; Mammen 2017) and not merely in an ad hoc manner. This drive toward general categories of analysis brings cultural psychology close to a philosophical semiotics or a semiotically informed philosophy of culture. While not all meaning-systems or value-systems elicit from us validation or sympathy, they do demand from us understanding, that is, a determination of their ‘lived logics’ and points of origin and reasons (even if bad) for their continuing reality. The notion of a lived logic binds together the conjoint concerns of cultural psychology and of a philosophy open to experience in all its modes. Such a philosophy, on a different level of abstraction, is looking for where to place what Plato called the ‘significant joints’ in a complex reality. Valsiner (2007; 2014; 2017) is right to see cultural psychology as informed by a search for the significant joints in the cultural matrices and signifying powers of psyche. Wittgenstein famously and controversially claimed that philosophy leaves everything as it is, in a kind of counter thesis on Feuerbach. Philosophy in its normative dimension would assert that cultural psychology as a companion human science is not, indeed cannot be, indifferent to human practices and should not consider them merely as exhibits collected for a kind of museum of curiosities, examined for our amusement or professional or political advancement. Cultural psychology charts and maps for us the range of ways humans, pulled toward ends-in-view, or pushed by an array of compulsions and needs, have formulated and built frames for flourishing—or, looked at normatively, for failing to flourish. In light of the great variation in value schemes, which cultural psychology has studied and uncovered, it is problematic just where cultural psychology on its own is to look for a normative frame or just what such a frame would look like. The philosophical semiotics of C.S. Peirce proposes ‘concrete rationality’ and the taking

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on of rational habits. For Peirce, this involves an apprehension and realization of the ‘intrinsically worthwhile’ or ‘eminently admirable,’ which is the ‘highest good’ or summum bonum (see Ibri 2017). This is, in the end, an ‘aesthetic’ goal. It points inquiry and life in the direction of an aesthetics of existence, but in a sense quite different from Michel Foucault’s conception, which is an unstable blend of ancient practices of self-cultivation and Nietzschean emphasis on self-creation (Innis 2016; Joranger 2010, 2019). Cultural psychology holds that culture permeates us down to the deepest levels of affect and feeling, constituting an existential ‘tonus’ that defines or ‘qualifies’ the sense of existing (Brown and Stenner 2009). As acting inquirers, we always find ourselves ‘turned’ or ‘biased’ just as the subjects of our inquiries are likewise ‘turned’ or ‘biased.’ How, then, are we as reflective inquirers to balance tolerance and sympathetic understanding with critical recoil and disapproval when faced with the horrors of history’s butcher block, to allude to Hegel’s provocative remark? Clearly, this swings our concerns back to philosophy, with its own models of flourishing and norms of existence, often laden with metaphysical premises, which cultural psychology can study but clearly does not construct. Philosophy, perhaps presumptuously, legislates or “lays down the law,” but is in no position to enforce it—unless it is embodied in institutional power structures, with powers to penalize or to ‘heal’ (Joranger 2019). It exhorts, while cultural psychology, in its moral dimension, reports, but since cultural psychology studies the conditions of realization of norms, it could, if committed to a schema of values, incline itself to facilitating the acquisition of value-systems—and thus involve itself in a kind of cultural ‘moral engineering.’ But how would cultural psychology itself validate its schema? Again, there is a swing back to philosophical analysis or to the philosophical dimension, which is not itself immune to preferential treatment of its own essentially contestable existential commitments, as its history so lugubriously shows. Because of its general empirical scope, cultural psychology cannot look away from any human reality in its psychological aspects. And philosophy cannot look away from the display uncovered by cultural psychology which sees our deepest potentialities—for good reason—made visible in the mirror of cultural forms. For both philosophy and cultural psychology, the guiding maxim must be nihil humanum alienum a me puto. ‘Know thyself’ and ‘Become who you are’ are not achievable solely by introspection without the essential aid of ‘the other.’ Philosophy is helped by cultural psychology to avoid, Dewey put it, “beating its wings in a void.” Cultural psychology is helped by philosophy, or at least by some elements from certain philosophical projects, in that philosophy can supply analytical tools and concepts that help it frame the frames its subjects to close examination. How does one frame the frames within which experience takes on meaning? One way is to try to outline certain indispensable aspects of the matrices within which we give meaning to the world and to ourselves. These dynamic matrices are what I am calling the thresholds of sense. Philosophy and cultural psychology intersect in their mutual concern to determine these thresholds of sense that mark the boundaries of the human world. I want to offer in what follows some philosophical and semiotic ways of marking these boundaries that could be of use for cultural psychology.

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Going beyond and in a sense beneath these general considerations, in the following chapters I want to show in highly condensed and schematic fashion how some selected philosophical analytical tools bear in different ways upon the problem of how to model what I am calling the ‘thresholds of sense,’ that is, how to picture or describe the fundamental matrices in which meaning arises for human beings and gets embodied in cultural forms, the principal theme of cultural psychology and of a philosophical semiotics. Staying within the format of the SpringerBriefs, I cannot engage except allusively and corollarily all the issues I have foregrounded that bear upon or arise from the linkages between philosophy and cultural psychology. I want to present some rich analytical tools of philosophical and semiotic provenance for sketching with sufficient generality the contours of the very ‘thresholds of sense’ that give rise to the world of cultural forms and the fundamental lines of the ‘cultural subject’ that operates at these thresholds. I will follow this thread of thresholds and contours through (a) John Dewey’s pragmatist analysis of contexts, situations, and backgrounds and the linked notion of atmospheres developed by Gernot Böhme (Chap. 2); (b) the linkages between C. S. Peirce’s triadic semiotic framing of the bottomless lake of consciousness, Karl Bühler’s unfolding of the implications of his organon-model of language into an account of diacrisis and abstraction, and Ernst Cassirer’s analysis of the triadic formative modes of consciousness that are the source of the form worlds of culture (Chap. 3); (c) Susanne Langer’s creative development of the heuristic role of the import of the art image that links feeling, abstraction, and symbolization in a rich ‘aesthetic model’ of minding and thereby of selving (Chap. 4); and (d) an extension and exemplification of the rich yet problematic concept of affectivation by reflecting upon the interruptive nature of semiotic processes, of the tacit roots of intentional bonds with the world, the nature of semiotic embodiment, and the existential dimensions of symbolic affectivation (Chap. 5). The chapters, which are by no means meant as a treatise, are meant as ‘exemplifying rotations’ of some of the ways philosophy can supply analytical tools that bear upon its link with cultural psychology: outlining the very thresholds of sense within which the experienced world and ourselves are put into play.

Chapter 2

Beyond the Kodak Fixation: Contexts, Situations, and Backgrounds

Abstract John Dewey, articulating the central idea of his naturalistic yet nonreductive pragmatism, places the ultimate thresholds of sense within dynamic systems of transactions that enable human beings to adjust to and to cope with the changing contexts and situations of action guided by affect-laden perception. Meaning or significance, in the most rudimentary senses of those words, arises through different types of transactions that occur within circuits or dynamic frameworks with distinctive qualities or tones. They expand in a widening gyre or spiral. These frameworks are indwelt and make up complex felt backgrounds and atmospheres whose complex nature generates severe tensions by reason of the tendency of human beings to resort to violence when the contexts of their lives become opaque or incoherent. Keywords John Dewey · Circuit of behavior · Contexts and situations · Qualitative backgrounds · Affect-laden perceptions · Atmospheres and staging · Symbolization · Communication · Force John Dewey, articulating the central idea of his naturalistic yet non-reductive pragmatism, places the ultimate thresholds of sense within a dynamic system of transactions that enable human beings to adjust and to cope with the changing contexts and situations of action guided by affect-laden perception. The primary stance is not to accomplish what Dewey called a ‘Kodak fixation’ of the experiential flux and then interact with it. For Dewey, meaning or significance, in the most rudimentary senses of those words, arises through different types of transactions that occur in a circuit that, depending upon the organism, expands in a widening gyre or spiral. In the case of human meaning-making, this spiral has no greatest upper bound. Peirce’s concept of unending or infinite semiosis or play of signs, which has no explicit role in Dewey’s thought, functions implicitly in the evolutionary orientation of his philosophical naturalism.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 R. E. Innis, Between Philosophy and Cultural Psychology, SpringerBriefs in Psychology and Cultural Developmental Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58190-9_2

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Dewey’s fundamental 1896 paper on the reflex arc supplies one of the keys to his pragmatist approach to knowing and is a valuable, if relatively ignored, analytical resource for cultural psychology. Dewey pointed out that organisms, including humans, do not just respond to a ‘stimulus,’ however we want to define such a notion. They respond into it, and thereby reconstruct the actional-perceptual circuit, as well as themselves. In the case of humans, this reconstruction process goes over into symbolization and interpretation. Referring to James’s famous child-candle example from the Principles of Psychology (1890), where the seeing of a burning candle elicits the action of reaching and the subsequent burn elicits the action of withdrawal, Dewey describes the process not as a linking of discrete units but as a continuing, self-constructing coordination. This notion of a self-constructing and reconstructing coordination is an elementary precursor of rational self-control and the development of rational habits, the goal of human life, a central idea of Peirce’s semiotic pragmatism (Colapietro 1988; Ibri 2017). According to Dewey, “the burn is the original seeing, the original optical-ocular experience, enlarged and transformed in its value. It is no longer mere seeing; it is seeing-of-a-light-when-contact-occurs” (1896, 4). This hyphenation foregrounds what is a ‘continual reconstruction’ of a circuit of multimodal experience. The theoretical point of the child-candle example is that the “seeing remains to control the reaching and is, in turn, interpreted by the burning” (1896, 4). Dewey further claims that there is nothing outside of a functioning circuit of coordinating activities that can be labeled ‘sensation’ or ‘response.’ They are relative to the context, clearly a counterthrust to another problematic claim that there are context-independent psychic atoms. The stimulus is that phase of the forming coordination which represents the conditions which have to be met in bringing it to a successful issue; the response is that phase of one and the same forming coordination which gives the key to meeting these conditions, which serves as an instrument in effecting the successful coordination. They are, therefore, strictly correlative and contemporaneous. (1896, 9)

Coordination is a process of unification, the essential factor in the fundamental copings by which we not only extract meaning from but also give meaning to the world. At the very threshold of sense, Dewey sees mediating coordinations, not mere sequencing, of perceiving and acting. As he writes in his essay, ‘Perception and Organic Action’ (1912, 401): “This functional transformation of the environment under conditions of uncertain action into conditions for determining an appropriate organic response constitutes perception.” In the case of sign-using organisms such as human beings, this functional transformation of the environment is to be taken in a general sense. Coping with the world involves overt action, including, according to Dewey, sign-action, that goes over in the human case to the concrete and semiotic manipulation of the world through, as Dewey writes in his 1929 The Quest for Certainty, “doing acts, performing operations, cutting, marking off, dividing up, extending, piecing together, joining, assembling and mixing, hoarding and dealing out; in general, selecting and adjusting things as means for reaching consequences” (125). These are all mediating activities that

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occur, in different ways and modalities, at the boundary between organisms of all types and the world. More generally: Knowing is an act which modifies what previously existed …. The spectator theory of knowing may, humanly speaking, have been inevitable when the thought was viewed as an exercise of a ‘reason’ independent of the body, which by means of purely logical operations attained truth. It is an anachronism now that we have the model of the experimental procedure before us and are aware of the role of organic acts in all mental processes. (195)

Such a position was foreshadowed in a 1908 essay honoring William James, ‘Does Reality Possess Practical Character?’ In this paper Dewey argued that the systems of transactions constituting knowing are to be considered forms of practice that make a change in the object known. The change, however, is not just in the object but in the organisms and the situations of perplexity in which knowing takes place and which the organisms, individually or in concert, are trying to resolve. Knowing, as a continuous process punctuated by events of culmination, does not entail or aim to construct a stable picture or snapshot of the experience that would ‘mirror’ it in, for example, a set of abstract representations. Such a goal, Dewey argued, leads to the ‘intellectual lockjaw’ of the epistemology industry: how to find an outside standpoint enabling one to distinguish between the mirroring and the mirrored, a problem systematically bedeviling philosophy since Plato. Knowing, Dewey proposed, with no idealistic intent, is a part of the very reality the knower is adjusting to and engaged in changing in light of ends-in-view. Such ends are pursued by organisms of all sorts who strive to complete and respond to the intrinsic tendencies of things and their potentialities for transformation. Knowing is a process that is part of nature, including social-cultural nature, and thoroughly dependent on its organic and sociocultural conditions, especially the semiotic powers that make possible conceptual systems of high complexity and advanced forms of cooperation and competition, as well as the systems of tools and artifacts. Knowing on this deeply pragmatist position is clearly ‘constructive’ of the known. What is known is not in any coherent sense a cause of the knowing. It is rather the ‘outcome’ of many types of complex processes on many levels. The known, Dewey proposes, is accessed ‘within’ processes of engagement of various sorts on multiple levels. Indeed, as Dewey (1938), argues in his Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, “biological functions and structures prepare the way for deliberate inquiry and … foreshadow its pattern” (30). Deliberate inquiry, Dewey argued, is not necessarily theoretical. It can take many forms, especially in the cases of art, myth, and religion, which are the joint concerns of philosophy and the cultural sciences. Dewey’s naturalistic logic and account of knowing is intent on establishing “continuity of the lower (less complex) and the higher (more complex) activities and forms” (1938, 30)—continuity, but not identity. For Dewey an organism, including the human organism, does not live in an environment as if it were a container: “it lives by means of an environment” and “with every differentiation of structure the environment expands” (1938, 32). Life, including social life, with which cultural psychology is concerned, is for Dewey “a continual rhythm of disequilibrations and recoveries of equilibrium” (1938, 34). A consequence of this notion is that the ‘higher’ the

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organism, that is, the higher level of sophistication of its semiotic capacities, the more complex the efforts to restore equilibrium. Symbolic equilibrium is always unstable, without a rigid center. Cultural processes, including the constant deleterious striving toward hegemonic supremacy of various sorts on the part of one group within a culture, ideally strive toward “the institution of an integrated relation” (1938, 35) between ourselves and the natural and cultural world. Such a relation, however, is always precarious, a theme developed in the second chapter of his classic Experience and Nature (1925). An integrated relation is never anything permanent. Symbolic equilibrium, which is intrinsically labile, is a constant project, just as organic equilibrium or homeostasis is (Damasio 2018). By reason of the temporal flow of consciousness, we are dynamically carried toward the future. New meaning-configurations, and conflicts between them, are found in the evolving and emergent circuits of interactions. Dewey points out that there is “direction and cumulative force” (1938, 38) to these meaningconfigurations and that their end-effect, as well as motivating matrix, is “the total state of the organism” (1938, 37), a theme central to Damasio’s reflections. Philosophy is linked with cultural psychology in analyzing the semiotic and ‘psychic’ dimensions of this ‘total state,’ which is not without deep reverberations in the body of the signusers and a principal determinant of the somatic tonus that defines each one of us as a unique individual. Dewey’s approach to the theme of a threshold both describes and prescribes, as is evident in the following passage from his Logic, which refers to an essential continuity, but not identity, between the biological and semiotic dimension. “What exists in normal behavior-development is … a circuit of which the earlier or ‘open’ phase is the tension of various elements of organic energy, while the final and ‘closed’ phase is the institution of integrated interaction of organism and environment” (1938, 38). Is it not possible to substitute ‘semiotic energy’ for ‘organic energy,’ or, in fact, to see how organic energy goes over into semiotic energy, manifested in the ‘circuit’ of semiosis in the course of which sign-use becomes conscious and reflective and thus able to be controlled, and in which behavior itself goes over into conduct, including the conduct of thinking? In a 1905 text, C. S. Peirce wrote: For thinking is a kind of conduct, and is itself controllable, as everybody knows. Now the intellectual control of thinking takes place by thinking about thought. All thinking is by signs; and the brutes use signs. But perhaps they rarely think of them as signs. To do so is manifestly a second step in the use of language. (Collected Papers, 5.534; cited hereafter as CP with volume and paragraph number)

Philosophy and the cultural (human) sciences study not ‘brutes,’ in Peirce’s sense of that term, but human conduct. Such conduct, even if brutish, is both controlled by and constituted by the use of signs. It is elicited by and enforced by signconfigurations that for agents are simply ‘the way the world is,’ a form of semiotic reification (ideology) and source of violence in its many forms. Description of such conduct goes over into criticism in as much as it interrupts the lived through use of signs by sign-users and subjects it and them to thematic and critical reflection, in

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the process tracing signs to their genetic conditions and behind-the-back motivating factors and making us aware of the ramifying consequences of semiosis that psychoanalytical theories explore and mediate. As Peirce wrote: ‘The brutes are certainly capable of more than one grade of control; but it seems to me that our superiority to them is more due to our greater number of grades of self-control than it is to our versatility’ (CP, 5.533). In Peirce’s philosophical project, and Dewey’s too, self-control is manifested in the development of rational habits. Descriptive procedures on their own are perhaps not in the best position to determine whether our conduct is out of control, and hence ‘irrational.’ Here, we encounter once again the problem of cultural psychology as a normative science, a theme running through Svend Brinkmann’s work (2016). A human science such as cultural psychology or cultural history, which engages self-interpreting human beings and their works, clearly has to settle the issue of whether it intends to, or even would want to, ‘leave everything as it is,’ or whether they can at least determine what simply cannot be left as it is on the inextricably intertwined social and personal levels. By reason of the very subject matter engaged, there is also perhaps a therapeutic task to be undertaken. Dewey claimed that the point of origin of the open circuit of perceiving/acting/signifying is the apprehension of something in the field of sensibility or experience that functions as a lure—a metaphorical burning candle— for inquiry in the most general sense. Such a lure disturbs an equilibrium and generates activities aimed at restoring balance, which itself is only temporary. Dewey, implicitly accepting the theme-field-margin triad of James’s ‘Stream of Consciousness’ chapter from The Principles of Psychology, argued in a number of key and permanently valuable papers that the original ‘theme,’ or area of concern, of the field of awareness is not an ‘object’ in the usual and customary sense of the term but a holistically felt objective perplexity, or ‘problematic situation,’ with a distinctive quality accessed through feeling, relying on Peirce’s category of quality, which he considered Peirce’s most important philosophical discovery. Objects, whatever they may be, are found in a ‘situation,’ which is not a ‘thing’ but indeed a kind of Jamesian ‘field’ or ‘relational whole’ (Heidegger’s Bewandtnisganzheit or ‘relational whole of involvements’) that supplies the defining context not just of any form of inquiry but of our lives as a whole, which cultural psychology is deeply concerned with.

Situations and Contexts In his indispensable ‘Qualitative Thought’ essay Dewey defined this central issue of a ‘situation’ as “the subject matter ultimately referred to in existential propositions” and as “a complex existence that is held together, in spite of its internal complexity, by the fact that it is dominated and characterized throughout by a single quality” (1930, 197). A situation is ‘taken for granted, ‘understood,’ or “implicit in all propositional

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symbolization” (1930, 197). In his essay, ‘Context and Thought’ to which I will return, Dewey assimilated situation to a background that: … is implicit in some form and to some degree in all thinking, although as a background it does not come into explicit purview; that is, it does not form a portion of the subject matter which is consciously attended to, thought of, examined, inspected, turned over. (1931b, 211)

Such a notion of context is similar to Michael Polanyi’s idea of a tacit framework of various types of premises that we operatively rely upon without our being able to control them explicitly and which he connects with an extended concept of embodiment. All thought contains components of which we are subsidiarily aware in the focal content of our thinking, and all thought dwells in its subsidiaries, as if they were parts of our body. Hence, thinking is not only necessarily intentional, as Brentano has taught: it is also fraught with the roots it embodies. It has a from-to structure. (Polanyi 1966, x).

A problem for cultural psychology, and for a critical philosophy, is clearly to find a way to access this dimension or at least to recognize that it even exists. It is the pre-thematic dimension explored by the existential phenomenologists and other thinkers from other traditions, relying on different empirical materials (as samples from a large literature: Damasio 2010; Gallagher 2006; Leder 1990; Todes 2001). It is out of or within such a context that ‘objects,’ what we are ‘concerned with,’ Dewey argues, are thematized and explicitly apprehended. By an object, Dewey means “some element in the complex whole that is defined in abstraction from the whole of which it is a distinction” (1930, 197). On this account, the apprehension of objects in the field is affected by a diacritical process, a recognition of difference, indeed, as Bateson put it in his essay ‘Form, Substance, and Difference’ (Bateson 1972), differences that make a difference. Objects—including all those ‘semiotic objects’ that arise and are constituted in sign systems of all sorts—emerge in a process of “selective determination … controlled by reference to situation—to that which is constituted by a pervasive and internally integrating quality” (1930, 197). Objects are not ‘given’ but ‘placed’ or ‘located.’ Does not cultural psychology take as one of its tasks to explore these places or locations in their variable social and cultural settings? And, as cultural, are they not semiotic through and through? Dewey proposes that we consider objects, relations, and relations between relations as ‘crystallized’ out of situations, which are unified by webs of affinities, which are themselves felt and which we do not control by thematic action. Knowing, to be sure, involves ‘discrimination’ and ‘segmentation’ just as much as it involves ‘synthesis’ and ‘binding.’ The flux of experience is permeated by felt affinities in which we find ourselves carried along. Qualitative links are operative even before being thematically recognized. The task is to raise to explicit consciousness the operative web of felt affinities marking all the levels at which agents encounter the world, especially those of which they are not thematically aware. When it is said that I have a feeling, or impression, or ‘hunch,’ that things are thus and so, what is actually designated is primarily the presence of a dominating quality in a situation as a whole, not just the existence of a feeling as a psychical or psychological fact. To say I have

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a feeling or impression that so and so is the case is to note that the quality in question is not yet resolved into determinate terms and relations; it marks a conclusion without statement of the reasons for it, the grounds upon which it rests. It is the first stage in the development of explicit distinctions. All thought in every subject matter begins with just such an unanalyzed whole. When the subject matter is reasonably familiar, relevant distinctions speedily offer themselves, and sheer qualitativeness may not remain long enough to be readily recalled. But it often persists and forms a haunting and engrossing problem. It is a commonplace that a problem stated is well on its way to solution, for statement of the nature of a problem signifies that the underlying quality is being transformed into determinate distinctions of terms and relations and has become an object of articulate thought. But something presents itself as problematic before there is recognition of what the problem is. The problem is had or experienced before it can be stated or set forth; but it is had as an immediate quality of the whole situation. The sense of something problematic, of something perplexing and to be resolved, marks the presence of something pervading all elements and considerations. Thought is the operation by which it is converted into pertinent and coherent terms. (1930, 198)

The fact of perplexity at the very threshold of an experienced situation is the manifestation of something that is ‘other,’ something that is opposed to us and not under our control, that resists us, that imbalances us, a feature of experience that Peirce called ‘secondness, although Dewey does not use this Peircean terminology even if he takes over Peirce’s idea of resistances, a notion that plays a key role in Jaan Valsiner’s high-level reflections on the fundamental analytical and methodological frame of cultural psychology. The ongoing flow of experience, indeed of life itself, is interrupted in many ways. This sense of being interrupted also ‘affects’ us, giving rise to habits of reaction and response. Indeed it elicits habits in ways not always under our control—and meant, at times, not to be under our control. One of the common tasks of philosophical analysis and cultural psychology is, or would be, to study descriptively, explanatorily, and critically the varieties of felt interruptions that we experience, including those embodied in sign systems that are specifically designed to upset and introduce imbalance, uncertainty, or fear. Of course, this is not perhaps in all cases unjustified and it certainly interrupts the constant practice of what Peirce called the ‘method of tenacity,’ our tendencies to continue in frameworks that deny other options. Here is a generalized notion of ‘conflict.’ It is a formal feature of consciousness, indeed, of life itself. It is the mark of ‘difference’ in the most universal sense of that term. Cultural psychology in the pragmatist semiotic mode such as proposed by Valsiner or implied by Dewey, and extended in a different register by Mead and others, must study in detail across different cultures and subcultures the psychic consequences of individual and group encounters with difference and their connections with violence in its different modes. Being unbalanced by difference often leads to the search for an authority, or for an authorization, to overcome by force, even lethal, the imbalance undergone in the individual and in various cultural groupings that is introduced by felt opposition to one’s world model. For Dewey, one of the main contributions of philosophy, which is otherwise helpless, is to contravene such recourse to violence or force by mediating communicative interchange and self-understanding. In this, philosophy and cultural psychology stand shoulder to shoulder.

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The value dimension of both a philosophical semiotics and cultural psychology is exemplified very clearly in Dewey’s idea that in their critical function they can furnish ‘new surveys of possibilities.’ While cultural psychology is clearly not a branch of an edifying or hortatory positive psychology with its connection to the human potential movement, its studies of the varieties of forms of human self-realization show a kind of affinity with it, as well as a healthy hesitation to apply a single template to the varieties of human flourishing. Such varieties, after all, have very different generating conditions and metaphysical and ethical premises. Reflection on the ‘logic’ of these premises is one of philosophy’s main tasks, but charting their ‘realization’ in the psychic reality of lived cultural contexts involves empirical attention of the highest order. When it comes to human well-being, there is an essential tension between analysis and advocacy. Negotiating the shifting lines of demarcation presents a permanent reflective methodological problem for both philosophy and cultural psychology, more serious for the latter perhaps than for the former. The general problem of the ‘background’ of thought that Dewey deals with philosophically in ‘Context and Thought’ is certainly also a core concern for cultural psychology. Background is the “immanent presence of the contextual setting of a moving experience” that provides a connection in all our thinking. Inquiry is into which connections these are and where they come from. It is not enough to claim there is a general background. The different temporal, or historically effective, backgrounds of thinking as manifested in the actual behavior of encultured beings, the uncovering of which is a main task of cultural psychology and the historical sciences, has, on Dewey’s account, an intellectual, as well as an existential component. It is part of the ‘funded’ nature of our experiential fields. The intellectual component—clearly involving both implicit and explicit conceptual frameworks—encompasses the lived culture in its entirety, as well as the more specialized domains of theory embedded in the common sense of a culture and all of its subsectors. Together they make up a very broad notion of traditions. Dewey describes its components or constituent features in both technical and imaginal terms. “Traditions are ways of interpretation and of observation, of valuation, of everything explicitly thought of. They are the circumambient atmosphere which thought must breathe; no one ever had an idea except as he inhaled some of this atmosphere” (Dewey 1931b, 211). The existential component pinpoints a deep fact about the embodied and not just atmospherically surrounded nature of our multileveled cognitional ways of being-in-the-world, where Dewey argues that perception, action, and signification are indissolubly intertwined. We cannot explain why we believe the things which we most firmly hold to because those things are a part of ourselves. We can no more completely escape them when we try to examine into them than we can get outside our physical skins so as to view them from without. Call these regulative traditions, apperceptive organs or mental habits or whatever you will, there is no thinking without them. (Dewey 1931b, 211–212)

The notion of skin is a rich one. It is a semiotic skin, a theme that Nedergaard (2016) has creatively developed and applied within the ‘context’ of health and medical communicative practices.

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On the basis of this analogy of our mode of being aware of our lived body, a term Dewey does not use but is a core notion of existential phenomenology, Dewey argues that we can never objectify or make totally explicit the “whole contextual background” of our thinking. Cultural psychology takes as one of its tasks to discover, describe, and explain the contextual lived backgrounds of the meaning-systems or meaning-frames within which human beings live. In this way it aims to make available an ‘outside view’ that increases our ability to reflect upon them and, if need be, to free ourselves from them or at least to learn how to navigate within them. From the point of view of philosophy, it would mediate the emergence of ‘critical selfhood’ or ‘rational self-control’—certainly normative notions. Selfhood, though, arises in the processes of being engaged by and living through and in structures many of which we have produced while not being aware of their enabling conditions or being able to foresee their consequences. These conditions, Dewey rightly claims, do “not come into question at once.” There is always that which continues to be taken for granted, which is tacit, being ‘understood.’ If everything were literally unsettled at once, there would be nothing to which to tie those factors that, being unsettled, are in process of discovery and determination. (Dewey 1931b, 211)

That is why, whether theoretically or in our existential engagements, we need ‘the other’ to mediate our self-knowledge. Such a tacit background applies to each of us in the spheres of our everydayness and our funded pre-thematic but operative selfimages (Damasio and autobiographical self). It also applies to cultural psychology and philosophy in their own theoretical and self-reflective practices, which aim to be ‘methodical’ in such a way as to acknowledge different methods for arriving at results, including the result of determining what forms of inquiry they are. Each has a paradoxical cognitional standing. Each is itself subject to the very conditions it is studying. So, cultural psychology needs ‘the other’ to become aware of its own ultimate analytical contexts and their shifting contexts. The primary theoretical ‘others’ for the type of cultural psychology proposed by Jaan Valsiner, for example, are philosophy and semiotics, especially of the Peircean type. Cultural psychology’s putative subject matter, the semiosphere enveloping every domain of lived meanings, also confronts us as our ‘others’ and has to be interpreted and dialogically engaged (Lotman 1990). Hermeneutical encounters, as distinct from explanatory research, do not aim at general laws but at a felt grasping of the lived contexts of meaningmaking and action found in the “boundless multiplicity of the concrete experiences of humanity” (Dewey 1931b, 216). One has to be able to chart how concrete experiences with their contexts, and these contexts with their contexts, have arisen and been realized in lived experience.

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Scope and Relevance of Scharfstein’s Schematization of Contexts Scharfstein (1989), writing about the ‘dilemma of context,’ writes that, for purposes of analysis, the “idea of context must be broken up or qualified in order to bear systematic examination” (62). He proposes five divisions or aspects, schematizing them in a putatively simple and natural sequence of levels, as if a set of Russian dolls: microcontext, correlative context, macrocontext, metacontext, and universal or metametacontext. Nevertheless, he starts his discussion with the second for reasons that are certainly familiar to philosophical readers and to methodologically aware cultural psychologists. Correlative context is exemplified in the case of philosophical text interpretation, but as Scharfstein shows in his discussions of cultural relativism, it also bears upon cultural psychology’s and the historical sciences’ attempts to understand the emergence, structures, and differences of cultural forms. A philosophical text is only understood, Scharfstein claims, if we ‘place’ it alongside other texts of the author or texts to which the author is responding or upon which the author is drawing, explicitly, implicitly, or even unwittingly. We are in the same situation with cultural groups and the meaning-systems that inform their lives. Scharfstein points out that if per impossibile we could trace with sufficient detail the lateral linkages and dependencies, rarely does an author, or social group, fully agree with an interpretation, and indeed other interpreters often disagree among themselves for other reasons, and the self-understanding of social groups or institutions often do not see other groups or institutions as intrinsically connected with them. Trying to understand another person, or social group, cultures, and subcultures, and forms of life as kinds of critical self-writing texts is difficult. Their own selfunderstanding, which is not necessarily correct or adequate, is often at variance with their being understood by others, especially since persons, as Nietzsche and many others have forcefully argued, often display different ‘faces’ to others depending on the contexts in which they interact with them. And as to cultures, their narrative lines are not always unitary. Memories, both individual and social, are often distorted or even repressed, being accessible only in fragments. Moreover, the lived situations of lives—being married to this particular person in this particular way or attending the funeral of an estranged parent with mixed grief and relief—are also only understandable by locating it alongside the correlative factors that make it this particular situation. We are ‘in’ situations rather more than they are ‘in’ us—which, nevertheless, they effectively are, since we are ‘outcomes’ of the web of situations in which we have lived our lives. As to microcontext, still using the generalizable example of a text, Scharfstein foregrounds a “more minute scrutiny,” involving sentence by sentence, concept by concept, or personal context, as source of the “personal resonance” of the words, style, things said as opposed to merely implied, and so on. A microcontext is marked by what Peirce called its defining quale. Microcontextual analyses of texts or persons or cultures cannot be satisfied with the explicit alone; the implied or tacit is also a

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critical factor as well as, most importantly, its ‘tone.’ As to ‘reading’ a personality or a culture, as opposed to a text, it is clear that different aspects of a person or culture are often more evident in the style of spontaneous gesture, including incipient or halted micro-gestures, and in speech by reason of intonation, forms of hesitation, repetitions, than in prepared statements and official proclamations and planned systematic actions that are counterproductive. Microcontextual analysis, whether of persons, texts, or cultural systems needs to focus on the balance and relations between spontaneity and planning as well as the timing, or absence of timing, of their appearing. Ethnographic research pursues such questions—as does psychoanalysis. ‘True’ self-understanding—recognizing the ‘truth’ about oneself—is dependent upon a microcontextual analysis of ourselves in processes of deep and motivated reflection. Such reflection can also be a group undertaking, as in the various ‘peace and reconciliation’ movements where the recognition of individual personal tones is paramount. When Scharfstein says that to understand texts we must ‘descend’ to their microcontextual qualities (65), so does the descent into the Kantian hell of self-knowledge, whether individually or socially undertaken. In such a case, one is not looking for an invariant but the unique way that one, alone and in associations with others, actually and uniquely is. The microcontext is defined by its distinctive quale, whose scope, Peirce claims, is general. The quale-consciousness is not confined to simple sensations. There is a peculiar quale to purple, though it be only a mixture of red and blue. There is a distinctive quale to every combination of sensations so far as it is really synthesized—a distinctive quale to this moment as it is to me—a distinctive quale to every day and every week—a peculiar quale to my whole consciousness. (CP, 6.223)

Philosophy and cultural psychology recognize an idiographic dimension to inquiry. They must enter into detail, but clearly do not remain there. They are interested, in their theoretical aspect, in the point of the particular. Of course, if there is a microcontext, there must be a macrocontext in which it is ‘located.’ What is the relevance or role of macrocontext in our attempts to understand texts, persons/selves, situations that make up the dense web of cultures? This becomes especially problematic for philosophy and cultural psychology in that Scharfstein thinks that a macrocontext is impersonal, while a correlative context and a microcontext are personal or individual or even subpersonal in some cases. Situating a life, a text, an event, or a situation, such as for example a race riot, systemic racism, a contested election, a scientific controversy, ritual practices, in a macrocontext involves confronting forms of reflection marked by deep, even buried, sets of interests, tensions, resistances, and differently rooted blindspots or scotoses (Lonergan 1957). Multiple currents or forces are operating in many cases behind our backs over which one has no control or even fully explicit functional knowledge. They make up materially effective premises or presuppositions for thought, action, and feeling. With respect to this state of affairs Polanyi writes: When we accept a certain set of presuppositions and use them as our interpretive framework, we may be said to dwell in them as we do in our own body. Their uncritical acceptance for the time being consists in a process of assimilation by which we identify ourselves with them.

