Cultural Psychology and Its Future : Complementarity in a New Key [1 ed.] 9781623966270, 9781623966256

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Cultural Psychology and Its Future: Complementarity in a New Key

A Volume in: Niels Bohr Professorship Lectures in Cultural Psychology Series Editors Brady Wagoner Nandita Chaudhary Pernille Hviid

Niels Bohr Professorship Lectures in Cultural Psychology Series Editors Brady Wagoner Aalborg University Nandita Chaudhary University of Delhi Pernille Hviid University of Copenhagen Cultural Psychology and Its Future: Complementarity in a New Key (2014) Edited by Brady Wagoner and Nandita Chaudhary

Cultural Psychology and Its Future: Complementarity in a New Key

Edited by

Brady Wagoner Nandita Chaudhary Pernille Hviid

INFORMATION AGE PUBLISHING, INC. Charlotte, NC • www.infoagepub.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The CIP data for this book can be found on the Library of Congress website (loc.gov). Paperback: 978-1-62396-625-6 Hardcover: 978-1-62396-626-3 eBook: 978-1-62396-627-0

Copyright © 2014 Information Age Publishing Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher. Printed in the United States of America

CONTENTS

Editor’s Introduction: Cultural Psychology Reborn ..................... vii Brady Wagoner, Nandita Chaudhary and Pernille Hviid P A R T

I

THE NIELS BOHR PROFESSORSHIP LECTURE 1.

Cultural Psychology and Its Future: Complementarity in a New Key .......................................................................................... 3 Jaan Valsiner P A R T

2

COMPLEMENTARITY AS EPISTEMOLOGY 2.

Complementarity as an Epistemology of Life ...............................33 Ivana Marková

3.

Onlookers and Actors in the Drama of Existence: Complementarity in Cultural Psychology and Its Existential Aspects...........................................................................................51 Svend Brinkmann

4.

Affordances, Mereology, Positions, and the Possibility of a Cultural Psychology: A Little Something Complementary to Some of the Themes in Jaan Valsiner’s Address ............................61 Rom Harré v

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METHODOLOGICAL EXPLORATIONS 5.

Open Complementarity in Cultural Psychology ............................77 Luca Tateo and Giuseppina Marsico

6.

From Describing to Reconstructing Life Trajectories: How the TEA (Trajectory Equifi nality Approach) Explicates Context-Dependent Human Phenomena1 .................................... 93 Tatsuya Sato, Yuko Yasuda, Mami Kanzaki and Jaan Valsiner

7.

Developing Idiographic Research Methodology: Extending the Trajectory Equifi nality Model and Historically Situated Sampling ......................................................................................107 Eric Jensen and Brady Wagoner P A R T

4

INTERPRETATION, IMAGINATION, AND ART 8.

Valsiner’s Horizons Toward Bohr’s Tradition .............................121 Lívia Mathias Simão

9.

On Not Beating One’s Wings in the Void: Linking Contexts of Meaning-Making......................................................................131 Robert E. Innis

10.

Kierkegaard, Kitchen, Complementarity and Cultural Psychology: A Thought Experiment ............................................151 Sven Hroar Klempe

11.

Sculpture and Art Installations: Toward a Cultural Psychological Analysis .................................................................167 Tania Zittoun and Alex Gillespie P A R T

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REPLY 12.

Complementarity Transformed: Constructing Freedom on the Border....................................................................................181 Jaan Valsiner

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

CULTURAL PSYCHOLOGY REBORN Brady Wagoner, Nandita Chaudhary and Pernille Hviid

Throughout the history of mankind, people have moved around the world and interacted with “others” for reasons of trade, exploration, adventure, study, exchange, intervention or domination. Narratives about these exchanges abound in archives in different parts of the world. Human beings have always had a fascination for cultural difference, and a concomitant favor toward familiar ways of living. Along with the unique dependence on cultural processes, we have inherited a particular inability to “see” our own culture (Cole, 1996). This bias is sustained by the corresponding lack of visibility of a familiar lifestyle that is sometimes realized only after encounters with the unfamiliar. The “other” thus becomes formative for our sense of self, as Mead (1934) proposed, providing a sturdy argument for a bridge between the social and psychological. Although cultural differences and social activity have received attention in many other disciplines, the understanding of group processes and the study of culture has been somewhat stunted in psychology. The universalization of standards in developmental psychology, for instance, has been supported by the proclivity to “think locally and act globally” (Gergen, Gulerce, Lock, & Misra, 1996). Additionally, there is a persistence to visualize Cultural Psychology and Its Future: Complementarity in a New Key, pages vii–xvii. Copyright © 2014 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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the individual as the primary and exclusive custodian of cultural phenomena. “Ontological individualism,” the belief that social processes are determined exhaustively by individual activity (Epstein, 2007), has been uncritically accepted as axiomatic. An unresolved tension persists in the literature on whether social phenomena supervene on individualistic properties of people, or social facts exist in an independent space. Cultural psychology as a discipline offers a solution to this impasse by proposing a dialogical arrangement between culture and the individual as co-constitutive; where culture is seen as belonging to a person as much as a person belongs to culture (Valsiner, 2007), thereby moving beyond the debate about primacy of society or the individual, whether ontological or explanatory. In this introduction, we will first describe how cultural psychology has been recurrently reborn through psychology’s short history. Second, we discuss Jaan Valsiner’s distinctive contribution to the current incarnation of cultural psychology and how we at the Centre for Cultural Psychology at Aalborg University intend to foster the growth of this new/old look in the discipline. Part of this effort involves holding annual lectures in Cultural Psychology, which will be followed by a volume in this book series. Finally, we describe the different contributions to the present book. CULTURAL PSYCHOLOGY’S HISTORY OF REINCARNATIONS In his lecture, Valsiner (this volume) mentions in passing that Cultural Psychology has been born four times. Its first incarnation co-occurred with the emergence of the discipline of psychology itself in the 19th century. In fact, the world’s first professorship in psychology was awarded to Moritz Lazarus for his cultural research. Lazarus, together with Hajim Steinthal, envisioned a new discipline, which they called Völkerpsychologie that would study the “folk spirit” (Volksgeist) through a systemic analysis of how a nation expressed their inner and higher activity within language, myths, religion, customs and habits. It owed a debt to the earlier work of Herbart, who began to extend individual psychological concepts to groups and Humboldt, who developed a method of comparative linguistics. This new discipline was meant to bring about a broad synthesis of the accumulation of knowledge in philosophy, history and linguistics. Lazarus and Steinthal edited the journal Zeitschrift with this aim in mind. Their approach had an enormous influence on a wide range of different disciplinary founding fathers, including Simmel in sociology, Boas in anthropology, and Wundt in psychology. The second incarnation of cultural psychology comes from Wilhelm Wundt, who avidly read Lazarus and Steinthal’s work. Wundt is known today, in the psychology’s origin myth, as giving birth to the discipline by opening the first experimental laboratory in 1879. Of course, this date is entirely arbitrary—a discipline emerges over a period of time rather than being born on a particular day. Wundt himself conceived of psychology as

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having both an experimental and a cultural component, each with its own methods and aims. He thought the cultural approach to be of higher importance and thus devoted himself to that task, while his student’s played with “brass instruments” in the laboratory. The outcome was Wundt’s massive 10-volume Völkerpsychologie, published 1900–1920. This work clearly owed much to Lazarus and Steinthal but extended their approach to include not just “historical” nations but a comparative development analysis of the progression of all societies, through the four stages of the primitive age, totemism, heroism and civilization. Franz Boas transformed Völkerpsychologie into American anthropology, but in so doing expelled the evolutionary schemes of its early forms and replaced them with a cultural relativism—cultures were to be studied on their own terms. Students of Boas (e.g., Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, and Edward Sapir), along with a number of others (e.g., Gregory Bateson, Clyde Kluckhohn, and John Whiting), extended this approach into the third incarnation of cultural psychology, what came to be known in the mid-20th century as the “Culture and Personality School.” This approach looked at the reciprocal relationship between personality and culture, recognizing that “Every man is in certain respects (a) like all other men, (b) like some other men, and (c) like no other man” (Kluckohn & Murray, 1948, p. 35, as cited in LeVine, 2001). Many of these studies incorporated a developmental aspect, exploring how the cultural patterned nature of childhood shapes the adult mind. The Culture and Personality School has since been transformed into what is today called “psychological anthropology.” The most recent incarnation of cultural psychology took off in the 1990s and continues to gain momentum today. This approach explores how persons and sociocultural worlds mutually constitute one another. This question has been investigated in different ways by cultural psychologists. For example, Michael Cole (1996) has been primarily inspired by the culturalhistorical tradition of Vygotsky and Luria (which itself could be considered another incarnation of cultural psychology, drawing on Wundt’s work), and developed a comparative developmental approach, often employing an experimental methodology, though a culturally sensitive one. By contrast, Richard Shweder (1991) has taken anthropology’s “romantic rebellion against enlightenment” as a starting point and developed a hermeneutically inspired approach, aligned with psychological anthropology. Both thinkers are aware of the rich history of the ideas touched upon above and recognize that human experience and action cannot be explored independently of the cultural canvas on which they take form. Thus, cultural psychology calls for a radical reorientation of psychology away from how it is often practiced today. To heed its call, psychologists must creatively use the resources of the past to develop new theoretical and methodological frame-

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works for the investigation of human beings in their rich complexity. To this end, Jaan Valsiner has been a major contributor. NEW HORIZONS FOR CULTURAL PSYCHOLOGY Valsiner has been at the forefront of developments in cultural psychology for over two decades. He has developed the field through his own original contributions to it, his editorship of numerous key journals and books, and through the active engagement with people from different cultural and academic traditions, especially young researchers. Over the last two and a half decades, Valsiner has been creating an innovative new cultural-developmental perspective (Valsiner, 1987, 1998, 2000, 2007). This perspective differs from traditional psychology by integrating the notion of semiotic mediation (based on Vygotsky, Bühler, and Peirce, among many others) into research methodologies for the study of the simultaneous personal and social nature of the mind (Valsiner & van der Veer, 2000). The mind operates not by scripts or schemata set up as analogues of computer programs (the usual look in cognitive psychology), but as a generator of new ideas and actions through the use of signs. The focus is on higher mental functions, which are mediated by signs. Semiotic mediation is a dynamic and unpredictable process that overcomes traditional cause-effect notions of causality by conceptualizing the acting person as a causal center (Harré, 2002), who actively constructs his or her own possibilities for action, with the particular resources available to the person in his or her sociocultural milieu. Human acting, feeling, and thinking is further constrained and enabled by the fact that they always take place within structured social contexts, thus, the need to study them as they occur in the “real world.” Second, Valsiner’s editorial activities have also been wide-ranging. His journal Culture & Psychology (Sage, since 1995) is acknowledged worldwide as the leader in cultural psychology, and his handbooks The Cambridge Handbook of Sociocultural Psychology (2007) and The Oxford Handbook of Culture and Psychology (2012) are the most comprehensive works available on the subject. Valsiner has also spearheaded several book series in cultural psychology, including Advances in Cultural Psychology (InfoAge) and Cultural Dynamics of Social Representations (Routledge). Finally, Valsiner has developed numerous, active collaborations with scholars from different parts of the world. He conducts his discussions with a genuine sense of engagement from which constructive dialogues have emerged. Over the years, he has allowed his proposals to be modified, expanded, and reorganized by the debates in which collaborators participate as partners, not simply beneficiaries. As we scan the scene of cross-cultural collaborations and international “projects,” democratic dialogue, equitability and co-authorship are quite rare to find in the industries that astute

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scientists have built around their own ideas. Local knowledge and cultural practice are frequently collapsed into conveniently packaged versions of phenomena to ensure the extension of an idea. Valsiner, on the other hand, has advanced his work as “a traveler in psychology” and has lived up to that reputation allowing his ideas to be shaped by and through this active interaction with cultural “others.” His collaborators come from every corner of the world—Brazil, Japan, Italy, India, and China, to name a few. For his innovative new approach and milestone contributions, Valsiner was awarded a Niels Bohr Professorship by the Danish National Research Foundation. As part of the Professorship, he will be the director of the new Niels Bohr Professorship Centre for Cultural Psychology at Aalborg University. The Centre aims to become a world leader in cultural psychology research, encouraging its continued growth so that it not only survives in its fourth incarnation but flourishes. There is a sense in which the contemporary world, with its rapid globalization and social changes, needs cultural psychology. As we are in closer contact with “cultural others,” our social-psychological adaptations to these changes acquire a cultural accent. Cultural psychology is thus the psychology best suited for the 21st century. The Centre will focus on four main research areas: (a) urban psychology, (b) creativity and innovation, (c) globalization and intervention, and (d) methodology. These research efforts are combined with MA and PhD degree programs in cultural psychology. While Aalborg University will be the heart of these activities, the Centre will be connected to an international network of cultural psychologists in every continent around the world (except perhaps Antarctica, which we are working on). Thus, the Centre aims to internationalize the content of psychology so that it is not simply the study of the American college sophomore but also involves researchers, in other countries of the world, with their indigenous theories, methods, concerns, and research participants. Valsiner had the idea of hosting an annual lecture at Aalborg University to encourage the development and dissemination of innovative new ideas in cultural psychology. The first lecture was made by Valsiner as Niels Bohr Professor. In the years to follow, the lecturer(s) will be selected by members of the Centre based on the originality of their ideas and contributions to the field. The idea for the lectures was inspired by Freud’s visit to Clark University in 1909, where he delivered his famous lectures published as An Outline of Psycho-Analysis. The second Niels Bohr Lecture in Cultural Psychology will be given by Alex Gillespie and Tania Zittoun, who have also contributed to this volume. Each year’s lecture will be published in this book series, together with a number of other chapters whose aim is to comment on and extend its ideas in a number of different directions by international contributors. Thus, this book series aims to facilitate the growth and formation of the contemporary discipline of cultural psychology as an

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international enterprise. Let us now preview the contents of the first volume in the series. A PREVIEW OF THIS BOOK This book is composed of Jaan Valsiner’s Niels Bohr Lecture in Cultural Psychology, 10 commentary chapters that further the development of different aspects of it, and a final chapter by Valsiner, responding to them. The 10 intermediate commentary chapters are divided into three parts: (1) Complementarity as Epistemology, (2) Methodological Explorations and (3)Interpretation, Imagination, and Art. Part 1. Niels Bohr Professorship Lecture in Cultural Psychology One of Valsiner’s major intellectual virtues has been his deep and constructive engagement with the history of ideas, rather than focusing on only the last decade of research, as has become common in psychology. In his lecture, he explores Niels Bohr’s major contribution to science—the Complementarity Principle—and its relevance for further development of interdisciplinary science of human psychology. According to him, this science starts from the assumption that human beings are constant meaningconstructors in their relating with their environments, which they have purposefully created for their living. The relevance of Bohr’s ideas for our new psychology in contemporary times is not surprising since the roots of Bohr’s thinking borrow from psychology of his time. The Complementarity Principle was developed on the basis of the ideas of William James, mediated through interlocution with Harald Höffding and Edgar Rubin. Such a fruitful move from the human to natural sciences by bringing over ideas across disciplinary boundaries is the hallmark of the Danish intellectual tradition that gets its philosophical basis from the Naturphilosopie of HansChristian Ørsted and its artistic form from the traditions of representing human lives by Danish sculptors of many generations. Contemporary cultural psychology—a growing field of a number of parallel directions that all share an interest in explaining context-relatedness of human acting, feeling, and thinking—builds its theoretical generalizations on the grounds of the Complementarity Principle, in accordance with the teleogenetic (goalsconstructing) nature of the functioning of the human psyche. Different ways of how such building is happening in contemporary cultural psychology, and how it can be advanced further, is outlined in his chapter. Part 2. Complementarity as Epistemology Marková, in Chapter 2, begins Part 1 by describing the Complimentarity Principle as a broad epistemology of life that offers an alternative to other conceptions. She highlights that there have been considerable dis-

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putes over both the meaning of complementarity and its intellectual roots. The concept must be understood within 19th century thought surrounding Naturphilosopie, with its emphasis on wholes, becoming, and the limits of knowledge. Bohr’s revolutionary perspective can be seen as an outgrowth of a number of different “truths” accumulating at the time that can ultimately be traced back to Naturphilosophie. It also offered new solutions to the problem of conceptualizing the subject-object relation, the nonreconciliation of opposites, and the importance of language in scientific thought. Marková then explores how the concept of complementarity permeates different theories in social and cultural psychology, highlighting dialogical theory and social representations theory as exemplary cases. She concludes that misunderstandings of complementarity stem, in part, from the fact that as an epistemology it cannot be strictly defined but rather works as a set of general guidelines for constructing a scientific theory. In Chapter 3, Brinkmann expands on Marková’s observation that Niels Bohr’s development of the idea of complementarity arose not just from problems in physics, but also from biology, epistemology, and psychology. Bohr even claimed that the necessity of taking recourse to a complementary mode of description “is perhaps most familiar to us from psychological problems” (Bohr, 1934, p. 96). According to Bohr (1934), “We are both onlookers and actors in the great drama of existence” (p. 119). Using this statement as a springboard, Brinkmann offers some reflections on the existential aspects of complementarity in psychology by drawing not just on Bohr but also on the Norwegian philosopher Hans Skjervheim, who introduced the participant/spectator figure into Scandinavian philosophy and human science. Harré’s Chapter 4 further argues that Niels Bohr’s concept of complementarity is not just an epistemic thesis but has deep metaphysical applications. To bring these out, two recent developments in philosophy are needed: the identification of the mereological fallacies and the concept of “affordance.” It is often a mistake to ascribe a predicate, the meaning of which is fixed by its use for a whole to one or more of the parts, and it is sometimes a fallacy to project the products of analysis back onto the analysandum as constituents. Different methods of analysis of the same target yield different affordances, and these fit nicely into the idea of complementarity. Similarly, using linguistic analysis to penetrate other cultures depends on the choice of the interrogatory language, so two methods of analysis such as those of Lutz and of Wierzbicka can be regarded as yielding complementary views, each picking up an affordance. Taking “person” to be the root concept for these discussions requires another innovation: attending to the positions, that is, beliefs concerning rights and duties to act and even to think in certain socially determined ways. Thus, Harré also

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provides us with methodological strategies for developing cultural psychology, which brings us to Part II. Part 3. Methodological Explorations Tateo and Marisco’s chapter creates another bridge between Parts I and II in that it explores both the epistemological and the methodological significance of the complementarity principle for psychology. They highlight Bohr’s thesis, that “There is a fundamental error in separating the parts from the whole, the mistake of atomizing what should not be atomized. Unity and complementarity constitute reality” (As quoted in Physics from Wholeness: Dynamical Totality as a Conceptual Foundation for Physical Theories [2005] by Barbara Piechocinska). The idea of complementarity introduces a new look at the epistemological stance in social sciences. Nevertheless, the idea cannot be simply translated from physics to psychology. Their chapter stresses some differences and communalities between the complementary principle in physics and psychology with respect to research activity and concludes by deducing the principle of “open complementarity” in psychology. In Chapter 6, Sato, Yasuda, Zanzaki, and Valsiner then note that the term “culture” in the discipline of cultural psychology is marked by an approach wherein it is seen as an organizing system for a person who lives within a particular culturally meaningful world. The collective entity enters individual minds as they participate in social institutions that provide meaning to their experiences, thereby linking psychology with semiotics. This is a critical element that has to be considered while developing methodology for the study of culture and psychology. Since we are, as humans, able to create artificial signs, the meaning-making process is central to the content as well as methodology in psychology. In this regard, the notion of a promoter sign is crucial, since it is that culturally guided, metalevel meaning system that predisposes individual minds toward specific ways of understanding their world and acting upon it. Introducing the Trajectory Equifinality Model, Sato et al. explain that this layered visualization of human action within context is presented in irreversible time. The authors argue that although human experience takes place at the microgenetic level of the everyday, the existence of enduring mesogenetic and ontogenetic levels are essential considerations in modeling developmental processes. Historically Structured Sapling, Bifurcation Points, and Equifinality Points are key concepts in this model and are explicated in the chapter. Following Sato et al.’s description of the Trajectory Equifinality Model (TEM), Jensen and Wagoner offer a constructive critique and extension of the model. They attempt to extend the TEM to a fuller account of the rich details of life trajectories. In so doing, they highlight the role of situational influences within trajectory development both in orienting the individual

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and circumscribing the range of available life options. Structural factors and continuous development over time are key factors that underpin and sometimes presage the configuration of pathways available to the individual. Methodologically, they argue that TEM needs to acknowledge the special challenge posed by the idea of researching unrealized life pathways and the limits of retrospective data. Their methodological solution is contemporaneous data collection through time, what they call “process ethnography.” Part 4. Interpretation, Imagination, and Art Simão begins Part III with an interpretation of Valsiner’s dialogue with the Niels Bohr tradition through the lenses of Gadamar’s philosophical hermeneutics. Specifically, Gadamar’s notions of tradition and horizon are introduced, using excerpts from the Valsiner’s lecture, to demonstrate his “‘artistry’ in creating his movements, facing barriers and crossing frontiers” in dialoguing with the tradition of Bohr’s work of complementarity. Simão thereby concretely demonstrates the strength of such dialogical analysis as well as the potentiality of Valsiner’s proposal for a “Psychology in the new key of Cultural Psychology,” where “natural science meets the poetic premises and romantic roots of Naturphilosophie.” Innis’s Chapter 9 then takes up an inherent invitation in Valsiner’s text: to examine his proposal for a cultural psychology through its linkages to philosophy, semiotics, and their linkages to one another. For Innis, this is a welcome opportunity to reexamine what John Dewey named “the most pervasive fallacy of philosophical thinking,” namely, its neglect of context. With Valsiner’s aim in mind, a psychology studying context-inclusive mental life, Innis investigates these linkages by examining Dewey’s analysis of the complex notion of context and the two complementary semiotic models of C. S. Peirce and Susanne Langer, both of which supply fundamental analytical tools for cultural psychology. Klempe’s Chapter 10 is a thought experiment, including imaginary constructions of “Kitchen Seminars” held at Clark University, Cultural Psychology, Kierkegaard, and the notion of complementarity. By applying the Kierkegaardian distinction between a what-perspective and a how-perspective, Klempe detects certain traits in the positions in cultural psychology. One of his main findings is that this type of seminar is characterized by a “radical unification approach,” which is a strategy for prevailing contradictory positions within a discussion. The other is that contradictory positions are strongly related to signalling a more or less subjective (empirical) or objective (ideal) position. This implies, Klempe argues, that subjectivity and objectivity still form a premise for discussions within the sphere of cultural psychology. In the final chapter of this section, Zittoun and Gillespie ask, What can cultural psychology learn from examining sculptures as meaning making?