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2 Beyond the Kodak Fixation: Contexts, Situations, and Backgrounds They are not asserted and cannot be asserted, for the assertion can be made only within a framework with which we have identified ourselves for the time being; as they are ourselves our ultimate framework they are essentially inarticulable. (1958, 61)

Cultures and traditions within these cultures with all their constitutive strands make up the macrocontexts of human life. They are marked by the types of questions they allow or motivate. If we follow up the implications of Polanyi’s claim, raising them to thematic awareness will always be incomplete, having a tacit residue, found deep within our forms of existence, both as participants and as analytical observers. How, then, can one begin to grasp those overarching and not just idiosyncratic parallel or correlative structures that make up the contexts of our lives? Philosophy of culture and cultural psychology join together here. Macrocontexts are effective and constitutive with many overlapping dimensions, embedded in historically thick traditions. There is the geographical context in which one lives, the legal, social, and religious contexts in play in that bounded or porous region, the various forms of life or life practices within the interwoven contexts. What is pertinent to self-understanding or the understanding of another within a multidimensional context is substantively pertinent to understanding a text, including even understanding in hindsight a text one has written oneself—or the text that oneself is or is in process of ‘writing’ or the self that is being ‘inscribed’ in us by experience. Macrocontextual analyses ‘locate’ their objects of concern within the flux of cultural and social forms and traditions. They do not claim to ‘explain’ everything about these objects or forms from the ‘outside’ so as to demolish their originality. Novelty rules—constant struggle with repetition—throughout. But such analyses do show that in the cultural world there are different directions and velocities of force that supply simultaneously emphases and blockages. Who is able to comprehend in full manner the multitude of macrocontexts that explain—or claim to explain—the course of one’s life and multiple situations in which one has found oneself? Cultural psychology—with its twin focus on the psychic reality of meaning in both socialized individuals and in the cultural forms that are embodied and shape the collective—finds itself faced with an evolving and unending task. It joins up with philosophical self-reflection especially in its narrative aspect, so as to see oneself as the outcome of transindividual forces while still taking responsibilty for what we bring to mind (Innis 2019b, c). Scharfstein’s notion of a metacontext points to another dimension of understanding, once again going beyond the example of a text to lives in their problematic situations in the vast diversity of cultural systems. In the case of a text or a single life it is not enough to consider what questions are being answered or at least raised or what conceptual means are employed to pursue one’s life course. Metacontextual analyses of cultures and cultural forms ask why these kinds of questions are asked, or not asked at all, and why such types of argumentation and conceptual frames are used or not used. It has been claimed that Indian and East Asian forms of reasoning differ from classical Greek forms and these from Medieval and modern forms (Nisbett 2010; Scharfstein 1998) What is the reason for this? Is it linguistic, such that forms of reasoning are intrinsically tied to the whole development of the language in which a text was written or in which we describe ourselves? From where do the different

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senses of illusion and reality derive when we bring into relation Indian, European, and Chinese traditions? Scharfstein, historical thinker that he is, argues that metacontextual analyses are essentially comparative, as are clearly many cultural psychological analyses. They raise questions about the variability and foundations of the ultimate operative premises of a tradition in order not just to subject them to criticism but to confront the truth of these premises. Indeed, ultimately, at the level of a kind meta-metacontext, we confront the problem of a universal context that would make visible the whole intellectual universe of a text, a person, a culture or cultural forms and of the universal, indeed, metaphysical processes in which they are located and the categorial frames that draw the ultimate significant joints in reality. These life-determining ‘divisions’ are subject to vigorous, indeed often lethal, debate by those who only seemingly share the same background, which Dewey calls ‘spatial.’ When Dewey speaks of the “spatial background,” that is, the synchronic background, of inquiry he contends that it “covers all the contemporary setting within which a course of thinking emerges” (Dewey 1931b, 212). Alluding to, but with no explicit mention of, James’s description of the dimensions of consciousness, Dewey thinks of the “focal material of thinking” as having a kind of solidity and stability, while it is situated in a vague contextual setting, although it is “no mere fringe” (Dewey 1931b, 212). Such a characterization applies on individual and different social levels. This vagueness is no defect, but a property of the rich fields that situate and contextualize the multiple thematic focal points of our attention in the vitally important or ‘problematic’ situations in which we find ourselves. In this way Dewey appropriates and applies James’s theme-field-margin/fringe schema to the discussion of context. Dewey’s vague contextual setting is analogous to James’s field, and it appears to me, as it has to others, that it is one of the main tasks of cultural psychology to study the power of the field, whatever its mode of existence may be, to determine the ‘theme,’ around which culturally diverse groups have organized their lives. Of course, the notion of a field played a central role in Kurt Lewin’s work and Dewey was aware of it (Ratner and Altman 1964, 62, 65, 67).

On Selective Interests and the Expanding Spheres of Context Dewey emphasizes that there is “selectivity (and rejection) found in every operation of thought” (Dewey 1931b, 212), at every level and, by extension, in the various disciplines of inquiry, one of which is cultural psychology, but clearly a factor in all interpretive disciplines, no matter what their disciplinary home is. From this rather bald statement, which is scarcely disputable, Dewey introduces something of critical importance for the study of meaning-making that cultural psychology proposes to undertake and also philosophy as a human science. It is the notion that every thinker is “differentially sensitive to some qualities, problems, themes” (Dewey 1931b, 212), with which he or she feels an affinity or affective resonance. This aspect of subjectivity cannot be thought away or completely eradicated, although it does not entail a radical

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subjectivism. Just as we cannot make our bodies a total object for inspection, since we rely upon our bodies as the ultimate background for becoming aware of objects, including its individual parts, a thesis central to Michael Polanyi’s (1958 and 1966) development of the notion of tacit knowing, so, following Dewey, we cannot make totally present “all elements of selective concern; some deeper lying ones will still operate. No regress will eliminate the attitude of interest that is as much involved in thinking about attitudes as it is in thinking about other things” (Dewey 1931b, 212). Polanyi argued this point vigorously under the rubric of intellectual passions, exemplified in scientific as well as political domains. Dewey pertinently points out that we can have a genuine “affection for a standpoint,” and rightly so, because a “standpoint which is nowhere in particular and from which things are not seen at a special angle is an absurdity” (Dewey 1931b, 212). There is, by reason of the universal phenomenon of embodiment, no view from nowhere. Individuality and uniqueness are essential features of our meaningmaking engagements with the world and of our resistances to difference. Cultural psychology, with its broad scope, must determine to what degree it must concern itself with the exemplificational power of the ‘tinctured’ individual worlds unique to each individual as opposed to focusing on uncovering the inner logic of the collective meaning-frames that the individual, always in need of social support and confirmation, is necessarily situated in and that defines for him or her the ‘limits of their worlds.’ In order to avoid the ‘fallacy of premature generalization’ that Dewey so fears as one of the fatal flaws of philosophy, cultural psychology, too, has taken the path trod by pragmatism and phenomenology of keeping close to exemplifying instances in order to reach some systematic knowledge of the objective frames in which all individual processes of self-formation take place. The ‘upper blade’ of theory is joined in idiographic analysis to the ‘lower blade’ of thick descriptions of embodied lived meanings. The great value of the idiographic turn is that it will demand keen attention to the individual nuances of the presence of cultural systems in individuals and extraordinary powers of description so as to capture the dynamic processes of the successful or failed ingression of cultural forms at all levels into the psychic reality of individuals. What Dewey says about philosophy can be re-interpreted in terms of cultural psychology, and to a certain extent vice versa. This is what makes the essay on ‘Context and Thought, ‘ with which I began, so important for a proper schematization of the linked tasks joining cultural psychology and a pragmatist and semiotic philosophical framework. Dewey writes: “If the finally significant business of philosophy is the disclosure of the context of beliefs, then we cannot escape the conclusion that experience is the name for the last inclusive context” (Dewey 1931b, 215). How does such a statement bear upon about the “finally significant business” of cultural psychology? Cultural psychology can certainly be taken to point back to experience itself as the last inclusive context of the processes that give rise to all the objectified contents that make up the cultural world. These processes are actions occurring in the open helical spiral of semiosis, the production and interpretation of signs, itself

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rooted in the functional circle that defines the parameters of our interactions with the world. However, the reflective character of human sign use raises a different issue for cultural psychology and its philosophical links and dimensions. It raises the same questions for philosophy itself. Philosophy for Dewey, we saw, employs a method of “reconstruction through criticism” (Dewey 1931b, 215), the upshot of which can be both positive and negative. We employ such a method at our peril since we cannot be absolutely certain of the normative validity of our criticism. This normative matter is different from description and explanation. Cultural psychology intersects here with philosophy in that it can supply essential descriptive components to our understanding of what Dewey calls the “generating conditions” of beliefs. But tracing beliefs to their sources is not in itself criticism. Moreover, beliefs are not just held or expressed discursively. They are embodied and ‘memorialized’ in material artifacts of every sort, especially in public monuments and sculptures and the ornamented surfaces that we encounter in all the spaces of life (Innis 2019a, b; Valsiner 2018). Dewey’s ‘reconstruction through criticism’ entails that we should distinguish both in philosophy and in cultural psychology a genetic component, a structural component, and a critical component in the analysis of beliefs. Culture as a system of embodied meanings emerges (genetic aspect) out of specific forms of activity on the part of ‘associated subjects’ and confronts them in such a way that these systems face them as objective structures (structural aspect). These systems force them by their resisting powers to higher levels of reflexivity, involving principled resistance to these objective structures or the realization that they have unexpected implications that they wish to develop further (critical aspect). For cultural psychology these resistances, as manifested in the results of the clash of opposing and partially overlapping cultural systems, are first and foremost facts that must be described and explained. For philosophy these resistances are matters not just for description and explanation but for criticism. While philosophy as reconstructive criticism of beliefs and the contexts of belief goes beyond cultural psychology, it nevertheless must utilize its indispensable discoveries and data in order for it to not beat its own critical reconstructive wings in the void. This is an essential lesson for philosophy to learn. Philosophy in the pragmatist mode shares with cultural psychology a focal concern with ‘experience,’ existential ground zero of psychology, “the last inclusive context,” as Dewey remarked. (Dewey 1931b, 215). Of course, if experience is this last inclusive context, it is necessary to construct an adequate conception or model of experience, since both philosophy and cultural psychology must acknowledge “the indispensability of context in thinking when that recognition is carried to its full term (Dewey 1931b, 215). Dewey, for his part, distinguishes what he calls three upward moving “deepening levels or three expanding spheres of context” (Dewey 1931b, 215). The first level is the level of the individual thinker, marked by the range and vitality of experience of the one doing the thinking. But each individual thinker, as one sees from the outside, is subject to bias, one-sidedness, systematic distortion. The individual needs acquaintance with the experience of others through “sympathetic inter-communication”

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(Dewey 1931b, 216). One hears an echo here of Peirce’s strictures against the method of tenacity in his famous essay on ‘The Fixation of Belief’ and the proposal of the experimental method as the only grounded scientific procedure—also in any philosophy that intends to be ‘experimental’ and subject to experiential resistances. The second level, “the next wide circle or deepened stratum of context,” Dewey calls ‘culture,’ with the qualification that he is using it in the sense employed by anthropologists. This ‘next wide circle’ is clearly the domain of research that cultural psychology engages. It must be thought of in non-doctrinal semiotic terms— extending beyond the bare models of sign types to the content-oriented investigations of the hermeneutical tradition and other interpretive projects that do not necessarily go under the rubric of semiotics or even cultural psychology, but could nevertheless be read and reformulated in more systematic ways by making the analytical framework more visible. Culture in this sense is made up of interlocked systems of semiotic embodiments. The important link between a pragmatist philosophical project such as Dewey’s and a cultural psychology such as Valsiner and others propose is that, in the last analysis, philosophy, as Dewey puts it, is devoted to the “universal,” but cannot reach it on its own. It needs concreteness so that the analytical engine is not merely idling. Cultural psychology is likewise situated between these two poles, since as a theory of the psychic reality and consequences of cultural forms it needs sufficiently universal analytical categories, but they must be applicable to all the cultural experience as a whole. Valsiner helpfully proposes normativity, liminality, and resistances as three cultural universals. I have discussed the scope and domains of application of this triad elsewhere (Innis 2020). Valsiner’s philosophically relevant triad, based upon deep methodological and theoretical reflection and long experience, offers strong support for Dewey’s claim that “a universal which has its home exclusively or predominantly in philosophy is a sure sign of isolation and artificiality” (Dewey 1931b, 216). Universals that are at home in the same way in cultural psychology or psychology or other human sciences are under equal pressure of avoiding isolation and artificiality. What is their analytical status? Where are they all to look? Dewey answers from the philosophical side: in “the significant features and outcomes of human experience as found in human institutions, traditions, impelling interests, and occupations” (216), precisely the domain that cultural psychology examines in concreto with the help of thick descriptions of exemplifying instances organized in light of Valsiner’s triad of universals. As to the third context “the context of the make up of experience itself” (Dewey 1931b, 216), Dewey thinks, as I have already noted, that it is very dangerous for philosophy to start here independently through a generalization of individual experience. It must not have recourse to a model constructed without wide attention to “the boundless multiplicity of the concrete experiences of humanity” (Dewey 1931b, 216), Valsiner’s making of meaning out of ordinary life. Out of a close study of these concrete experiences reflection will “naturally terminate in some sense of the structure of any and all experience” (Dewey 1931b, 216). Philosophers, says Dewey, need a close and thorough familiarity with all those disciplines that will “afford indications as to the nature of this structure” (Dewey 1931b, 216). Cultural psychology is one of

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the prime material sources of these indications for philosophy just as a broad based semiotics is a prime analytical source for cultural psychology.

On the Betweenness of Atmospheres Gernot Böhme’s development of the concept of an ‘atmosphere’ offers a confirmation, reconfiguration, and supplementation of Dewey’s claim that the life-world, both social and cultural, is primarily defined by its vast array of affective qualities and affect-laden situations. Böhme (2017a) remarks that the “expression ‘atmospheric’ is applied to persons, spaces, and to nature” (11). It is a fundamentally polysensory ‘aisthetic’ as well as, by extension, ‘aesthetic,’ not causal, concept. It is connected with environmental or situational factors or elements that initially ground and produce an affective and not primarily conceptual impression, a mood or a sense of ‘being tuned’ in a certain way. In Böhme’s Atmospheric Architectures: The Aesthetics of Felt Spaces (2017b) the German word Befindlichkeit is sometimes translated as ‘disposition’ (also used by Dewey) or ‘mood,’ a more subjectively grounded term. At other times it is translated as ‘attunement,’ depending on whether it is we who are being tuned or the world being tuned. The focal point is where the emphasis is: on the balance of reciprocity between the subjective or objective pole of the dynamic intentional bond with the world. Atmosphere, as proposed by Böhme, is the Janus-faced in between joining the feeling organism with a complex environment. Atmospheres, while real, are not free floating independent ‘things’ or free-standing ‘objects.’ Böhme argues that an atmosphere is something ‘quasi-objective’ that exists intersubjectively, implying by this that they are not merely private or inner states. They are characterized in language – as happy, smiling, depressing, exciting, and so forth—by the different ways they affect us, such as the atmosphere of a room, a building or neighborhood, a landscape or cityscape, or a philosophy seminar. Their naming, which involves creative recognition of a distinctive quality, is, as Dewey put it, the interpretive and evaluative process of “going out into symbolization and analysis,” a process that could also lead to profound discord or dissonance if the affectively charged descriptive frames to which we have been assimilated—or which have been imposed on us—are not grounded in coherent configurations of ‘generating’ particulars of the atmosphere. Atmospheres, emerging from and affectively framing situations, dis-pose us by our dwelling in and growing into them. Although the notion of atmosphere has a meteorological origin, like a certain mood hanging in the air as weather patterns exemplify (see Ingold 2011a, b), Böhme proposes that we can best think of atmospheres as tuned spaces, that is, spaces with a certain mood. They are not ‘objects’ but the ‘tone’ emitted by object-grounded situations. Atmospheres, looked at one way, are ‘spatial’ and emotional places in which we dwell. They are named by attending to their characteristics, their “tendencies to modify my own mood” (2017a, 2), a naming process handed down to us by the ‘idiom’ in which we come to mental life. Polanyi thought this process of mood formation and modification happens fatefully

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behind our backs, tacitly, with no operative action on our part and thus become part of our form of existence. They are a form of affective semiotic skin (Nedergaard 2016). Conceptual frameworks and the symbol systems of societies have or create their own atmospheres. Looked at through Böhme’s lenses, contexts and situations of thought, Dewey’s multileveled ‘inclusive mental life,’ are marked by the “atmosphere they are radiating” (2017a, 6). Confirming Dewey’s core insight, Böhme claims that ‘radiating atmospheres’ of all sorts is a universal phenomenon of the lifeworld, involving in the modern world a “ubiquitous aesthetization of our lifeworld … of staging of everything, every event and performance” (2017a, 6), joining affect-laden perception, rooted in the body, and the explicitly semiotic, and rhetorical, world of the articulate animals that we are. Atmospheres, according to Böhme, have a “peculiar intermediary status” between subject and object in that both are ‘in’ it, rather than its being in them, similar to Peirce’s claim that we are in thought rather than thought being in us. Böhme connects the concept of an atmosphere with Walter Benjamin’s notion of aura, which Böhme asserts, is “almost something like a breath or a haze” that one takes into oneself, permeating the affective-somatic tonus of the perceiver. As Dewey’s remarkable formulation puts it, such taking in and going out proceeds serially and rhythmically by waves throughout the body, engendering a felt rational ordering of qualities or a felt disordering, where the affective, the actional, and the conceptual/symbolic orders go their own way and, in extreme circumstances, all that is solid vanishes into the air. Böhme for his part develops the explicit connection of atmospheres with the body with reliance on Hermann Schmitz’s ‘new phenomenology.’ This phenomenology, Böhme remarks, is not bound to things, but to the spatial character of atmospheres, “without borders, disseminated and yet without place, that is, not localizable,” yet felt as present. Atmospheres are “affective powers of feeling, spatial bearers of moods” (2017a,16), such as the strained atmosphere of a room, an oppressive thundery atmosphere, the serene atmosphere of a garden, the tension of a political debate or rally (2017a, 16). We undergo these atmospheres, are taken up, even seized and changed by them, our body a locus of tension and expansion and in its affectivity manifesting itself in bodily impulses and symbolic actions and declarations. These atmospheres can clearly interrupt us or surprise us or alienate us – or seduce us. But looked at positively, they are also forms of attunement meant to accommodate us to the world and its ‘toned’ objects and to the situations with distinctive qualities within which these objects and their relations appear. Dewey in a famous chapter in Art as Experience (1934) wrote of the organization of energies, referring both to the energies of the perceiver and the energies of things, their potencies and shades of expressiveness. There is an obverse phenomenon here: felt disorganization of energies, scattering, lack of center and central control, incoherence. Böhme, from a phenomenological perspective, proposes in analogous fashion—with perhaps a bit of poetic license—that we think of things and their ‘ecstasies’ and not of things and their determining subject-independent properties. Things are to defined in terms of their powers. Like Dewey, Böhme claims that our relation to the field of experience is not to be looked at first and foremost as

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to ‘objects’ which we ‘represent’ in neutral and static fashion, which Dewey characterized as a ‘Kodak fixation,’ namely, a snapshot. Our fundamental intertwining with the environmental field is marked by an evolving awareness of “my state of being in an environment—how I feel here” (2017a, 18) and how this feeling is led by apprehending the ways things go forth from themselves with radiating and luring power and with our striving to find a ‘fitting’ characterization and response to them and not just a pragmatic adjustment. Thinking of even “so-called primary qualities such as extension and form as ecstasies,” as not being enclosed within limits, takes away “the homogeneity of the surrounding space” and fills it with “tensions and suggestions of movement” (2017a, 19)—including the diversity of movements of symbolization that mark human meaning-making. This is a generalizable point. The ‘movements’ are not just individual but also social, such as joining in a riot, being swayed to vote or to support a candidate who ‘radiates’ a distinctive ‘tinctured’ atmosphere rather than a coherent program—as in the rise of rightwing populism or the historical instances of fascism. This notion of a space, including social space, is of something ‘being tinctured’ or created by the dynamic presence of things, persons, and environmental constellations (2017a, 19). It is not something ‘free floating’ but a vibratory medium. Conceived in this fashion, atmospheres are neither something objective, that is, qualities possessed by things, and yet they are something thing-like, belonging to the thing in that things articulate their presence through qualities—conceived as ecstasies. Nor are atmospheres something subjective, determinations of a psychic state. And yet they are subjectlike, belong to subjects in that they are sensed in bodily presence by human beings and this sensing is at the same time a bodily state of being of subjects in space. (2017a, 19)

Atmospheres define or ground a distinctive sense of whereness, the sharing of which grounds habits of “trust between people” (2017a, 126), like the odor of a nest with its aura of safety and commonality, giving it a feel of home. Every indwelt space “enters our disposition as a touching character,” eliciting from us or motivating us to acknowledge, and act accordingly, that we are participants not observers of the atmospheres in which we live and produce through our own actions—including allowing those produced through the actions of others (2017a, 129). Is it possible, indeed necessary, to characterize the failure, on both the individual and the social levels, to live up to or to construct ‘qualitatively rich’ frameworks for living as a form of existential untruth with deep affective and actional consequences, a condition cognate to false consciousness? And can we also see the aggressive repelling of ‘strangers’ or ‘outsiders’ as arising from the sense that our ‘nests’ are being invaded? Both philosophy and cultural psychology can find in the notion of atmospheres an analytical tool of great power. These atmospheres tune us into what Böhme calls, in another context, “the great concert of the world.” But, I propose, they can also generate, by reason of their supporting elements, which we could think of as Polanyian subsidiaries, a world out of tune, a world that is ‘untrue’ to our existence and to our hunger for experiential meaning. A ‘bad’ atmosphere is a kind of experiential ‘untruth,’ devoid of

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2 Beyond the Kodak Fixation: Contexts, Situations, and Backgrounds

affectively tuned aisthetic fulfillment and introducing existential and symbolic imbalance. Clearly, cultural psychology can take on the tasks of uncovering their diverse cultural roots as part of its normative role. Atmospheres as emergent qualities arising from their ‘generators’ shape the very felt contexts of our existence, our ‘placeways’ (Innis 2017), and form over time distinct sensibilities in those who dwell in them and make. How difficult, then, to try to free ourselves from—or at least make ourselves aware of—the affective force of these contexts, our forms of life informed by multileveled cultural traditions. One is reminded of Wittgenstein’s aphorism that if a lion could speak we would not be able to understand her. Are we not in many ways by reason of being embodied or dwelling in affectively charged atmospheres—including the semiotic ones both produced by and producing them—often lions to one another? Are our debates so rooted in existence that we cannot come to mutual understanding and hence at common truth, however tentative, based on “trust between people” and recognition and acceptance of radical differences that still allow us to leave one another alone and abstain from the use of force to impose uniformity and unanimity.

Between Force and Meaning: Turning to the Semiotic Dimension Dewey writes in Experience and Nature (1925, 132) that ‘naming’ gives events a double life by embedding them in the processes of communicative discourse. Dewey was supremely aware of the great role symbolic formations play in the formation of community and of the consequences of the breakdown of common symbols. In The Public and Its Problems he wrote: Symbols control sentiment and thought, and the new age has no symbols consonant with its activities. Intellectual instrumentalities for the formation of an organized public are more inadequate than its overt means. The ties which hold men together in action are numerous, tough, and subtle. But they are invisible and intangible. We have the physical tools of communication as never before. The thoughts and aspirations congruous with them are not communicated, and hence are not common … Communication can alone create a great community. Our Babel is not one of tongues but of the signs and symbols without which shared experience is impossible. (1927, 142)

Dewey’s rich text refers first and foremost to the political order, but it has implications and applications far beyond it. Cultural systems, with their different orders and suborders, tie us together not just in action but in the structures of our affects and the ultimate symbolic systems that we rely upon to orient us toward what the liberal protestant theologian Paul Tillich called ‘our ultimate concern,’ exemplified in the ‘limit situations’ of life that Karl Jaspers explored in his philosophy of existence. The clash between political orders that apply to everyone living in the polity and the other cultural orders marked by radical differences in ultimate premises and commitments leads to severe conflict. Ultimate premises and commitments entail deep existential consequences, especially in the affective dimensions of our lives and our adherence to

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our own points of view. Philosophy and cultural psychology face normative tasks and concerns of the highest order. They face the challenge of mediating understanding of differences by fostering of cross-cultural communication. Dewey addresses this challenge, too, and in the following rich passage, which I cite at length as a way of opening and contextualizing the path to the next chapter, outlines an ideal of life to the realization of which philosophy and cultural psychology must contribute in multiple ways, with, however, no guarantee that their contributions can be made purely from ‘on high.’ Dewey writes: Participation in activities and sharing in results are additive concerns. They demand communication as a prerequisite. Combined activity happens among human beings … Only when there exist signs or symbols of activities and of their outcome can the flux be viewed as from without, be arrested for consideration and esteem, and be regulated. … [W]hen phases of the process are represented by signs, a new medium is interposed. As symbols are related to one another, the important relations of a course of events are recorded and are preserved as meanings. Recollection and foresight are possible; the new medium facilitates calculation, planning, and a new kind of action which intervenes in what happens to direct its course in the interest of what is foreseen and desired. Symbols in turn depend upon and promote communication. The results of conjoint experience are considered and transmitted. Events cannot be passed from one to another, but meanings may be shared by means of signs. Wants and impulses are then attached to common meanings. They are thereby transformed into desires and purposes, and which, since they implicate a common or mutually understood meaning, present new ties, converting a joint activity into a community of interest and endeavor. Thus there is generated what, metaphorically, may be termed a general will and social consciousness: desire and choice on the part of individuals in behalf of activities that, by means of symbols, are communicable and shared by all concerned. A community thus presents an order of energies transmuted into one of meanings which are appreciated and mutually referred each to every part of those engaged in combined action (my italics). ‘Force’ is not eliminated but is transformed in use and direction by ideas and sentiments made possible by means of symbols. (1927, 152–153)

Cultural psychology and philosophy, participants rather than merely observers of this process, looked at through Deweyan lenses, can play a central role by fostering in multiple formats and throughout the complex webs of human institutions the ‘force of understanding’ of the roots and effects of differences, symbolic and material, that are put into play in the ‘combined activity’ of human agents. These agents are ‘located’ in swirling currents of meaning-making. It is imperative, then, to foreground in more detail the semiotic contours of these agents and to outline the various schematizations of meaning-making that join philosophy and cultural psychology in their common multifocal tasks at the thresholds of sense.

Chapter 3

Semiotic Framing of Thresholds of Sense

Abstract Semiotics studies the systems of sign configurations that make up as well as inform the objective frames of self-formation within which human meaningmaking takes place. It is directly linked in multiple ways with cultural psychology’s deepest concerns: the genesis of cultural meaning and its psychic realization and spread. We have at our disposal powerful analytical resources for highlighting and outlining central features of these thresholds. They allow us to draw lines through the semiotic continuum in different ways. Complementary approaches to linking perception with semiosis can specify the paths sign production follows in consciousness and the semiotic powers of and relations between different types of sign systems. C. S. Peirce’s triad of icon, index, and symbol, Karl Bühler’s triad of symptom/index, signal, and symbol, and Ernst Cassirer’s triad of expression, representation, and pure signification exemplify in interlocking ways how to carry out such analyses. Keywords Sign-systems · Typologies of signs · Matrices of cultural meanings · Peirce’s triadic model of signs and of the self · Bühler’s organon-model of language · Cassirer’s formative modes of consciousness · Relation between signs and forms · Thresholds of sense

Turning to Semiotics Semiotics, in the broadest sense and in its different forms, studies the systems of sign configurations that make up as well as inform the objective frames of self-formation within which human meaning-making takes place. It is directly linked in multiple ways with cultural psychology’s deepest concerns: the genesis of cultural meaning and its psychic realization and spread, pivotal exemplifications of which Valsiner has extensively studied. These systems make up what Ernst Cassirer called ‘form worlds’—language, artistic images, mythical symbols or religious rites, scientific and mathematical systems—that make up an ‘artificial medium,’ the “symbolic net” that captures experience in a “tangled web” (1944, 25). Each form world as a sign

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 R. E. Innis, Between Philosophy and Cultural Psychology, SpringerBriefs in Psychology and Cultural Developmental Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58190-9_3

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configuration is defined by a semiotic logic that shapes it as an ‘access structure’ within which we apprehend systems of relevant units and patterns of relations in experience. These form worlds, with their distinctive ‘feel,’ leave what Dewey calls a “qualitative impress” upon experience (Dewey 1931a, 213), informing the self on all levels. Human meaning-makers dwell in vast networks of signs that make up their distinctive functional circle, the symbolic circle. These networks function like semiotically constituted exosomatic bodies just as the networks of tools, instruments, and machines arising from processes of organ-projection that accompany and extend sign processes, constitute an essential dimension of the exosomatic bodies in which we dwell (Innis 2002). Such frames, along with geographically specific environments, supply the ultimate cultural contexts within which the activities of human meaning-making and their psychic consequences are to be understood. Semiotics foregrounds the form of placement or locating of meaning-makers in the universe of signs. There is, of course, no universal agreement about just how we are to divide the semiotic continuum into its ultimate units and how to map the upper and lower boundaries or thresholds within which we operate. Roman Jakobson considered language “a purely semiotic system” upon which other sign systems were dependent in some way of the other, but at the same time asserted that “semiotics deals with those general principles which underlie the structure of all signs whatever” (1971, 698). Dewey wrote in his Experience and Nature (1925, 146) that for us language is the “cherishing mother of all significance,” but not in the sense that the signifying powers of the language animal’s offspring—art, myth, religion, ritual, mathematics—are merely derivative and never go beyond the semiotic power and reach of language in the normal discursive or pragmatic sense. Moreover, Dewey thought that language can or should be taken in its widest sense to include not just written or oral speech or gestures but “rites, ceremonies, monuments and the products of industrial and fine arts” such as temples, statues, and looms (1938, 51–52). Semiotics clearly cannot be, and its practices shows that it is not, logocentric. We live in a dynamic plurality of interlocked forms of mediated and parasitical experiences in all their concreteness (Serres 1982; Brown and Stenner 2009). It is the very capacity of existing in an all-permeating realm of mediations that allows humans to go beserk, affectively, actionally, and logically, and to construct multidimensional symbolic structures that in being transformed into actions destroy not just themselves but others. Having spun symbolic nets out of ourselves, we proceed to spin ourselves into them and identify with them as the only possible frameworks of meaning. Semiotic objectification leads to reification. This is a permanent possibility of humans as the symbolic species. The vast differences of cultural forms in which we are embedded generate fields of resistances between different form worlds with their often seemingly radically different contents. Derangement can lead to pathological forms of violence if the interruptions and felt systems of resistances challenge the very foundations of the sign configurations that make up what Yuri Lotman (1990) called the human ‘semiosphere.’

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How can one frame from an explicitly semiotic perspective the subjective and objective frames, the thresholds of sense, within which experience takes on multileveled forms of meaning? We have at our disposal powerful analytical resources for highlighting and outlining central features of these thresholds. They allow us to draw lines through the semiotic continuum in different ways, but in doing so they illustrate complementary approaches to linking perception with semiosis, specifying the paths sign production follows in consciousness and the semiotic powers of and relations between different types of sign systems. These are long and winding paths, to be sure, but my goal is not elaborate presentation, which I have carried out elsewhere (see references), but analytical schematizing and exemplification of pivotal notions. There an analytical line linking (a) Peirce’s claim in his (1868) ‘Some Consequences of Four Incapacities’ that “whenever we think we have present to consciousness some feeling, image, conception, or other representation, which serves as a sign” (74) to (b) Karl Bühler’s exploitation of the “duality of phonic image and word meaning” (1927, 14) and the heuristic power of his organ-model of language for establishing the centrality of diacrisis and abstraction in establishing “the sense functions of signs” (1927, 47) quite generally to (c) Ernst Cassirer’s analysis of the symbolic net of ‘form worlds’ and the ‘formative modes of consciousness’ that generate them. Not every important semiotic analysis of cultural forms must exclusively or explicitly rely on the categorial apparatus of these three. But their openness to development and extension as well as their incorporation of materials from the whole history of thought on these ‘threshold’ matters merit close attention as analytical models and tools. I have given more extensive and differently configured treatments of the following themes elsewhere (Innis 1982; 1988; 1994; 2002; 2012).