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Whereas Valsiner’s studies concerned statues, Zittoun and Gillespie examine art installations as they are presently installed in parks in Aalborg. From this analysis, six aspects of art experience are proposed. Although all of these are, the authors write, “constitutive of any experience we have as humans participating in our complex world,” some aspects of experience and sense making pose much bigger challenges to cultural psychology than others. Zittoun and Gillespie end their chapter by new “openings” to cultural psychology; they encourage cultural psychology work with experiences that go beyond words, as our embodied experiences do, and to develop methodology to capture and integrate multimodal sense-making of the world, a point also explored by Jensen and Wagoner in their chapter. Part 5. Reply Any book needs a conclusion that guides the readers’ minds to wander beyond its scope. Valsiner’s conclusive chapter is meant to develop further some of the intriguing ideas that reverberate all through this volume. First of all, it is the question of how the notion of complementarity could fit into psychology. Bohr’s notion of equality of opposite perspectives is left behind. Instead, complementarity is viewed as a form of relationships between different parts of complex systems. Furthermore, cultural psychology starts from the top—from human encounters with themselves that have made complex realities like art museums, football stadiums, and stock markets into the center of defining what “being human” is. It relies on the focus on structures of wholeness, which cannot, and need not, be reduced to their elementary constituents. This leads to the concept of mereological opportunity—the possibility to create new knowledge at the intersection of different levels of Gestalts that allow for flexible adaptation to ever-changing conditions of the world. The most potent reservoir of such opportunity is the act of sign-making and sign-using. This creates an open horizon for future work in cultural psychology. REFERENCES Bohr, N. (1934). Atomic theory and the description of nature. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Cole, M. (1996). Cultural psychology: A once and future discipline. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Epstein, B. (2007). Ontological individualism reconsidered. Retrieved September 15, 2013,from http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11229-007-92728#page-1 Gergen, K., Gulerce, A., Lock, A., & Misra, G. (1996). Psychological science in cultural context. American Psychologist, 51(2), 496–503. Harré, R. (2002). Cognitive science: A philosophical introduction. London, UK: Sage.

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Kluckohn, C., & Murray, H. A. (Eds.). (1948). Personality in nature, culture and society. New York, NY: Knopf. LeVine, R. (2001). Culture and personality studies, 1918–1960: Myth and history. Journal of Personality, 69(9), 803–818. Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind, self and society from the standpoint of a social behaviourist (C. W. Morris, Ed.). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Piechocinska, B. (2005). Physics from wholeness: Dynamical totality as a conceptual foundation for physical theories. Uppsala Dissertations from the Faculty of Science & Technology, 63. Uppsala, Sweden: Uppsala Universitet. Shweder, R. (1991). Thinking through culture: Expeditions in cultural psychology. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Valsiner, J. (1987). Culture and the development of children’s action. Chichester, UK: Wiley. Valsiner, J. (1998). The guided mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Valsiner, J. (2000). Culture and human development. London, UK: Sage Valsiner, J. (2007). Culture in minds and societies: Foundations of a cultural psychology. New Delhi, India: Sage. Valsiner, J., & van der Veer, R. (2000). The social mind: Construction of the idea. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

PART I THE NIELS BOHR PROFESSORSHIP LECTURE

CHAPTER 1

CULTURAL PSYCHOLOGY AND ITS FUTURE Complementarity in a New Key Jaan Valsiner

“Every sentence I say must be understood not as an affirmation, but as a question” ——Niels Bohr (as cited in Rosenfeld, 1945, pp. 12–13) Bohr’s imperative for interpretation was ahead of his time. It breaks out of the tradition of constructing ontological accounts—reconciling the particle and wave forms, and the need to accept alternative ways of measurement— through the general Principle of Complementarity. His solution for physics leads to more general questioning the very next steps in our construction of understanding of the World. While our statements are about ontologies, the reasons for our making them are epistemological. We want to know about how we might get to know something we do not know yet. But how do we know what it is—that we do not know yet? Creativity—both in science and in everyday life—begins here. Cultural Psychology and Its Future: Complementarity in a New Key, pages 3–30. Copyright © 2014 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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We look for ways of creating new knowledge through what we know already—by feeling into the not-yet-known. Science is a passionate affair. And we ask questions, at first naïve, then tentative, and finally informed. On that frontier of new knowledge, poetry, literature and science converge. At first, any scientific endeavor reveals new knowledge, but the new vision that accompanies it is not knowledge. It is less than knowledge, for it is a guess; but it is more than knowledge, for it is a foreknowledge of things yet unknown and at present perhaps inconceivable. Our vision of the general nature of things is our guide for the interpretation of all future experience. Such guidance is indispensable. Theories of the scientific method which try to explain the establishment of scientific truth by any purely objective formal procedure are doomed to failure. Any process of enquiry unguided by intellectual passions would inevitably spread out into a desert of trivialities (Polanyi, 1962, p. 135)

Psychology at our time is at a turning point—whether to continue the application of “purely formal procedures” (Toomela & Valsiner, 2010) and accumulate further empirical data of low generalization potential or to advance theoretical perspectives that would allow for a new look on the basic features of the human condition. The (re)emergence of interest in psychological issues claiming the links with the imprecise but appealing notion of culture is the indicator of striving toward such a new look. Cultural psychologies of today—results of interdisciplinary efforts that gathered momentum since the 1990s—constitute the fourth time1 a similar focus has come into being in the history of psychology over the past two centuries. Can it survive? And provide us with deeper understanding of the human lives than that achieved by artists? Development of scientific thought—as that of Wissenschaft— is nonlinear. At times, it takes a helical form—what had been done before is reached, in a new version, at another historical period. Some stage that has been passed through in its history may reemerge, in a new form, at a future time. From the initial unity of science and art around the flourishing times of Natural Philosophy in the 18th-19th centuries, science moved to the denial of the creative impulse of the arts in its domain, only to return to the question of creativity in the 21st century. The principal domains of expected breakthroughs have moved from physical to biological sciences over the 20th century and are on the doorstep of making the human psyche into the target of new inquiry in our century. The time to make sense of the whole complexity of the human ways of living has come again. 1

The previous three occasions were: Völkerpsychologie of Lazarus and Steinthal in 1850s-1890s, Wilhelm Wundt’s Völkerpsychologie in 1900-1920, and the “culture and personality” school of thought in the 1950s.

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My goal in this presentation is to situate cultural psychology in general—and the specific version of it that I call cultural psychology of semiotic dynamics—in the wider intellectual sphere of ideas that unite the sciences and the humanities and are becoming fertilized by the Danish cultural-historical context. The latter—marked by the stubborn resistance to the suggestions to separate science from philosophy, literary scholarship, and the arts—has facilitated the flourishing of new ideas in each of these domains of knowledge. Thus, cultivating contemporary cultural psychology in the Danish context can be beneficial for its quest to overcome the disciplinary impassés that have been created over the last two centuries. What is needed is the building of its knowhow in unison with both basic sciences and the arts. The Danish intellectual tradition—marked by the work of Søren Kierkegaard and Hans-Christian Ørsted in the 19th century, and of Harald Høffding, Niels Bohr, and Jesper Hoffmeyer in the 20th century—constitute a solid basis for such renewed synthesis of ideas in the human sciences. THE COMPLEMENTARITY PRINCIPLE: NIELS BOHR’S INNOVATION Starting from the laboratory work in the early 1920s and marked by his Como Lecture of 1927, Niels Bohr arrived at a radical theoretical solution—recognizing the complementarity of opposite perspectives upon the phenomena under study. The innovation here was the assertion that both views are equally true, yet not applicable at the same moment. What Bohr accomplished here is basically a change in the classical-logical disjunction “or”—moving its primary interpretation of ontological exclusion (A or non-A = if A then non-A cannot exist) to its secondary interpretation (A or non-A = either A exists or non-A exists at this moment, while the opposite could exist at another moment). When we see a phenomenon at this moment as a wave function, we cannot see it simultaneously as a particle, but at the next moment (next observation) we can observe it as a particle. So, both A and non-A are “true.” From a classical-logical perspective, this move to the conjunctive (subdominant) notion of the disjunction “or” is not a large step. It remains well within the axiomatic system of the Aristotelian-Boolean classical logic. But interpreting its results as the truthfulness of both opposites in general is. It adds perspective taking—and perspective shift—to the classical-logical scheme. Bohr’s claim needs to be put into the context of development of various logical systems over the 20th century. The canons of the Aristotle-Boole logic of 2-valent kind were crushing with the introduction of multivalued and deontic logics (Rudolph, 2013). Yet Bohr himself insisted upon keeping scientific explanations within the realm of explainability in common language and rejected the suggestion to shift to the use of multivalued logic (Bohr, 1948/1998, p. 147). The relevance of irreversible time had not yet

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penetrated from philosophy to physics and chemistry. This happened later—in the 1970s—through the work of Ilya Prigogine. The 1920s in physics was a struggle trying to solve the ontological problem of the being of microparticles. The search was for what they are like—AS-IS in contrast to AS-IF—in terms of Hans Vaihinger.2 When observed from the perspective of logics, Bohr’s principle was a reasonable compromise. Starting off as an inductive generalization based on experimental evidence, it broke the demand of the Aristotelian logic to accept only one of the opposites, in favor of two without allowing them to hybridize. Bohr opened the “dislocated relationship between non-Aristotelian logic and Aristotelian language . . . Through the metaphor of complementarity, Bohr re-established consistency between the order of concepts and the order of signification” (Fischer, 1985, p. 52). The given concept—be it that of a wave or of a particle—remains intact in the AS-IS world, while the signification becomes context-bound and specifiable in one form in one context, and in another form—in other context (Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle). Bohr’s notion of complementarity underwent subtle changes over his life (Katsumori, 2011). It was originally an inductive generalization—an effort to reconcile different empirical findings. The move to accept copresence of various perspectives—or “joint completing” of the picture of the phenomena—was a conceptual (abductive—in the sense of C.S. Peirce) leap. In his “Middle Period,” Bohr characterized complementarity through the conceptual pair ANALYSIS SYNTHESIS—referring to “mutual exclusion” and “joint completion” (Katsumori, 2011, p. 30). Yet it remained unclear how synthesis operates in the complementary relationship. From around 1950s to his death (the “Late Period”), Bohr continued his adherence to the complementarity principle in terms of paradoxical truth.3 The very notion of complementarity came to mean—as an abstracted claim— joint completion under the condition of mutual exclusion (Katsumori, 2011, p. 18). This solution can be viewed as paradoxical, indeed. How can mutually excluded parts of a whole jointly complete the whole? Two Forms of Distinction The conceptual problem in the “paradoxical” formulation—not for quantum physicists, but for thinkers in other disciplines where the phenomena are open-systemic—is in the implications of the notion of mutual 2

Whose work in philosophy was publicly available since 1911, even if it was accomplished back in the 1870s. 3 That is, the truth whose negation is also truth. This statement demonstrates the ontological overcoming of Aristotelian logic, but not yet an arrival at a “dialectical leap” from the relationship of the two opposites.

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exclusion. If freed by its negation implications (of something not linked with something else—exclusion) the relationship can be depicted as that of inclusive separation. Here, the target is differentiated from its context, but the context is retained in the subsequent analysis because it is considered interdependent with the phenomenon. Although the emphasis in research is on the object phenomenon, the relevance of its context is recognized in the investigation. (Valsiner, 1997, p. 24)

The implications of inclusive separation render the claim for joint completion possible—the opposites are separated and enter into a relationship with one another. The next state of the system becomes jointly completed through that relation, which may range from comparison of two opposite positions (formal complementarity) to dialectical synthesis of a new set of inclusively separated opposites (Valsiner, 2012, ch. 10). Here the ANALYSISSYNTHESIS opposition becomes conjoint—one needs differentiation (analysis) for integration (synthesis). This brings the Natural Philosophy’s invention of the differentiation theory—from J. W. Goethe to Heinz Werner—into a complementary relation with the Principle of Complementarity. The latter is developed further—rather than merely applied as a borrowing from physics—in the case of open systems. It is here that the theoretical efforts of contemporary cultural psychology can be claimed to follow Niels Bohr’s footsteps. And continue to build the path in the jungle of efforts of understanding where he stopped. Epistemological Roots of the Principle of Complementarity Interestingly, the history of the Complementarity Principle includes a demonstrable tribute to psychology. Niels Bohr’s arrival at his Principle is embedded in his life course that includes Natural Philosophy (Søren Kierkegaard and Hans-Cristian Ørsted) and psychology (William James; Brush, 1980, p. 412). The specifics of Kierkegaard’s role in Bohr’s thought are widely disputed, beyond the documented fact of his possession of his books. A possible impact can be found in Bohr’s dislike of Hegel’s dialectical speculations that were rejected previously by Kierkegaard as well (Holton, 1970, p. 1041). One does not need to be in contact with the original source to gain an advantage from it. Mediators are often more important than the originators. Bohr’s interest in philosophy was mediated by the role the friend of his family Harald Höffding played in the European and Danish intellectual scene (Whitt-Hansen, 1952, p. 384) until Höffding’s death in 1931. It is most likely that the Kierkegaard’s link in Bohr’s thinking could have proceeded through Höffding’s mediatory role (Höffding, 1913; Katsumori,

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2011, p. 540). Höffding also was the intermediary in keeping the interest in biology up over decades through discussions of vitalism. Psychology was important in the intellectual climate of the emerging quantum physics. Bohr’s indebtedness to William James was direct, particularly through the idea of stream of thought, as Bohr acknowledged briefly in 1962 (Holton, 1970, p. 1034). Dated back to the year 1905, when Bohr was interested in surface tension, and through shared intellectual interests with Edgar Rubin, the input from psychology was—and remained over decades—a background for his work in physics. The Principle as based on the idea of the figureground reversal. Edgar Rubin’s (1886–1951) role in Bohr’s formulation of the Complementarity Principle may actually be more central than that of James, or even Høffding. Both Bohr and Rubin were students together at University of Copenhagen in the first decade of the 20th century, taking philosophy courses from Höffding. Rubin moved to University of Göttingen for 1911– 1916, during which his studies of figureground relations were made (published in Danish in 1915, and in German; Rubin, 1922). Both Bohr and Rubin continued at the University of Copenhagen as faculty until the ends of their lives. Rubin’s classic demonstrations of figureground relations—particularly the reversal of the roles of figure and ground—are one of the very few basic facts in general psychology that can be found. However, while being brilliant snapshots of arrested—dynamically cyclical—perceptual activity (see Figure 1.1), Rubin’s demonstrations did not reveal developmental progression of the perception-based meaning construction beyond the figureground conflict and fluctuation.4 Rubin’s visual images (like the one in Figure 1.1) were constructed with the notion of mutual exclusion of the two figures embedded in their image, while the whole as the trigger for figureground reversals became pos4

Rubin built his quasi-abstracted figures on the basis of the analysis-- by Alois Riegel (1901)-of Roman ornamentation. Riegel had noted that when the complementary ornamentations become increasingly abstract, the speed of figureground dynamics increases (van Campen, 1997, p. 134). However, ornaments are patterns that are fixed, and dynamics of their perception is completely confined to the visual system of their observer. Hence, for psychology of meaning-making—in which our contemporary cultural psychology has its focus—the Rubin patterns remain demonstrations of how the ever-dynamic perceptual processes can be temporarily fixated, while still retaining the holistic (Gestalt) nature of the stimulus as given. In the regular world of perceiving and acting, the Figure Ground shifting necessarily happens at high speeds and serves as the basis for new meanings— encoded in any modality (visual, verbal, hyper-generalized, tactile, olfactory) that may leave the original opposition behind in a synthesis of new signs. Rubin himself came to address such constructivity in his theory of psychoid images (German: Psychoide Gebilde—Rubin, 1936, p. 395), focusing on the extendability of word meanings (e.g., the meaning of “meaningless”, or of “slow”).

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FIGURE 1.1. An example of Rubin’s stimuli forcing figureGround reversal onto our perceptual system.

sible through joint completion. The two sides of the curvy line in Figure 1 need to be recognized alternatively as the face (Figure)—turning the other part into the ground, with the possibility of switching the positions because the two sides are mutually excluded. Rubin’s figures were first published in 1915. Their visual logic precisely matches the abstract logic— expressed in verbal terms—of Bohr’s Complementarity Principle that emerged in the thinking of Copenhagen physicists in 1922–1926 and was publicly presented by Bohr in his Como Lecture in 1927. It is important to recognize the limits of Rubin’s figures—and of Bohr’s version of his Principle—as special cases of human conceptualization. It is not the parallel possibility—or even competition—of rivaling perspectives that dominates human relating to the world—of everyday life, or of artists’ creations, or—of scientists’ interpretation of experimental evidence. Rather, it is the relation—reciprocity5 as definable in various ways6—that characterizes the functional uses of the perception, action, and signification 5

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Interestingly, Bohr used the notion of reciprocity briefly – in 1929—in his thinking, instead of complementarity, but reverted back to the latter for the rest of his life (Katsumori, 2011, p. 21). These ways can include, among others, various versions of “aesthetic synthesis” (Baldwin, 1915), mutual “in-feeding” (Valsiner, 2002), or dialectical synthesis as developed further from the ideas brought into science by Maimon, Fichte and Hegel (Valsiner, 2012, chapter 10). The crucial issue is the theoretical specification of the nature of the relationship implied in the recognition of the reciprocity of the opposites.

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processes as human being adapt to the next moment in their irreversible life courses. Such necessity does not exist in the domain of quantum physics the objects of which are nonliving microscopic dynamic processes. Language and Generalization Our science is shared—between areas and cross-disciplines—by the use of semiotic systems. Of those, language is central. While on skiing holiday, the “Bohr group” of physicists were intensively discussing language use in science while being involved in the mundane task of washing dishes. According to the memories of Werner Heisenberg, Bohr reminded his colleagues of the analogy: We have dirty water and dirty dishcloth, and yet we manage to get the plates and glasses clean. In language, too, we have to work with unclear concepts and a form of logic whose scope is restricted in an unknown way, and yet we use it to bring some clarity into our understanding of nature. (Shomar, 2008, p. 331)

Bohr’s focus on language use was central for his way of operating, in contrast to Einstein for whom language became important after the problems were solved in the visual-symbolic domain (Kaiser, 1994). Bohr’s preference for verbal language made him a master of generalization of complex physical concepts in text, with rare use of mathematical formulae. EXTENSIONS OF THE PRINCIPLE OF COMPLEMENTARITY: BIOLOGY The notion of complementarity is, first and foremost, a metatheoretical notion that was arrived at by Niels Bohr inductively, as an effort to make sense of experimental evidence. Bohr was dealing with phenomena of a relatively simple kind. Sure, the microparticles in physics may be difficult to locate and can be influenced by the experimental procedures, and scientists studying them are constantly confronted by the potential ephemerality of what they can observe, and the dangers of their own tools creating erroneous outcomes. However, in contrast to open systems in biology, psychology, and social sciences at-large, physicists do not need to assume that their phenomena may “absent-mindedly” ignore, or intentionally neutralize, or even purposefully counteract the scientists’ efforts. Nor would we need to assume that these particles would willfully deceive the researchers. All these possibilities of answerability are there when we start to consider living systems, from viruses upwards to the social systems created by human beings. The basic issues of vitality and intentionality cannot be ignored at higher levels

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of the organization of the living matter and its emergent reflexivity of the psyche. The unity of the complementary opposites in Bohr’s principle can be safely declared as involving exclusive separation of the opposites, despite the acceptance of the joint completion notion. Bohr came close to overcoming the Kantian dualism between the mechanical and teleological sides of functioning of natural systems; he tried to turn the dualism into a duality. In that he succeeded—the Complementarity Principle is a perfect example of duality in theoretical thinking of scientists. Yet he failed to take the next step—elaborating the various forms of such duality. To be fair, he did not need to do that. Arriving at the Complementarity Principle was sufficient for the tasks he had set up for himself in physics. The question of the relationship between the two forms is not necessary to ask and hence, that question did not need an answer in the physics of the 1920s–1930s. Yet it is a pressing question for contemporary biology, moving actively from the orthodoxy of genetics to the elaboration of processes of epigenetics. Talking to one’s nearest neighbor. Transfer of a metatheoretical idea—fruitful as it is in one science—to another is always a risky enterprise. The phenomena of the receiving field may bear partial resemblance to that of the donor, hence the transfer may be justified; yet the resemblance is not the whole story. As Isabelle Stengers has cautioned, the transposition of the Complementarity Principle “upwards”—to human sciences —may be hard: Niels Bohr was able to formulate his concept of complementarity with respect to quantum physics because that discipline deals with what are defined in classical mechanics as variables, apparently capable of describing a body objectively as it “is” (where is it? What is its speed?) and because in quantum mechanics such “variables” are in fact “operators,” which no longer describe, but rather correspond mathematically to the “production” of specific description (the thing observed) . . . Transferred to other domains, complementarity engenders no specific resemblance to physics, but it does prompt an explicit formulation of the risk and the responsibilities inherent in the questions posed. (Stengers, 1995, pp. 182–183)