Peirce’s Semiotic Triads and the Bottomless Lake of Consciousness In a rich and allusive text Peirce offered a striking image of consciousness, on first view quite different from his friend William James’s image of the stream of consciousness with its eddies and currents, a notion taken up in phenomenology. … our whole past experience is continually in our consciousness, though most of it sunk to a great depth of dimness. I think of consciousness as a bottomless lake, whose waters seem transparent, yet into which we can clearly see but a little way. But in this water there are countless objects at different depths; and certain influences will give certain kinds of those objects an upward impulse which may be intense enough and continue long enough to bring them into the upper visible layer. After the impulse ceases they commence to sink downwards. (CP, 7.547)

In another text Peirce ‘divides the water,’ distinguishing “three parts or faculties of the soul or modes of consciousness,” calling them “constant ingredients of our knowledge” and “congenital tendencies of the mind” (CP, 1.374). Peirce delineates these modes in the following way:

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3 Semiotic Framing of Thresholds of Sense … first, feeling, the consciousness that can be included with an instant of time, passive consciousness of quality, without recognition or analysis; second, consciousness of an interruption into the field of consciousness, sense of resistance, of an external fact, of another something; third, synthetic consciousness, binding time together, sense of learning, thought. (CP, 1.377)

These modes are called in other contexts ‘primisense,’ ‘altersense,’ and ‘medisense’ and are even considered by Peirce to be “faculties of the soul” (CP, 1.374). The self, on Peirce’s account, is to be understood as a triadic congeries of (a) feelings or affective qualities, (b) felt senses of resistances that distinguish between, as well as connect, self and something other, and (c) abductive processes of synthesizing, or bringing into unity, of an affective/indexical array, reducing multiplicity to unity by means of an ‘idea’ or ‘medium’ of connection. This image of the bottomless lake and the triadic division encompasses both individual and collective forms of consciousness. In his review of James’s Principles of Psychology Peirce had asked whether James’s classification of ‘mental states’ into feelings and thoughts, a duality, was sufficiently scientific. He proposed replacing ‘mental states’ with a logical division of mental elements: feeling-qualities, reactions, and habit-taking. And while Peirce wrote at one time that consciousness is “a very vague term” (CP, 8.256), he still continued to maintain that these elements of consciousness, while radically different, are an analytical ultimate, “these and no more:” immediate feeling, the polar sense, and synthetical consciousness (“the consciousness of a third or medium”) (CP, 1.382). The pattern informing our conscious appropriation of the world—in all its orders—is complex, for “every kind of consciousness enters into cognition” (CP, 1.381) and into our engagements with the meaning-drenched forms that make up the world of culture. Although, as Peirce writes, feelings that make up the affective plenum “form the warp and woof of cognition,” and while “the will, in the form of attention [to the other], constantly enters,” cognition is neither feeling nor the polar sense. It is “consciousness of process, and this in the form of the sense of learning, of acquiring, of mental growth.” It cannot be immediate for it cannot be “contracted into an instant.” It is “the consciousness that binds our life together. It is the consciousness of synthesis” (CP, 1.381). Cultural forms, as sign configurations, manifest the ways of binding our lives together, lives that in themselves are unique with their distinctive qualities and with their relations to others marked by radical differences. Each man has his own peculiar character. It enters into all he does. It is in his consciousness and not a mere mechanical trick… as it enters into all his cognition, it is a cognition of things in general. It is therefore the man’s philosophy, his way of regarding things; not a philosophy of the head alone—but one which pervades the whole man. This idiosyncrasy is the idea of the man. (CP, 7.595)

Peircean semiotics proposes in laconic fashion that the ideosyncratic ‘idea’ of a person that “pervades the whole man” and not “the head alone” is the felt unity—or disunity—of the affective, actional, and thought fields that make up a person’s life. It marks the felt pervasive quality of a person’s life—“a peculiar quale to my whole

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consciousness” (CP, 6.223)—and of the person’s mode of appearing to others, which can also be the realization of a shared culturally predominant mode or ‘style’ that has been internalized and is constantly reenforced. In his (1935) essay, ‘Peirce’s Theory of Quality,’ Dewey, in a kind of gloss, saw such a notion as Peirce’s key philosophical discovery: the determination of the presence of a “sheer totality and pervading unity of quality in everything experienced, whether it be odor, the drama of King Lear, or philosophic or scientific systems” (371). The peculiar quale to my whole consciousness and its contents is that of a semiotically determined being: “the entire phenomenal manifestation of mind … is a sign resulting from inference” (1868, 53), that is, acts of interpretation by which ‘mind’ accesses experience both passively and actively through signs. This is the phenomenal manifestation that semiotics studies and that connects it with cultural psychology, as the following text with its slippages between ‘word,’ ‘sign,’ ‘language,’ and ‘thought’ illustrates. There is no element whatever of man’s consciousness that has not something corresponding to it in the word; and the reason is obvious. It is that the word or sign that man uses is the man himself. For, as the fact that every thought is a sign, taken in conjunction with the fact that life is a train of thought, proves that man is a sign, so, that every thought is an external sign, proves that man is an external sign. That is to say, the man and the external sign are identical, in the same sense that the words homo and man are identical. Thus my language is the sum total of myself; for the man is the thought. (1868, 87)

On this account, my culture’s sign systems are the sum total of myself, including both enabling as well as constraining and diminishing my abilities to take a critical distance from it. Sign and sign systems make their objects known according to the specific semiotic powers that make up and channel what James called “the free water of consciousness.” These powers are at work as ‘certain influences’ in the bottomless lake. Peirce’s ‘man is a sign’ entails that a sign “must plainly have some characters which belong to it in itself … the material qualities of the sign” (CP, 4.447). This position is echoed in, but not strictly identical with, Vološinov’s assertion that “consciousness itself can arise and become a visible fact only in the material embodiment of signs” (1973, 11). The ‘symbolic’ dimension—that is, the explicit human use of signs—is the defining frame of distinctively human intercourse with the world. It is the core activity that holds human experience together, around and out of which sense-making grows and develops in its dynamic branching. The material qualities of signs have distinctive tones or feels, even in the omnipresent feel of discursive or representational transparency where the word-signs fade in their physical presence into the background and are not self-focusing as in Jakobson’s poetic function. Philosophy and cultural sciences make us aware of signs and their ‘qualities’ in a thematic way. What, then, do we have to think about when we think about signs in what Peirce called this “second step in the use of language” when we think of signs as signs? Peirce defines what a sign is with deceptive generality, echoing, continuing, and extending classical themes and classifications. A sign, or representamen, is something which stands to somebody for something is some respect or capacity. It addresses somebody, that is, creates in the mind of that person an

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3 Semiotic Framing of Thresholds of Sense equivalent sign, or perhaps a more developed sign. That sign that it creates I call the interpretant of the first sign. The sign stands for something, its object. It stands for that object, not in all respects, but in reference to some sort of idea, which I have sometimes called the ground of the representamen. (CP, 2. 228)

The sign is not the thing or object it refers to. It stands for it by being linked in some way to it. It has a significate effect—an interpretant sign—on its addresee, which can be oneself. The significate effect to which the sign gives birth, as Peirce put it, can go beyond the coded or established sense of the sign, but it “is at least, in all cases, a sufficiently close analogue of a modification of consciousness” (1998, 411). The link between sign and object is not unrestricted. It has to have a ground of delimitation and pertinence. Peirce correlated the categorical triad of forms or modes of consciousness— feeling, reaction, and thought—with his most fundamental triad of classes of signs: icons, indices, and symbols. This division divides the field of awareness into three modes or dimensions of signification and their accompanying proper significate effects, the birth of equivalent signs arising out of signs. In line with his three elements of consciousness and their proper objects, Peirce pointed out that universally we (a) immediately are grasped by or apprehend qualities in the flux of experience (ground of iconicity) (b) are guided by, and attend to, trails of existential connections (ground of indexicality), and (c) form general conceptions or their equivalents (ground of symbolicity) that bind experience into intelligible unities, types, and laws. This division gives rise to the fundamental and most well-known, through not original, Peircean semiotic triad of (a) icons, which Peirce in one formulation divided into images, diagrams, metaphors or figured speech, linked to their objects by resemblances of some sort, grounded in a shared quality, (b) indices such as scars, blushes, tracks in the snow, smears on a diagnostic plate, weather vanes, a hesitant gesture, a different manner of walking, linked to their objects by existential connections whether natural or cultural, forcing our attention to the linkages, (c) symbols and symbol systems—language, mathematical systems, contracts, legal systems, political forms and so forth—whose objects are general conceptions and habits arising from powers of generalizing abstraction. A central, indeed challenging, consequence of the Peircean approach is not the distinction between icons, indices, and symbols, but his grounding them in an ultimate triadic division of the elements of consciousnes: “these and no more.” Reflection on the social and cultural play of signs leads us back to the fundamental forms of meaning-making and modes of consciousness: the iconic domain of feeling, the indexical domain of action and resistant existent particularity, and the inventive symbolic domain of concepts and ideas that are not restricted to discourse. These distinctions throw a powerful light on the ultimate factors at work at the thresholds where self and world mutually inform one another through the production and interpretation of signs. Iconic signs present in shaped forms with an ‘affective charge’ what Susanne Langer called the ‘morphology of feeling.’ They make up a central part of the circulation of meaning in cultures and fill the affective or pleromatic plenum of life with vast arrays of images of realized feelings of specific sorts. They give birth to the

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emotional/affective interpretant in Peirce’s schema, modifications of the very tone or distinctive feel of consciousness of qualities. It is the specific function of iconic signs to capture, embody, and enact the felt qualities of the world and our deepest affective commitments. The qualitative determinations of this plenum—luringness, friendliness, threatening, indifference, and so forth—are the permeating core of Dewey’s “boundless multiplicity of the concrete experiences of humanity” (Dewey 1931a, 216), the generative matrix of the processes of the meaning-making out of ordinary life foregrounded by Valsiner (2018) in his rich work on ornamented lives. This affective or feeling core is expressed in the great pregnant images of art, music, ritual and myth, and the secular and sacred sacramental forms and acts that mark the life of feeling at the thresholds of sense. These images and action make up part of the great liminal realm in which we relate ourselves through feeling to the unfathomable processes of nature naturing and affirm, or deny, the togetherness, or separation, of diverse social collectives. The indexical mode of consciousness, being caught up in vectors or directive lines of force that constrain, or interrupt, our attention and lure it, often without our control, toward identifying the carriers of felt differences, foregrounds pragmatic engagement with the world, our ‘dealing concernedly’ with it in interlocked networks of receptivity and activity, of undergoing and doing, of avoidance or pursuit. It is exemplified quite generally in the role of perceptual vectors and particulars in everyday life and in, for example, connoisseurship in artwork authentication, reading of X-rays, wine tasting, medical diagnoses, and so forth. Indexicality, as well as iconicity, also functions below the human symbolic level of semiosis. It is a mark of sensibility or more generally ‘alert beings.’ The failure to attend to environmental indices, no matter how low or how high, can be catastrophic both on the natural and the cultural orders. The realized force or effect of indices, Peirce’s energetic interpretant, involving a sense ‘muscular’ effort (CP, 5.475) arising out of the emotional/affective interpretant, is matched by the existential consequences of ignoring them. The symbolic moment or mode of consciousness, as Peirce defines it, is exemplified in the highest degree on the human level, although there are prefigurements on lower levels. It is a metabasis eis allo genos. It is constituted by the grasp of a unity, coherence, or focus in the experiential array by a mediating synthesis that grasps the object or ‘thing meant,’ some sort of typological constancy or regularity of expectations, some ‘idea’ or ‘rule’ which holds things together. The modification, indeed the restructuring of consciousness by the symbolic apprehending, is what Peirce calls the ‘logical interpretant.’ On the human level of semiosis, marked by thirdness or mediation, the level of law, regularity, and rational habits, the prior levels of iconicity and indexicality are transformed into and embedded in properly symbolic formations, exemplified in language as a purely semiotic phenomenon. It is extremely important to note, however, that ‘symbolic’ and ‘logical’ do not exclusively mean ‘discursive,’ a distinction central to Susanne Langer’s division of the semiotic continuum and her development of a theory of presentational forms that, while nondiscursive, are nevertheless truly symbolic (Langer 1942; Innis 2009; 2013; Chaplin 2020). This theme is taken up in the next chapter.

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Peirce’s semiotic framework shows that there is no turning back from the symbolic level, the defining semiotic mode for humans. There can be regressions and distortions, as shown by the loss of symbolic capacities due to trauma, organic degeneration, and so forth, which were studied by Cassirer and supported by classic investigations under the rubric of the ‘pathology of symbolic consciousness (1929). This symbolic pathology to which human meaning-making is liable has had catastrophic political and social consequences in linked forms of symbolic and physical violence. Iconicity, indexicality, and symbolicity jointly permeate and constitute the human field of consciousness as semiotically defined and intertwined modes of intending. They are present simultaneously, with different weightings, in different patterns or frameworks of experiencing or intending the world, such as the aesthetic, the mythic-religious, the scientific, and the spheres of encompassing everydayness. We are simultaneously affected, induced to act, and led to understand at all the thresholds of sense. All patterns of semiosis on the human level are permeated by symbolicity in the sense that they are mediations or, perhaps, ‘intermediations,’ as they grow together. Symbols grow. They come into being by development out of other signs, particularly from icons, or from mixed signs partaking of the nature of icons and symbols. We think only in signs. These mental signs are of mixed nature; the symbol-parts of them are called concepts. So it is only out of symbol that a new symbol can grow. Omne symbolum de symbolo. (Peirce 1998, 10)

That the symbolic dimension presupposes, appropriates, and transforms the prior dimensions entails that one must avoid reifying or radically separating sign types or semiotic powers. Peirce’s model of semiosis establishes that every sign configuration produced by humans will be constituted, in different measures, by a mixture of, and transitions between, iconic, indexical, and symbolic factors. Peirce describes this mixing in a striking metaphor: In all reasoning, we have to use a mixture of likenesses, indices, and symbols. We cannot dispense with any of them. The complex whole may be called a symbol; for its symbolic, living character is the prevailing one. A metaphor is not always to be despised: though a man may be said to be composed of living tissues, yet portions of his nails, teeth, hair, and bones, which are most necessary to him, have ceased to undergo the metabolic processes which constitute life, and there are liquids in his body which are not alive. Now, we may liken the indices we use in reasoning to the hard parts of the body, and the likenesses we use to the blood: the one holds us stiffly up to the realities, the other with its swift changes supplies the nutriment for the main body of thought. (1998, 10)

What Peirce calls ‘thirdness’ or ‘mediation’ marks every type of sign or sign configuration on the human level. Philosophical semiotics and cultural psychology work together for uncovering sign-using processes in actu in different contexts and in their variable results. Cultural psychologists such as Valsiner (2004; 2014; 2017) have shown that empirical investigations into concrete cultural phenomena without adverting to the semiotic matrices of meaning-making become bloated by a too heavy diet of ‘facts.’ However, without diminishing the heuristic power of Peirce’s account of these matrices, other semiotic resources for schematizing them draw attention to these matrices in ways that foreground different, but complementary, features.

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Language, Abstraction, and Diacrisis: Bühler’s Analytical Exemplifications Bühler’s famous ‘organon-model of language,’ with its diagrammatic specification of the fundamental features of an intrinsically social ‘speech event,’ is well-known in psychology, especially in psycholinguistics, but, as I have discussed in other formats, it has great philosophical import in terms of modeling the thresholds of sense semiotically (Innis 1982; 1988; 1994; 2002) (Fig. 3.1). Bühler explains his model in the following text: The circle in the middle symbolizes the concrete sound phenomenon. Three variable moments on it are capable of raising this phenomenon in three different ways to the rank of a sign. The sides of the inscribed triangle symbolize these three moments. The triangle encompasses, in one respect, less than the circle (illustrating the principle of abstractive relevance). In another way, however, it surpasses the circle, in order to indicate that what is given to the senses constantly experiences an apperceptive enlargement. The multitude of lines symbolizes the defined semantic relations of the language signs. It is a symbol by reason of its being coordinated to objects and states of affairs; a symptom (Anzeichen, Indicium: index) by reason of its dependence on the sender, whose interiority it expresses; and a signal by reason of its appeal to the hearer, whose outer or inner behavior it directs just as other communicative signs do. (1934, 28)

Bühler’s three sense functions or semiotic modes are, then, representation, the work of symbols; expression, the work of indices; and appeal, the work of signals.

Fig. 3.1 Organon-Model

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The focal point of Bühler’s model is the analytical power of the notion of apperceptive enlargement of the sensibly given material sign configuration as the result of abstraction. Abstraction distinguishes the relevant from the nonrelevant. The expressive function carried out by the symptom/index is intrinsically linked to its source, which in Bühler’s model of a speech event is assimilated to a ‘sender.’ But such a notion can clearly be extended from the realm of a ‘toned’ speech event, so important in social interactions, to the ‘expressive face’ or ‘defining quality’of anything experienced, whether object or situation, their Peircean and Deweyan ‘defining quality.’ The appellative, or conative, function carried out by the signal effects a steering of inner and outer behavior of the perceiver, linking the perceiver to the surrounding field in which it is acting. The signal’s source clearly need not be an intentional sender but can be features of any environment, natural or social, in which we act and which steers or even controls our behavior and forces our attention. Bühler (1934, 34) notes that the antecedents of the expressive and appellative functions on prehuman levels are found in Uexküll’s notions of context-dependent ‘perceptual signs’ (Merkzeichen) and ‘effector’or ‘operative signs’ (Wirkzeichen). The representational function, carried out by symbols, is clearly identical to Peirce’s notion and incorporates ‘prior’ functions. A symbol is a free creation, a way of making sense of an object as a something or other. Taylor (2016) foregrounds the rise of as-consciousness as the foundation of human beings as language animals. Bühler shows that the ways signs are differentiated from one another by diacritical markings model their semiotic powers to effect differentiations in the world and thereby carry information. Diacrisis is the conceptual core of the principle of abstractive relevance, the apperceptive enlargement of the sensibly given. This principle is the key to the human use of signs and their powers of grasping significance in the sensory plenum. The analytical value of this principle comes from exploiting the heuristic potential of phonology’s fundamental distinction between a phone, the physical or tonal reality of a word, studied by phonetics, and a phoneme, which is phonology’s concern. Bühler’s core thesis is that diacrisis and abstraction mark every level of our meaning-filled interactions with the world in continual processes of marking differences. Perceptual segmentation and classification both ground and are taken up into our language schemes, which are not laid over experience as a veneer. In language there is a constant mutual adjustment of perceptual clues and sign systems of various sorts since experience outruns our ability to catch it in our symbolic nets. These symbolic nets, ‘free creations of the spirit,’ generate new experiences by exploiting their semiotic potentialities and interrelations. One and the same material sign-vehicle, exemplified in language, but extended to the field of experience, can perform all three functions depending upon its place or role in the relational pattern that makes up the speech event or situation. The distinction between types of signs is functional, not substantial, avoiding in this way reification. “The phenomenon of abstraction holds a key position in ‘sematology’ (Bühler’s term, now abandoned, for semiotics), to which we will have to return time and again” (1934, 45). The reason is that it is always “only a matter of abstract moments by reason of which and with which the concrete things functions ‘as’

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signs,” carriers of sense (1934, 40). Recognition of such moments gives a material configuration, the concrete speech event in particular, or an experiential occasion, a telic structure (Zweckgebilde) that enables it to ‘stand for’ something or have a ‘sense’ of some sort. In Die Krise der Psychologie (1927) Bühler’s analysis insightfully oscillates between foregrounding a duality and differentiating a triadic schema of semantic functions or meaning spaces. As to the duality, Bühler’s concern for the “sense functions of signs” (Bühler 1927, 47) is grounded in the Husserlian “intentional moment” (72) of our orientation to a material configuration that is taken to be a sign. The foundation of this position is the semiotically and philosophically important distinction between phonetics and phonology, between “the clearly recognizable and never mistaken duality of phonic image and word meaning …; this analogy and the complex relation between sign and meaning which is derived from it is ever to be found in the most complex variations in all sense-filled experiences” (14). The paradox of signification is found in the “double face of an abstracting from and a turning to the sense of signs” since “to the whole which is language there belong sensibly perceptible signs and their meanings” (45). Indeed, we can extend such a notion to the whole of experience itself and ultimately to the cultural forms that cultural psychology and semiotics analytically engage. The flow of experiencing is a material continuum engaged in multiple ways. The continuum or total fund of sounds in the material continuum of language, what Bühler called a Lautschatz, is segmented or marked by the recognition or constitution of relevant sounds by a process of diacrisis. These relevant sounds are Merkmale or distinctive features highlighted in the physical flow. They are a model for the grasp of specific kinds of relevancy in experience quite generally. Bühler shows how to exploit for a semiotic analysis of experience the fundamental distinction between phones and phonemes: between sounds as tonal pictures composed of material units in time and as signifying units. Phonemes belong to the class of marks, properties, criteria, notes: they are sound properties on the tonal picture of the word and constitute the correlate to the properties of things, which we have known from time immemorial in logic and have characterized as marks, or, in Latin, as ‘notae.’ (1934, 278)

Two objects identical in weight can be differentiated by color, texture, shape, and so forth. Two sounds, different in their physical reality, as in regional accents, can be identical in function if they ‘realize’ the same signifying property, as in regional accents. Three flags differing only in color, no matter what the degree of saturation, can be used for signaling, for instance, ‘stop,’ ‘go,’ ‘slow down,’ with the differences in form, size, material, pattern having no relevance to their signaling function. Bühler points out in his philosophically pregnant essay ‘Phonetik und Phonologie’ (1931) that the distinction between the sound-constituted structured totality [lautliches Gesamtgepräge] and the diacritical elements that differentiate it from other totalities is applicable to our apprehension of an untold number of everyday things— human beings, animals, use objects—that we playfully and immediately cognize as kinds or as individuals. In the case of language the structured totality of a word is

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a kind of physiognomic unity, that arises in the experiential flow out of the bottomless lake of consciousness. It has a ‘sound-form’ [Klanggestalt] and a thing-form [Dinggestalt], that is, a form that marks it as this word. So Bühler can write: Phonemes are sound-marks in the word’s tonal reality and in every word they can be counted. But the word-image is also Gestalt-like, it has a tonal face or aspect, that also changes like a human face in the changing course of the expressive or appellative function. (1934, 258)

‘Face’ and ‘descriptive’ features are what Bühler calls ‘figurative names’ for describing diacritical functions, assigning ‘face’ to the domain of Gestalten and ‘descriptive features’ to ‘summative connections’ [Undverbindungen]. But diacrisis is the root of abstraction, the recognition of significant/relevant differences. In the case of signs that bear a meaning, the situation is such that the sensible thing, this perceptible something with which we are immediately dealing, does not have to enter with the total plethora of its concrete properties into the semantic function. Rather, it can be the case that that for it to fulfill its function as a sign only certain specific abstract moments are relevant. That, in the simplest words, is the principle of abstractive relevance. (1934, 44)

Diacrisis is not restricted to the explicitly semiotic dimension nor is it something that is necessarily under our control. Indeed, Merleau-Ponty, no stranger to psychology, left a laconic working note in his uncompleted The Visible and the Invisible (1964): “To be conscious = to have a figure on a ground—one cannot go back any further” (191). What Merleau-Ponty called the “circle of the perceived” (1942, 212) is the locus of a diacrisis that effects “the joining of an idea and existence which are indiscernible, the contingent arrangement by which materials begin to have meaning in our presence, intelligibility in the nascent state” (1942, 206–207). Bühler, for his part, issued in Die Krise der Psychologie a kind of warning about pansemiotic analytical concepts: It is not correct to conflate the concepts of structure [Struktur], sense [Sinn], and value [Wert]. The concept of a whole [der Begriff der Ganzheit] with its constitutive moments is the widest concept and to it is ordered knowledge by insight. Intentionally produced wholes that are meaning structures … can only be a restricted domain of structures quite generally. (137)

These pivotal concepts are needed for, in Dilthey’s words cited by Bühler (1927, 106), the analysis of the “living totality of consciousness” and “the contextual matrix of its functions.” Bühler’s schematization of the frames of consciousness is not thematized exclusively or primarily in contemplative terms. It is rather praxeological, intertwined with ways of dealing with the world. In processes of perception, Bühler writes, “one can say that the impressions of sense release and steer an action” (1927, 75). Indeed, “sense impressions release and guide a goal-directed activity” (1927, 77), just as in the giving or receiving of orders and directions within a human community one discerns such a coordination and ordering of activities. Melodic lines of behavior emerge from processes of interaction with and into the natural and social world— also lines of behavior that are chaotic and dissolving into randomness and anomie. Bühler’s distinction between the Gestalt-like tonal face of a word and its phonemic

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structure allows us to think of the sensory continuum itself as a locus of luring qualities with determinate properties. Significance is also pushed down by Bühler, as by Merleau-Ponty and others, to the emergence of affective figures from a ground that is the equivalent of Peirce’s and Dewey’s Peirce-based theory of quality and the qualitative matrix of the lower thresholds of sense where perceiving and being affected occur. The field of experience itself has an expressive face just as the social field is permeated by expressive configurations that are the topic of theories of expression, to which Bühler devoted a remarkable book (Bühler 1933). Bühler wrote in Die Krise der Psychologie, “everything that man can understand has a sense” (82). We become aware of the sense of things “by means of and out of the sign” (124). The concept of sense itself, understood on the level of human semiosis, which is the principal focus of semiotics and of cultural psychology, cannot be grasped “without an advertence to telos, to subject-relatedness” (132). Bühler’s fundamental analytical framework, while developed on the basis of the organonmodel of a speech event and on the representational or symbolic level of language, still functions as a heuristic guide to outlining the fundamental contexts in which experience develops and within which it can be thematized semiotically. Indices, signals, and symbols, taken together, make up for Bühler the sign types that define the ultimate contours of meaningful or signifying interaction with and within the world. Bühler’s language functions play the same role in his thought that the categories of consciousness and the differentiation of sign classes did for Peirce: they are modeltheoretic and present complementary and overlapping outlines of the semiotic matrix of consciousness and the thresholds of sense. Bühler was well aware that the arc from lower to higher thresholds was not without its internal divisions or phases: “Human language as a representational instrument, such as we know it today, has behind it some evolutionary steps, all of which can be understood as freeing it more and more from pointing and removing it further and further from painting” (1934, 225). In Peircean terms this is the transitional path from indexicality, through iconicity, to symbolicity as modes of signification. Their intertwining is also seen against the background of the organon-model in the following text. The linguistic fixating and grasping of perceived states of affairs is prepared and rooted in the processes we are accustomed to calling ‘perceptions’ and to separating off in an unjustifiably rigorous way from a ‘following’ linguistic apprehension … The orientational instrument of human language that is produced in linguistic intercourse potentiates what the natural signals and symptoms accomplish, which we in perceptual processes derive from things and our speech partners and to which we are indebted. (1934, 252)

Bühler in this way shows us another fertile pathway to exploring the linkages between philosophical semiotics and cultural psychology in their common task of uncovering the thresholds of sense by means of holding in view the complex patterns informing the intertwining of semiotic and perceptual processes. His work stands beside, and even within, Cassirer’s attempt to model the thresholds of sense, one which is also of capital relevance for enabling us to see the how such a reflection ends up engaging and situating the play of forms that make up the cultural world as a whole.

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Sense Functions and the Vortices of Consciousness: The Case for Cassirer In the third volume (1929) of his great trilogy, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Cassirer wrote that his aim was to uncover the “original attitudes and formative modes of consciousness” and to resolve “the question of the structure of the perceptive [wahrnehmenden], intuitive [anschauenden], and cognitive [erkennenden] consciousness” (57). These structures make up the overarching analytical frame of his philosophical analysis of culture. These formative modes are the generative matrix of the “three form worlds” (448) that constitute progressively more ‘objectifying’ relations to the world, a process instantiated on both individual and collective levels. These modes of consciousness make up the analytical frame of Cassirer’s philosophy of culture. Cassirer proposes to elucidate this structure and its form worlds “without surrendering to the method either of scientific, causalexplicative psychology or of pure description. We start rather from the problems of the objective spirit, from the formations in which it consists and exists … we shall attempt by means of reconstructive analysis to find our way back to their elementary presuppositions, the conditions of their possibility” (7). This tripartite structure does not, however, refer to successive stages of consciousness, with prior stages left behind, but to “its necessarily intertwined … constitutive factors” (9), which are to be taken as semiotic categories or sense functions. Cassirer distinguishes three semiotic modes and correlates them with three forms of consciousness. These make up the Cassirer’s schematization of the thresholds of sense. The first mode, Expression [Ausdruck], covers the domain of the “vast diversity of original physiognomic characters” (68) that mark the “physiognomic individuality” and “original face” (69–70) of figures appearing in the experiential continuum. This mode defines the type of ‘perception’ [Wahrnehmung], understood as ‘expressive apprehension,’ that engages “original and immediate characters,” not isolated elements entering into objectification but is “always attuned to the specific expressive tone” or mode of “total manifestation—the character of the luring or menacing, the familiar or uncanny, the soothing or frightening, which lies in this phenomenon purely as such and independently of its objective interpretation” (66–67). This is clearly consonant with the foundational insights of Dewey and Peirce. The paradigm of such a mode of consciousness, Cassirer finds, is the world of myth and its accompanying ritual and sacramental acts. It is a realm of ‘liminality,’ of being at affect-laden thresholds of sense that are filled with luring resonances. Of course, the symbolic pregnancy of objects and ritual or sacramental acts gets appropriated in narrative frameworks that place the objects and acts in wider and wider frames. But the discursive form of narratives, a representational form, involves imaginative elaboration and deep creativity that reveal by ‘presenting’ aspects of the affective world of desires and fears and a sense of wholeness. Langer (1953) will take this further in her own way in her classic work of aesthetic theory.

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The second mode, Representation/Presentation [Repräsentation/Darstellung], encompasses the grasp of objects and states of affairs that is at the term accomplished through language as a constructed representational system intrinsically wedded to some image-schematic experiential base. This mode defines ‘intuition’ [Anschauung]. Language as a semiotic form, which Peirce ascribed to ‘thirdness,’ is for Cassirer “closely bound up with the sensuous factor of expression; it is both factors together in their close interdetermination that first constitute the actual life of language. This life can never be merely sensuous any more than it can be purely spiritual; it can only be apprehended as body and soul at once, as an embodiment of the logos” (113). According to Cassirer’s schema, the creation of systems of representation in the material vehicles of language sets up “a fundamentally new relation between subject and object” (113). The relation involves a specific act or process whereby from the conceptually undifferentiated totality of what is ‘given’ to consciousness, “a factor is not only detached by abstraction but at the same time taken as a representative of the whole,” and in this way the content gains the “imprint of a new universal form” while still retaining its material ‘particularity’ (114). This imprinting is due to the creation of the linguistic sign, which enables us to ‘find again’ a constancy in experience. The linguistic sign stands for this ground of constancy and fixes the ‘formed total intuition’ as an “objectively significant whole, filled with objective meaning” (123). The relationship of standing for Cassirer calls “an authentic primary phenomenon” within the semiotic order, an “awakening of the symbolic consciousness as such” and the creation of or finding of a “new horizon” (121) with the creation of ‘the name’ whereby reality begins to stand fast. The ‘naming of the Gods’ is an originary exemplification of this process of bringing experience to a stand, but linguistic representation is directed to all regions of experience. In this way, Cassirer argues, the character of representation, the arriving at the notion of an objective world, belongs to the very essence of human consciousness. It is an act of the productive imagination issuing into “an act of original formation,” an act of “symbolic ideation” (1929, 134). Things and relations are captured in this process, but they are not captured in the same way in the different languages that make up the cultural world. By reason of the variable intuitional grounds upon which the linguistic sign rests, the language-articulated content of experience entails a relativity of horizons in which encultured beings define the contours of their lives and divide the social and cultural frameworks in which they dwell. Cassirer’s third semiotic mode, [Bedeutung/formal abstract signification], goes beyond what in the two first modes constitute the “natural world concept” (283). The first two strata, the expressive and the representational, deal with “configurations” (283) of greater or lesser fixedness. These two strata are, however, not isolated or detached, since the semiotic modes are not to be understood genetically. “Definite totalities of meaning” are always present, although the movement to the third mode emerged progressively over a tortuous historical and semiotic evolution, where its telos was discovered and exploited in pure theoretical understanding, what Cassirer calls Erkenntnis. This mode is exemplified in formal systems utilizing “pure signs of signification” (285), involving “the free construction of the possible” (320),

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with, to be sure, application to the actual: theoretical physics, mathematics, formal logic. Here the semiotic supports are the symbolic structures themselves with their heuristic powers, a position close to Peirce’s. Cassirer’s point is that semiosis on this level also reveals that “no being is tangible or accessible except through meaning” (299). So, even at the highest level of formalization, even if it involves a “new mode of awareness,” the same principle obtains. The experiential manifold is grasped as complex configurations of meaning, proceeding from the emergence of affective figures on a ground, through variably determined system of experienced objects captured in various webs of representations and presentations, to the free determination of possible systems that can be exemplified in theoretical systems with their claims to universality. This third mode has consequences for our understanding of ‘reality’ and of ‘objects.’ This is clearly a challenge to philosophy and the human sciences in general and to the cultural sciences, including cultural psychology, in particular. What we define as the ultimate physical reality has cast off all appearance of thingness: there is no longer any meaning in speaking of one and the same matter at different times … What we call the object is no longer a schematizable, intuitively realizable ‘something’ with definite spatial and temporal predicates; it is a point of unity to be apprehended in a purely intellectual way. (473)

Cultural psychology and a philosophy of culture bound to a broadly pragmatist and semiotic account of meaningful action are not theoretical in this way. At the same time they, too, do not reify cultural meanings. The meanings they are interested in are not ‘the same matter’ at different times. Different times are marked by different meanings. And, furthermore, their multifarious objects and systems of objects cannot be apprehended in a purely intellectual—that is, formal—way. Their procedures and concerns—as diverse forms of knowledge-seeking—are, as Cassirer thought, special cases of the general problem of meaning. The theory of knowledge itself—that is, a methodical reflection on methods of creating and interpreting the forms of meaning and meaning-making—becomes a hermeneutics of knowledge forms embodied in the various forms of world-understanding. For Cassirer this would be a semiotic philosophy that had the whole history of culture as its theme and toolbox. It is, in fact, as Cassirer developed it, a philosophy caught between signs and forms. This is precisely the situation I see cultural psychology caught up in and, in fact, Cassirer has something to offer here that illustrates once again the close links between philosophy and cultural psychology.