Stengers (1995) was particularly focusing on the human case where the issues of highly complex organizational forms—those of ethics—regulate the events in the field of everyday life. The hierarchical nature of complex systems of biological and social kinds requires that the forms of causality and embrace a variety of nonlinear forms of organization that could be unified by the term catalysis (Mittasch, 1938). Efforts to develop models of causality for multilevel biological and social systems are in a very initial stage in psychology (Cabell & Valsiner, 2014), despite the notion of catalysis

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dominating chemistry since 1830s. This oversight by psychology of a conceptual solution that has established itself in chemistry and biology is at least mildly surprising, especially in the context of psychologists’ “physics envy,” which has had profound impact on the discourse styles in the field. Before we turn to look at the ways in which complementarity could be applied to the human sciences, let us consider its existing application in biology. That application was wrought by one of the students of Bohr who, after receiving an intellectual inspiration from Bohr in 1932 (McKaughan, 2005; Roll-Hansen, 2000) became the leader in 20th century biology—Max Ludwig Henning Delbrück (1906–1981). His efforts to discover new physical principles in biology were sidetracked by the hesitancy about the special nature of living organisms. Delbrück became fascinated by Bohr’s 1932 Light and Life talk, yet the issue to applying the complementarity notion at the biological level was complex. Bohr himself was aware of that, yet interested in it (as well as to psychology). The issue—extending of laws of physics to another field, versus discovering new laws of physics through that other field—haunted the efforts. The specificity of different forms of organization of the subject matters of the fields allowed both. Yet the coexistence of both—the mechanicism of physics and vitalism of biology—was a complicated matter then (as well as now). “Turf wars”—or boundary maintenance—between different disciplines has been a reality. Efforts to apply principles of inorganic chemistry to its organic counterpart in early 19th century were at first viewed as problematic. Further up in levels of organization of the subject matter, the boundaries between physiology and chemistry, for their part, raised passionate debates during the nineteenth century. Nineteenth-century chemists submitted animal compounds to elementary analyses in their laboratories, while the physiologists claimed they could not understand the processes transpiring in living bodies because they dealt with dead matter. (BensaudeVincent, 2003, p. 209)

The rivalry continues between physiology and psychology, with the curious American invention of “behaviorism” occupying an intermediate state between the two. Likewise, reduction of sociological level phenomena to psychological (e.g., psychoanalytic explanations of society) have created local frictions between the disciplines. However, even when the social “turf wars” between disciplines are pacified, the conceptual issue remains—how would theoretical notions that fit one discipline become applicable in another? Can the notion of measurement taken from the practices of land surveying to psychology? Or is psychological measurement the same as its counterpart in physics? For example, Bohr’s Principle—fitting physics—overlooks a relevant biological focus. In the case of complementarity,

Cultural Psychology and Its Future • 13 Bohr did not refer to its ordinary, everyday meaning, namely the aspects of two different parts of a thing that make that thing a whole, such as the two “complementary” polynucleotide chains that make the DNA double helix whole . . . Rather, under Bohr’s meaning, complementary aspects of the world give rise to rationally irreconcilable concepts, whose inconsistency can never be demonstrated empirically (Stent, 2004, p. 210, added emphasis)

Here is the ultimate limit of the applicability of physical theories to biological—and psychological phenomena—where the “inconsistency” is consistent within a functioning whole. That whole is autopoietic, through autocatalytic processes. Hence, psychological systems can provide a fertile ground not for the application of the Complementarity Principle to them, but to further advancement of the principle in its full potency. Finding a new solution of a complementary kind is important for psychology—as it overcomes the reductionist focus brought into it by emulation of techniques—rather than new theories—from the neurosciences. Cultural psychology is at our present time the next area for potential growth, provided that it elaborates the notion of reciprocity of the Person and the Umwelt through cultural tools (Chang, 2009; Lamiell, 2003). Complementarity and the Irreversibility of Development How would the Principle of Complementarity illuminate developing systems that include levels of biological, psychological, and social kind? With contemporary genetics—since 1960s—turning into epigenetics (Gottlieb, 1997; Valsiner, 2013) and the axiomatic acceptance of the asymmetry of the irreversible time. Here, the complementarity principle finds its most general application—in the unity of the opposites of the PAST and the FUTURE at the very moment—infinitesimally small—of the PRESENT. Bohr did not need to consider the irreversible nature of lifetime in his quantum physics, Prigogine could get by by demonstrating irreversibility of selected chemical processes. In this sense, physics and chemistry could avoid the very difficult challenge that biology, psychology, and social sciences as a whole face—the inevitable uniqueness of all of their phenomena, due to their historicity of emergence within irreversible time. At the most basic level—that irreversible time is nonsymmetric (Figure 1.2)— the trajectories of the past do not determine those of the future. The future does not create a mirror image of the past (is, thus, unpredictable). Gilbert Gottlieb’s theory of Probabilistic Epigenesis (Gottlieb, 1997) has been the major theoretical innovation that has preserved the complementarity of different levels of the organization of phenomena while accepting the uncertainty of development resulting from irreversibility of time. As seen in Figure 1.3, different levels—ranging from the genetic basis to that of higher psychological functions—lead development through their proba-

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FIGURE 1.2. Anisov’s model of “broom of time”: Past and future are asymmetric.

bilistic linkages over time. The scheme allows for all versions of causality— “upward,” “downward,”,and “horizontal.” What makes human psychology special? Why is a general hierarchical scheme like that of Figure 1.3 needed? It allows us to see how the organizational level of understanding the psyche is special. Aside from the feature of self-inclusion (recognized already in quantum physics in the form of inevitability of observer-apparatus-phenomena link), it is also characterized by self-reflexivity, and—last but not least—selfintentionality. While self-reflexivity can be found in biological systems—the capacity of the immune system to ward off detected viruses qualifies as its minimal version, it is the self-intentionality that sets humans apart from the rest of the biological world. It is here where the innovative potential of biological development ends, and the possibilities for psychological creativity abound. Traditionally phrased in terms of the question of “free will,” the realities of self-intentional systems cannot be reduced to lower levels of explanation. Figure 1.3 indicates the conceptual limit of contemporary neurosciences, as the latter fail to conceptualize the self-intentionality (Clegg, 2009, 2013) of the human systems: Contemporary neurobiologist investigators of the human brain tend to consider freedom of the will as a pseudo-problem and its discussion as a waste of time. Most of these neurobiologists are Aristotelian monists. They confidently expect that recent advances in brain research will soon allow us to account

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FIGURE 1.3. A general scheme of probabilistic epigenesis (after Gottlieb). for all mental processes, including willing, in terms of lawful neurobiological mechanisms. They regard the dualism doctrine as a crackpot idea that is—or ought to be—dead and gone. (Stent, 2004, p. 211)

Dualism may be gone, but duality is all over the place in human biosocial functioning (Figure 1.3). Since human beings have developed systems of self-signification—those of ethics and morality—such neurobiological monism bypasses the multilevel organization of human systems and is therefore theoretically mute to understanding intentionality in its real time and social contexts. Human beings need to be studied starting at the level where they function—irrationally, ethically, striving for goals that do not seem to be reachable (but sometimes are achieved), and talking about what they do. It is here that the new (re)birth of cultural psychologies find their place (overview in Valsiner, 2009). Here, I briefly elaborate the basic system of one version of these new inventions that is unique by its focus on the irreversibility of time and the construction of hierarchical complexes of signs. THE DUALITY OF THE HUMAN PSYCHE What needs explanation is the regular open-endedness of the range of potential conduct—the psyche is self-guiding through the setting out limits for

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FIGURE 1.4. The structure of Gegenstand.

itself and then challenging these very same limits (Valsiner, 1999). Human beings create images of super-human agents—deities and demons—through their imagination, and let these constructed agents guide further their feeling and acting. The psyche—an active agent—operates through acting upon objects. The latter are not neutral, but resist. They object, along the lines of the notion of Gegenstand7 (Figure 1.4). Gegenstand is the minimal structural unit for psychological analysis. It is untranslatable into English (the usual rendering of it as object fuses it with other nuanced German terms—Objekt, Ding). The implication of the complementarity of the “barrier,” and the “force” acting upon the “barrier” is crucial for our conceptualization. All psychological phenomena can be characterized by DIRECTION and COUNTER-DIRECTION (or—RESISTANCE to DIRECTION). The unity of such direction and counteraction creates for psychology the arena for conceptualizing dualities in their functions. Developing under social guidance. The human psyche is not left alone in the creation of its objects—the making of such objects is socially suggested: Our society is an institution which inhibits what it stimulates. It both tempers and excites aggressive, epistemic, and sexual tendencies, increases or reduces the chances of satisfying them according to class distinctions, and invents prohibitions together with the means of transgressing them. Its sole purpose, to date, is self-preservation, and it opposes change by means of laws and regulations. It functions on the basic assumption that it is unique, has nothing to learn, and 7

“Something standing [over] against”—as Goethe pointed out in terms of etymology of the German word (Stephenson, 2005, p. 565).

Cultural Psychology and Its Future • 17 cannot be improved. Hence its unambiguous dismissal of all that is foreign to it. (Moscovici, 1976, p. 149, added emphasis).

Cultural psychologies address the issue of complementarity of the person and the society. At least as an analogy—as did Niels Bohr in physics—yet at a different level. THE BASIC MODEL OF SEMIOTIC DYNAMICS My perspective is simple: human beings, while relating with their environment (acting upon it) create signs that regulate that very process of acting in irreversible time (Figure 1.5). Within the flow of the irreversible time, the sign (S) differentiates from the ongoing experience and becomes available at the present moment to guide that moment toward the future in two ways—immediate (at the locus of the Act) and through its relative extension over time—for the future (Figure 1.6). The act of meaningful social construction is thus always dual, involving action toward the future through the context of the sign (S), and vice versa (i.e., the sign has the act as its context). The phenomenon and its context cannot be separated from each other—by charting out a phenomenon, its context is charted out dependently—according to the co-genetic logic. The power of signs regulating human conduct is so obvious that under our ordinary conditions, we hardly notice it. When I (internally and in an abbreviated form) reflect upon my own ongoing action (“this feels GOOD,” “I am SO STUPID”), the superordinate sign I use guides my action further. I may cherish in the pleasure of “feeling good” or try to “overcome my stupidity”; in both cases the sign-making is regulating the flow of my experience.

FIGURE 1.5.

The Core of the Dynamic Semiotic Perspective: Duality of the Act.

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FIGURE 1.6. The Emerged Sign with Functional Longevity (Feed-forward to the Future)

As signs emerge in the flow of experiencing and regulate that flow in the present, they can also set up a residual guidance of similar flow in some unspecifiable time in the future (Figure 1.6). Such feed-forward functions of the emerged sign may be explicit—fixing it in some form to be usable in the future—or implicit—carried forth to anticipate similar situations in the unpredictable future (see Figure 1.6.—Future anticipated present moment). The function of signs is always future-oriented, both in their immediate impact (turning the next immediate future into a new present) and their general orientation toward encountering similar situations in some indeterminate future moment. Human beings are not acting teleologically—by orientation to some future goals—but teleogenetically. They create their own goal-orientations for the future as they move toward their immediate future states, turning those into the passing presents. This brings us to the curious question: if sign use is future oriented, how can it be that the meaning-makers are constantly referencing the past—digging into one’s memory, trying to recall relevant life moments of the past. The meaning-maker at the present accesses different traces of the signs of the past that can be accessed now—at the present moment—as s/he is moving toward the future. What looks as if it entails “looking back” at the given moment is actually “looking forward” thanks to the accessibility of different trace signs from the past. Within irreversible time, one cannot reference “what was” without making it to be in the service of “what might come.” Figure 1.8 is the central general scheme representing the process dynamics of semiotic mediation. It includes the construction and destruction of the hierarchy of signs (x + n) that can either “open” or “close” the ongo-

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FIGURE 1.7. Coordination of SELF (SC) OTHER(S) Within the Irreversible Move from PAST into FUTURE.

ing flow of experience (into different meaning complexes), including the demolishing of the whole constructed hierarchy and, alternatively, fixating a meaning through boundary (constraint). Both the specific (particular signs in their specific locations in the hierarchy) and the holistic regulators of the whole experience flow are represented here.

FIGURE 1.8. General process of dynamic hierarchical sign construction in irreversible time.

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Through a process like this, it is possible to unite episodic and transitory meaning constructions and longlasting emergent meanings (prejudices, deep convictions, affective fascinations, devotions). The scheme itself remains analogous to a biological (genetic) self-regulation process. It is here where natural science meets the poetic premises and romantic roots of Naturphilosophie. WHO IS AFRAID OF NATURAL PHILOSOPHY? The inductively generalizing enterprise of the natural sciences is, and has been over the last two centuries showed its limits. The focus on the wholeness of nature and its developmental tendencies was an enigma to late 18th century natural sciences and its poets, like J. W. Goethe (Richards, 2002, ch. 11). The schism between natural and human sciences that took place over the 19th century is unfortunate for a number of reasons. First of all, it is self-blinding for both—the human sciences create a barrier to borrow from the “mechanist” levels of “lower” kind (e.g., the brain)—failing to understand that everything that contemporary neurosciences do is framed by our higher level cultural models that are applied to experiment on the topic of “how the brain works.” A similar “blinder” operates in the neurosciences, which at times assume that the principles of neuronal functions come out of the specific brain studies. They do not, as long as the researcher who asks questions is a well-educated human being. Our common sense—culturally constituted—determines the research questions that are asked at the neurobiological level. History of science in Denmark provides interesting extension of the German Naturphilosophie tradition, which has produced realistic breakthroughs in physical sciences, such as Hans-Christian Ørsted’s theory of electromagnetism (1820). While that holistic philosophical tradition in the German language area failed to lead to breakthroughs in the natural sciences, Ørsted’s devotion to the holistic view of Naturphilosophie turned out to be a rich source for scientific breakthroughs and was recognized as such by the Danish society (Figure 1.9). The “science war” in German areas—the full invasion of the human soul investigations of Geisteswissenschaften by Naturwissenschaften (Valsiner, 2012)—rendered mute many creative ideas of the former for the latter. Furthermore, at around the same time in the North— in the Swedish academic context—Jöns Jacob Berzelius, while arriving at the innovation to the concept of causality through introducing the notion of catalysis—was part of a fight against Naturphilosophie. The context of Denmark, sandwiched between the Continental European and Scandinavian mindsets, seems to be proven by history to be fertile to the application of the spirit of Naturphilosophie to basic science. Ørsted’s version of natural philosophy was poetic:

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FIGURE 1.9. The monument to Hans-Christian Ørsted in Copenhagen. When we make mathematical figures and formulas for the use of science, we produce something which bears an acknowledged stamp of beauty. The same, though in a much higher degree, occurs in our experiments for the discovery of the laws of nature. The facts, concerning two different branches of science, might appear at a hasty glance to have but slight connection in common, but upon closer investigation, we perceive that they are on the contrary very intimately connected, and that the explanation of this matter must be reckoned among the tasks of natural science. (Oersted, 1852, p. 372)

This sentiment of primacy of the aesthetic side repeats itself in many other forms in the Danish cultural history—in philosophy, science, and design. Thus, Harald Høffding was explicit about the superiority of the poetic understanding of the world,8 and the affective experiencing of the ordinary world is encoded into everyday life activities.9 We could consider this orientation an example of tacit vivopoesis—implicit and total binding of all aspects of human life—ordinary objects and activities as well as extraordinary and episodic cultural constructions—by field-like hypergeneralized signs that provide the activity its affective flavor. 8 9

“Our deepest life-experiences can only be expressed in poetic form” (Höffding, 1905, p. 89). Such as the poetry of “living light” in the daily use of lighted candles in decoration (Bille & Sørensen, 2007)

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Poetry can be embedded in everything, as well as fail to surface in anything. The human sign-construction facilities operate through the unity of schematization and pleromatization (Valsiner, 2006). It is the affective—sensual—relating with the world that sets the stage for human living. From symmetry to complementarity. Bohr’s Principle of Complementarity is in a way antedated by Ørsted, who idealized the notion of symmetry: Symmetry alone, which represents no other thought but symmetry, is sufficient to satisfy the sense of beauty. The figure10

< by no means satisfies the eye, whereas the figure

produces a pleasing impression. One part of the figure is not a mere repetition of the other, but it is antitype, as it were; the object and its reflection. The one half is the same as the other, but in the form of opposites. We here see the same opposition as between the thought of the thinking being, and the thought viewed as something that is thought. Opposites, and the union of opposites. Thus the fundamental form of thought meets our perception in symmetry (Oersted, 1852, p. 375, added emphases)

I am not claiming that Bohr “was influenced by” Ørsted (and the whole tradition of the Naturphilosophie he represented) in the process of deriving his Complementarity Principle. Rather, I would argue that the themata (Holton, 1970, see elaboration of that concept in social representations theory; Moscovici & Vignaux, 2001) of beauty and symmetry that were functional at Ørsted’s time would continue to be in the background of Bohr’s thought. That would fit also the analogy of the Principle with Rubin’s Figure Ground examples—symmetric, mutually shifting, but not transforming. The latter absence is a limitation on the application of the Principle (at least in its original form) to developing systems in biological, psychological, and social realms. As I showed above (Figure 1.2), the complementarity of PAST and FUTURE in the case of irreversible time is axiomatically asymmetric. 10

For technical reasons, the original “3” and inverted 3 are here replaced by .

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Niels Bohr ran into the difficulty with applying his own Principle in the practical life on developing organisms—his own children. The difficulty emerged from the asymmetry— of time and relationship. Jerome Bruner encountered him in 1943 or 1944, and by his account, their talk turned entirely on the complementarity between affect and thought, and between perception and reflection. [Bohr] told me that he had become aware of the psychological depths of the concept of complementarity when one of his children had done something inexcusable for which he found himself incapable of appropriate punishment: “You cannot know somebody at the same time in the light of love and in the light of justice!” (Holton, 1970, p. 1044, added emphasis)

Love is constant and childhood adventures—or “misbehaviors”—episodic. The act of “loving punishment,” often practiced by parents and their proxy,11 is an example of the interdependence of the opposites (rather than their mutual separation)—the predicament of love encompasses its opposite (punishment) and that unity acquires remarkable power through the signs through which it works. Human lives entail constant asymmetric relations between the immediacy of the present-moment experience and the solid constancy of many features of the environment. It is the relationship that is at stake—but what is it? MAKING MEANING OUT OF ORDINARY LIFE: WHY SCULPTURES MATTER? Human beings are ordinary. And it is precisely through that living of most ordinary lives that they create most extraordinary environments for themselves, their heirs, and, by preserving their experiences through semiotic tools, for centuries to come. Aside from ordinary things, they use in their lives, they create extraordinary signs, and situate them in public settings. The traditions of architecture, paving of the roads, building of bridges and border markers, as well as decorations—engraved and cultivated12—are all semiotic resources that encode meaning systems across generations. Monuments constitute a specially accentuated set of sign complexes in public places (Abousnnouga & Machin, 2010; Beckstead, Twose, LevesqueGottlieb, & Rizzo, 2011). Their silent presence in urban environments—on squares, parks, and bridges—constitutes a purposeful orientation by some social power holding institution (a monarch, a government, a political party, a community) toward some value orientation for the populace. Generals who have won battles, or monarchs who have reigned may get their monuments established in public places or on their sarcophagi on their graves. 11 12

Different religious institutions that promise “punishment with love.” Naturally included trees, hedges, bushes, lawns, flower beds, etc. in the macro-environments

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FIGURE 1.10. Den døende galler—Galata Morente (in Ørsted-Park, København). A: Front view; B: Back view.