Between Signs and Forms In his 1939 essay on the naturalistic and humanistic grounding of the philosophy of culture, referring to the ideal of humanity and of a universal philosophy of culture in eighteenth century Germany, Cassirer wrote that it:

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… extends to every creative act whatever, regardless of the particular sphere of life within which it realizes itself. Here there emerges, as the fundamental feature of all human existence, the fact that man is not lost within the welter of his external impressions, that he learns to control this sea of impressions by giving it ordered form, which, as such, stems in the final analysis from himself, from his own thinking, feeling, and willing.

Indeed, The giving of form, a unique productivity, is the defining mark of Humanitas. ‘Humanitas,’ in the widest sense of the word, denotes that completely universal—and, in this very universality, unique—medium in which ‘form,’ as such, comes into being and in which it can develop and flourish …. What the human being thus completes is the objectification, the apperception, of the ground of all theoretical, aesthetic, and ethical creation of form. (22–23)

Cassirer gestures here toward another triad that, when examined closely, resembles the Kantian feeling, action, and thought triad that informs Peirce’s semiotic theory and, indeed, is meant to specify the ultimate frames in which we carry out our lives. Cassirer emphasizes that the creation of form is not ‘free,’ in the sense of unrestricted: “All form demands a determinate mass and is bound to its sheer thereness. Life cannot produce form purely from itself, as naked, freely streaming activity; it must concentrate and focus, as it were on a fixed point in order to take part in [the world of] form” (1939, 23). Creation of form is ‘checked’ by a kind of principle of limitation that is not without benefits. “Within the free sphere of one’s personality such checking heightens personality; it truly acquires form only by forming itself (25) and “this very shaping of one’s personality is a genuine and underived power” (25). This heightening and shaping is due to multiform ‘resistances.’ What does Cassirer think the task of philosophy is and what would be its bearing on cultural psychology’s tasks? Cassirer’s answer: “As critical philosophy it endeavors to understand the universal and basic cultural orientations; it seeks, above all, to penetrate to an understanding of the universal principles according to which man ‘gives structure’ to his experience” (36–37). Cassirer follows a rather neglected analytical line from Kant that functioned as a ground theme in his account of Kant’s life and thought: dedication to the “fertile lowland of experience” (Cassirer 1918, 92). For Cassirer the logical and the perceptual orders are intertwined (1942, 65). Logic, he claims, does not work in a vacuum. “It encounters no absolutely amorphous stuff on which to exercise its formative power” (65). There is a “prelogical structuring,” a “stamped form … which antecedently lies at the basis of logical concepts” (65). Philosophy, as Cassirer conceives it, “seeks the manifold, the fullness and inner diversity of ‘appearances themselves’” (66). But it does not seek to go beyond or behind the world of appearances, even in the domain of signification, which is essentially bound to the material stratum of signs. At the same time, however, certain sign systems open up to or make manifest realms of sense that make dimensions of reality come to presence in nonobjective ways. Cassirer sees human experience, then, as rooted in prelogical structuring and differentiating out into the “three form worlds” (1929, 448) that make up the frame of his great trilogy. Philosophy attempts to determine how “each objective form is conceivable by it and accessible to it only as mediated by a specific form of cognition.

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The material it is concerned with and relates to is hence always material preformed in some manner” (1918, 154). Philosophy must never lose its “firm footing” in this preformed world, lest it head into the “empty space of abstraction” (154).

Transition This is precisely the common task of Peirce’s, Bühler’s, and Cassirer’s semiotic analyses of the thresholds of sense and of cultural psychology’s descriptive and analytical engagement with the great diversity of our embodiments in symbolic forms that penetrate, augment, realize, or destroy the lived psychic reality of our lives carried out in the fertile lowlands of experience. This fertile lowland of experience clearly can be mapped in explicit semiotic terms with overlapping, complementary, but not isomorphic or identical schemas. But each one that has been passed in review indicates fertile pathways on both the methodological and substantive side of supplying sharply focused analytical tools and rich empirical materials for assimilation and reformulation by cultural psychology, a service that cultural psychology, and the general psychology that informs and underlies it, can also render to philosophy. Another fundamental, indeed indispensable way, of looking at this reciprocal informing and co-dependency of a differently focused philosophical semiotics and a general psychology in constructing a fundamental model of minding is to be found in the work of Susanne Langer. Her work foregrounds the heuristic power of linking feeling, abstraction, and the art image into a powerful model of minding that weds attention to concrete detail to the power of generalization. This is the topic of the next chapter.

Chapter 4

Feeling, Abstraction, Symbolization: Langer’s Aesthetic Model of Minding

Nothing is inner, nothing is outer For what is inner, is outer. Goethe

Abstract Susanne Langer presented human experience and self-formation as a dynamic spiraling matrix of feeling and of processes of symbolic transformation in which ‘meaning accrues essentially to forms.’ Her powerful analytical framework maps the processes of ‘realization’ of feeling in the image-based fore-structures of symbolization. Symbolization follows two main paths of abstraction, presentational and discursive, that together give rise to the symbolic ‘open ambient’ of human culture. Nondiscursive forms exemplified in the art image can be used as a heuristic guide to human minding by displaying the properties and dimensions of feeling itself manifested in rhythms, gradients, and ordering of felt vital imports. Such an approach, while recognizing the centrality of language, enables us to consider art images as images of minding and establishes the analytical concept of aesthetic rationality that can be applied normatively to the selving process both individually and socially. Keywords Susanne Langer · Symbolic transformation · Presentational abstraction · Generalizing abstraction · Centrality of feeling · Heuristic power of art images · Contours of experiencing · Gradients · Rhythms · Aesthetic rationality

Interpretive Disciplines In her classic work on aesthetic theory, Feeling and Form, Susanne Langer wrote: The comprehension of form itself, through its exemplification in formed perceptions or ‘intuitions,’ is spontaneous and natural abstraction; but the recognition of a metaphorical value of some intuitions, which springs from the perception of their forms, is spontaneous and natural interpretation. Both abstraction and interpretation are intuitive, and may deal

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 R. E. Innis, Between Philosophy and Cultural Psychology, SpringerBriefs in Psychology and Cultural Developmental Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58190-9_4

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4 Feeling, Abstraction, Symbolization: Langer’s Aesthetic Model … with nondiscursive forms. They lie at the base of all human mentality, and are the roots from which both language and art take rise. (1953, 378)

Many years earlier in The Practice of Philosophy (1930), Langer had argued that philosophy’s task was to “see possibilities of interpretation” (x) and, further, to effect the “emancipation of modern philosophy from common-sense and from the method and interests of natural science” (5, my emphasis). Philosophy deals with meaning, Langer holds, not in “any one restricted sense, but in all its varieties, shading and fulnesses” (22). In this early book Langer started on a long path, passing through her classic Philosophy in a New Key and Feeling and Form to culminate in her Mind trilogy (1967; 1972; 1982), of tracing the roots of meaning down to the most fundamental levels of feeling and sensibility and following its upward articulations and differentiations in the world of embodied cultural forms. Human experience is seen as a dynamic spiraling matrix of feeling, Langer’s cover term for minding quite generally. Langer developed a powerful analytical framework to map the ‘realization’ of feeling in the image-based fore-structures of symbolization that pass through distinctive forms of abstraction that give rise to the symbolic ‘open ambient’ of human culture. Her analytical framework was not spun out of her head as pure speculation, yet was clearly not meant to be a ‘natural science’ in the sense meant by Langer of discovering new facts. Her procedure was conceptual elaboration and interpretation that at the same time did not shy away from the “the study of trivial examples” (25). The task is not to melt them down into some universal class but to illuminate their informing principles and lived reality and not to pursue a relentless reductionism to ‘elements.’ Philosophical inquiry of the interpretive sort that Langer is proposing is a fusion of methodological reflection, conceptual analysis, and theoretical construction. These are also the concerns and practices of cultural psychology as Valsiner (2017) and Mammen (2017) have argued. While Langer argued that philosophy must “go into detail” (Langer, xiii), it is still to be conceived as a ‘rational science’ that develops by following up the “implications of a few fundamental ideas” (33). In Langer’s case, as in the cases of Peirce, Bühler, and Cassirer, these ideas cluster around modeling or schematizing the processes of the symbolic transformation of experience. Langer sees experience as ‘interpretive’ or ‘signfiicance-oriented’ all the way down, a position asserted by Peirce in his laconic comment that “the fact is that it is not necessary to go beyond ordinary observation of common life to find a variety of different ways in which perception is interpretive” (CP, 5.184). Symbolic processes are at play in a situated affect-laden experiential continuum which is given form: meaning, Langer asserts, “accrues essentially to forms” (1942, 90). Forms are the productive outcomes of different types of transformations and divisions of the experiential ‘contents’ of an affective-sensory plenum. The originary ‘cutting’ or ‘segmentation’ of the plenum is the apprehension of a figure on a ground. But the figure is not to be thought of primarily in terms of an ‘object’ in a perceptually circumscribed sense but of a ‘point of interest’ or center of ‘focal import’ or an ‘affective tone’ emerging out of the ground of feeling. Sense experience is the primary stratum of sense-giving, “a process of formulation” (1942, 89), since “a mind that

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works primarily with meanings must have organs that supply it primarily with forms” (1942, 45). The selection of “certain predominant forms … is the primitive root of all abstraction” and, she claims, “all sensitivity bears the stamp of mentality” (1942, 90). Webs and lines of felt significance and existential connections, features of the environment with unique physiognomic qualities, define focal points of perception and spaces of action for organisms with their intrinsic powers of sensing and moving. Langer calls this basic intrinsically ‘practical’ stratum of meaning-giving ‘indication.’ The qualities and diacritical features that define its contents have their primary function in action-based, and not contemplative, life contexts that are restricted in their range of generality. Biosemiotics and ethnology have focused on this part of the circuit of behavior with conceptual clarity and different types of analytical frameworks (Hoffmeyer 1997, 2009; Favareau et al. 2012; von Uexküll 2010; Kull 2002, 2005, 2008; Bateson 2000, 2002). Langer argued that philosophy’s singular subject matter was the interpretation of interpretations. This is clearly also one way to characterize cultural psychology’s own approach to its tasks: to uncover in their cultural contexts the psychic reality and consequences of the panoply of cultural forms as embodied and enacted interpretations. What is encountered in the wide range of experiential occasions is not just mirrored by a kind of imprinting of itself on passive human organisms, although everything experienced does leave some trace on the organism. The ‘open’ passivity or undergoing at the lower thresholds of experiencing is matched by processes of ascending active structuring in the world-organism encounter. Langer follows von Uexküll, explicitly in line with Bühler and Cassirer, in holding that each type of organism accesses and structures what it is undergoing in distinctive ways. Langer’s contention, drawing the semiotic lesson from French work on image formation as ground for symbolic processes, is that on the human level “all conscious experience is symbolically conceived experience; otherwise, it passes ‘unrealized’” (1967, 100) and that “the human response [is] a constructive, not a passive thing” (1942, 24). Construction for Langer is construal, interpretation, rooted in our power to recognize “relations, systematic form, and analogies” (1930, 102). This is a power that grounds the going out into symbolization that makes up the human world: the creation of signsystems, or systems of expressions, in which to capture the distinctive features of experience and to steer and to transform multiformed responses to and into them. The human world is an ‘open ambient,’ arising out of symbolic transformations and progressing in a dynamic spiral with no greatest upper bound, although the spiral, as Langer was well aware, could often be experienced as quicksand. Langer likewise connects symbolization, in the full sense, with abstraction. Following Whitehead, if not fully accurately, Langer defined a symbol quite generally as “any device whereby we are enabled to make an abstraction” (1953, xi). Her core and indispensable idea is that abstraction is the originary symbolic act of human minding, “the explicit recognition of a form which may be variously exemplified’ (1930, 130). That forms can be variously exemplified entails that “every entity has some logical form” (1930, 123) which it may share with other entities. Langer writes in her classic work on aesthetic theory, Feeling and Form:

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4 Feeling, Abstraction, Symbolization: Langer’s Aesthetic Model … The comprehension of form itself, through its exemplification in formed perceptions or ‘intuitions,’ is spontaneous and natural abstraction; but the recognition of a metaphorical value of some intuitions, which springs from the perception of their forms, is spontaneous and natural interpretation. Both abstraction and interpretation are intuitive, and may deal with nondiscursive forms. They lie at the base of all human mentality, and are the roots from which both language and art take rise. (1953, 378)

To symbolize something means, in the most general way, to grasp and make present a form through another form by processes of abstraction and interpretation. Langer’s linking of abstraction and interpretation to nondiscursive forms, however, is a critical point of intersection between her philosophical semiotics and the subject matter of cultural psychology. The notion of ‘logical form’ as Langer is using it, seen against the background of the work of Henry Sheffer and Wittgenstein (see Chaplin 2019), is assimilated to Gestalt as a “new primitive notion … a conceived form where it is expressed in nature” (1930, 132), but not just in nature. Forms are always, in Polanyi’s phrase, ‘ordered contexts,’ including the ordered contexts or ‘configurations’ of the perceptual field (Langer 1942, 73). It is precisely these configurations that the power of seeing takes as, or turns into, symbols, whether natural or created by us and operating in sociocultural frames with their shifting and variable psychological matrices and contents. These matrices, Langer holds, are matrices of feeling. Feeling is the originary ground out of which the world of forms emerges. Langer’s concept of feeling has substantial overlaps—but different points of derivation -- with Peirce’s and Dewey’s concept of quality. Experiencing at the most primordial level links feeling, abstraction, and symbolic imaginative development. Langer’s definition of feeling as “whatever is felt in any way, as sensory stimulus or inward tension, pain, emotion or intent” (1967, 4) is her way of characterizing the affective plenum within which this linking occurs as an open spiral. Langer pushes feeling ‘up’ to encompass the whole cultural sphere, understood as objectified forms with their own ‘logics’ and diverse histories—mythical narratives, art genres, ritual and sacramental action, mathematics, political and social orders—and ‘down’ to the point where the ‘psychical’ arises out of unconscious physiological processes and is radically transformed, going out into symbolization.

Abstraction: Generalizing and Presentational Langer traces the symbolic transformation of experience that marks the ‘advent of man’ as grounded in powers and processes of two different types of abstraction—generalizing and presentational—that generate and underpin two very different systems of symbolization. Generalizing abstraction, upon which the representational function of language is based, is commonly taken as the paradigm of abstractive procedures. It is exemplified in language’s ‘labor of the concept’ and in other formal systems such as mathematics and formal logic that develop complex procedures of hypostatic abstraction. Generalizing abstraction is familiar in philosophy’s persistent

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debates between nominalists and realists and in psychology’s attempts to chart the evolution of concepts of different levels of abstraction in children and their regression or nondevelopment in the brain-damaged, classic investigations of which took place after the first world war and have continued since. Langer followed the general consensus of her time about the following conditions for a language: (a) It must have a vocabulary and a syntax, what Karl Bühler called the ‘dogma of lexicon and syntax,’ (b) its lexical units must be able to be defined in terms of other units, that is, it must be possible to construct a dictionary with its sets of internal relations, (c) each language as a system must be able to be translated into another language, although there is no strict isomorphism between source and target languages. While language is “in a sense conception, and conception is the frame of perception” (1942, 126), yet there is always an untranslatable tacit residue of some sort between the two systems, a position close to Sapir’s original nuanced analyses. Like many others, Langer traced the variability of natural languages with their affectively charged perception-based systems of representations to their roots in “abstractive seeing” (1942, 72). The types and degrees of their influence upon modes of thinking in different cultures is a topic with a long and contested history. It is a permanent provocation for cultural psychology and the philosophy of language and linguistics. Langer’s basic model of language as a ‘discursive form’ has multiple sources familiar to psychologists and language theorists, the most important sources being Wegener, Cassirer, Bühler, and Sapir. When Langer, following Sapir’s lead about the heuristic function of language, states that “our primary world of reality is a verbal one” (1942, 126), the primacy has nothing to do with exclusivity. For Langer discursive process exemplifies most clearly “formulative, abstractive experience... symbolic transformation and abstraction” (1942, 127). It follows the path of natural languages, on the one hand, and paths leading to the great realms of mathematics, number, formal systems of logic, on the other, accompanied by the reflective operations of hypostatic abstraction and the critical self-control that Peirce saw as the immanent goal of semiosis. The ultimate trajectory of such abstractive techniques is, as Cassirer pointed out with his notion of Bedeutung or ‘formal signification,’ the development of formal systems far from the intuitive or perceptual supports of natural languages, which functioned in the semiotic mode of Darstellung, or ‘perception-based representation.’ Langer’s synthetic and rich account of language resolutely denies that language and its systems of concepts is laid over experience as a kind of veneer or that it displaces or must be seen as a model for all symbolic systems. At the same time, it is, as Charles Taylor (2016) has powerfully argued, not merely ‘designative’ but ‘constitutive.’ Langer’s most important link with cultural psychology is to be found in her account of a different type of abstraction not oriented to discursive construction and reconstruction of experience, to weaving language-like systems of signs into experience. It the work of a type of abstraction that transforms and weaves experience itself into systems of symbols, presentational symbols. Recognizing the power and extent of this form of abstraction furnishes a fundamental analytical resource to cultural psychology that joins it inextricably to a philosophical semiotics and aesthetics of cultural forms. It also foregrounds that we are not wedded to discursive resources.

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We reveal what we are by other means than by what we can put into words and what we merely say about who we are or want to be, even if the language in which we describe ourselves in inscribed in our very being. Presentational abstraction, in contrast to generalizing abstraction, gives rise to types of symbolic configurations by means of a form of abstractive seeing that takes experiential configurations themselves—dancing flames, waterfalls, sunrises and sunsets, violent deaths, heroic acts of self-sacrifices, snakes and crocodiles, sharks, a mother’s smile, a crucifix, the pole star, ritual acts of washing, and so forth—and sees them as carriers of “ideas that haunt the human mind, yet are never satisfactorily stated in words” (1930, 156). These ideas belong to the realm of ‘liminality,’ that is, ‘threshold phenomena’ that haunt and inform cultural situations in many different forms (Stenner 2017). It is the function of myth, ritual, sacrament, and art to articulate these ideas and make them ‘present,’ not by naming them or stating their content but by unfolding their existential significance. This is the domain of ‘life symbols’ which coalesce into systems in various media, including language used in the presentational mode—as in poetry, literature, drama—and not the discursive mode (see Cassirer 1925). Life symbols, presentational symbols, are materially embodied in visual and auditory forms, in gestures and ritual acts, buildings, designed spaces, marked surfaces of every kind, and so forth. They are perceptible affect-laden images that express or exemplify, not ‘concepts’ in the discursive sense, but ‘forms of feeling,’ what Langer calls their ‘morphology.’ Feelings have “definite forms, which become progressively articulated” (1942, 100) in these images or systems of images, such as those found in the Vedic tradition, pre-Columbian Art, the Christian transformations of pagan art, and so forth. They do not arise from what Langer called the types of “analytic and genuinely abstractive techniques” (1942, 201) that define the discursive mode. Systems of presentational symbols are, nevertheless, creations of discursive beings who recognize that experiential configurations manifest or exemplify various dimensions of “the experience of being alive” (1942, 147) that articulate a vital import rather than abstract concepts. Humans are especially responsive to these dimensions and strive to hold their significances present in stable forms. This brings about the development of a “semantic of vital and emotional facts” (1942, 235), that enables us to capture a panorama of affective tones, forms of feeling, and lures of and for specific engagement with them, such as the rapturous gaze, rhythmic dancing, or the hearkening to patterned sound. Presentational abstraction is a form and mediator of affective semiosis (Innis 2016), a permanent feature of the cultural world that appears in many guises. It makes manifest and articulate the life-significant traits of experiencing that would be merely named in discourse but are made available to us in thick or perceptually ‘dense’ configurations replete with a felt sense into which we are absorbed and within which we come to find our affective grounds. Langer’s semiotic approach shows that beings endowed with language develop both spontaneously and systematically such forms of symbolic transformation of experience. These forms present or construct (or enact in the case of ritual) experiential configurations as symbolic forms not reducible to discourse but not in any

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way bearing upon a totally inaccessible content. Their content may be ineffable in the sense of unsayable, but not meaningless. The limits of language are not the limits of sense. The semiotic fullness of presentational forms is beyond language, but not beyond meaning. The rise and development of presentational symbolization was a new departure in semantic… The recognition of vague, vital meanings in physical forms—perhaps the first dawn of symbolism—gave us our idols, emblems, and totems; the primitive function of dream permits our first envisagement of events. The momentous discovery of nature-symbolism, of the pattern of life reflected in natural phenomena, produced the first universal insights. Every mode of thought is bestowed on us, like a gift, with some new principle of symbolic expression. It has a logical development, which is simply the exploitation of all the uses to which that symbolism lends itself. (1942, 201)

Langer’s core thesis is that presentational symbolization is grounded in seeing and articulating deep resemblances between experiential configurations and forms of feeling. It stabilizes and develops these configurations into complex symbols that convey an “unspeakable import” (1942, 100), a felt import that informs a “pattern of sentience—the pattern of life itself as it is felt and directly known” (1953, 31), but not in any necessarily thematic way by those manifesting the pattern. Such a notion is close to Peirce’s notion of our dwelling in iconic symbolic configurations with ‘affective interpretants’ that are the ‘proper significate effects’ of these configurations and systems of configurations. The various patterns of sentience, defining quales of existence displayed in these configurations, are among the main objects of a semiotics and cultural psychology. However, the felt dimension of life shown on the presentational level and the ideological expressions on the level of discursively articulated content may not correspond and can have disastrous psychic and sociopolitical consequences. Presentational symbolization presents forms of feeling—and their ‘objects’— in pregnant images of varying internal complexity. Our being assimilated to—or attracted and attached to—them induces a felt insight or sense of active participation in its object or thing-meant, the discursive articulation of which always remains incomplete and indeed even beyond our attempts to put it into words. Such symbolic images—a dancing flame, a tornado, a whirlpool, a burning bush, a flag, or pennant— display, and evoke in us, first and foremost “a stream of tensions and resolutions” (1953, 372), a sense of something beyond pure perceptual reality. What Langer says more generally about perception in the everyday transactional and instrumental modes of life applies more so to presentational forms which are not only perceived but meant to be perceived in and through their material reality and yet exude an aura of ‘something more’: Sentient beings react to their world by constantly changing their total condition. When a creature’s attention shifts from one center of interest to another, not only the organs immediately involved … but hundreds of fibers in the body are affected. Every smallest shift of awareness calls out a readjustment, and under ordinary circumstances such readjustments pass easily into another. (1953, 372)

Philosophical semiotics and cultural psychology must take seriously how the “fibers in the body are affected” by cultural forms—especially how they are

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affected in the cases of the degradation or desensitization of apprehensive powers and affective responsiveness, whether spontaneous or enforced by dogmatic authorities. An astute and psychologically pertinent passage from Dewey’s Art as Experience makes a parallel point, unfolding further aspects of the circuit of behavior in which we engage presentational symbols circulating in and informing cultural spheres: It is not just the visual apparatus but the whole organism that interacts with the environment in all but routine action. The eye, ear, or whatever, is only the channel through which the total response takes place. A color as seen is always qualified by implicit reactions of many organs, those of the sympathetic system as well as of touch. It is a funnel for the total energy put forth, not its well-spring. Colors are sumptuous and rich just because a total organic response is deeply implicated in them. (1934, 127)

These texts point to a deep somatic research dimension that philosophy and cultural psychology are well equipped to explore: the distinctive features of the felt lives of encultured bodies and their resonating ‘total organic responses’ to the presentational symbolic artefacts—art works, ceremonies of all sort, mythic and religious narratives even if disguised in political programs—that make up the cultural world. Such forms make up the experiential occasions in which symbolically endowed bodies find themselves and with which they most identify and resonate, or fail to. Presentational symbols, both ‘high’ and ‘low,’ independent of aesthetic value, are symbolic images of felt life. But Langer leads us to ask the following question: is not the whole constructed world in which we live also, if not an image, able to be considered as if it were a symbolic artefact with more than just discursive characteristics? Indeed, the cultural world, including the material and institutional contexts of our lives, could be looked at through the semiotic lenses that Langer proposes. The functions of art as a system of symbolic affective-laden images is to mold “the objective world for the people” and thus, ideally, to be a “defense against outer and inner chaos” (1953, 409). Language as the universal ordering principle offers discursive instruments for this molding and defense. But we are also confronted everywhere with forms of outer and inner chaos, manifestations of cultures gone sour, and also the need for other bases for precise forms of criticism of such cultures beyond discursive argument. The background to this assertion is encapsulated in the following passage from Langer’s Feeling and Form the import of which goes far beyond the ‘continuity of thought’ that thinks systematically or narratively: … It is perception modeled by imagination that gives us the outward world we know. And it is continuity of thought that systematizes our emotional reactions into attitudes with distinct feeling tones, and sets a certain scope for an individual’s passions. In other words: by virtue of our thought and imagination we have not only feelings, but a life of feeling. (1953, 372)

What is this life of feeling? For Langer “the entire psychological field— including human conception, responsible action, rationality, knowledge—is a vast and branching development of feeling” (1967, 23). Langer’s novel claim is that a systematic reflection on the art image, as paradigm of presentational abstraction, holds one of the most important keys to understanding this life of feeling and can reveal central features of both the lower and upper thresholds in which we find

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our way around in the world. In this way Langer supplies, from the aesthetic side, powerful descriptive and normative analytical tools for outlining the contours of the feeling beings that cultural psychology studies in their psychic breadth and depth.

The Art Image as Image of Mind Langer makes the observation, or rather the claim, in the first volume of Mind that “we all have direct knowledge of feeling” (1967, 56), in a kind of prescientific way—or at least can have such knowledge. Builders may know the basics of mechanics, cooks find out chemical properties, and sailors map the sky; but who has any such naïve yet expert knowledge of psychical phenomena? Who knows the essentials of feeling? … The real patterns of feeling—how a small fright, or ‘startle,’ terminates, how the tensions of boredom increase or give way to self-entertainment, how daydreaming weaves in and out of realistic thought, how the feeling of a place, a time of day, an ordinary situation is built up—these felt events, which compose the fabric of mental life, usually pass unobserved, unrecorded and therefore essentially unknown to the average person. (1967, 56–57)

How, then, do we raise this lived through realm of felt events to explicit consciousness, to conceptual knowledge? Langer’s answer involves a turn to the ‘import of art’ and to presentational abstraction’s power to construct rich images. Her approach is clearer than Peirce’s analysis of iconicity, although they are not incompatible and intersect in many ways. An image, specifically an art image, Langer contends, “is a rendering of the appearance of its object in one perspective out of many possible ones. It sets forth what the object looks or seems like, and according to its own style it emphasizes separations or continuities, contrasts or gradations, details, complexities or simple masses” (1967, 59). The art image as a form of appearing or ‘semblance’ presents by its very form or shared material quality an ‘import’ or ‘felt significance’ of something and thereby gives us access to it. The art image does not just render the appearance of its object—or non-object. Langer’s thesis is that it renders the appearance of appearing and maybe even the appearing of the non-appearable in the case of nonobjective art such as in religious art’s grappling with the numinous. (One thinks of Mark Rothko or Barnett Newman). Langer writes: An image does not exemplify the same principles of construction as the object it symbolizes but abstracts its phenomenal character, its immediate effect on our sensibility or the way it presents itself as something of importance, magnitude, strength or fragility, permanence or transience, etc. It organizes and enhances the impression directly received. And as most of our awareness of the world is a continual play of impressions, our primitive intellectual equipment is largely a fund of images, not necessarily visual, but often gestic, kinesthetic, verbal or what I can only call ‘situational.’… [W]e apprehend everything which comes to us as impact from the world by imposing some image on it that stresses its salient features and shapes it for recognition and memory. (1967, 59)

Langer resolutely holds to the key semiotic notion, already a central theme in her The Practice of Philosophy, that we “tend to see the form of one thing in another”

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(1967, 60). Her contention is that the form of an image—in various material configurations—enables us to see or somatically, kinesthetically feel or hear the form of feeling, or the type of feeling, embodied or articulated in it. The formed image, no matter what its sensory modality or its level, is an objectified form of feeling—and is itself felt, even if not thematically reflected upon. It has a ‘material quality’ or ‘defining quality’ in Peirce’s or Dewey’s sense. Since images can exist in an almost unlimited number of forms and combinations (one thinks of Nelson Goodman’s phrase, ‘samples from the sea’), they can exemplify an unlimited number of forms of feeling, since each image, materially considered (the allusion here is to Peirce’s notion of a sinsign), is a distinct and distinctive configuration. The image stabilizes, by an objective projection, the play of impressions “in terms of the conception which the image expresses” (1967, 60). In the case of art, which is Langer’s leading concern, this is the artist’s idea, not a discursively formed concept. Her radical claim is that artists in different genres are image-makers who have such a prescientific knowledge, indeed an “intimate and expert knowledge of feeling” (1967, 64) such that they can map phenomenally, through an unbounded spiral of images, “the form of felt life” (1967, 64). This mapping is not merely a form of disclosure of its actuality but of what felt life could and should be—or not be. There is a normative element at play here, although not necessarily an ethical one in the strict sense. Langer’s contention is that the analytical path through art images to an adequate concept of human minding orients our attention not to their content, which is an interpretive or hermeneutical task, but to what she calls the morphology of feeling— the ‘logical’ form—embodied in and presented in them. Langer argues that because feeling—in all its modes—is “a dynamic pattern of tremendous complexity” (1967, 67) its constitutive features can be accessed through those special types of images that, because they are meant to be perceived in their full density and plenitude, are publicly accessible outside the organism. Artworks in many genres are to be considered precisely as multi-leveled and polyvalent images, not models, of forms of feeling. The “extraorganic structure” (1967, 69) of works of art, in whatever genre, turns them into created semblances, images of the inner life of feeling that confront us now as phenomena in the so-called external world. A work of art, Langer specifies, “only presents a form which is subtly but entirely congruent with forms of mentality and vital experience, which we recognize intuitively as something very much like feeling; and this abstract likeness to feeling teaches me, without effort or explicit awareness, what feeling is like” (1967, 67). Polanyi describes this process in terms of the tacit assimilation of perceptual particulars and coming to dwell in them in terms of habits of induced feeling, giving us a kind of knowledge by acquaintance which can be raised to explicitness, but not replaced, by analytical reflection, such as Langer herself undertakes. The issue for a philosophically informed semiotics, or a semiotically informed philosophy, and, it seems to me, for the general psychology that is to inform cultural psychology, is to explore in various ways, both systematically and empirically, the possibility of “recognizing vital patterns in pure art which may be keys to essential relations in the life of feeling” (1967, 69). The life that Langer conceives as encompassed by feeling clearly occurs in many modes, including the universal modes of

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discursive forms and the institutions of culture and society arising from discursivity. Our life is itself this ramifying dynamic process of objectification and subjectification. The analytical value of examining or reflecting on the art image—as opposed to an institution such as marriage or the constitution of a state—is that its goal is not to make visible or frame the space of interpersonal or political relations between associated individuals nor to project an identifiable ‘object’ or ‘thing-meant,’ which it certainly can and even does in various forms. Rather, the image presents the form of feeling in which the object is accessed, a form which the image exemplifies and embodies. This projection, Langer claims, gives an ‘idea’ or ‘object’ “enhanced perceptibility” (1967, 75) by reason of its logical form (1967, 77), a core analytical notion from the very beginning of her work. A symbolic image is, she says, “primarily the formulation of perceptual experience, and the constant reformulation of the conceptual frames which the cumulative symbolizing techniques—conscious or unconscious, but rarely altogether absent—establish, one upon another, one in another, one by negation of another” (1967, 80). By extension, we can see the cultural world itself is the outcome of these processes of semiotic and material ‘formulation’ and ‘reformulation.’ Langer and Hegel share a central insight. Langer sees the art image as having a wondrous power, rich in ways and means, to both express or make visible the diversity of cumulative techniques of ‘mind’ or ‘minding’ that underlie the generative processes of culture. The sphere of art is the sphere where “diverse means and very subtle ways of projecting ideas force themselves on one’s attention” (1967, 81), or, in Jakobsonian mode, are made ‘palpable’ and, indeed, resist and affect us. These “diverse means” and “very subtle ways,” belonging to the phenomenal form of the artistic image, are the source of its heuristic fertility for our understanding of minding in its human form, whose variable products are the objects philosophy, semiotics, and cultural psychology mutually strive to describe, interpret, explain, and evaluate. The phenomenal ‘logic’ and perceptual reality of art images are very complex; it is largely by virtue of their complexity that they can present us with images of our even more complex subjective activity (1967, 84) out of which they arise. In this, of course, they are not alone. All cultural forms are revelatory. Still, the analytical outcome of the artist’s activity, wittingly or unwittingly, reveals a path to uncovering the contours of the generative matrix and perceptual effects of cultural forms quite generally. On Langer’s reckoning, subjective activity is even more complex than the image itself can show. But the image, that is, the universe of all images, gives us privileged access to the realm of the constitutive features of subjectivity, of felt life as lived through. While the art symbol, as a presentational form with an intentional goal, certainly expresses and thereby gives us a specific kind of knowledge of the ‘objective’ world of feeling projected in it, it can just as certainly give us knowledge of our own possibilities, which are not always benign. It functions as an instance of Peirce’s principle that self -knowledge must also take the ‘long road through signs’ and by extension through all those meaning-permeated institutions and structures that the symbolic and material processes of externalization, objectivation, and internalization have constructed.

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Indeed, Langer points out, the whole universe becomes the source of the artist’s exploratory and creative activity and of the philosopher’s and cultural psychologist’s interpretive concerns—and a fortiori one of the richest sources of our knowledge of the life of feelings embodied in pregnant images and human cultural forms and habits. Look at what features of the image Langer highlights. Is this not also the philosopher’s and the cultural psychologist’s eye? [T]he artist’s eye sees in nature, and even in human nature betraying itself in action, an inexhaustible wealth of tensions, rhythms, continuities and contrasts that can be rendered in line and color; and those are the ‘internal forms’ which the ‘external forms’—paintings, musical or poetic compositions or any other works of art—express for us. The connection with the natural world is close, and easy to understand; for the essential function of art has the dual character of almost all life functions, which are usually dialectical. Art is the objectification of feeling; and in developing our intuition, teaching eye and ear to perceive expressive form, it makes form expressive for us wherever we confront it, in actuality as well as in art. Natural forms become articulate and seem like projections of the ‘inner forms’ of feeling, as people influenced (whether consciously or not) by all the art that surrounds them develop something of the artist’s vision. Art is the objectification of feeling, and the subjectification of nature. (1967, 87)

The objectification of feeling, as Langer understands it, means that the artistic image bears the stamp of both cerebral process and the deepest levels of the “whole vital substructure” of our lives, a point Antonio Damasio (2010; 2018) has also made over and over again. In the artistic image—indeed in cultural forms as a whole— we have presented to us paradigmatically and objectively “the feeling of activities interplaying with the moments of envisagement” (1967, 99), both individual and collective. It is not always a pretty picture. Cultural processes are ‘practical’ and ‘existential’ attempts at ‘envisagement’ of frames within which we can live and make sense of our lives on all levels. The artistic image is a ‘semblance’ of the vital pulse of life, a record of human sensibility and minding. And so in one sense can all cultural forms be taken. But they are not mere semblances which present themselves for our contemplation. They are the constitutive materially and socially grounded frames of life itself. Not all cultural forms or institutions are images in the artistic sense. But they are products or outcomes of the types of processes in which the creation of art images are rooted in the matrix of feeling which universally marks human process. At the same time philosophy and cultural psychology have a pathway toward beginning to see not just the objects of cultural psychology’s concern through the ‘artist’s eye’ but the fundamental contours of human subjectivity uncovered by such an ‘eye.’ When Langer writes, relying on key insights from Philippe Fauré-Fremiet, that “all conscious experience is symbolically conceived experience; otherwise it passes ‘unrealized’” (1967, 100), what does such a realized experience look like? And what light does it throw on the constitutive contours of experiencing?

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Contours of Experiencing: Some Analytical Lessons The originating matrix of experience, Langer argues, is found in a felt change in the “resting tonus of the whole organism” (1967, 127) which in irreversible time recognizes and tries to institute forms of order in its experiential field. Order is marked by “symmetry, or correlation of counterparts, which creates the axis as a structural element” (1967, 125). Artworks are ordered symbolic artifacts even if, as Anton Ehrenzweig (1965; 1967) has argued, the order is hidden and intricate in the extreme and is apprehended only by means of long observation and engagement. Langer thinks that the art image as heuristic clue to minding “seems to be capable of encompassing the whole mind of man, including its highest rational activities” (1967, 150). The phenomenon of mind as a complex Gestalt, a figure appearing on the dynamic ground of feeling, has like an artwork a fundamental tone or physiognomic quality. It is this self-creating figure that is exemplified in the multi-leveled and multiformed situations of society and history and in the objectified forms of cultural life. The formal structure of the art image presents a morphology of a way of feeling that even if unsettling has something ‘settled’ about it. A presentational symbol or image is Janus-faced: it embodies a mode of toned feeling of the world, while manifesting in its variety the complex physiognomy of our powers of minding and our ceaseless striving to attain felt attunement with the world in which feeling, action, and meaning are one. The physiognomic quality of minding, just as that of artworks, can also express ‘felt non-attunement,’ presenting an image of a ‘restless tonus.’ Langer develops this notion of a physiognomic seeing, an appreciation of expressive form or the expressivity of a form, by relying, among others, on the work of Ernst Cassirer. In physiognomic seeing such qualities as fearfulness, friendliness, serenity, awe, and so forth are not just projected onto and into experience from the outside. They belong to the ‘ground level’ stratum of the intentional bond between the organism and its world, including the interpersonal world of encultured beings. The inner process of art, Langer says, is “from felt activity to perceptible quality; so it is a ‘quality of life’ that is meant by ‘livingness’ in art” (1967, 152) and in the lived contexts of life that philosophy and cultural psychology also reflect upon and subject to critical analysis. It is, in fact, the quality of minding, the symbolic ‘quickening’ of physiological process in the felt sense of engaging a world in all its dimensions, a quality that is paralleled and exemplified by the ‘quickening’ of matter in the symbolic image. It is the felt sense of the livingness of the artistic image that Langer wants both to explain and to utilize as a key to minding with normative implications. ‘Livingness,’ the physiognomic quality par excellence, is the very mark of mind. But it is also the mark of those multifarious cultural situations which make up the forms of life of meaning-making organisms such as we are. Does cultural psychology, as well as philosophy, not have here access to a way of establishing a kind of normative measure of the degrees of semiotic and material ‘livingness’ of encultured beings such as we are, a livingness manifested in the variety of forms of human agency “stretching from the elementary tonus of vital existence to the

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furthest reaches of mind” (1967, 151) in which the immanent felt sense of life comes to expressive form? The power of abstraction and the concomitant power and range of symbolization is the constitutive mark of the human type of semiotically enabled organism. The analytical core of Langer’s philosophical investigation of meaning lies in this domain. The power of generalizing abstraction, of recognizing types, classes, and sets of things with instantiating instances underlies the representational and relational power of language and the intertwining of language systems with the perceptual world of things and relations. The language animal is that animal that divides and patterns its voice as its divides the continuum of experiences into units and recognizes patterns and relations joining them together. But this is not the lesson Langer wants to teach, essential as it is to understanding the significance of one pathway followed in the symbolic transformation of experience. Indeed, it is precisely the language animal and the richness of its image life and its hypersensitivity to focal points of felt significance in the flows of experience that has developed and exploited experience itself as a symbolic resource. This presentational abstraction takes up and foregrounds in images, image-based narratives, and actions features of experience that link by reason of a shared quality different existential domains: dying is seen in and as the progressive extinguishing of a flame, immersion in water as spiritual cleansing, breathing as presence of spirit (spiritus, atman), and so forth. Langer’s work is an attempt to show how such a use of experience itself is “capable of expressing the entire range and complexity of human experience” (1967, 157). The field of symbolic exemplifications in the presentational mode is a field of symbolically pregnant images. They display the features of minding and features of the world or the ‘thing-meant’ at one and the same time, linking them indissolubly together. For Langer, as also for Dewey, a work of art, or the art symbol, is first and foremost generated by as well as embodies a pattern of tensions, which, as Langer puts it, “reflects feeling predominantly as subjective, originating within us, like the felt activity of muscles and the stirring of emotions” (1967, 164). Existence, and life itself, is far from placidity or languidity, although these are also constitutive features of the deepest rhythm of life. Langer argues that the philosophical importance of art images is that they are isomorphic constructs, images of forms of human experience, “which means an objective presentation” (1967, 164) of instances of minding. But so, one could say, are institutional structures and patterns of behavior as clues to the ‘lived logic of minding’ as symbolic transformation. They, too, are objective presentations of forms of human experience. Institutions and shared patterns of behavior are deeply affect-laden. They frame feeling and have not just conceptual content but distinctive ‘atmospheric’ qualities that we indwell (Böhme). Langer writes, in a way similar to Dewey, of the livingness of the image, a quality rooted in and manifested by a kind of “permanent tonicity” (1967, 175) that results from the dialectical fusion of structure and dynamism in the image. We as live organisms are also moving interlacings of structure and dynamism. Structure of self and structure of the objective matrices of self-formation are always evolving and not fully thought out in advance.

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The root of the permanent tonicity shared by the art image and the culturally shaped self is a dynamism itself that arises through and is constituted by the interaction of diverse elements. Reflection by philosophy and cultural psychology on the meaning systems in which associated selves engage in processes of integration, in fact, selfintegration—or disintegration—need to foreground these webs of patterns of tension, sense of livingness, and the deep seated, sometimes tragic and ineluctable, conflicts between structure and dynamism. Dewey (1934), not indifferent to the concerns of both social and cultural psychology, discussed this interaction in a remarkable chapter of his Art as Experience under the rubric of the ‘organization of energies’ (168–193). Organization is both a process and a result. Langer remarked on the necessity to consider the artwork as an Endgestalt that holds “all the phases of the evolving vision” (1967, 179) embodied in it. In the ‘realized’ form, she asserts, we find retained all the experiential aspects “which an ordinary perceptual datum gives up as it reaches its full objective status; because the ordinary percept becomes a thing for the percipient, but the artist’s creation becomes a symbol” (1967, 179). The artwork as a presentational symbol exhibits and exemplifies a form of feeling that is the result of processes of sedimentation, bearing its history in its present reality. And so does each encultured self. To use a term from Dewey, it is ‘funded.’ Each self as a locus of multiple forms of funded meanings presents a complex physiognomy, just as all social forms do. It takes special effort to grasp them since we are in them already. What Langer writes about an artwork can function as heuristic guide: Everything that enters into a work has some physiognomy or at least the seed of physiognomic value…. There is a reflection of inner feeling in the most typically outward, objective data of sensation. Their character is never as fixed and simple as the distillations our conventional store of qualifying adjectives has made from them. (1967, 179)

Their ultimate character transcends discourse, although language enables us to steer our interpretive practices toward completion in detailed and nuanced apprehension. They arise out of a rich reservoir of mental complexity, but they display, in their inner logic, life and mind itself. The art symbol, as model of the self, projects a specific and distinctive image of mind—or phase or dimension of mind. Langer argues that the artistic projection makes mentality, which is its generative source, appear “as a highly organized, intricate fabric of mental acts emanating more or less constantly from the deeper activities, themselves normally unfelt that constitute the life of the individual” (1967, 200). Both artworks and mental acts have “characteristic dynamic forms” (1967, 200). Such dynamic forms are proper not just to the individual artwork or artist but are manifested in others linked by resemblances and overlappings of various sorts. Langer’s chief, and eminently difficult, contentious, yet analytically rich, thesis is that the logical form of acts is projected in the art symbol and indeed, I propose, can be extended to all cultural forms, though the projection does not entail that the artistic or cultural elements themselves appear as acts. The elements of the art symbol have formal properties “which, in nature, characterize acts” (1967, 204), such as inviolability, fusability, revivable retention of

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past phases, tension, gestalt-character, contrast, accent, rhythm—just like social and cultural forms and just like the encultured selves making their lives in and through them. In Langer’s conception, the artwork in its total qualitative dimension gives the appearance of “springing out of a matrix or body of potentialities” and in fact gives “the illusion of bodily existence” (1967, 207)—if, that is, it is successful. Cultural forms, quite generally, also give the appearance of such a springing out of such a matrix. All levels of feeling attendant upon bodily existence are reflected, according to Langer, in the artwork: substantiality, depth, unity, individuality or ‘uniqueness’— it is also the crushing absence of such levels that is reflected. Once again, the sense of a work’s being ‘alive’ or ‘expressive’ derives from its ‘uniqueness.’ Expressive aliveness and uniqueness are likewise properties of the process of becoming a self. The absence of a sense of uniqueness, of a distinguishing, living, or characteristic physiognomic quality, is the source of a work’s deadness or lack of expressiveness and also, by extension, of a self’s ‘aisthetic poverty.’ Minding, on Langer’s conception, is manifested in the artist’s aesthetic ‘quickening’ of nature just as livingness animates or quickens nature in the form of the artistic image when its form of feeling is appropriated by whoever engages it and opens up to it. Such a notion of ‘quickening’ certainly applies to Böhme’s various ‘atmospheres’ or ‘affective in-betweens’ that mediate our access to, and radiate from, the various ambients in which we live out our lives. Langer points out that another source as well as manifestation of a work’s livingness and its heuristic fertility for grasping minding is the fact that the artistic elements that it both exploits and embodies are made up of gradients. This notion is of capital importance for a phenomenologically astute semiotic reflection on minding and its social matrices. “Gradients of all sorts—of relative clarity, complexity, tempo, intensity of feeling, interest, not to mention geometric gradations (the concept of ‘gradient’ is a generalization from relations of height)—permeate all artistic structure” (1967, 211). Indeed they make up its “rhythmic quality” (1967, 212)—and the rhythmic quality of every social structure, too. Dewey in pragmatistic mode considered rhythm as ‘rationality among qualities.’ Indeed, Langer’s notion of ‘phase beauty’ points toward a property already alluded to: an artwork is not only complete, but the result, the Endgestalt, of successive phases. It appears to have developed and to have retained the phases of its own development, thus being in a kind of ‘motion.’ The sense is one of ‘virtual’ growth, Langer claims. These characteristics of the artwork, I propose, are revelatory of the phasal structures of subjective life of feeling out of which they emerge and which they exemplify. Social forms also contain, by hysteresis, all the prior phases and consequences of their formation, even if they are not immediately apparent and demand a kind of ‘archeology’ to be uncovered. They are sedimented or funded forms of embodied memory, whose historical paths and present consequences are lived through with deep effects even if their sources are not apparent to those subject to them. Langer ascribes to gradients an almost metaphysical import. In the artwork comes to expression “the all-inclusive ‘greatest rhythm’ of life,” a kind of universal cadential rise and fall, growth and decay, and so forth. In the artwork, she writes, life speaks to life. Langer, paralleling the work of James and Dewey, asserts a “tacit recognition of

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… qualitative continua, which is inherent in human perception itself” and thinks of this as being “the intuitive basis of our concepts of degree” (1967, 214). Articulation, whether visual, audial, or some other mode, deploys sensory materials by degree. “Sensations, like emotions, like living bodies, like articulated forms, have gradients of growth and development” (1967, 214). All social and cultural institutions and forms likewise have such gradients. Langer continues in the phenomenological mode: The rhythm of acts which characterizes organic forms pervades even the world of color and light, sheer sound, warmth, odor and taste. The implicit existence of gradients in all sensation reinforces our appreciation of living form by giving it an echo or reiteration, in sense, which is always charged with feeling and consequently tends to subjectify the form, to make its import felt yet hold that import to the projective medium. This is probably the greatest single means artists have of ‘animating’ their work. (1967, 214)

But it is we, and the array of cultural forms, who are animated, not just the artwork. Animation, in fact, is a goal and a norm: to create selves alive to life and to one another. Human mentality, Langer argues, consists in a “constant stream of cerebral activities which are essentially subjective, having no perceptible overt phases, but terminate as images, thoughts, recollections, often elaborate figments, entirely within the organism in which they take rise.”. That is, human mental acts have “intraorganic climaxes” (1967, 229), some of which, being felt, can be objectified in exosomatic structures. The artwork, as an art symbol, Langer says in a remarkable formulation, “reflects the nature of mind as a culmination of life, what it directly exhibits, first of all, is the mysterious quality of intangible elements which arise from the growth and activity of the organism, yet do not seem entirely of its substance” (1967, 230). These intangible elements Langer assimilates to the difficult phenomenon of secondary illusions in art, such as ‘color’ in music, ‘eloquence’ in the lines of a sculpture, ‘musicality’ in the play of colors, ‘movement’ in the plastic arts, and so forth. The objectification of these intangible elements “makes the art symbol capable of reflecting the many-dimensional and incalculable character of experience” (1967, 238), the sudden appearances of novelties. But it is precisely the sudden appearance of novelties in collective life that marks the human organism as an open system that problematically creates symbolic worlds that at times, indeed quite often, close it to novelties and generate nostalgic regression to a lost time (Innis 2019b). An artwork, however, is an image of mind, not a theory of mind, or an explanation of mind. Such theories and explanations are the function of philosophy and psychology in their specifically focused ways. Langer’s proposal, which is not exclusive of other emphases, is to find a central “key to the mystery of art as an image of mind” (1967, 242). She does this by reading off and generalizing from the constitutive features of prime artistic symbols, which are defined precisely as ‘symbols of feeling.’ They display all types and levels of activity that go under that cover term, but in simplified form. The artistic image is “incomparably simpler than life,” Langer states. The construction of symbolic images is the pivotal act of the mind and the prime symbolic image of mind is the artistic image which, as a symbol, “presents its import in simplified form, which is exactly what makes that import accessible for us” (1967, 244). The import in this context is the import of a form of feeling.

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But feeling takes many forms. What Langer wants to do is establish, in the interpretive, hermeneutical mode, not just the import of a particular form of feeling, of a particular symbolic image, but the general import, illustrated in the case of the artwork, of objectified forms of feeling for a theory of mind. A presentational form, it is Langer’s thesis, exhibits the structures and processes involved in its creation and shows us what it means to feel in its multiple modalities and material embodiments. That is the ‘import of art’ as systems of images in every modality. Langer does not propose reducing all presentational forms to artworks. She is proposing a heuristic guide. Images, on Langer’s conception, show us not just ‘how things are’ but also how the structures of appearing, that is, experiencing, can be made to appear and what we can learn from them. The artistic image, just like feeling, like the world around us, is not just a whole-like web of relations of ‘elements’ but also a dynamically charged field that directs, motivates, and elicits the elements that constitute it. In this sense, Langer argues, the image ‘mirrors’ the life of feeling itself as a dynamic field and opens the way to further differentiation of the constitutive features of minding, including the other main source of meaning-making: language and number as the keys to the discursive side of mind. The ramifying life of feeling, branching out into the full panoply of cultural and social forms, is held together by “rhythmic concatenation” of integrated elements that are progressively more and more unified, giving rise, ideally, to the agent as a “vital matrix” (1967, 322). For Langer, an organism, and the mind, “is made entirely by processes which are vital acts” (1967, 327) and “the body, throughout life, is the ‘dynamic equilibrium’ itself, growing and differentiating into articulate forms” (1967, 184). The mind, like an artwork, has a material substrate. This is, Langer points out in a deeply cryptic statement, a material matrix, “which is the counterpart of the functional matrix of activities, and indeed the product, and therefore the exact reflection, of the latter” (1967, 184). Such a remark extends the scope of Langer’s proposals to treating the cultural world as itself a kind of semiotic body indissolubly linked with the twin processes of objectification and subjectification. Linking semiotics, psychology, and biology, Langer has foregrounded a web of deep connections, both conceptual and material, between feeling, mind, and abstraction that joins the inner movement of her work to Goethe’s Spinoza-based thesis: what is inner is outer and what is outer is inner. Langer’s work offers us an invaluable resource for thinking about minding and its semiotic matrices and is a model of how to wed attention to concrete detail with the power of abstractive generalization itself.

A Normative Pointer: Aesthetic Rationality Langer’s aesthetic modeling can be seen as a contribution to Dewey’s contention that “to aesthetic experience, then, the philosopher must go to understand what experience is” (1934, 286)—and what a fully experienced and experiencing life should or can be. Such a life on both the individual and collective levels can manifest a kind

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of ‘aesthetic/aisthetic’ rationality as an experiential ideal toward which to strive. Langer offers a set of phenomenologically derived criteria for measuring the values of experiential occasions and their adequacy to fulfill human needs within a vast range of diverse possibilities. It gives us an experiential ideal that Dewey also saw as immanent in the dynamics of experience itself. Our lives can and ought to be marked by cumulation of significant experience, their conservation in ongoing activities, a continuous linking of prior and present phases so that life is not broken into fragments, sufficient experienced tension to ‘quicken’ one sense of life, and an ability to anticipate future courses of experience and action so that habits of existential confidence can be formed and enforced. Cultural psychology and philosophy cannot stand apart from these descriptive and normative issues foregrounded by aesthetic experience as a social norm and as a measure of one’s own life.

Chapter 5

Affectivation: Life-Giving Signs

Abstract Affectivation is a Janus-faced phenomenon. It is a permanent feature of our life in signs and of the life of signs and not just of a specific use of them. Human beings give life to themselves in multiple dimensions by giving life to signs, including the apprehension of the symbolic pregnance of natural objects taken as signs, and thereby giving life to their worlds. Cultural psychology and the philosophical analyses of cultures study these processes in intersecting and complementary ways, focusing on the felt sense of being affectivated. This giving of life to signs not only challenges and reveals us to ourselves but in the very processes of their creation or apprehension shapes, develops, and mirrors us. They stand over against us, interrupt and resist us, and make us present us to ourselves and to others in our multiple modes of existing. The production and interpretation of signs—and of the institutions and material frames they inform—is by its very nature a work of affectivation understood as processes and events of self-activation and self-affecting. Keywords Affectivation · Symbolization · Semiotic embodiment · Resistances · Peirce’s fixation of belief · Existential self-knowledge · Interruptions · Vološinov · Materiality of signs

On the Notion of Affectivation Human beings give life to themselves by giving life to signs and thereby to their worlds. Cultural psychology and the philosophical analyses of cultures study these processes in intersecting and complementary ways. This giving of life to signs gives rise to objective forms, meaning-bearing structures and configurations of all sorts that not only challenge and reveal us to ourselves but in the very processes of their creation shape, develop, and mirror us. They stand over against us, presenting us to ourselves and to others in our multiple modes of existing. The production and interpretation of signs—and of the institutions and material frames they inform— are by their very nature a work of self-activation and self-affecting. It is as well a way

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 R. E. Innis, Between Philosophy and Cultural Psychology, SpringerBriefs in Psychology and Cultural Developmental Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58190-9_5

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of getting a grip on the world by means of various lattices of signs through which we access what is ‘real’ for us. What has been called ‘affectivation’ as an analytical category (see Cornejo 2018; Valsiner 2007) encompasses this dual process. I propose that we consider affectivation as a Janus-faced phenomenon. It is a permanent feature of our life in signs and of the life of signs and not of a specific use of them. A pragmatist philosophical approach quite generally foregrounds in its various formulations that we first of all directly engage the world not just in a cognitive way, as spectators or observers. Such engagement is marked on the most fundamental level by felt differences. Neither the organism nor the world are static. They dynamically intertwine on multiple levels. The world of our experiential engagements, as filtered through signs of all sorts, consists of interwoven Deweyan ‘problematic situations’ with defining qualities that have to be disambiguated in multiple ways, through adjustment, accommodation, and transformation, processes in which systems of signs play an essential role. But we do not just engage the world. On the further reflexive level, we engage, praxically and thematically, our forms of engagement with the world. This double process affectivates us, in the sense defined, on the generative side and on the receptive side, since engagement is double-sided: we engage the world, but the forms of engagement are constructed by us so as to further engage us when they break down or prove not effective. The result is a continuing spiral of self-formative and world-building processes. Philosophical semiotics—along with cultural psychology—holds that signs and sign-configurations have agential force, even if, in the last analysis, such agency is ultimately due to the productive and creative semiotic activities of sign-users. Their own powers come from their appropriation of semiotic tools, the empirical and genetic conditions of which cultural psychology takes as one of its main themes. But, once these tools begin their circulation in and permeation of the life-frames or contexts in which the users live their lives, these sign-configurations stand over against us and increasingly bind us to them in deeply entrenched habits of attending to the world through them. These sign-configurations, in Ernst Cassirer’s words, “weave the symbolic net, the tangled web of human experience.” The shared focal point of philosophy, semiotics, and cultural psychology is that the self pursues, indeed needs to pursue, multiform constructive activities, that, in their exercise and in the self’s engagement with their results, (self)-activate and (self)-affect it, even if not always to the good. Peirce’s critical idea that signs give rise to what he calls their ‘proper significate effects,’ the ‘interpretants’ of a sign or sign-configuration, entails that these significate effects are ‘in’ the sign-user, as modifications of consciousness, just as much as the sign-user in ‘in’ them. They have, from a cultural psychological point of view, psychic reality. While each interpreter of signs is in one sense irreducibly individual, individuum est ineffabile, in another sense, by reason of the trans-individual nature of signs, each interpreter is also irreducibly social. It is ultimately in the swing and sway between individuals and the cultural contexts in which they appropriate sign systems and are appropriated to them that cultural psychology sees their ‘affectivating powers.’ Peirce’s schematizing of the ultimate frames of our linkage to the world by means of the triad of feeling, action-reaction, and thought is not meant to primarily delineate

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stages of engagement but permanent dimensions of the intentional arc that binds human beings inextricably to the open ambients that make up their world. This is in contrast to the relatively closed environment of other organisms, whose meaningsystems lack the generativity and transcending creativity of those sign-constituted systems proper to humans. At the same time, these stages or dimensions are not radically separate from one another but appear and function in a dynamic continuum and ontogenetically emerge differentially in the course of development of semiotic capacities. A consequence of this triad of modes of consciousness for understanding the notion of affectivation is that the proper significate effects or interpretants of a sign can belong to the affective order, the actional or behavioral order, and the conceptual order, either singly or altogether, with various emphases and mixtures. While affectivation as a putatively novel analytical category is meant to foreground the undeniably self-aware and deliberately pursued self-activation or self-affectivating goal of human life practices, affectivation’s fundamental heuristic value is to draw attention to a feature of the psychic reality of sign use in all semiotic modes: bringing awareness of thresholds.

On Interruption, Resistances, and Reflection The direct and unselfconscious production and use of signs in the first instance does not entail a critical distance between the sign-user and the domains that are brought under control by the use of signs. It is our own behavior that first and foremost is brought under control by our interpretation of signs, but the thematic recognition of the steering function of signs leads to the human goal of rational self-control and the development of rational habits. Initially, the world of objects and their relational field are as they are caught in the experienced semiotic webs that we dwell in. The artificial medium of the realm of symbolic forms that Cassirer refers to is not first and foremost encountered as artificial. It is strangely transparent. Experiencing the world through webs of signs does not mean at the beginning that we have a thematic, as opposed to an operative, awareness that that is what we are doing, even if we are tacitly aware of the effect of doing so. Polanyi (1958, Chaps. 4 and 5) has shown how the assimilation of sign systems is, in the first instance, analogous to the assimilation of tools and probes with the consequent projection of awareness away from the tool or probe to what we are put into contact with or access through them. This assimilation process is, in his terms, a-critical. Skillful action, riding a bicycle for instance, involves a kind of attained transparency or incorporation of the tool to our bodies—or the extension of our bodies into the tools, which thereby subjects us to their ‘logic.’ The world appearing through signs is first and foremost the world, and we enter it a-critically as we dwell in the sign systems, primarily language, that surround us and shape our signifying powers. While this unconsciously reifying tendency is unavoidable, it is ultimately unsustainable. It is unsustainable because it is inevitably interrupted by encountering alternative

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semiotic frames and schemes and the concomitant experience of alternative ways of world-making through signs. A kind of semiotic inertia informs sign systems as they continue on their paths unless or until they are subjected to resisting forces from the outside, which they always are. The consequences of this are not always what one would hope, but they are psychically real, nonetheless. Echoing in a different mode what Elmar Holenstein said about structuralism, we can say, quite generally, in accordance with the arguments and discussions in the preceding chapters, that philosophical semiotics and a semiotically informed cultural psychology draw our attention to “the root-like attachment of the world’s subjective constitution to sign systems” (Holenstein 1976, 5). Holenstein rightly says that “the universe of language may not be a closed system; the universe of signs certainly is” (159). But any individual universe of signs, no matter what the modality, is certainly not closed. Our lives are drawn into ever widening networks of signs and sign-configurations that have no greatest upper bound. We are irreversibly carried forward into such unforeseeable frameworks by the very course of life that has no stable resting point. There is always an ‘outside’—of feeling, behavior, thought—which can break in upon our sign systems at any time. This breaking in makes us aware of them as just one matrix for multiple “finite provinces of meanings” that are not necessary or inevitable. Sign systems, and the patterns of feeling, action, and thought that they embody and both enable and constrain, are indeed labile, subject to shifts, rotations, upsettings. It is the threshold experience of such at times threatening ‘outsides’ that affect and condition the reflexive and reflective reorientations of our sign systems and their systems of interpretants as well as increased efforts to protect them from attacks. While the reflexivity of signs is, as Peirce noted, a second stage in semiotic processes, it does not necessarily lead to ‘semiotic freedom,’ something that Cassirer placed as the end goal of symbolic processes. The realization of this goal is not guaranteed any more than is Peirce’s parallel commitment to ‘semiotic hope’ for the realization of the ever receding full embodiment of ‘rational habits’ in all forms of existence, the ultimate goal of the play of signs in the universe. Cultural psychology, devoid of metaphysical commitments of this sort, is fully aware that such a postulated ultimate teleology of semiosis is subjectively diverted by psychological factors of various sorts. Various forms of bias due to personal blind spots, repression, behavior inhibitions and blockages, anxiety, and other forms of distorting powers or biases are always working behind a person’s back (Lonergan 1957). Forms of bias or biasing can and do transcend any individual. The individual is not a closed system of meanings but is permeated by diverse surrounding systems that are rooted in community and political life. The drive to maintain oneself in existence, which Spinoza asserted that everything was committed to doing, leads to deep tensions and conflicts in communities which are themselves composed of centers of vital interests that have to be unified in some way by involving these centers in common tasks and eliciting acceptance of common fields of meaning. Communities of all sorts, as supports of individual life, also strive to persevere in their being and to engage in activities to guarantee that they do. Communities are marked by diverse centers of tension and

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conflict. These fields of conflict can be short-term or long-term, with millennial forms of bias persisting in spite of all attempts to overcome them. But it is precisely the psychological inertial force of such biases that causes them to persist. Peirce’s famous 1877 analysis of the ‘fixation of belief’ schematizes the methods—tenacity, authority, a priori, and experimental—of satisfying the unbalancing itch of doubt that marks our existence. While Peirce’s ultimate concern was to outline how to arrive at stable true beliefs about experience, these are methods that also mark social formations and not just individuals or groups within them. These methods bear upon the determination of the usefulness of a broad concept of affectivation as an analytical category for cultural psychology. Our first inclination, echoing Peirce’s first method, when faced with uncertainty is to simply hang on to the frameworks embodied in our affective, actional, and symbolic/conceptual forms of life. Peirce calls this the method of tenacity. Religious and political frames, with their existential and social forms of peril, are prime contexts where this method is practiced. To be outside these frames, or to be in different frames, is to be ‘wrong’ or in error or in a state of metaphysical horror. Indeed, since we internalize these frames and bet our ‘psychological’ lives on them, it is extremely difficult to leave them. And deep conflicts with inclinations to various forms of violence both intrapersonal and interpersonal arise. The social impulse, however, as Peirce rightly maintains, makes it impossible to ignore such differences. This is the realm of idiosyncratic resistances. But tot capita, quot sententiae is not a viable rule of life in light of our clearly social nature. This unsettling interruption on the individual as well as social levels has two main consequences. Social disorders rooted in the irreconcilable dynamics of the method of tenacity have led, for multiple reasons, high and low, to the search for an authority—or for someone to take authority or power—upon whom one can rely not just for proposing but also for imposing a stable and secure framework of beliefs about how the world is and how one is to feel and act in it. This method of authority, whose diversely motivated practitioners are all too well known, easily leads in the last analysis to the imposition of a frame that, in extreme cases, annihilates the bearers of ‘foreign,’ and therefore, ‘wrong,’ frames in the search for a ‘single-minded’ community, at least about those things that lead to social disorder. The method of authority exercises force in various forms and not necessarily through the power of idea and argumentation, although their ideas can be rich and systematically developed. The psychic roots leading to this method, however, are deep and problematic. Dewey traces them to the ‘quest for certainty’ in a world in constant transition without existential guarantees. Langer (1982) delineates the persistent tensions between the demands of individuation and ineluctable demands of involvement with others. The resultant clash of semiotic frameworks is exemplified in the transition from mythic worldviews, even those with high levels of articulation and sophistication, to worldviews or conceptual frameworks radically demythologized, at least in claim but in reality regressive. Practitioners on the ‘power side’ are often themselves superb exemplars of the method of tenacity. The combination of the method of tenacity with the method of authority is often deadly, both for those wielding the authority and for those submitting to it.