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If political systems change, it is the monuments that often become objects of vandalism or demolishing. Somehow, the sculpted environment of sign complexes—uniting iconic and symbolic signs—matters for the ordinary social lives of people over centuries. What kind of general view on phenomena would the examples of publicly displayed three-dimensional sculptures set up for their viewers? Their presence may carry symbolic meaning—a monument to a writer or a composer carries a meaning different from those to political or military leaders. Yet in terms of visual access—basis for meaning construction—such sculptures may afford viewing around 360 degrees of visibility (see Figure 1.10 A and B) —in contrast to paintings on walls where such visibility is limited to the maximum of 180 degrees—on the horizontal plane.13 This difference in visibility, together with location and potential haptic access, render the experience with sculptures highly potent for freedom of exploration. Sculptures can be seen as extensions of paintings into the third dimension. They range from nonattached statues (Figure 1.10) to various types of reliefs (bas-relief to high-relief to sunk-relief). They constitute an iconic medium of (obvious) durability and potential for encoding complex and pervasive complex communicative messages (Meier, 2000). Viewers—persons on the move—encounter sculptures of human beings in their stroll around. The link of the iconic encoding of human living—sculptures—with that of flesh-and-bone activities is made through the moving body—in dance (Purkayashta, 2009). Dance can be viewed as dynamic sculpture created from the material of the human living body and visible only in the here-and-now moment. Occidental ballet—or Hindu Odissi dance—are communicative media of high complexity. The public domain in Denmark of today is notably filled by public sculptures. Ever since the bronze statue of Frederik V was erected in Copenhagen (by French sculptor Jacques Saly in 1768), and especially over the 19th century, the public urban environments have received their insertion of sculptures (like Figure 1.9). Of course, decorations of church entrances— pioneered by Horderus in the 12th century—antedate that public symbolic marking. Sculptures are only one of the new phenomena that cultural psychology opens for psychology as a legitimate object for study. Cultural psychology of the dynamics of semiotic mediation is a part of general psychology, creating basic knowledge through generalizing from particular examples, with the help of abstract theoretical tools. Such examples are single cases, analyzed 13

Which is the usual plane of experiencing sculpted and architectural objects. The possibility of vertical exploration may be at times added, yet usually for the viewer orienting outwards from the object (e.g., climbing a church tower to look around from there to the city, not climbing the attic of the nearby house to look at the church). If the vertical exploration of the object is contemplated, its visibility remains maximum 180 degrees, as in the case of paintings.

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as such in their systemic organization, and generalized through the use of abstract models (Salvatore & Valsiner, 2010). Qualitative methodology is prioritized in cultural psychology14 because of the structured and dynamic nature of its phenomena. The human phenomena used by cultural psychology are not only human beings who are alive and well, but also their constructions—in architecture, literary creations, poetic images. literature—“fiction” created by novelists— can be a more potent source of psychological insights (and analysis) than a superficial answer to a questioinnaire by a student invited to psychological study (to get credit). Analyses of novels (Brinkmann, 2009; Eco, 2009) is a rich resource for cultural psychology. Fictional characters created by the imagination capacities of writers may have the advantage over our regular research participants. Not only would anybody in one’s sane mind ask Anna Karenina (or her “guardian,” Lev Tolstoy) to sign a “consent form” demanded by our contemporary “human ethics” committees,15 but the experience that is painfully shared by the author and us—the readers—is considered to be truthful16 through the complementarity of intuitions of the author and the reader. Cultural psychology, by widening the range of phenomena to be included in the research process, provides psychology with opportunities for transdisciplinary collaborations. GENERAL CONCLUSION: PSYCHOLOGY IN THE NEW KEY Contemporary cultural psychology is a growing field of a number of parallel directions that all share the interest in explaining the context-relatedness of human acting, feeling, and thinking. It builds its theoretical generalizations on the grounds of one or another notion of complementarity of the person and the surrounding social world. Hence, Bohr’s notion of the Complementarity Principle can serve as a basis for further theoretical advancement. However, as I pointed out here, its use in the original form, based on symmetry of equal positions, is confronted with the asymmetry of the irreversible time. A solution to the problem is in the move forward to elaborate various forms of relationship between the already established cultural forms and others that are about to emerge in their relationship. The same should be the case (but in practice is not) for the rest of psychology. As Lee Rudolph (2006) has made clear, psychological phenomena cannot be characterized by real numbers. For psychological theory, imaginary number system may provide important advantages (Valsiner & Rudolph, 2012), which would allow consideration of the existing (past) and not-yet-existing parts of the system Interestingly, Niels Bohr advocated the use of imaginary numbers in quantum physics (Bohr, 1937/1998, p.86; 1948/1998, p. 144). 15 Which also require the keeping of the research materials (the novel Anna Karenina, in this case) in a safe and locked-up place, and removal of all identification marks—names—for “confidentiality.” At the end of the research (reading of the novel), the “data” (i.e. the novel) is to be destroyed. 16 For example, Anna Karenina’s suicide does not require external validation by witnesses. 14

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In some sense, this theoretical move entails a focus on the complementation process. This amounts to a consistently developmental focus in all of cultural psychology. Such focus has existed in developmental psychology over the last century, for example, in the work of James Mark Baldwin, Lev Vygotsky, and Heinz Werner, as well as in Frederic Bartlett’s constructionist view of memory functions. The specific focus on semiotic dynamics that has been outlined here adds to the general notion of complementation a teleogenetic focus—the person who creates sign hierarchies sets up one’s goal orientations through signs that serve as constraining devices in unpredictable moments in the future (Figure 1.6). The teleogenetic nature of human striving for meaning fits well with the most general elaboration of the Complementarity Principle in the realm of human living: “in the great drama of existence we are ourselves both actors and spectators” (Bohr, 1960/1963, p. 15). Contemporary cultural psychology builds its knowledge on the basis of the notion of complementarity, creatively mapping it upon the phenomena of complex human creativity, and transcending the methodological confines of psychology in the old key that has given us a “psychology of variables.” Reduction of human psychological phenomena to such “variables” has destroyed the focus on the functioning wholes of such phenomena. In contrast, cultural psychology studies agentive human beings, whose uniqueness follows general principles of human cultural science. REFERENCES Abousnnouga, G., & Machin, D. (2010). Analyzing the language of war monuments. Visual Communication, 9(2), 131–149. Beckstead, Z., Twose, G., Levesque-Gottlieb, E., & Rizzo, J. (2011). Collective remembering through the materiality and organization of war memorials. Journal of Material Culture, 16(2), 193–213. Bensaude-Vincent, B. (2003). Chemistry. In D. Cahan (Ed.), From the natural philosophy to the sciences (pp. 196–220). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Bille, M., & Sørensen, T. F. (2007). An anthropology of luminosity. Journal of Material Culture, 12(3), 263–284. Bohr, N. (1936). Kausalität und komplementarität. Erkenntins, 6, 293–303. Bohr, N. (1937/1998). Causality and complementarity. In Philosophical writings of Niels Bohr, Vol 4 (pp. 83–91). Woodbridge, CT: Ox Bow. Bohr, N. (1938/1998). Analysis and synthesis in science. In Philosophical writings of Niels Bohr, Vol. 4 (pp. 92–93). Woodbridge, CT: Ox Bow. Bohr, N. (1948/1998). On the notions of causality and complementarity. In Philosophical Writings of Niels Bohr, Vol 4 (pp. 141–148). Woodbridge, CT: Ox Bow. Bohr, N. (1959/1998). Quantum physics and biology. In Philosophical writings of Niels Bohr, Vol 4 (pp. 180–185). Woodbridge, CT: Ox Bow. Bohr, N. (1960/1963). The unity of human knowledge. In Philosophical writings of Niels Bohr, Vol 3 (pp. 8–16). Woodbridge, CT: Ox Bow.

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Brinkmann, S. (2009). Literature as qualitative inquiry: The novelist as a researcher. Qualitative Inquiry, 15(8), 1376–1394. Brush, S. (1980). The chimerical cat: Philosophy of quantum mechanics in historical perspective. Social Studies of Science, 10, 393–447. Cabell, K. R., & Valsiner, J. (Eds.). (2014). The catalyzing mind: Beyond models of causalityy. New York, NY: Springer Chang, R. S. (Ed.). (2009). Relating to environments. Charlotte, NC: Information Age. Clegg, J. E. (Ed.). (2009). The observation of human systems: Lessons from the history of anti-reductionistic empirical psychology. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Clegg, J. (Ed.). (2013). Self-observation in the social sciences. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Eco, U. (2009). On the ontology of fictional characters: A semiotic approach. Sign Systems Studies (Tartu University), 37(1/2), 82–98. Fischer, R. (1985). Deconstructing reality. Diogenes, 33, 47–62. Gottlieb, G. (1997). Synthesizing nature/nurture. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Hayes, W. (1982). Max Ludwig Henning Delbrück. Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society, 28, 58–90. Höffding, H. (1905). A philosophical confession. Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, 2(4), 85–92. Höffding, H. (1913). Søren Kierkegaard 5. Mai 1813–5. Mai 1913. Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, 21(6), 719–732. Holton, G. (1970). The roots of complementarity. Daedalus, 99(4), 1015–1055. Kaiser, D. (1994). Bringing the human actors back on stage: The personal context of the Einstein-Bohr debate. British Journal for the History of Science, 27(2), 129–152. Katsumori, M. (2011). Niels Bohr’s complementarity. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer. Lamiell, J. T. (2003). Beyond individual and group differences. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage McKaughan, D. J. (2005). The influence of Niels Bohr on Max Delbrück. Isis, 96, 507–528. Meier, U. (2000). The iconography of justice and power in the sculptures and paintings of town halls in medieval Germany. The Medieval History Journal, 3(1), 161–174. Mitttasch, A. (1938). Katalyse und determinismus. Berlin, Germany: Julius Springer. Moscovici, S. (1976). Society against nature: The emergence of human societies. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities. Moscovici, S., & Vignaux, G. (2001). The concept of themata. In S. Moscovici (Ed.), Social Representations (pp. 156–183). New York, NY: NYU Press. Oersted, H.-C. (1852). The soul in nature. London, UK: Henry G. Bohn. Polanyi, M. (1962). Personal knowledge. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Purkayashta, P. (2009). Warrior, untouchable, courtesan: Fringe women in Tagore’s dance dramas. South Asian Research, 29(3), 255–273. Richards, R. J. (2002). The romantic conception of life. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

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Riegel, A. (1901). Spätrömische Kunstindustrie. Wien, Austria: Österreichische Staatsdrückerei Roll-Hansen, N. (2000). The application of complementarity to biology: From Niels Bohr to Max Delbrück. Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences, 30(2), 417–442. Rosenfeld, I. (1945). Niels Bohr’s contributions to epistemology. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: North Holland. Rothenberg, A. (1980). Visual art, homospatial thinking in the creative process. Leonardo, 13, 17–27. Rubin, E. (1922). Visuell wahrgenommene Figuren. København, Denmark: Gyldendanske Bokhaendel. Rubin, E. (1936). Bemerkungen über unser Wissen von andere Menschen. Erkenntnis, 6, 392–397. Rudolph, L. (2006). The fullness of time. Culture and Psychology, 12(2), 157–186. Rudolph, L. (Ed.). (2013). Qualitative mathematics for the social sciences. London, UK: Routledge. Salvatore, S., & Valsiner, J. (2010). Between the general and the unique: Overcoming the nomothetic versus idiographic opposition. Theory & Psychology, 20(6), 817–833. Shomar, T. (2008). Bohr as a phenomenological realist. Journal for General Philosophy of Science, 39(2), 321–349. Stengers, I. (1995). Do we know how to read messages in the sand? Diogenes, 43(1), 179–196. Stent, G. S. (2004). Paradoxes of free will and the limits of human reason. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 148(2), 205–212. Stephenson, R. H. (2005). “Binary synthesis”: Goethe’s aesthetic intuition in literature and science. Science in Context, 18(4), 553–581. Toomela, A., & Valsiner, J. (Eds.). (2010). Methodological thinking in psychology: 60 years gone astray? Charlotte, NC: Information Age. Valsiner, J. (1997). Culture and the development of children’s actions (2nd ed.). New York: Wiley. Valsiner, J. (1999). I create you to control me: A glimpse into basic processes of semiotic mediation. Human Development, 42, 26–30. Valsiner, J. (2002). Forms of dialogical relations and semiotic autoregulation within the self. Theory & Psychology, 12(2), 251–265. Valsiner, J. (2006, June 12). The overwhelming world: Functions of pleromatization in creating diversity in cultural and natural constructions. Keynote lecture at the International School of Semiotic and Structural Studies, Imatra, Finland. Valsiner, J. (2009). Cultural psychology today: Innovations and oversights. Culture & Psychology, 15(1), 5–39. Valsiner, J. (2012). A guided science: History of psychology in the mirror of its making. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Valsiner, J. (2013). Epigenetics in Development: Three models of control. In V. Lux & J-T. Richter (Eds.), Epigenesis. Berlin, Germany: W. Fink