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One could, however, try to present one’s own frame as having a kind of intrinsic rationality that makes it in a sense a priori self-validating, arguing for its intellectual beauty and coherence. In fact, Peirce remarks, there are many systems of belief that have produced magnificent cultural forms—works of art and associated forms of association—that continue to inspire by their aesthetic rationality. There are examples from the history of science of ‘rational models’ that in spite of their internal coherence were not true to the way the world is. And great works of religious art are admired and given supreme value in their power to embody religious affections without our being forced to accept the metaphysical or doctrinal systems out of which they arose—and continue to arise. In such cases, many individuals have no felt need to go outside the frame, being seduced by its intellectual beauty, which paradoxically is itself a mark of its truth. The a priori method may take great imaginative skill and give rise to superb constructions of embodied meanings and sign-configurations, which function not as a prison-house but as a happy home. Peirce rightly remarks that it can produce magnificent works of architecture and art and poetic works of a high order. Such a method explores, often to great advantage, the internal logic and coherence of the sign-configurations, making their worlds visible and permanent under the protection of unsurpassable beauty. Cultural psychology and semiotics find a rich field for empirical and cross-cultural studies here. Finally, the fourth way of ‘fixating belief’ would entail habitually being willing to measure the empirical adequacy of the world picture that defines the ultimate contours of one’s form of life by subjecting it to the constraints of the continuous spiral of novel experiences and new conceptual frames. Peirce argues that this is the lesson of modern science. It is not just comparative internal superiority or strength of enforcement of a semiotic frame that is determinative of its truth. It can have scientific power by reason of its conceptual coherence, consistency, and intrinsic interest, but its truth must be determined, even if only provisionally, by means of testing its ability to ‘correspond’ to ‘reality’ and by means of its heuristic fertility or openness to conceptual novelty. It must have the capacity to develop and be strengthened by leading to new discoveries through abductive procedures. Cultural psychology can use this schematization in two ways. First, it can be applied to the cultural psychologist’s own premise systems and conceptual frameworks. It is a guide toward self-examination and methodological self-reflection. Secondly, it offers a typology of types of embodied frameworks operative in social and cultural forms that cultural psychology has as its task to explore in their psychic reality both individually and collectively. But, of course, if we follow Peirce’s and Cassirer’s position that reality and sign systems are interwoven, or the principle of semiotic closure alluded to by Holenstein, we have to acknowledge that there is no totally independent ‘outside’ for us. Nevertheless, in line with Peirce’s objective idealism, our sign production and use is constrained or measured by something which is not immediately a sign, something that, in fact, constrains the chain of interpretant signs that unlimited semiosis engenders. It would appear, then, that the methods of inquiry and the formation of habits of feeling and acting, in all their modes, would be marked by ‘open comparison’ and ‘mutual adjustments.’ We must always measure the adequacy of a sign-configuration

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by means of the ‘thing-meant,’ which, nevertheless, is not accessible except through some configuration of signs and processes of interpretation. The semiotic turn in cultural psychology is, then, also a hermeneutical turn and the ultimately ethical goal is mutual comprehension and, in the long term, agreement. It also entails the existential challenge and risk, for both participants and researchers, of ‘passing over’ to alternate frames, a process that ‘puts us into play,’ often against our will. This is an instance of Peircean secondness, the indexical role that experience plays in our lives. Indexicality, or resistance, points to the fact that we are affectivated in an essential way by encounters with difference. This is not just a fact but, looked at from the side of the ethics of inquiry, a demand. The fact of difference reveals the existence of pluriform initially opaque ‘outsides’ to our seemingly transparent and indeed reified ‘insides.’ We are not the only ones who produce sign-configurations with veridical claims. The very production and holding fast to them does clearly affect us as an ineluctable background, but it is often when we are driven to a kind of forced reflexivity or feeling of resistance that we take our own semiotic commitments with the appropriate seriousness. Affectivation also involves a demand, perhaps an obligation, to realize that there are many ‘ways the world is’ and yet to strive to avoid a radical relativism where ‘anything goes.’ We can accept Nietzsche’s dictum that “All things are subject to interpretation,” but it is deeply problematic whether the universal consequence of this is that “whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.” This may be a brute fact about cultural life, but it must be subjected to the possibility of criticism in light of what are clearly operative lived differences. Is it not the task of cultural psychology to explore the psychological matrices and processes in which different systems of relevance and pertinence arise and the attendant practices of reflexivity that the perception of differences forces us to engage in or resist engaging in? This very reflexivity, a forced, interruptive reflexivity, and the need for the reflective practices it enables, holds one of the analytical keys to our understanding of the scope and nature of the concept and phenomenon of affectivation. It is axiomatic and a phenomenologically self-evident fact that we first of all interpret the world and ourselves directly, without a reflexive self-awareness. But, the very incorporation of the selving organism into a surrounding ‘play of signs’ makes inevitable its interruption and the introducing of a kind of ‘distance’ in the self’s relations to its meaning-systems, including the meaning-systems that define for it its identity, which, while unique, is never uniform. This is certainly one of the major lessons of cultural psychology. Nothing that we perceive or engage in any way is without effect in some sense, even if it only stabilizes and strengthens a refusal to change or to be “put into play.” It often involves a consequent holding to a stable set of predicates by means of which we define ourselves and the world. It is not just the world that is subsumed under systems of predicates. There are clearly gradations of engagement, but there is always the possibility of some shift of some sort, positive or negative, in every encounter with ‘the other.’ The semiosphere is that great other that situates us, mirrors us, and interrupts us. Semiotic interruption is an essential aspect of multiform processes of affectivation.

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The Socratic lesson of philosophy and cultural psychology is that we need to be interrupted not just in order to know ourselves in a reflective and reflexive manner, but also in order to be forced to engage or attend to something that breaks the frame(s) in which we are located or, moreover, makes us aware in a more effective fashion of just what these frames are or entail. It is the role of the great ‘meaning-makers,’ the creators, and committed transmitters of ‘prime symbols,’ to give rise to those signconfigurations that most clearly make visible the operative logic of affectivating signs. But the consequences do not have to be benign, as political and religious frames exemplify in multiple ways. We are affectivated by what touches us. As embodied beings, we need to advert to how we are interrupted on multiple levels. These levels have themselves multiple dimensions, with distinctive ‘affective tones.’ Being affected is not just something in the mind, a matter of pure thought or thinking. It goes all the way ‘down’ to feeling and all the way ‘up’ to symbolic thought. Embodiment is not just supported but nourished by its ‘roots.’

Semiotic Embodiment and Affectivation In a text cited earlier, Michael Polanyi, writing about the tacit dimension of our cognitional life and extending the analyses in his Personal Knowledge, describes our situation in these terms, which clearly bears upon the theme of semiotic embodiment that has run throughout this discussion: All thought contains components of which we are subsidiarily aware in the focal content of our thinking, and all thought dwells in its subsidiaries, as if they were parts of our body. Hence, thinking is not only necessarily intentional, as Brentano has taught: it is also fraught with the roots it embodies. It has a from-to structure. (Polanyi 1966, x)

We can take further the connection of affectivation with this notion of embodiment, thought of as ‘indwelling.’ Following Dewey’s and Peirce’s leads, we have seen that forms of embodiment in various problematic situations have distinctive feels or specific types of ‘tones’ or felt qualities. They are operative even if not focally attended to. The Polanyian notion of subsidiary indwelt roots bears in a special way upon our expanding the understanding of the experiential range and scope of semiotic affectivation. It clarifies the way signs or sign-configurations ‘qualify’ the various interpretants that link us to the thing-meant. Each type of sign in itself has an indwelt quality, even if one of seeming transparency, as in straightforward discursive prose. A key principle of semiotics is expressed in the words of Peirce: “since a sign is not identical with the thing signified, but differs from the latter in some respects, it must plainly have some characters which belong to it in itself… These I call the material qualities of the sign” (CP, 4.447). These are, I propose, to be taken as characters that belong to the sign as embodied in a medium, proper to the ‘sign vehicle’ as something perceived, just as the weight of a hammer or the feel of a knife is perceived, but not focally, to use a Polanyian expression. The indwelt felt materiality of the Peircean

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sign classes plays a key role by entering into and conditioning the total felt quality of the sign-interpretant-object triad, which can function, so to speak, behind the backs of the sign-users. Polanyi’s notion of indwelling can be extended in this way to the lived materiality of the felt contexts of our lives. These fields of possible actions and reactions also define that ‘background’ that Dewey recognized and analyzed and that Langer saw as the ‘symbol world.’ Vološinov, independently of Peirce, in his Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (1973), in a critique of ‘abstract objectivism,’ which he thought was represented by the Saussurean approach to language and to its role as a model for the general heuristic powers of sign systems, argued vigorously that every sign, no matter of what type, “has some kind of material embodiment, whether in sound, physical mass, colour, movements of the body, or the like” (11). However, for Vološinov, those signs are ‘particular, material things,’ appearing in the external world and therefore phenomenologically accessible and describable, which does not reify them. Such a mistake he does not make. Vološinov rather situates signs within what he called a ramified and diversified ‘ideological sphere’ that has a material base (10). For Vološinov, and for Vygotsky, Peirce, and others (Wiley 1994, 2016) even socalled ‘inner speech’ is dependent on “some kind of semiotic material” (11) and, in fact, “consciousness itself can arise and become a viable fact only in the material embodiment of signs” (11). Vološinov parallels Peirce in holding that in as much as “sign bears upon sign … the understanding of a sign is, after all, an act of reference between the sign apprehended and other, already known signs.” Vološinov concludes that “understanding is a response to a sign with signs” (11), a response that in the case of affectivation is experienced as a provocation to respond. Peirce, in his discussion of interpretants, calls the interpretant a ‘more developed sign’ that itself becomes the object of another sign, and so forth and so on, in the great spiral of ‘unlimited semiosis.’ Affectivation, in this case, is the experienced shift toward openness and the recognition that sense appears against an unlimited and moving horizon, which has no attainable ‘outside’ or ‘ultimate beyond,’ as Raymond Tallis has argued in his Michelangelo’s Finger (2012). In the words of Vološinov, which could also be Peirce’s, “from one link of semiotic nature (hence, also of a material nature) we proceed uninterruptedly to another link of exactly the same nature. And nowhere is there a break in the chain, nowhere does the chain plunge into inner being, nonmaterial in nature and unembodied in signs” (11). Semiotic embodiment, therefore, encompasses both our exosomatic and endosomatic bodies. Semiosis exemplifies, too, for Vološinov the great Spinozan principle, recognized by Goethe, that what is inside is outside and what is outside is inside. Consciousness, or rather life itself, is a bodying forth of signifying processes, which, as biosemiotics has shown, is also the original and originating sign of life (Hoffmeyer 1997; 2009; Kull 2005). For humans, and for higher forms of life, signs both emerge and are transformed, as Vološinov says, in the “process of interaction of one individual consciousness and another” (11). Affectivation, then, can also be seen as the result of specifically threshold transcending interactions between consciousnesses through signs. But since a sign is a “phenomenon of the external world,” its semiotic

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power is not limited to a kind of ‘transparency’ that makes the sign disappear into the ‘thing-meant.’ Affectivation in this sense involves a kind of ‘opaqueness’ as well as an accompanying ‘strangeness’ experienced in the sign as a vehicle ‘birthing’ the interpretant. This opaqueness and strangeness is, in my opinion, the mark of difference and it is the mark of difference that interrupts us and puts us into motion. When Roman Jakobson in his famous 1960 essay “Linguistics and Poetics” defined the poetic function as rooted in the ‘palpability of signs’ and the Russian Formalists foregrounded the ‘making strange’ aspect of a work of art, these are two sides of the same multisided phenomenon. The palpability of signs is connected with the material quality that Peirce and Vološinov delineated, while the ‘making strange’ is connected with the experience of being moved from a familiar place to another place where one is not initially at home and maybe could never be completely, but could also recognize as a place one had been seeking all along. It is the mark of humans, by reason of the essential generativity and openness of semiosis and the open spiral of their world engagements, to constantly produce sign-configurations and contexts that, by reason of new material qualities and their felt effects, interrupt the normal course of passing through experience and dwelling in a familiar circle of meanings. Affectivation foregrounds this constant interruptive feature of unlimited semiosis as a materially embodied objectifying process. So, in as much as affectivation as a creative process, and as a resultant experiential effect, is in and through signs or other artifacts, it is marked by certain signs or differential markers or indications of experiential shifts and in the material qualities and not just semantic properties of the signs and contexts whose proper significate effects are manifested in James’s ‘infinite iridescences’ of consciousness. It is the function of signs and sign-configurations both to embody these iridescences and in our encounters with them to give rise to them as felt effects. Affectivation, understood now in this way, foregrounds the pursuit of felt effects through the action of signs.

Existential Dimensions of Symbolic Affectivation In one sense, then, affectivation encompasses the whole domain of semiosis. Why else would we produce signs and sign systems if not to bring us into motion or to stabilize ourselves and the world? One of the main lessons of Dewey’s extension of Peirce’s theory of quality, as I pointed out in “The ‘Quality’ of Philosophy” and other essays (2011; 2014; 2019b; 2019c) and throughout this book, is that each state of being-related-to-the-world-through-signs has its own distinctive feel or distinctive quality, even if we do not advert to it thematically. It is simply, but powerfully and effectively, part of the background organic tonus, fusing the exosomatic and endosomatic aspects of our existence. A clear indication that we are affectivated by even the most trivial and superficial sign-configurations or experiential occasions is, as I have already pointed out, that we are inclined to hold onto them with all our might. Sign-configurations have an effect by setting up habits, and are meant to have such an effect, even if we are not thematically aware of anything specific about them. This

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is true even if, because of their experienced transparency, we simply dwell in them and use them as extensions of our own body, as Polanyi has shown quite generally in his examination of the phenomenon of tacit knowing. Holding tenaciously to our sign systems is due to a congenital inclination to reification: we identify our sign systems with the world and experience any difference as a challenge to our mental and existential security, a topic Dewey examined in The Quest for Certainty (1929). Situations where mental and existential security are in play take many forms. There are times and situations when we find ourselves conflicted in terms of deep conceptual, actional, and affective commitments. There are occasions when a kind of semiotic threshold lights up. At times we need specific sign-configurations to make us aware of existential meanings that are lurking around us without our being able to grasp them on our own. Even objects, especially natural objects, can take on a semiotic valence, and it is the encounter between our active need, which we might not be thematically aware of, and the sign-configurations or objects-with-meaning that would, or do, satisfy this need that affectivates us. The well-known psychotherapist Rollo May, for example, echoing Wordsworth, ascribes extraordinary power to nature in his autobiographical essay, “Poppies in Greece,” in his My Quest for Beauty (1985) where he was ‘moved’ from his deeply depressive state by encountering a field of poppies while walking around in the mountain where he had gone off in search of psychic respite. He writes: My poppies in their dance were swaying in unison and bowing in the slight breeze, each of them having a miraculous perfection of beauty in itself. When they nodded toward me they presented their yellow-black centers, and when they nodded away they then seemed a fiery scarlet. I thought how good it would be to sit among these flowers and draw their forms so that I would never forget them. So I went back to the house and borrowed a pencil and pad and came out to kneel among the poppies to sketch them. They made an imprint on my mind that seems as vivid today as it was then. (11)

Note that May speaks of ‘my’ poppies as if he recognized some sort of privileged relationship to them and how he needs to create a drawing, an image-sign, to capture them and their permanent power to enliven or quicken him. The self-presentation of the poppies and the drawing that captured it awoke May to what he was not, and what he lacked, and in this recognition he was ‘moved.’ But May was affectivated not just by the poppies but by his recollection of Wordsworth’s encounter with his own dancing daffodils. Here, affectivation is linked with a kind of felt fusion of horizons, which Gadamer (1960/1989) made a focal point of his philosophical hermeneutics. In this sense May’s experience illustrates the fundedness of affectivation. But what strikes us is the profound psychological and existential effect of a simple perception of poppies ‘dancing’ in the breeze. It is the contrast between the simplicity and the background situation in which May, in his early 20s, found himself: lonely and teaching in a foreign country, uncertain about his life course, and—prior to the poppy experience—another experience in an inn on the mountain where he had spent a cold and lonely night. He had met a group of men sitting in the inn, surrounded by the smell of grilling, and as he sat at a table writing down his thoughts, one of the men asked him what he was writing about. He answered: the secret to the meaning

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of life. He was met by derisive laughter. What, then, is it, he responded? The answer came: a grilled anchovy and a piece of bread. But note that May also felt the need to draw the forms and that he knelt down to do it. He captured them in an image just as much as they captured him by teaching him the deepest life lesson by their symbolic pregnance. At the other end of the scale, Paul Tillich, the great liberal theologian, had been a chaplain on the front lines in World War I, surrounded by death, suffering, filth, and despair. To hold himself together he would, whenever he had the slightest chance, page through picture magazines at the field bookstores. The war service, however, gave him no chance to see the original paintings, which he hurried to do in Berlin at the end of the war. There, in the Kaiser Friedrich Museum, he encountered a picture whose reproduction had consoled him in battle, Sandro Botticelli’s Madonna with Singing Angels, unfortunately now destroyed. Here is Tillich’s account of this encounter as recounted in his “One Moment of Beauty:” Gazing up at it, I felt a state approaching ecstasy. In the beauty of the painting there was Beauty itself. It shone through the colors of the paint as the light of day shines through the stained-glass windows of a medieval church. As I stood there, bathed in the beauty its painter had envisioned so long ago, something of the divine source of all things came through to me. I turned away shaken. That moment has affected my whole life, given me the keys for the interpretation of human existence, brought vital joy and spiritual truth. I compare it with what is usually called revelation in the language of religion. I know that no artistic experience can match the moments in which prophets were grasped in the power of the Divine Presence, but I believe there is an analogy between revelation and what I felt. In both cases, the experience goes beyond the way we encounter reality in our daily lives. It opens up depths experienced in no other way. I know now that the picture is not the greatest. I have seen greater since then. But that moment of ecstasy has never been repeated (Tillich 1987, 235).

These two episodes, May’s and Tillich’s, one ‘low’ and one ‘high,’ exhibit the same structure or form. But Tillich foregrounds a ‘break’ with the forms of perception of ordinary or daily life. May’s poppies belong to the self-proliferating and everpresent world of what we could call nature naturing. The break was in his perception, not the emergence of the poppies. But Botticelli’s painting was an emergence of a different order. It was designed to affectivate. But both May’s and Tillich’s existential interruptions and confirmations arise within and out of a matrix of a felt need, a sense of lack. They are captured by means of what Polanyi called “a powerful and moving image, embodying our own diffuse experiences, thus giving us an object in which to see them as integrated” (1973, 79). Both May and Tillich are carried away out of themselves and given an experience of self-integration. This is also one of the goals of affectivation, which belongs to what one could call the ‘material rhetoric of the sign.’ Still, the silent voice of the poppies and singing voice of Botticelli are in the same existential register. The “powerful and moving image” that Polanyi mentions is likewise connected with, but not identical to, what I referred to earlier as the ‘material quality of a sign’ or its ‘palpability.’ It also goes beyond those properties to incorporate a kind of semiotic depth and a change in the relationship of the subject to the sign-configuration or

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sign vehicle and to what it makes present. Polanyi calls this relationship ‘symbolization’ and the semiotic vehicle a symbol. To clarify how he is using ‘symbolization’ Polanyi distinguishes, in a way different from Peirce’s use, between ‘indication’ and ‘symbolization.’ Indication, in Polanyi’s usage, involves what he calls the integration of subsidiarily attended-from particulars into a focally attended-to whole to which they are connected. The particulars, the parts of a perceptual object such as a cube, for example, bear upon the whole but are themselves of no intrinsic interest even if they are indispensable for constituting the whole and cannot be separated from it. More generally, pointers, scripts, probes, bodily movements and positions, and so forth are vehicles in this sense: their ‘meaning’ is what they are integrated into, whether a cognitive or practical achievement or a perceptual whole. In mere recognition of a face, for example, we attend from the features to the face. It is the face as a whole that we are interested in. It gives meaning to the features just as much as the features give meaning to it. Polanyi calls such integrations in the mode of indication self-centered because they “are made from the self as a center (which includes all the subsidiary clues in which we dwell) to the object of our focal attention” (1973, 71). The diacritically important phonemic markers of a word or the typography of a text or the parts of a whole are absorbed into the thing-meant or object. The sign vehicle, as subsidiary, is of no intrinsic importance in itself. It gets its importance from the role it plays in the whole, to which it is clearly subordinate. But, still, they can become ‘palpable.’ And when they do, no importance for representation becomes importance for signification in the sense of intrinsic felt meaning of a whole. This is another one of the great lessons of Peirce’s idea of the ‘material quality of a sign’ and is a theme studied to great effect in Meyer Schapiro’s classic essay, “On Some Problems in the Semiotics of Visual Art: Field and Vehicle in Image-Signs” (Schapiro 1994). In ‘symbolization,’ however, what Polanyi calls the subsidiary clues “do not function … merely as indicators pointing our way to something else. In this second kind of meaning it is the subsidiary clues that are of intrinsic interest to us, and they enter into meaning in such a way that we are carried away by these meanings” (1973, 71). In the following summary text, what Polanyi says about being carried away illuminates another side of the concept of affectivation: an interruptive aspect in that symbolization, in Polanyi’s sense, leads to self-articulation and self-recognition. Polanyi writes: The symbol, as an object of focal awareness, is not merely established by an integration of subsidiary clues directed from the self to the focal object; it is also established by surrendering the diffuse memories and experiences of the self into this object, thus giving them a visible embodiment. This visible embodiment serves as a focal point for the integration of these diffuse aspects of the self into a felt unity, a tacit grasp of ourselves as a whole person in spite of the manifold incompatibilities existing in our lives as lived. Instead of being a selfcentered integration, a symbol becomes a self-giving one, an integration in which not only the symbol becomes integrated but the self also becomes integrated as it is carried away by the symbol–or given to it. (1973, 74–75)

Polanyi describes here in his own terms, a feature of affectivation I have earlier pointed out, namely, affectivation is the felt effect of having been ‘put into play,’ of

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having been ‘moved’ from dwelling transparently in a semiotic frame to becoming conscious of oneself in a new, vitally important way. The Polanyian symbol functions as a living mirror, engagement with which gives rise to a complex interpretant, dependent upon and marked by a feeling of self-activation. Affectivation here entails a willingness to carry out, or be carried away by, an act of self-integration. It is to attempt, in Polanyi’s formulation, to ‘validate’ by self-appropriation rather than ‘verify’ by external experience the relevance of the meanings and significances given ‘visible’ embodiment in the sign-configuration. Here is a different way of thinking about ‘palpability,’ the power of a symbol or an object functioning as a symbol to touch us. Are not May’s poppies, Wordsworth’s daffodils, and Tillich’s/Botticelli’s singing angels and Madonna symbols in Polanyi’s sense? They are Langer’s presentational forms highlighting the affect-laden iconization of experience.

Conclusion: The Continuum of Affectivation Affectivation is not a unified concept, but its exemplifications share a number of interlocking and related features. It is a constitutive feature of the human use of signs. Affectivation, in many instances, is exemplified in some form of ‘breaking’ or ‘interruption’ that is attendant upon an awareness that one has been ‘moved.’ The core idea of afffectivation, namely, that “I activate you to affect me,” entails that the ‘you’ can, and often is, a sign-configuration and not necessarily or even primarily another person. And the ‘me’ is for the most part, if we take the focus of cultural psychology in the social sense, an ‘us,’ since the circulation of signs belongs to the shared world of perceiving, acting, and interpreting organisms. But we are differentially affected by our placement in this spiraling play of signs with their psychic consequences. Affectivation at the highest levels is not so much the actual living in and through a new system of meanings as the elevated sense of being affected by certain types of objects and signs (sign-configurations). It involves letting oneself both pursue and be led toward that elevated state. This involves, I think, a certain diminishing not so much of affectivation’s conceptual usefulness but of its claim to radical novelty. Affectivation’s major strength, as I see it, lies in the power of its compound structure to foreground first and foremost the active nature of the felt dimension of semiotic transitions, of passing beyond and into semiotic frames, and the enhanced sense that the indwelt frames have a distinctive quality that makes them worth attending to in themselves both because of their expressive power and their power to mirror, and hence engage, us in the depths of our being. It is clearly the function of artists and of the great symbolic visionaries, including, albeit not often, political leaders, to produce these affectivating sign-configurations. But even nature itself, as May and many others show, can take on such an affectivating power, even if it has not been ‘produced’ by any external power to do so, and nature naturing is the dynamic source of deep symbols of ultimate importance, as Donald Crosby has explored with

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nuance and depth in his More than Discourse (2014) and Robert Corrington in quite different contexts (2013, 2017). In another sense, the notion of affectivation captures the ability of the energies of objects and sign-configurations to give rise to an unlimited chain or spiral of interpretants (Innis 2017). While we can classify interpretants by the use of Peirce’s triadic affective, energetic, and symbolic schema, if we really take his theory of quality and immediate feeling seriously, as Dewey did, each instance of an interpretant will eo ipso have a distinctive feel. Interpretants can be identical in power by reason of their ability to direct us communally to the same object, while the distinctive feel of the interpretant can be different. This feel, when it breaches the threshold of being-taken-for-granted, constitutes one of the core features of affectivation. Looked at from the point of view of a philosophically informed semiotics, then, the concept of ‘affectivating,’ although proposed as a neologism for use in cultural psychology, encompasses in fact a plethora of well-known and extensively explored characteristics or constitutive features of the life of consciousness itself. Such a semiotics and its informing philosophical partner, which are eager collaborators with a comprehensive cultural psychology, attempt first of all to thematize the formal frames of the life of consciousness and the flux of experience in terms of the production and interpretation of signs and meaning-systems. These semiosic processes define the ultimate parameters of selving and of the autoregulation of life attendant upon the spread of Peircean thirdness or sign-mediated rational orders. Indeed, a philosophical semiotics agrees with cultural psychology that the ‘self’ is not a substance or stable thing but a self-integrating multileveled dynamic unity that emerges from these processes and is ‘placed’ or ‘located’ in the resulting objective sign systems, frames that are both enabling and constraining. Such semiotic frames are enabling in that they are essential tools for the autoregulation of human conduct, without which the selving process is dispersed and scattered in a wild continuum of autogenic impulses and exogenic stimuli, without an effective, or reflectively accessible, center. Such frames are constraining in that they also fill the emerging processual self with content and significance, with ‘predicates’ that define it, since semiosis, in its ramifying processes of the play of signs, produces the semiosphere which is not a neutral set of cultural tools that are merely formal in nature. Assimilation into and indwelling in a repertory of semiotic tools, which occurs both tacitly and explicitly, shapes and transforms our relations both to ourselves and to the world and empowers as well as weakens us on multiple levels. Sign-configurations or systems of signs are first and foremost engaged by us in their role of being ‘about’ or making present in an intentional way their ‘objects.’ But these ‘objects’ or ‘things-meant’ also include ourselves. As Peirce argued, we, too, appear to ourselves as objects to be interpreted, and, like all objects, are accessed through the ‘interpretants’ that link the signs and sign-configurations with their objects and the relational complexes within which they (we) are located. Selfinterpretation and world-interpretation are inextricably intertwined, and both rely on the available conceptual, affective, and action schemas that surround them in their cultural and interpersonal milieu. It is this dynamic multiform milieu in all its breadth and depth and its spiraling and ramifying differentiations of felt meanings and their

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material embodiments that is the focal concern that joins philosophy and cultural psychology together. In this sense, affectivation—in all its conceptual dimensions— describes not just a shared research topic of cultural psychology and philosophy but their existential goal.

Extensions and Continuations: On Power and the Limits of Logocentrism

Robert Innis’s book deals with fundamental issues, shared by philosophy and cultural psychology, of the thresholds of sense, outlining the power that defines subjective and objective frames within which experience takes on multileveled forms of meaning. Innis’s core assertion is found in the following text: Cultural psychology, and a philosophically informed semiotics, sees this semiotic power as dividing the whole sensory continuum and the domains of human meaningful action at their significant joints and recombining them into stable forms that embody meanings that cannot also be captured in discourse. Such are the meanings presented or embodied in the pregnant symbolic configurations of art, myth, religion, sacramental acts and rituals. A philosophical semiotics and cultural psychology, while clearly discursive disciplines, are not, indeed cannot be, logocentric.

There are specially two areas in Innis’s book that I want to comment on and take further. The first area concerns the semiotic aspects of the relations between power expressions and power relations. Such relations are historically and culturally defined. They cannot be captured by logocentric examination and discourse. The second concerns the view that our environment, that is, our health care institutions, schools, political orders, and so forth are historical and social facts with a psychological and linguistic reality that push us into engagement with things and situations that we not always are truly aware of and which not always seem meaningful (cf. Joranger 2013, 2015, 2018, 2019a, b).

Regimes and Experiences Human beings are moulded by a great many distinct regimes and experiences (Joranger 2019a). Our experiences are affected by the fact that our bodies and minds are broken down by the rhythms of work and holidays, Netflix series, snapchat, meditation, education, politics, and feelings such as fear and love: love for nature, love © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 R. E. Innis, Between Philosophy and Cultural Psychology, SpringerBriefs in Psychology and Cultural Developmental Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58190-9

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for family, love for life, fear of living, fear of dying, fear of terror, fear of isolation, fear of being infected by pandemics, and so forth. Our body-minds are so intoxicated by these feelings and the cultural and historical rhythm that we melt into it all without recognising it in a thematic way. However, as human actors, Innis foregrounds, we respond not to, but into, our environment and our fellow human beings who are informed by past, present, and future expectations and experiences, which Innis, following Dewey, characterizes as ‘funded.’ Independently existing human beings do not engage an independently existing ‘objective’ world that they then experience or ‘realize’ subjectively. Rather, we are always already defined by the world (institution) or by the forms of experiencing that make it up. The objects of these forms of experiencing are already revealed within one or the other subjective states or modes of relating to the world, the fore-structures that Innis delineates with his combination of Peirce’s theory of interpretantsand Heidegger’s analysis of the fore-structures of understanding. That is, certain subjective yet world-intending structures of being-in-the-world make it possible for us to appear as autonomous human beings in relations to others (Joranger 2019). Lived experience is thus neither a property of the person nor a function of the object, but the product of a ‘strife’ between the human world and the natural world (Valsiner 2014). The philosophical concept of being-in-the-world, which Innis describes in pragmatistsemiotic terms, defines here an experience that is primarily relational; it is not the pasting together of two separate entities that exist independently first and only subsequently enter into a relation with each other. As humans we affect and are affected by personal experience as well as historical and cultural habits which through a variety of meaning systems pushes us to act, speak, join and withdraw from groups and situations we do not always find meaningful or even are inclined to think about. We can speak of an extended mind that is larger than anything to be found in an individual’s immediate environment (Gallagher 2013). In this sense environments and institutions take on a life of their own and allow us to engage in activities, often cognitive activities, that we are unable to do purely in the head, or even in many heads (Gallagher and Crisafi 2009). Such institutions are the result of a network of human cognitive processes. They are externalizations of individual minds working collectively. They are employed to solve problems and to control behavior. The institutions of civil society, the social, educational, and legal institutions that originate in human cognition are thus, ideally, not alien to the human being, but externalizations of individual minds working collectively, permeated and marked by prejudice and shame. Prejudice and shame are cultural and historical mechanisms, deeply personal, that regulate thought and behaviour. They are somatically marked in terms of vague uncomfortable or comfortable feelings aroused by our bodies and facial features, feelings that are experienced implicitly and thus engrained beneath the level of explicit consciousness, part of the somatic tonusthat Innis discusses. Because they are cultural and historical, they resist correction by mere discursive arguments for tolerance, which can be accepted on the rational level without changing the visceral grip of prejudice. Innis approaches these topics by an analysis of qualitative determinations of the situations and contexts of our lives and their ‘atmospheres.’

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Most of the hostility and lack of hospitality toward people is the product not of rational thought but of deep historical and cultural prejudices showing itself in language and concepts, as well as bodily habits (Joranger 2019). Language and concepts that govern our thinking are not just matters of the intellect. Like the human body and mind, our concepts structure what we perceive, how we get around in the world, and how we relate to other people. Our conceptual system thus plays a central role in defining our everyday realities. Like the daily movements of our bodies, however, our conceptual system is not something we are normally aware of (Lakoff and Johnson 1980). In most of the little things we do every day, we simply think and act more or less automatically along certain lines. Just what these lines are is by no means obvious, embedded as they are in our semiotically grounded language, institutions, and concepts. Since communication is based on the same conceptual system that we use in thinking and acting, language is an important source of evidence for what that system is—and is like. Embedded in the multilayered contexts of our lives, we often deny we even have prejudices because we do not realize that expunging them demands that we develop the reflective somatic awareness to recognize them in ourselves. Intersubjective social relations and prejudices, then, involve a historical, physical, and bodily connection that is crucial for understanding ourselves in relation to others (Joranger 2019). The bodily self is both psychologically and physically active and influential, alienated, infinite, and restricted. Because the natural and bodily self will always resist becoming an object of its surroundings, the self will always strive for development and integration with the world of the other (Joranger 2014). In this vein, because we cannot escape the judgment of others if we want to become real, we shape an illusion of invulnerability. This illusion of invulnerability becomes an additional world that we connect to reality itself. The self—that is, the mind, the body, and the surroundings—constitutes, in this case, an internal relational structure in which they mutually refer to each other and become part of what we are and human life itself.

The Apparatus: Language, Power, and Power Relations The French intellectual historian Michel Foucault (1980) saw these internal relational structures as produced and kept alive by what he calls the apparatus (or dispositif ). The term represents a thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions, in short, the said as much as the unsaid. The apparatus itself is the system of relations that can be established between all these internal relational elements. What Foucault tries to identify in the apparatus is precisely the nature of the connection that exist between the objective and subjective, history and present, the said and the unsaid, the rational and irrational, the physical and psychological. Between these internal relational elements, whether discursive or non-discursive, there is a sort of interplay of shifts of position and modifications of function which

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can vary very widely. Thus, a particular discourse can figure at one time as the program of an institution, and at another time it can function as a means of justifying or masking a practice which itself remains silent, or as a secondary re-interpretation of this practice, opening out for it a new field of prejudice and rationality. The apparatus is a kind of formation which has as its major function at a given historical moment: that of responding to an urgent need for establishing order and meaningful connection. The apparatus thus has a dominant strategic function. In time of pandemic, such as Coronavirus and Covid 19, it may be the fear of death and infection that suddenly establishes an apparatus of extensive public control over our behavior and freedom. In time of war and terror it may be the assimilation of a floating population found to be burdensome for an essentially mercantilist economy: there is a strategic imperative acting here as the matrix for an apparatus which gradually undertakes the control or subjection of refugees and asylum seekers. Not seldom the apparatus establishes perceptual regimes of classification of sovereigns and subordinates who are placed in very different universe of possibilities and dependencies. As I have written elsewhere: Not very surprising, the perpetual regimes of classification, hierarchization, and observation that we find in modern society will necessarily create a residue of unclassified individuals who cannot be integrated in this restricted and disciplinary power regime. Thus, in modern welfare states a number of deviance systems are established with their own specialized institutions set up to care for deviants.

The deviance systems and the modern mental health care systems, together, pin the subject-function exactly to the human body (Joranger 2019a, 73). The production of meaning and reality cannot be detached from human actors, institutions, language, culture and history. These are all power mechanisms, in the sense that they make possible and bring about the production of truth. Such production of truth itself has the power to bring us together and tie us to a common world. Truth/power and knowledge/power relationships have a historical foundation: ‘Power relations as they function in today’s society are rooted in positions of strength that at specific historical points of time were established in war and by war’ (Foucault 1997, p. 17). War and power relations are something that enlightened people like to think that they have put behind them. But the point is that the techniques of power mechanism are also present in peacetime. They are to be found in every human life and in every being-in-the world as semioticexpression, such as institutions, practices, and language. Even though scientists dealing with mental phenomena devote a great deal of effort to making their theoretical language and knowledge clear, objective, and empirical, that is, non-historical and non-subjective, one has to acknowledge that the meanings in which psychological phenomena are categorized carry an enormous burden of unexamined and unquestioned power structures connected to sociocultural and historical assumptions and preconceptions (Joranger 2015; Rose 1998; Taylor 1989). When one consults current scientists in psychology and mental health care, with which I am especially involved, they seem to treat language (including numerical language) and concepts as if they were the bearers of truth by means of which

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they inform their colleagues and their culture of the results of their observations and thoughts (Gergen 2001). However, our language is not historically neutral, nor is it so objective that we ever can speak of a purely objective reason or a purely objective truth. No human beings live in a world where historical occurrence is nothing but an unending concatenation of illusory progress and bitter disappointment. To excavate this hidden level of reality, to make it visible we need a semiotic-philosophical and cultural-historical analysis of the concepts and discourse from which different knowledge areas derive their sense. Innis provides analytical tools that contribute to this important task of uncovering the diverse derivations and thresholds of sense. In a world where bodies are mutilated, alienated, starved, and abused, our familiar discourses and concepts of duty, virtue, charity, and respect for other can get no meaning and make no sense. Although every human is unique and has a mind of his/her own, every human being is dependent on others to become what he or she is or believes they should be. What we are and who we become depends not only on subjective perceptions and actions, but on what other people do and think, and want us to be. Our social and professional networks, friends, family, and colleagues define, protect, demand, and serve each other. Dyads, roles, settings, social networks, whether they are in a local community or in institutions, are all parts of an environmental apparatus that have an impact on our psychological growth and the way we think and behave, functioning behind our backs. In this case, we can only extract the ‘objective’ truth of classification and class relations as power relations by destroying everything that helps to give domination the appearances of legitimacy. However, we fall short of objectivity by failing to write into our theory of social classes the primary truth against which it was constructed, in particular the veil of symbolic and semiotic relations without which in many cases, class relations, such as gender and ethnicity, would not be able to function in their ‘objective’ truth as relations of exploitation. Objectivist and logocentric visions often forget that misrecognition of the reality of class relations is an integral part of the reality of those relations. When the arbitrary differences recorded by statistical distributions of properties are apprehended in terms of a system of schemes of perception and appreciation objectively adjusted to the objective structure, they are recognized as legitimate. They then become signs of ‘natural’ distinction directly related to their rarity. All appearances notwithstanding, the value of the properties capable of functioning as symbolic capital lies not in any intrinsic characteristic of the practices or goods in question, but in their marginal value, which, since it depends on linking their values and number, necessarily tends to decline as they are multiplied and popularized. Symbolic capital, as Bourdieu (1990) explains it, is the product of a struggle in which each agent is both a ruthless competitor and supreme judge. However, this capital, or the classes and titles that guarantee it, seems in some cases to be defendable in times of inflation, pandemic, and times of class movements, such as MeToo and Black Lives Matter (BLM), where one’s struggle for recognition becomes visible to the whole world.

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History and social events impress themselves not only in things and events but on thinking and behaviour. Our bodies and semioticexpressions become the surface of inscription of events, manifesting the stigma of past experience and also giving rise to desire, failings and errors (Foucault 1984, p. 83). Social groups and environments are constituted by way of diverse bodily habits, language use, rules, norms, and values. Behind each concrete experience that would shape each of us as an interdependent human being the standpoint of others represents the social and institutional codes that allow or prohibit acting in a certain manner. Being affected in this way, our actions are not only conducted according to our personal will, but also potentially affected by the collectivistic dimension of the historical and cultural environment in which we are located, issues that permeate Innis’s discussion of affectivation. As soon as we move from the structure of language and discourses to the personal history and collective functions it fulfills, that is, to the uses agents actually make of these structures, one sees that the mere knowledge of the concepts and ‘code’ gives only very imperfect mastery of the linguistic, and language-informed, interactions really taking place. As Innis observes, the meaning of a linguistic element depends as least as much on extra-linguistic as on linguistic factors, that is to say, on the semioticcontexts and situations in which it is used. Everything takes place as if, from among the class of ‘signifieds’ abstractly corresponding to a speech sound, the receiver ‘selected’ the one which seems to her/him to be compatible with the circumstances as (s)he perceives them (Prieto 1964). Thus, reception depends to a large degree on the objective structure of the relations between the objective positions in the social structure of the interacting agents, e.g., relations of competition or objective antipathy, or relations of power and authority, which govern the form and content of the interactions observed in a particular conjuncture. Representing the Geneva school, the Swiss linguist Charles Bally (1965, p. 21), shows how the very content of communications, the nature of the language and all the forms of expression used, posture, gesture etc., and above all, perhaps, their style, are affected by the structure of the social relations between the agents involved and, more precisely, by the structure of their relative positions in the hierarchies of gender, ethnicity, age, power, prestige, and culture: When I talk to someone, or talk about him, I cannot help visualizing the particular type of relationship (casual, formal, obligatory, official) between that person and myself; involuntarily I think not only of his possible action toward myself, but also his age, sex, rank, and social background; all these considerations may affect my choice of expressions and lead me to avoid what might discourage, offend, or hurt…my language becomes reserved and prudent; it becomes indirect and euphemistic, it slides over the surface instead of insisting.

Reciprocal influence always arises on the basis of certain drives or for the sake of certain purposes: therapeutical, ethical, professional, economic, aesthetic, educational, ideological, political, or the merely associative impulses, and for purposes of defense, attack, play, gain, or aid. These and countless other interactions cause human beings to live and to connect with other human beings, to act for them, with them, against them, and thus to adapt their needs, wishes, skills, and drives with theirs. In brief, every human being influences and is influenced by such interactions and exchanges on every level of their existence (Simmel 1971, p. 23). Social and

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professional institutions, like cultural practices and legal systems, are pieces of the mind, externalized in their specific time and place. We create these institutions via our own shared mental processes. We then use these institutions instrumentally to do further cognitive work—i.e., to solve problems and to control behavior.

Humans as Living Actors As humans we are living actors, not objects who passively react to stimuli, analogous to the mechanistic cause-effect relationships between objects (Joranger 2015). In this scenario, the unity between subjective feelings and objective seeing cannot ultimately be conceived as merely contingent, as something whose existence depends for its realization solely upon the choices of individual agents. Nor can this unity take the form of some sort of imposition of an independently formed subjective end onto an objective domain that is otherwise external to this end. On the contrary, as Innis shows, subjectivity and objectivity are intertwined in their very essence, such that, in the final analysis, one cannot ultimately understand one without the other. Thus, rather than conceiving of our subjectivity as essentially distinct from what is made objectively manifest through our actions, for instance, as an interiority that we may or may not successfully externalize in action, it seems that we must think of action as the very actuality or actualization of subjectivity, as that distinctive form of objectivity without which there would simply be no subjectivity. It is thus that Hegel (1991, p. 124) can say, for instance, that “what the subject is, is the series of its actions,” a position fully consonant with the analyses of the semioticcontours of the self that Innis sets forth relying on rather different conceptual resources. What Hegel implies here is that any attempt of a human being to identify its true self with certain internal aspirations, commitments, or self-conceptions that were never made objectively manifest in actual deeds is ultimately disingenuous. It is only in its actual deeds, in its objectivity, that the subject shows itself for what it really is. While the contrastive sense of subjectivity and objectivity will presumably still have an important role to play in Hegel’s account, it seems that in the larger scheme of things this contrastive sense must be conceived, not as the fundamental state of things, nor as the ultimate starting point of action, but rather as a derivative, deficient mode of a more fundamental unity. The challenge is how to understand the precise nature of this unity, and to understand exactly how the basic concepts of subjectivity and objectivity, as well as the corresponding concept of action, are to be reconceived in its light. Innis’s book reminds us that the desire to integrate variations, exceptions, and accidents into descriptions of regularities and to show how individuals in particular structures handle the choices with which they are faced as individuals in all societies, leads one to regress to the pre-structuralist stage of the individual and his/her choices, and to miss the very principle of the logocentric error. Like Husserl (1970) in The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology,Innis aims to protect our modern scientific knowledge areas from the naïve thought that

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everything, also the human psyche, can be measured and generalised. He certainly wants to rescue modern psychology and modern way of thinking from being trapped in this naiveté, which is also a great danger for philosophy. That the objectivistic approaches of modern sciences cannot go beyond generalized epistemological and ontological discussions about reason and unreason, or about us human beings as subjects of freedom regarding our capacities for rationally shaping ourselves and our surrounding world, is not a satisfying state of affairs. Innis’ssemiotic and philosophical reflections on cultural psychology reach deep into the two cultures theme (Snow, 1959), that is, the relations between nomothetic sciences and ideographic sciences, although he does not frame it in this book in this way. The separation relates to the distinction between explanation (erklären) and interpretation (verstehen), a distinction first outlined by the neo-Kantian philosopher Wilhelm Windelband (1905, 1919). Conceptually, the nomothetic sciences are based on what Kant ([1787]1996) conceived the role of the natural sciences to be, that is— sciences that can generalize and describe by the effort to derive laws and concepts that explain objective phenomena in general. Idiographic sciences are based on the humanistic sciences and what Kant describes as a tendency to specify, that is—our efforts to interpret and understand the meaning of contingent, unique, and often subjective phenomena.1 One can see Innis extending, without it being necessary in light of his focus to mention them, Kant’s and Windelband’s division further by means of a terminological modification into ‘generalizing’ and ‘individualizing’ sciences to become a connected and comprehensive methodology of a cultural psychology with a semiotic and philosophical tone. Since empirical reality presents in its sensory perceptibility both an extensive, regarding its totality, and an intensive, with regard to each of its parts, as well as an enormous diversity of individual representations in time and space, its scientific comprehension can only consist in the mastering of a complex totality. The problem with purely general explanations is that they inevitably end up with reductionism, a philosophical position antithetic to Innis’s whole approach and to cultural psychology. The appeal of reductionist thinking lies in its putative ability to offer clear and concise explanations for problems that might otherwise defy explanation. However, once psychological phenomena are reduced to their scientific component status, they are essentially removed from the wider social and cultural commonsense language in which all human action takes shape (Smedslund 1988). As a result, the language we use to describe and explain human agency is curiously absent in psychological research. The conceptual history of mental health care, with which I have been occupied, shows that a perceptual change occurred during the nineteenth century, when modern psychology adopted concepts from the logocentric and natural scientific knowledge area to reach an objective understanding of mental phenomena without including ethical and philosophical questions (Joranger 2019). The consequence of excluding ethical and philosophical questions from their knowledge areas was 1 For

American psychology, the terms idiographic and nomothetic were introduced by Gordon Allport in his work Personality: PsychologicalInterpretation (1937).

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that physicians and mental health care workers basically stopped searching for the meaning of the words ‘health’ and ‘disease,’ and became totally concerned with these vital phenomena from a purely objective point of view (Canguilhem 1989; Jaspers [1913]1997). Consequently, a modern mental health care system grew up that asserted that one could apply exactly the same scientific and medical concepts and methods used to investigate the human body to the human mind. The modern mental health care system, like the somatic field of knowledge, has for a long time now divided subjective feelings and diseases into abstract concepts and categories, leaving little room for personal experience and expression that do not fit into these neat concepts and categories. For many scientific projects of investigating the human form of life, the world and the individual mind are still simply out there, available for observation. However, “by the time explicit psychological theories are formulated, most of the theoretical work has already happened—it is embedded in the categories used to describe and classify psychological phenomena” (Danziger 1997, p. 8). In all viable systems, there must be an area where the individual is free to make choices so as to manipulate or deal with the system to his or her advantage. In accepting an obligatory alternative, the model and the situation, the structure and the individual variations, one condemns oneself simply to take the diametrically opposite course to the logocentric abstraction which subsumes variations, regarding them as simple variants, into the structure. The desire to integrate variations, exceptions, and accidents into descriptions of regularities, and to show how individuals in a particular structure handle the choices that they are faced with, as individuals are in all societies, leads one to regress to the pre-structural stage of the individual and his or her choices, and to miss the very principle giving us access to the structuralist and logocentric error. As Innis observes, there are external facts that we can explain in logical fashion. What we cannot explain is what the facts are independent of all conceptual and perceptual choices. Because we always already are defined by the world or by the objects around us, this indicates that an independently existing subject does not go into an independently existing world of which the subject has an independent experience or scientific knowledge. Scientists who study human beings in their everyday life and psychological phenomena will always have to define their ideas in relation to something/ someone already defined: a mindset, a rule, a theory, a language, an environment, a position, etc. Therefore, it is important to ask critical questions about one’s own research tradition: how does it come into play, what kind of concepts and rules control it? The aim is to reveal whether one is affected by rules and notions that are more limiting than illuminating, or with meaningless practices that has become meaningful, and vice versa. Such are some continuing and extending thoughts from other angles provoked by Innis’s conceptual framing of the intersections between philosophy and cultural psychology. Line Joranger, University of South-Eastern Norway, Porsgrunn

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Taylor, C. 1989. Sources of the self: the making of the modern identity. Cambridge, MA, USA: Harvard University Press. Valsiner, J. 2014. An invitation to cultural psychology. California: Sage. WindÙelband, W. 1905. Über Willensfreiheit: zwölf Vorlesungen (2. unver. Aufl. ed.). Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr. Windelband, W. 1919. Präludien: Aufsätze und Reden zur Philosophie und ihrer Geschichte (6. unveränderte Aufl. ed.). Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr.

Body, Affectivity and Language: The Affective Semiosis of the Emergence of the New

Abstract The present commentary onBetweenPhilosophy andCultural Psychology (Innis 2020) proposes to discuss Innis’s interpretation of presentational signs, highlighting the records of ambiguity and ambivalence that are part of his aesthetic take on the relation between individuals and culture. In order to add vividness to these thoughts, I will use some fragments of two masterpieces of Brazilian literature by Clarice Lispector: Água Viva (2012) and The Passion according to G.H. (1988). Some of the hallmarks of Clarice Lispector’s work are living metaphors that address something beyond language, yet are full of meaning, of affective intensities, recreated in the experience of the readers who feel themselves read by the text. Keywords Presentational signs, Affectivity, Clarice Lispector, Literature

Intersections Between Philosophy and Cultural Psychology takes a semiotic plunge into the complexity of human experience, an experience with apparently ineffable outlines. The investigation of experiences is one of the fields most resistant to theoretical reason due to the singularity of its forms of irruption, distinct from the subject’s observable automatisms of habit or grammar in controlling daily experiences. In the encounter between the subject and the alterity of the world, the life of the signs active in the experience is an issue as abstract and complex as it is concrete and embodied in the forms of life.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 R. E. Innis, Between Philosophy and Cultural Psychology, SpringerBriefs in Psychology and Cultural Developmental Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58190-9

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In this book, the emergence of the sign and its signification effects—the “nanoparticle” of human uniqueness—is placed under an analytical magnifier of a holistic hermeneutic for the purpose of understanding the open and creative dynamics of being-in-the-world. The sign is thus positioned as a mark/representative of a dual corporeality that updates both the unique and immediate qualities of feeling, as well as the more exosomatic ones that Innis discusses in this book, specific to the cultural discursiveness embodied through abstract qualities, hypergeneralised in the oneness of the self (Valsiner 2019). In this sense, long before babies become competent language users, they are able to apprehend something through the intensity/power of words, generating response patterns such as spontaneity or aversion, or even expressions apparently moved by the voice of the mother’s otherness, melodically sung. Conversely, it is still impressive how encounters with certain cultural formations are able to silence us, dismantling previous meanings, mutually transforming the subject and object of the experience, exemplified by the rapture typical of the sublime in the arts. The dimensions of the body, affectivity, and language can be read as ontological records irreducible to each other. Nevertheless, they are also inseparable spheres of the whole and of the unity inherent to psychic events specific to human creative activity. Accordingly, the understanding of the interpenetrable and borderline record of the body-affectivity-language triad requires, necessarily, that Psychology rewrite its modern scientific emancipation project, guided by the epistemological matrices of the science of nature. The articulation among these three dimensions of the experience is a type of question that goes beyond the relations between theoretical and empirical fields and necessarily requires a dialogue with Philosophy as the science of first precedence in relation to the advent of Psychology in psychophysical laboratories. The rewriting of the modes of knowledge construction, as proposed by Cultural Psychology of Semiotic Dynamics (CPSD) (Lyra and Pinheiro 2018), is driven by overcoming the generalising and elementaristic behavioural triviality (Koch, 1981) towards what Innis, with a nod to Plato, thinks of as tracing the significant joints between psyche and the cultural matrices of significant action. A central thread of Innis’s discussion is that both semiotically informed Philosophy and CPSD share the view about the key role of aesthetic experience in shaping the relationship between subject and world. Such a view of this aspect of human experience allows access to the holism involved in human action, which could be thought of as a field of inquiry about the qualities of feeling, of the construction of an affectively-toned corporeality constituted in language and, thus, the creative transformativity proper to symbolic exchanges between individuals and culture. The initial project of Psychology, the one that arose from Fechner’s inductive aesthetics, was to describe the subjective aspects of experience. But because of the role of the experimental method, this science ended up focusing more and more on the objective aspects such as the perception of sounds, lines, rhythms, volume, symmetry, etc. Such an experimental aesthetics opposed the idealistic German tradition by trying to build an empirical foundation to aesthetic laws. According to Fechner, philosophical aesthetics was like a giant with legs of clay (apud. Richter 1973). At a

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certain point in history, research on Psychology became the science of the empirical and perceptual bases of thinking and thus half of human experience was erased. Innis’s book constructs a dialogue between philosophy and psychology through the lens of semiotics. The theoretical universes of both a semiotically informed philosophy and psychology operate on the basis of approaching the disquieting slit in the ordinary record of human lives, an alteritarian universe of feeling, that aims to gain shape in the process of human becoming through semiotic dynamics. In this perspective, aesthetic experience can be understood as a complex psychological process in which the ordinarity and mundane sphere of existence is transformed by a dynamics that rises over a sort of “objectivity of the object”, a construction that is at the same time creative, affective and symbolic. Such process requires a recognition that a comprehensive analysis of the human condition must pass through the wholeness of the aesthetic experience as it emerges in new signs in personal and collective culture. Innis, when exploring semiotic dynamics—which “‘pushes meaning down’ to the lower levels of sensibility and affectivity and ‘pushes meaning up’ to levels beyond and even within discourse” (in this book)—leads the reader to a kind of materiality of the sign that sheds light on: (a) the necessary and borderline unity among the worlds of philosophy, science, art and life (Bakhtin 1999), (b) the realisation that human life can only be scrutinized in the significant action produced in the continuum between sensitivity and sign emergence beyond its observable external contents, and c) the fact that signs create realities that organise the nebulosity of what impacts us and takes it further into and beyond language, at the same time inaugurating new meanings through affectivesemiosis. In what follows I propose to discuss Innis’sinterpretation and analysis of presentational signs, highlighting the records of ambiguity and ambivalence that are part of his aesthetic take on the relation between individuals and culture. In order to add vividness to these thoughts, I will use some fragments of two masterpieces of Brazilian literature: Água Viva (2012) and The Passion According to G.H. (1988) by Clarice Lispector. Some of the hallmarks of Clarice Lispector’s work are living metaphors that address something beyond language yet are full of meaning, of affective intensities, recreated in the experience of the readers who feel themselves read by the text. In her unusual journey, Lispector’s quasi-autobiography undertakes a journey about the body and its sensibilities into the strangeness of raw life. Here is a passage from Água Viva (Lispector 2012): I see that I’ve never told you how I listen to music—I gently rest my hand on the record player and my hand vibrates, sending waves through my whole body: and so I listen to the electricity of the vibrations, the last substratum of reality’s realm, and the world trembles inside my hands. (p. 5)

By invoking Clarice Lispector’s metaphors, we intend to shed light on the dimension joining body-affectivity-language in the presentationality of signs by the author, who invented a new language for each of her books.

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Presentational Signs: Ambiguity and Ambivalence as Marks of Aesthetic Experience In thedialogue between Peirce’s philosophy and CPSD, Innis takes up the issue of the purpose of knowledge construction in light of a pragmatic ethics. In a necessary provocation, he reminds the reader that it is not enough, or even naive, to think of a purely descriptive goal for Psychology’s scientific project. This would signify aimless theoretical reason, blind to the concreteness of the ways of life. In the assertiveness of Innis’s words: Philosophy in its normative dimension would assert that cultural psychology as a companion human science is not, indeed cannot be, indifferent to human practices and should not consider them merely as exhibits collected for a kind of museum of curiosities, examined for our amusement or professional or political advancement.

So the author returns to the ethical horizon of Peirce’s philosophy, enunciated as the ‘eminently admirable,’ meaning the ‘highest good’ or summum bonum. These formulations would point to an aesthetic goal guided by the role of significant actions in the construction of a desirable and full life, a representation of one’s life as a totality of meaning (Boero 2019, p. 45). From the viewpoint of sign dynamics, the perspective of an aesthetic existence takes up the reflection on spontaneity, on the emergence of the new that goes beyond the automatic record of rule following, of the numbness of everyday ordinariness over the universe’s chaos. The resistance of the objects of the experience—in their quality of concrete otherness as opposed to the world of life—can potentially trigger the construction of alternative paths in the field of action. This would be the very nature of the emerging creativity of abductive processes, those that escape the logic of the predictability of laws, of what is clearly visible. Abduction happens as an exploration of a possibility that surprises or even overturns prescribed categories. It is important to underline the fact that mental and cultural life is an endless process of producing signs and signification effects. An important premise is that the idea of representation has very particular outlines in this philosophical pragmatism that always implies a field of openness and excess. The object of representation exceeds the very representamen and the interpretative sign transforms, as a reference to some idea, the aspect/capacity of the object represented in the sign. Therefore, language would not be a mirror of nature, but a second nature that humanises us as an opening in the sign to what exceeds it, which would be beyond itself. Based on the philosophical framework of Susanne Langer, Innis highlights counterintuitive relations for the understanding of the unity of sign emergence. The combinatorial simultaneity of abstraction and intuition, perception and interpretation, as well as the more immediate sensitivity that bears the mark of the mind, characterise a sign quality grammar that subverts a certain tradition in the dichotomizing Psychology of affect and cognitive relations. At this point, the author is emphatic in proposing that “abstraction is the originary symbolic act of human minding.” This abstraction would not belong exclusively to the language games

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that rationalise experience, but, on the contrary, would be deeply involved in affectivesemiosis. So the emergent sign originates in the selectivity of forms that capture the user/producer of signs positioned before the world’s chaos. This process actively recreates the capturing and pathic dimension of the subject in the symbolically constituted consciousness. The analogies, relations and systematic forms constitute the constructive and active character of interpretation as a component of intuitive abstraction as related to the symbolic abstraction processes of the mind. From this conceptual path, Innis introduces the reader to a particular sign formation, proposed by Langer, namely: presentational signs. The particularity of this sign starts from another referentiality, as if originating from an interior, tense. and disturbing otherness of the embodied self. In the author’s words the presentational signs would be “images of felt life”, differing from the conceptual record of the discursive sequence, but explaining and elaborating marks/traces of the significant life, in the aesthetic sense of the experience, that is, such as the irruption of an affectladen image. “The semiotic fullness of presentationalforms is beyond language, but not beyond meaning.” These signs, explains Innis, are marked by both incompleteness and resistance to being put into words, as if the latter were precarious in their ability to say, always concealing a portion of a semi-said. From the analytical viewpoint of the aestheticholistic and subjective dimension of experience, we can ask how the intensification of ambiguity, in its nebulous effect in the field of the interpretant, would be an indication of the presentational nature of the sign. In the context of human communicative exchanges, an ambiguity breaks the illusion of language transparency, of meaning as something that could be “shared” intersubjectively, as some psychological jargon may say. The intensity of ambiguity in the experiences of language point to meaning uncertainty, but especially to the infinite field of the possible. Thus, the ambiguity experienced in the meaningmaking processes leads to a place where the subject does not sovereignly dominate what is said, shedding light on an affectivesemiosis full of ambivalence, a nonlinear dynamic of feelings. Ambivalence, as a co-existence of distinct, opposing, and tensioned affectiveforms, would be specific to the subject’s capturing, and the intuitive motor in the effort of signification. Although ambiguity and ambivalence are not synonymous, their dual occurrence can be investigated as a special marker of significant experiences, with an aesthetic sequence, in the flow of life. The presentational signs—in their face of ambiguity, inconclusiveness and resistance to the field of words—can perform a representation of what is in the larval stage in the experience: a semi-said potentiality, laden with affect, a living form produced in a logic distinct from discursiverationality. As introduced in the book, the most everyday and little observed experiences for the common person, are reconstructed in the presentational sign in an unusual plunge into the invisible and, simultaneously, is capable of transforming the experiences. This other record of life, provoked by the universe of presentational signs, perhaps comes close to what the Argentinian essayist José Juan Saer characterizes as fiction. In his words:

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By moving towards the unverifiable, fiction infinitely multiplies treatment possibilities. It does not deny an alleged objective reality; on the contrary, it submerges in its own turbulence, showing disdain for the naive attitude of pretending to know in advance which way reality will fall. (Saer 2012, p. 3)2

In this proposition derived from the experience of authorship in literature, it is interesting to note that fiction is related not to the field of the unreal, but to the multiple complexity of the possible that underlies what may emerge as a truth. Accordingly, fiction would not be the field of what transfigures reality, but of what expands the weave of the senses (Pinheiro and Simão 2020). In a pragmatism very different from what has been addressed here, but worth mentioning nevertheless, Richard Rorty (1993) highlights that literature is a potential field of the experience marked by the possibility of expanding the reader’s imagination, through idiosyncratic aspects conceived in the act of reading. Literature would be able to put the self in contact with the pain and humiliation of the other, as well as his/her own intimate, yet perceived as strange. For him, human solidarity, that which takes place, would be a participatory emotion provoked by the intensity of recognition, where the literary experience would be a potential reality laden with presentational signs.

Clarice Lispector’s Signs: Presentational Signs? As an interpretative exercise to approach the issues discussed about the relations among presentational signs, ambiguity and ambivalence, I want to approach the fictional work designed by Clarice Lispector (1988, 2012), one of the greatest Brazilian authors of the XX century. Her work takes as a mark the construction of characters that, in the everyday of their lives, plunge into the inquiry of their own desire, as a kind of epiphany, a birth of themselves, that is, the words about to be said. The intimate and subjective traces of her literature allows the reader to access the abyss hidden by the most trivial prose of life. In her writing, the stable solidity of her own name melts away in the unusual intensities of the corporeality through which she felt the world and herself in an excessive way. Lispector’s fiction is very particular because it deals, precisely, with the limits of language, thereby producing in the reader a disquieting experience. In the book The Passion According to G.H. (1988), the protagonist, whose name is mentioned only by the initials of the book’s title, is faced with a foreign territory within her own home. In the empty room of her maid, G.H. smashes a cockroach in the cupboard and sips the insect’s taste in a profound and transformative epiphany of the most immediate sensitivities. In G.H.’s words: “Yesterday, however, I lost 2 Original text: Ao ir em direção ao não verificável, a ficção multiplica ao infinito as possibilidades de

tratamento. Não nega uma suposta realidade objetiva, ao contrário, submerge-se em sua turbulência, desdenhando a atitude ingênua que consiste em pretender saber de antemão como essa realidade se conforma. Não é uma claudicação ante tal ou qual ética da verdade, mas sim a busca de uma ética um pouco menos rudimentar (2012, p. 3).

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my human constitution for hours and hours. If I’m brave I will let myself be lost” (Lispector 1988, p. 4). The first-person narrative is revealed through a decentralized experience, identified by G.H. as the loss of her human form. But are the discoveries of infancy like those made in a laboratory where one finds what one will? Was it then only when I became an adult that I started to fear and grew the third leg? Can I as an adult, have the childlike courage to lose myself? To lose oneself is to go looking with no sense of what to do with what you might find. (p. 5)

In this construction, the author addresses, in a succession of nebulous images, the ambivalences between getting lost, which replaces fate with possibility, and the desire to return to her previous and stable formation, a G.H. with initials stuck even on travel bags. The discoveries of childhood seem to recover, in the author’s writing, something from the field of a lost, unlimited and unspeakable courage. The third leg—which makes G.H. a stable tripod, but unable to walk—breaks through the text as a living and potentially incomplete representation, something lost, but that can be reborn as new grass. This sign reconstructs the tension between the rapture for the non-felt experienced in a body that is a field of almost incommunicable affects and the stability that structures but crystallizes the character. In these presentational signs of the work, the author-person Clarice, resembles a shaman, that is, a woman who accesses other dimensions of the ineffability of the experience, becoming able to translate different worlds, where the potential otherness of corporeality, affectivity, and language do not seem to coincide with each other. The difficult work of translation between the intimacy of raw life and the transformation into literary images is addressed directly to a faceless reader, but “with a formed soul”, just like she warns at the beginning of the work. It is as if the unfinished metaphors could give rise to a transforming gap that is capable of reading the reader. With uncommon scores and anti-rationalizing grammars of experience, Lispector’s characters experience ruptures in the midst of the numbness of the days. They are like midwives of meanings that resist traditional ways of saying, Innis’s living images of what is felt. They are images produced by a kind of distress that touches, in a single stroke, their characters and all women who are willing to accomplish the reading. In the ambivalence between the horror and the desire to lose her human form, the signs that make up G.H.’s metaphors inaugurate an ambiguous transitivity, laden with potential meanings. Later in the text, we can read: (…) I don’t sense that I have the strength to stay disorganized, now that, fatefully, I shall have to frame that monstrous, infinite flesh and cut it into pieces that something the size of my mouth can take in, the size of my eye’s vision, now that I shall fatefully succumb to the necessity of form that comes from my fear of being undelimited—then let me at least have the courage to let that formform by itself, like a crust that hardens in its own, a fiery nebula that cools into Earth. (1988, p. 7)

It is not by chance that the body is a constant field of return in her work. It is established in the text as a territory that oscillates, ambivalently and ambiguously, between the monstrous, amorphous producer of pure immediate sensitivity, and the inherited human form. In the aforementioned stretch, the abject monstrosity is both interior and

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exterior, to the point that it is necessary to cut the meat “mouth-sized”, in the dimension that becomes possible to be contemplated with the eyes. The allegory produced reveals a cannibalism that does not happen in the acquisition of the powers of otherness, but in its subtraction, felt as fear of the risk of subjective undifferentiation and delirium of meaning. In another work, “Água Viva”, Lispector (2012) constructs a protagonist who interestingly works as a visual artist. In the recursiveness of the tension between form and its dissolution beyond language, we can read: So writing is the method of using the word as bait: the word fishing for whatever is not word. When this non-word-between the lines-takes the bait, something has been written. Once whatever is between the lines is caught, the word can be tossed away in relief. But that’s where the analogy ends: the non-word, taking the bait, incorporates it. So what saves you is writing absentmindedly. (p. 15)

In her words, there is a “strength” which makes her achieve something that convulses the verbal construction, something that is made of intensities, that “simply exist beyond thought” (op. cit.), or even, as above mentioned, “the word fishing for whatever is not word”. So what saves her in the act of writing is called by the protagonist as the ‘it’ (ibid.), that is, the field of whatever is formless and amorphous in the unravelling of the differential relations produced by the linguistic sign. Therefore, “Água Viva” convokes what would be “beyond language, but not beyond meaning,” an issue constantly addressed by Innis. The passage through these Clarice Lispector’s texts sought to shed light on a Brazilian author who turned the rawness of what she felt into the aesthetics of the crossing, the human becoming or the “overmuch human”. Although succinctly, we can ask how ambiguity and ambivalence can be thought of as analytical access routes: it is in the experience of reading/interpreting presentational signs and their aesthetic effects intensified by incompleteness. You who are reading me please help me to be born (Água Viva 2012, p. 29).

Marina Assis Pinheiro, Federal University of Pernambuco, Recife, Brazil

References Bakhtin, M. 1999. Towards a philosophy of act. Austin: University of Texas Press. Boero, H. 2019. Ethics and reasonableness or how to live creatively. Cognitio 20(2):244–258. Lyra, M., Pinheiro, Marina Assis (Org.) 2018. Cultural psychology as basic science: Dialogues with Jaan Valsiner. Switzerland: Springer Nature. Lispector, C. 1988. The passion according G. H. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Lispector, C. 2012. Água Viva. New York: A New Direction Book. Pinheiro, M., and L. Simão. 2020. Fiction. In The Palgrave Encyclopedia of the Possible, ed. Glaveanu, V. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98390-5_95-1. Richter, S. 1973. A history of poetics—German scholary aesthetics and poetics in international context: 1770–1960. Berlin: De Gruyter.

Body, Affectivity and Language: The Affective Semiosis … Rorty, R. 1993. Contingency, irony and solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Saer, J. 2012. O conceito de ficção. Revista FronteiraZ 8. Valsiner, J. 2019. Ornamented lives. Charlotte: IAP.

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The Double Faces of Each Semiotic Process. The Multiple Dynamics of the Mind Between Form and Text

Intersections Robert Innis’ valuable work is an intense, passionate, and lucid dialogue between cultural psychology and philosophy. The fruitful and common ground of this dialogue is provided by semiotics and a broad-based pragmatism. The semiotic frameworks set forth in his book function as heuristic spaces that point toward and support the development of research on the wealth of human experience and on the dynamics of mind. These are joint concerns of philosophy and cultural psychology in their different orientations. For both disciplines, the mind and processes of minding are not thought of as disembodied, algorithmic, and abstract systems. The mind is seen as embodied and dynamic endo-exo-semiotic relational systems. Affect, cognition, action, and forms of existential relationships make up the fundamental pillars for understanding the experience and development of the mind in pragmatist and semiotic terms. My commentary will take up these themes and offer some parallel and complementary reflections on and reformulations and extensions of them, provoked or elicited by the reading of Innis’ text. The nature of any psychological process is inevitably dynamic and transformative. However, psychology itself is not always capable of grasping the continuous change of its units of analysis, which are thus set up, fixed, and stiffened from time to time. Analysis of the intersections between psychological reflection and a semiotically informed philosophical reflection allows us to develop a profound dialogue with important philosophical implications, and vice versa. The expected result consists in a ‘de-marbling’ of reality and a recognition of the becoming nature of each relational process (De Luca Picione 2015a, b, 2017, 2020, 2020/in press).

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 R. E. Innis, Between Philosophy and Cultural Psychology, SpringerBriefs in Psychology and Cultural Developmental Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58190-9

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Through signs and their concatenation, people are able not only to signify experience, to interact, to learn, to work, to communicate, but also to play, to love, to lie, to make art, to betray, to fail, to hope, to invent, to sacrifice, to die for an ideal, to laugh, and to dream. Sign articulation is at the same time the cause and effect of affective activation giving a specific direction and orientation for experience over time. Semioticmediation does not only concern the ‘meaning’ (i.e., semantic content) of experience, but also constructs—starting from an affective plastic matrix—the ‘sense’ (i.e., the temporal and relational trajectory) of experience (De Luca Picione and Freda 2012). This semiotic process takes on modal values, that is, it defines not only the content of the experience, but also first of all it configures the ‘way’ it is subjectively experienced (the organization of the process within a relational field). Any biological phenomenon is always a process of sense-making. Sense is properly the mode of organization of every living being that moment by moment, within a temporal, dynamic, and complex trajectory, organizes its parts and functions with the whole, organizes the inside with the outside (i.e., the relationship between organism, the environment and its parts), the past and the future through the semiotic experience in the present. As Sebeok argues, where there is life there is semiosis, without semiosis there can be no life (Sebeok 1991). The semiotic process is typical of every living form (Uexküll 1920; Kull 2009; Hoffmeyer 1996; Sebeok 1991; Bruni and Giorgi 2016) being active within an environment and not just passively reacting to stimulation, processes rightly highlighted by Innis This leads us to argue that sense-making as a becoming process cannot be considered a purely physical and algorithmic signal transmission activity (see the classic information model of Shannon 1948), nor a thought activity that exclusively deals with awareness, with the ‘conscious will’ to communicate (De Luca Picione and Freda 2016a, b, c). In every form of life and in every biological process, we find the use of different signs (iconic, indexical, and symbolic—Peirce 1935; Sebeok and Danesi 2000; De Luca Picione and Freda 2016c; De Luca Picione 2020). In human beings, complexity is increased considerably by the emergence of symbolism as an ability to create, and to use symbols as mediation devices between oneself and the world and as a space of possibilities. The symbolic capacity constitutes a basin of absolute fertility for the development of culture, where people interact with bodybased perception, affect, and agency in a circular and recursive way. This is a core theme I have been concerned with in systematic and parallel ways. As Innis clearly shows in presenting and discussing Bühler’s organon-model (Bühler 1934), every relationship that the subject weaves in his various contexts takes place through signs that always have a threefold semiotic foundation of representation, expression, and appeal (symbol, symptom, and signal). Signification is therefore not understood as the ‘a posteriori’ act of giving meaning to a relationship or an event. The sense-making process is characterized by the fact that any sign that enters the semiotic chain has the double value of interpreting the previous sign and of eliciting the next sign which will in turn interpret it (Salvatore 2016; De Luca Picione 2017, 2020/in press). In this way, the continuous re-signification of experiences is given not only by the search for meaning but also by the fact that by continually creating new experiences,

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continuously living through and in new events, each person is faced with new relational horizons that re-elaborate and re-organize the previous experiences in order to be able to maintain a cohesive and united sense of one’s subjectivity and plastic bonds with the social environment. At any moment, both continuity and crisis, both stability and rupture, both discontinuity and the re-composition of a new order are active in the processes of sense-making. Innis’ reflection clearly shows that each process of making experience meaningful is a situated, pragmatic, semiotic process. The dialogue between philosophy and cultural psychology that Innis proposes shows some dichotomies that have governed the epistemology of psychological research to be totally misleading: mind versusbody, affects versusrationality, individual versus society, awareness versus unconscious (De Luca Picione 2015, 2017, 2020). These distinctions can recover a fundamental developmental function for psychology only on condition that they cease to be rigid dichotomies and become conceptual systems in dialectical relation. In my own work, I have likewise proposed that instead of rigidly separating these concepts in mutually exclusive terms, they must be reconnected in new topological and temporal ways in which mutual interdependence is recognized (De Luca Picione 2020/in press).

Sense-Making as Form and as Text In light of these general premises, going beyond them and adding to the conceptual schemes of Innis’ book, I propose that we can think that the activity of sense-making takes on two modes simultaneously: the one morphogenetic, the other textual. On the one hand, semiosis is like the process of engendering forms, on the other hand semiosis takes shape as a text. With this observation we do not intend to contrast these two modalities, but to describe two specific perspectives on the processes of semiotic activity: one as a holistic (synthetic) organization that—synchronously—assumes an integrated configuration of the whole; the other one as a discrete (analytical) modality that is constructed over time—diachronically—through the propositional activity, the activity of relating, articulating and successive connection between various signs and sign systems. Form and text are discussed as two coexisting faces of the same coin. Both the emergent form—understood as a dynamic and variable configuration assumed in the present by relationships—and the text—understood as a process of development of sense through the connection between different signs—imply dynamic processes. It is necessary to overcome a reductive and simplistic vision of the idea of form and text. A form is not a figure, fixed in time and with stable borders, but a dynamic and variable organization that assumes different configurations through the ways of

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creating relationships with its parts and with the ground3 (De Luca Picione 2015; De Luca Picione and Freda 2016a, c; De Luca Picione in press). In the same way, a text is not a linear string of connections and additions in which different signs are continuously added4 , but it is a multilevel organization of semiotic acts of connection, juxtaposition, overlap, cancellation, negation, similarity / difference, categorization, generalization, mediation between the universal and the particular, simultaneously marked by self -referentiality and eso-referentiality. Innis sketches in various ways the nature of this complexity, showing us how Peirce’s notion of unlimitedsemiosis is at the dynamic basis of the constant development of sign systems, but also the basis of the formation of semioticforms endowed with a certain degree of stability (namely, habits). Defining semiotic activity as a process of both morphogenesis and textualization allows us to go well beyond the simple ‘referentialist’ operation of the sign, which Innis shows to be completely inadequate. I would add that it is in fact essential to consider that a semiotic process always carries out a predicative function of a phenomenon, that is to say a semiotic activity leads to the existence of a definite scenario of the possible, starting from the quality—a central analytical category running through Innis’ discussion—that the subject experiences and lives (Salvatore and Zittoun 2011; De Luca Picione and Freda 2012, 2014). Through the affective experience, the world is instantly configured/lived as a reality characterized by a sense for the subject. Starting from this initial and instantaneous experience of the “explosion of sense”, the textual process of semiotic activity can be carried out in terms of construction of connections, organization of relationships, detections of similarities and oppositions, propositional relationships between categories, and so forth. Such a dynamic recombination and the interdependence between predication and referentiality of the semiotic process appears congruent with many theoretical perspectives. We think of Werner & Kaplan’s studies on the formation of the symbol and the physiognomic versus geometric dimensions of metaphor (Werner and Kaplan 1963), we think of Peirce’s phaneroscopic categories of firstness, secondness and thirdness (Peirce 1935), Matte Blanco’s bi-logics and his notions of symmetrization and asymmetrization (Matte Blanco, 1975), Lotman’s semiosphere and sense-making processes (both explosive and gradual ones) (Lotman 2005). These are important links to Innis’ analytical project.

3I

consider that topology (namely, the qualitative branch of mathematics, interested in invariant relations and transformations of forms without considering quantity, measure and size) has been crucial for the development of semiotics and psychology (De Luca Picione in press). 4 Every semiotic process is always a text understood as a chain of signs. The textual perspective of semiosis should not be confused with mere verbal activity, nor reduced to a merely glottological perspective.

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Fig. 1 Magritte’s Lesson

The Bivalent Nature of the Sign Between Reification and Relationship In the famous painting depicting a pipe, the French painter Magritte affixes a caption below the image, stating that “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (“This is not a pipe”), in order to showing the divergence between the representation and the reality (Fig. 1a). The sign is not reality, the drawing is not reality, and the pipe is not real. The caption on the painting works precisely by exercising its warning function: “Do not confuse the plane of our representations with something ontologically given or assumed as a real thing!”. This painting offers us remarkable opportunities for a psychological reflection on a semiotic level, capturing some forms of processuality in the construction of the meaning of experience by means the use of signs. The experience, in fact, does not exactly correspond to the caption that gives it a name, although this fulfills the important and central function of being able to refer and to share a “meaning”, a “fact”, a “portion of reality”, a “system of beliefs”, in short, a knowable and therefore shareable condition to be treated.

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Yet, at the same time, supplementing Innis’ discussion, we could also consider another kind of relationship between the sign and the experience. Indeed, the sign reifies an experience, concretizes something that is much more evanescent and transient, something that is of the order of the “possible”. This condition is shown in Fig. 1b in which the pipe (the object of our representation) is not depicted (the dotted line indicates its non-existence). Yet the caption “This is a pipe” invites us to track down and find the object in the background, looking for it despite its not showing itself to vision. We are saying that a semiotic device (a sign, a word, a name, a symbol, a sound, etc…) leads us to create a reality—or, better to say, a semioticscenario— that offers temporary conditions of stability to think, to act, and to interact with other people). The sign reifies a system of relations that is possible but not factual yet. These two examples introduce a central question. The theme of the connection between philosophy, semiotics, and cultural psychology invites us to consider a fundamental tenet that we define as “the bivalent nature of signs” The process of sense-making in fields of experience is a process of articulation of signs, through which people are able to perform simultaneously two (only apparently antinomical) operations: distancing from the here-and-now of experience, and at the same time, living in the present time “forgetting” that signs are being used to think, actand connect (Valsiner 2014; De Luca Picione 2017, 2019). A sign is a device of both presence and absence, of both truth and falsity. It is essential to dwell on this in order to deepen the sign as a unit par excellence of semiosis. The sign is something more than just an instrument for referring to something else. In the Stoic definition, the sign is considered as “aliquid stat pro aliquo” (“something-that-stands for-another”). As I have noted, the profound relational nature of the sign is not limited to a purely indicative, referential function. Human beings move, are transformed over time, and enter into relationships not through ‘thing in itself ’ that is always missing (i.e., absent and indicated/represented by the sign). Through its symbolization (namely the symbolic reification of a system of relationships), “the thing” is instantiated in the phenomenal field of experience. Semioticmediation is a process that institutes or sets up a present and reified form of a system of relations (of how, where, when, with whom and for whom). In very general terms, a sign establishes a process of discretization of the undifferentiated flow of experience.5 Such discretization has great importance for cultural psychology. The sign therefore represents a device for acting and for being in relationships in and with the world. The sign becomes a powerful tool for mediating between experience, thought and action. As Valsiner made clear (2007, 2014), the fullness of the subjective flow needs to be broken, by transforming parts of it into relatively stable reflective entities. This discretization is made possible by the invention and use of signs (semioticmediation). The fundamental characteristic of the mediation of signs in the human psyche is not that of the mere presentation of the world through signs (this is the risk of the static view that is very common today in semiotics), but dynamic movement from a 5 A sign creates a first distinction of a temporal (present/past), spatial (inside/outside) and subjective

(me/non-me) type (De Luca Picione and Valsiner 2017).

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structure of signs to another one. Innis’ foregrounding of the relevance of Peirce’s notion of interpretants is important here. All the semiotic processes that people carry out in their lives are oriented to regulate and direct this flow towards selected future directions. For Peirce present meaning has an ineluctable future meaning. Different processes come into play in the transformation of sign production: contextuality, reduction of polysemy, the uncertainty of the sign, abstraction, generality/specificity tension, andrepresentation/ indication/hypostatization dynamics. The main and radical characteristic of human semiotic processes is that of creating possible worlds starting from affectivesymbolizations. This characteristic had already been highlighted by Peirce as a “play of fantasizing” and refers to the possibility of producing more models, of inventing, of simulating, of hypothesising, of making inferences, of imagining an infinite number of possible worlds. In this discourse, the decisive and initial moment of any semiotic activation are the affects, as Innis constantly shows. Transformations of body/world bonds activate different symbolization processes. Philosophy, semiotics, cultural psychology and psychoanalysis, although in different ways, have shown the centrality of this point (Valsiner 2007, 2014, 2020; Valsiner and De Luca Picione 2017; Innis 2016, this book; Salvatore 2016; Salvatore and Zittoun 2011; De Luca Picione and Freda 2012, 2014; Matte Blanco 1975). An affect generates a scenario, a climate, an atmosphere, a ground, a hyper-generalized frame, a predisposition from which the world acquires sense and value for the experience of the subject. This process produces a double effect: on the one hand, it exercises a limit, a constraint (reduction of the range of possibilities), and on the other, it offers the conditions for thinking, decisionmaking and creativity (De Luca Picione and Valsiner 2017). I am proposing that semiotic activity always has a pars destruens of parcelling, decomposing, delimiting and reducing the world but also a pars construens of continuous reconfigurations, of creating novelties, of connections and re-connections, of innovative relationships and of new predications. Peirce, as Innis has shown, articulates his whole system of thought by triads and defines three phenomenological categories defined as pharenoscopic. They are the categories of Firstness (feeling, pure quality, possibility, immediate present), Secondness (brute facticity, realization, actual existence, what happens and binds the subject) and Thirdness (mediation, interpretation, thought, law, necessity). Something hypothetically isolated can only be a pure quality or a possibility. An “effective existent” enters into dyadic, co-presence, and cause-effect relationships. A law always has a triadic function of mediation and interpretation. We can consider the three pharenoscopic categories as defining the fundamental steps of each phenomenon in processual recursive terms. I would argue that these categories allow us to reflect in terms of identity/alterity, reification/relationship, and transformation/stability. Another related way to observe semiotic processes is possible. The mind, on my conception, can be conceived as a stratified and dynamic process in which different levels of functioning coexist, each with a particular proportion of symmetry and asymmetry. It is a continuum marked by a pole of absolute symmetrization characterized by homogeneity of relationships and indivisibility between

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World/Self, and a pole of asymmetrization that distinguishes, separates, and creates logical-propositional relationships (Matte Blanco 1975; De Luca Picione 2015).

The Field Dynamics of Affective Semiosis: Between Stability and Change At this point, we should highlight some relevant further implications for a sensemaking approach in psychology. It is necessary to reject the hypostatization of meaning as a relationship already given, fixed and pre-ordered between the mind and the world (that contributes towards the reification of these two notions and their “pseudo-empiricization”) (Salvatore 2016; De Luca Picione 2017, 2020). Dealing with sense-making processes means to move towards the direction of grasping the development, the transformations and life of the human being in intersection with the environment, with other people and with himself, leading to radical self-reflection. Semiosis is a process that always takes place within a field. The notion of field allows us to move/escape from the descriptions of things taken as ontologized entities towards acknowledging networks of relationships that make up the field in which the signs take on value. Placing every possible semiosis within a field has the value of interconnecting different systems of relationships between them and of being able to think of them even at different times and in different states of their development (De Luca Picione and Freda 2016a). In this view, we can follow Innis in seeing “thresholds” and “borders” as concepts bearing upon the fundamental transition points of semiotic processes (De Luca Picione and Freda 2016b, c). It is important to emphasize that the human semiotic field can be considered as an intersubjective biosemiotic space organized by social and subjective, cultural and affective processes. In the human species, the environment is not a physical environment that releases only energy, matter and neutral (i.e. amodal) information. The human environment is a symbolically culturally negotiated and emotionally experienced environment (Valsiner 2007, 2014, 2020; Salvatore and Zittoun 2011; De Luca Picione and Freda 2012; De Luca Picione 2017, 2020), and every transformation/transition is experienced—since the first moment—as something significant and already valued-shared with other people. The context develops together with the subject and must be treated not as a static background but as a scenario full of value and in co-evolution with the subject, as Innis, relying on Dewey and others, shows. The degree of growth and decrease, of fixity/flexibility of the networks of semiotic-cultural-subjective relationships between context and subject contributes to their mutual definition of identity. There are at least three processes of semiotic dynamics within a field carried out by semiotic-cultural mediation: contextualization, pertinentization and subjective positioning. These three processes are fundamentally inter-connected, belonging to the affective, perceptual, and agentive dynamics.

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1. The key definition of a context is realized starting from wide “frames of sense” which allow interpreting the present experience and directing action and the various forms of interaction (De Luca Picione 2020). 2. Pertinence is the local definition—within a contextual context—of what it is relevant and what is not, what is being dealt with, what is being disputed and negotiated with others, what is being discussed (Salvatore 2016; De Luca Picione and Freda 2012, 2014). 3. The positioning assumed by a subject is the effect of his relationship with otherness (this process is always both actively and passively lived). The subject organizes his experience through the construction of semiotic boundaries of mutual/oppositional/complementary positioning with the other (imaginary or real) social actors (Harré and van Langenhove 1991; De Luca Picione 2017). Within a process of unlimitedsemiosis, we observe a twofold process, one in the direction of the formation of a habitus (with the function of stabilizing and attracting the field to a specific state), and the other in the direction of creating novelties and transformations. This point has deep roots in philosophical, biological and semiotic reflection. Uexküll (1920), as Innis is aware, questions the general concept according to which the environment is universal and identical for all living organisms and defines the Umwelt as the species-specific meaning environment for the organism. constituting a model of reality starting and built up within a subjective “Functional Circle/Circuit” of perception and action (Funktionskreis). In this view, the environment thus becomes a species-specific and subjective semiotic system of signs, reproduced through recursive circles or spiraling cycles of perception and action. The human functional circle/cycle is filled with diverse, differentiated contents of high complexity and variation. If Uexküll’s perspective introduces the importance of specific ways of experiencing–-starting from the singularity of one’s own corporeality—it must however be recognized that there is the risk of being transformed into a conceptually closed circularity perception/action. Uexküll’s theoretical scheme maintains that the environment (Umwelt) of a given organism is the product of its peculiar Merkwelt, its perceptual world, and its Wirkwelt, its world of action (Uexküll 1920). That is, the environment constitutes for the animal a part of its intimate organization. Tedesco (2016) has shown that Uexküll constructs a radical theory of the “immanence of perception”, in which perceptual signs or sensations provide the operative marks of reality. This implies that the properties of things are properly the product of sensations. However, recognizing the centrality of subjectivity, another conceptualization of subject/world circularity can be taken into account, namely that of the Gestaltkreis or ‘Gestalt circle’ by Viktor von Weizsäcker, a German neurologist, doctor, and philosopher (Weizsäcker 1956). The Gestaltkreis can be translated as “Circle of Form” only in a reductive way. At its basis is the idea that every ‘biological act’ is both subjective and pathic (from the Greek term “pathos”), that is, deeply affective and relational. Each living being through the dynamism of the ‘biological act’ (consisting

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of a very close relationship of mutual reciprocity and opacity between movement and perception) fits into its own environment (Umwelt). A relevant aspect for our discussion is that every biological act works as the restoration or a new organization of a disturbed order, a regaining of balance, howsoever temporary. In this dynamic scenario, each transformation and development process is carried out starting from discontinuity, breakdown, crisis, turning point, crossing of a threshold. Pathicity represents the modal emotional experience of this dynamic and pushes towards the creation of new temporary balances between the subject and the relational world (De Luca Picione et al. 2018). The living subject through the pathic/affective dynamics of the biological act has both a passive and active character, but basically it is in-between. This is crucial: the pathic dynamic of experience generates an interest (from the Latin ‘esse-inter’, that is “to stay between”) which is the expression of a value, of what is important, of what matters (Masullo 1992). Human being is always moved by an interest, namely by an affective value-imbued “in-between,” as Innis emphasizes. “Staying in-between” does not mean that the Gestaltkreis is an intermediate point. It is not even the axis of a centralized system (the core of the system), but it implies passage, degree, station, threshold (Weizsäcker 1956). This open and changing vision of the human/world circle is central to grasping the semiotic dynamic of cultural and psychic processes. The experience of rupture, of overcoming a threshold, of traversing perturbation, generates change in the affective relationship with the world. The plasticity of semiotic systems is triggered and solicited in order to reconfigure new contextual, transitory and dynamic circles, instances of which are discussed in Innis’s chapter on affectivation.

Conclusion The pragmatic philosophical bases laid out in the Innis’ volume have prepared us to be sensitive to many issues. In the face of turning/rupture of a quasi-stable semiotic construction, a phase of disturbance, of confusion, of disorder is triggered; and it needs a new semioticsynthesis in order to make a new experience of the present rupture, to make a new perspective on past experience, and to make a new proleptic view towards the future. In every moment of life, a person experiences the world as in continuous change. These changes most of the times are minor and trifling, while at other times they take on an intensity that shakes the whole life of the person and her systems of semioticmediations. It is properly the change as a specific aspect of every form of life that generates the processes of signification and new systems of relationship with the world. The human being grows within a semiotic network already given (constituted by many languages, images, symbols, behavioral forms, etc.). It represents not only a guide to its development but also a sort of semiotic captivity that channels the flows of meanings. The pre-existing semiotic baggage - in many situations—offers a sort of semioticscaffolding (Hoffmeyer 2007; Kull 2014; Wood et al. 1976; Vygostkij 1978;

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Valsiner 2004) thatguides the actions and choices. However, the human experience of the crisis and of thresholds can subvert/open this symbolic structure at every moment—and then return to close itself in a new order – by continually redefining the form of the subject/world unity. In this sense, life is deeply affective and aesthetic and the mind can be considered a semiotic process both morphogenetically and textually. Raffaele De Luca Picione, University Giustino Fortunato, Benevento, Italy

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Index

A Abstraction, 3, 6, 8, 14, 33, 36, 39, 40, 42, 45, 48–53, 62, 66, 93, 100, 101, 113 Aesthetic rationality, 49, 66, 74 Affectivation, 8, 69–71, 73, 75–84, 90, 116 Affective, 21, 25–28, 34, 36, 43, 44, 46, 52, 54, 56, 71, 73, 79, 83, 97, 99, 101, 108, 110, 113–117 Affective interpretant, 37, 55 Appeal, 39, 92, 108 Art, 2, 11, 32, 37, 52, 54, 56, 58, 60–63, 65, 66, 74, 78, 85, 98, 99, 108 Art image, 8, 48, 49, 56–63 Artist’s eye, 60 Atmospheres, 8, 9, 16, 25–28, 64, 86, 113

B Biosemiotics, 51, 77 Body, 3, 11, 12, 14, 17, 19, 26, 38, 45, 55, 64, 66, 76, 77, 79, 85–90, 93, 97–99, 103, 108, 109, 113 Böhme, G., 8, 25–27, 62 Brinkmann, S., 13 Bühler, K., 8, 31, 33, 39–43, 50, 51, 53, 108

C Cassirer, E., 2, 3, 8, 31, 33, 38, 43–47, 50, 51, 53, 54, 61, 70–72, 74 Communication, 28, 29, 87, 90 Consciousness, modes of, as bottomless lake, 8, 33, 36, 37, 42, 44, 71 Contexts, 2–6, 8–10, 13, 14, 16–18, 20, 22– 24, 26–28, 32, 34, 38, 43, 51, 52, 56,

61, 65, 70, 73, 77, 78, 83, 86, 87, 90, 101, 108, 114, 115 Contours, 6, 8, 29, 43, 45, 57, 59, 60, 74, 91 Corrington, R., 3, 83 Criticism, 1, 5, 12, 21, 23, 56, 75 Crosby, D., 3, 82

D Descriptive, 1, 3–5, 13, 23, 25, 42, 48, 57, 67, 100 Dewey, J., 1, 2, 4, 5, 7–17, 21–26, 28, 29, 32, 35, 37, 43, 44, 52, 56, 58, 62–64, 73, 76–79, 83, 86, 114 Diacrisis, 8, 33, 40–42 Discursive, 2, 32, 35, 37, 44, 49, 53–56, 59, 66, 76, 85–87, 101

E Embodiment, 3, 8, 14, 22, 24, 35, 45, 48, 66, 72, 76, 77, 81, 82, 84 Energetic interpretant, 37 Existential, 2, 3, 5, 7, 8, 13, 14, 16, 17, 23, 27, 28, 36, 37, 51, 54, 60, 62, 67, 73, 75, 79, 80, 84, 107 Exosomatic body, 2 Expression, 25, 31, 39, 43–45, 51, 55, 64, 76, 85, 88, 90, 93, 98, 108, 116

F Feeling, 2, 5, 7, 8, 13, 14, 19, 25–27, 33, 34, 36, 37, 47–52, 54–66, 70, 72, 74–76,

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 R. E. Innis, Between Philosophy and Cultural Psychology, SpringerBriefs in Psychology and Cultural Developmental Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58190-9

127

128 82, 83, 85, 86, 91, 93, 98, 99, 101, 113 Focal awareness, 81 Force, 5, 12, 15, 19, 20, 23, 28, 29, 37, 40, 59, 70, 72, 73, 75 Form, 14, 41, 42, 45, 47, 49–51, 56, 59, 63, 85–87, 90, 91, 93, 97, 101, 103, 104, 107–112, 115–117 Form worlds, 8, 31–33, 44, 47 From-to structure of consciousness, 14, 76 Functional circle, 3, 23, 32, 115

G Gadamer, H-G., 79 Gestalt, 42, 52, 61, 115 Gradient, 49, 64

H Heidegger, M., 5, 13, 86 Hoffmeyer, J., 51, 77, 108, 116

I Iconicity, 36–38, 43, 57 Iconic signs, 36, 37 Icons, 36, 38 Images, 36, 37, 49, 54–60, 62, 65, 66, 101, 103, 111, 116 Indexicality, 36–38, 43, 75 Indication, 24, 51, 78, 81, 101, 113 Indwelling, 3, 76, 77, 83 Ingold, T., 25 Innis, R., 3, 7, 20, 23, 28, 33, 37, 39, 54, 65, 83, 85, 86, 89–93, 97–101, 103, 104, 107–110, 112–116 Integrations, 63, 81, 87 Interpretants, 36, 70–72, 74, 76–78, 82, 83, 86, 101, 113 Interpretation, 2, 6, 10, 16, 18, 22, 35, 36, 44, 49–52, 69, 71, 75, 80, 83, 88, 92, 97, 99–101, 113 Interpretive disciplines, 21, 49 Interruption, 15, 32, 34, 73, 75, 80, 82

J Jakobson, R., 32, 35, 78 James, W., 10, 11, 13, 21, 33–35, 64

K Kierkegaard, S., 5

Index Klempe, H., 5 Kull, K., 51, 77, 108, 117 L Langer, S., 3, 8, 36, 37, 44, 48–66, 73, 77, 82, 100, 101 Logical interpretant, 37 M May, R., 79, 80, 82 McCarthy, V., 5 Mediation, 32, 37, 38, 108, 110, 112–114, 116 Merleau-Ponty, M., 3, 42, 43 Myth, 2, 11, 32, 37, 44, 54, 85 N Nedergård, J., 16 New semantic, 55 Normative, 1, 6, 13, 17, 23, 28, 29, 57, 58, 61, 67, 100 O Open ambient, 49–51, 71 Organon-model of language, 8, 39 P Peirce, C. S., 6, 8, 12, 13, 15, 18, 19, 24, 26, 31, 33, 35–38, 43, 44, 46, 47, 50, 52, 53, 55, 57–59, 70, 72–74, 76–78, 81, 83, 86, 100, 108, 110, 113 Perception, 2, 4, 9, 10, 16, 26, 33, 42–44, 49–53, 55, 56, 65, 75, 79, 80, 89, 98, 100, 108, 115, 116 Phase beauty, 64 Phonology, 40, 41 Physiognomic, 42, 44, 51, 61, 63, 64, 110 Physiognomy, 61, 63 Polanyi, M., 2, 3, 14, 19, 22, 25, 52, 58, 71, 76, 77, 79–82 Pragmatist, 1, 5, 6, 8, 10, 11, 15, 22–24, 46, 70, 86, 107 Premises, 5, 7, 14, 16, 19, 21, 28, 74, 109 Presentational, 37, 49, 52–56, 59, 61, 63, 66, 82, 97, 99–104 Presentational abstraction, 54, 56, 57, 62 Principle of abstractive relevance, 39, 40, 42 Problematic situations, 1, 13, 20, 70, 76 Psychic realization, 31 Pure signification, 31

Index Q Quality, 4, 13–15, 25, 34, 36, 40, 43, 52, 57, 58, 61, 62, 64, 65, 76–78, 80–83, 98, 100, 110, 113 R Rationality, 6, 56, 64, 67, 74, 88, 101, 109 Realization of feeling, 49, 50 Reflexivity, 23, 72, 75 Representation, 4, 11, 31, 33, 39, 45, 46, 53, 81, 92, 100, 101, 103, 108, 111–113 Resistances, 15, 19, 22–24, 32, 34, 47, 73, 75, 100, 101 Rhythm, 11, 49, 60, 62, 64, 85, 86, 98 Rhythm of acts, 65 S Self-formation, 1, 22, 31, 62 Semiosis, 2, 9, 12, 13, 22, 31, 33, 37, 38, 43, 46, 53, 54, 72, 74, 77, 78, 83, 97, 99, 101, 108–110, 112, 114, 115 Semiotic continuum, 31–33, 37 Semiotics, 1–8, 10–12, 14–17, 22, 24–26, 28, 29, 31, 32, 34–38, 40–48, 51– 53, 55, 57–59, 61, 64, 66, 70–77, 79, 81–83, 85, 86, 88–92, 97–99, 101, 107–117 Signification, 3, 5, 16, 36, 41, 43, 45, 47, 53, 81, 98, 100, 101, 108, 116 Situations, 1, 8, 9, 11, 13–15, 18–21, 25, 26, 28, 40, 42, 46, 54, 57, 61, 76, 79, 85, 86, 90, 93, 116 Staging, 26 Stenner, P., 3, 4, 7, 32, 54

129 Subsidiary awareness, 14, 76 Symbolic net, 31–33, 40, 70 Symbolic transformation, 49–54, 62 Symbolization, 8, 10, 14, 25, 27, 49–52, 55, 62, 81, 112, 113 Synthesis, 14, 34, 37, 116

T Taylor, C., 2, 40, 53, 88 Thresholds of sense, 7–9, 29, 33, 37–39, 43, 44, 48, 85, 89 Tillich, P., 28, 80, 82 Tone, 5, 9, 19, 25, 35, 37, 44, 50, 54, 56, 61, 76, 92 Tonus, 7, 12, 26, 61, 78, 86 Tool, 2, 3, 5, 7, 8, 11, 27, 28, 32, 33, 48, 57, 70, 71, 83, 89, 112 Transactions, 2, 9, 11

U Uexküll, J. von, 3, 40, 51, 115

V Valsiner, J., 3–6, 15, 17, 23, 24, 37, 38, 50, 70, 86, 98, 112–114, 117 Violence, 9, 12, 15, 32, 38, 73 Vološinov, V., 35, 77, 78 Vygotsky, L., 3, 77

W Walter, E., 4