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Valsiner, J., & Rudolph, L. (2012). Who shall survive? Psychology that replaces quantification with qualitative mathematics. In E. Abbey & S. Surgan (Eds.), Emerging methods in psychology (pp. 121–140). New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. van Campen, C. (1997). Early abstract art and experimental Gestalt psychology. Leonardo, 30(2), 133–136. Whitt-Hansen, J. (1952). Some remarks on philosophy in Denmark. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 12(3), 377–391.

PART 2 COMPLEMENTARITY AS EPISTEMOLOGY

CHAPTER 2

COMPLEMENTARITY AS AN EPISTEMOLOGY OF LIFE Ivana Marková

Despite the fact that Niels Bohr was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics for his major contribution to understanding the structure of atoms, it was his Complementarity Principle that has gone far beyond the interest of physicists and has attracted the attention of historians, social and natural scientists, health professionals, and philosophers. The tremendous amount of literature on complementarity offers such diverse perspectives and ideas that it is hardly possible to propose yet another issue that would advance the available knowledge and interpretations. I shall touch on two points, not only because of their interest in the history and philosophy of science, but, above all, because they have significant parallels in social and cultural psychology. These two points refer to the following issues. First, Bohr’s Complementarity Principle remains a puzzle in the history of scientific thought. One could hardly find another major concept surrounded by so many sharply diverse opinions (Beller, 1999). Even now, more than 80 years after Niels Bohr introduced the Complementarity Principle, the disputes over it continue. While some physicists, like Wheeler and Cultural Psychology and Its Future: Complementarity in a New Key, pages 33–50. Copyright © 2014 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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Rosenfeld, considered complementarity “as the most profound intellectual insight of the twentieth century” (Beller, 1992, p. 147), for others it was an obscure double-think. Einstein never accepted complementarity because he performed his analyses of time and space within the framework of deterministic classic physics (Einstein, 1949, p. 674; Rosenfeld, 1961/1979, p. 505), rejecting probabilistic and uncertainty principles. He expressed his disagreement both with Bohr’s complementarity and with Heisenberg’s principle of uncertainty in the often repeated quote that God does not play dice. Bohr himself was aware that despite the tremendous interest in complementarity, responses to it ranged from enthusiasm and admiration to the opinion “from various sides that this attitude would appear to involve a mysticism incompatible with the true spirit of science” (Bohr, 1937, p. 289). Nevertheless, we find both throughout Bohr’s oeuvre and the analyses of commentators that his optimism about the future role of complementarity was unshakable and that he was never discouraged by its rejection by others or by critiques. Rosenfeld (1963a/1979, p. 535) comments: On one of those unforgettable strolls during which Bohr would so candidly disclose his innermost thoughts . . . Bohr declared, with intense animation, that he saw the day when complementarity would be taught in the schools and become part of general education; and better than any religion, he added, a sense of complementarity would afford people the guidance they needed.

Complementarity was not for Bohr just a scientific concept, but it was an epistemology in a broad sense: it was an epistemology of life (Rosenfeld, 1963a/1979, p. 535). Second, recognizing that the value of the principle of complementarity went far beyond physics, a number of commentators on Bohr were intrigued by the question as to where his ideas came from. Was he influenced by his father, who was a prominent professor of physiology, or by the philosopher Harald Høffding, who was a family friend, by the psychologist William James, by his fellow student Edgar Rubin, by the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, by Immanuel Kant, or by whom? This search for “the roots of complementarity” or “the birth of complementarity” was also inspired by the mystery of why it was Niels Bohr and not someone else who made the revolutionary invention. Bohr of course was not the only one, or even the first, who was aware of the duality in physical phenomena. It was Einstein who, at the beginning of the 20th century, drew attention to the dual nature of light, showing that light presents itself sometimes in the form of particles and sometimes in the form of waves (Rosenfeld, 1963b/1979, p. 517). Yet it was Bohr and not Einstein who invented the concept of complementarity. While most scholars commonly suggest that the sources of influence on Bohr’s invention are Rubin, James, Høffding, and Kierkegaard (e.g., Holton, 1973), other scholars like Léon Rosenfeld (1969) and

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David Favrholdt (1992) adamantly dispute the reality of these “influences.” Favrholdt (1992) even entitles the chapters of his little book on Niels Bohr’s Philosophical Background as “The James-myth,” “The Kierkegaard-myth,” and so on. For example, he argues that when Bohr invented complementarity, he did not know James’ work; Favrholdt also contends that the concepts of Kierkegaard, Høffding, and others have little to do with those of Bohr. Favrholdt only accepts as the possible “influence” the psychologist Edgar Rubin (see Valsiner, this volume) with whom Bohr discussed his ideas early in his life, but he does not imply that Rubin inspired Bohr’s complementarity. Rubin and Bohr were friends and discussed philosophy and psychology together (see below), but one cannot say that Rubin influenced the direction of Bohr’s thought. To all this we may add that Bohr chose the yin-yang complementarity of opposites Contraria sunt complementa (Opposites are complementary) as the symbol on his coat of arms when he was knighted. Inspection of this literature suggests to me that rather than being “influenced” by this or that, Bohr found striking examples of complementarity (Rosenfeld, 1963a/1979, p. 533) in various areas of science and life. He referred to them in support of his own theory according to which the principle of complementarity applied to all natural and human phenomena and to the explanation of the nature of reality. These two issues, that is, disputes over complementarity and the puzzle of “the roots of complementarity,” suggest to me that Niels Bohr’s complementarity is a fascinating case study in the history and philosophy of science. It illuminates the difficulty of the human mind to understand an alternative epistemology and to reject what it cannot comprehend. While we can refer to similar instances of misinterpretation and misapprehension in the history of science, the difficulty of understanding Bohr’s complementarity is a case study that has a particular relevance for social and cultural psychology. Both complementarity and certain trends in social and cultural psychology, to which I shall refer in this chapter, have emerged from the same or similar conceptual frameworks. They have become subjected to similar kinds of misapprehension by the established positions that reject multifaceted and multidirectional ways in which the human mind functions. Complementarity and Naturphilosophie In order to understand the nature of the above two puzzles and to appreciate Niels Bohr’s principle of complementarity, it may be profitable to consider the cultural, philosophical, and scientific atmosphere that surrounded the scientific revolution of the late 19th century and early 20th century in which Bohr worked. Valsiner (this volume) maintains that we need to search for clues to Bohr’s ideas in the Danish history of science, which could be seen as an extension of German Naturphilosophie. German Naturphilosophie of the 19th century was a revolt against mechanistic con-

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ceptions in science; it considered Nature in holistic terms and emphasized the process of change and of becoming. In addition, Kant’s philosophical thought, examining conditions and limits of knowledge, was pervasive in Denmark (McEvoy, 2001). These new trends, which presented nature in nonmechanistic terms, emphasized interaction between natural phenomena, their processes and dynamics, focusing on wholes rather than parts of wholes (see Harré, this volume). While the Cartesian revolution of the 17th century totally separated the knower (the knowing subject) from the object of knowledge and considered them as independent entities, the scientific revolution of the late 19th century and early 20th century focused on their interdependence. Consequently, fundamental epistemological questions like what is the nature of reality or what are the possibilities and limits of knowledge were answered differently by the Cartesian epistemology, and the epistemologies that were emerging from Naturphilosophie. For Descartes, the separation between the subject and object of knowledge was complete, and he suggested that it was doubt or thinking of the individual that provided certainty in the search for knowledge. In contrast, German Naturphilosophie, represented by philosophers like Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, emphasized the unity and organic development of nature and the interdependence between the subject and the object of knowledge. Toward the end of the 19th century and the early years of the 20th century, European science and philosophy were torn, on the one hand, between ideas ensuing from Naturphilosophie and Kantian questions of the limits of knowledge and judgement and, on the other hand, mechanistic views about Nature and narrow positivism in science. These disputes inspired the emergence of new trends, for example, phenomenology, pragmatism, and Gestalt psychology. For instance, pragmatism conceived interaction between human agents and their environment as a basis of its theorizing. Dewey (1929) argued that the environment must not be viewed as external to living agents but that there is a mutual and internal interdependence between them (see Innis, this volume). Knowledge was not a system of facts but an expression of the interdependence between organism and environment. The same idea of mutual co-determination and interdependence between living agents and their environment was developed by George Herbert Mead, who argued about this in many of his writings (e.g., Mead, 2011, pp. 35–37) in relation to biological, human, and societal agents and their environment. The English philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (1861– 1947), too, conceived Nature as holistic, his position being reminiscent of Naturphilosophie. Whitehead called his approach “a process and reality” (Whitehead, 1929/1979), placing emphasis on change and becoming. Philosophy can contribute to the systematization of civilized thought and dig into infinite possibilities offered by Nature.

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The case of Gestalt psychology is particularly interesting in the context of Niels Bohr. The emergence of German Gestalt psychology had some connections, through the work of psychologists, with Naturphilosophie. The founder of psychophysics, Gustav Fechner, attempted to mathematically express the unity of mind and body, which was an idea coming from Naturphilosophie. Fechner, together with Helmholtz and Wundt, became not only the founders of experimental psychology in Germany, but their ideas on sensation and perception, and the combination or association of elements are often viewed as forerunners of Gestalt psychology (Ash, 1998). One may assume that not only Edgar Rubin, who made a significant contribution to Gestalt psychology, but also Niels Bohr were sympathetic to Gestalt psychology; they had good knowledge of the idea of figure-ground and the reversibility of perceptual perspectives. Moreover, whether it was right or wrong, the early years of the 20th century assumed a close relationship between Gestalt psychology and the theory of relativity (e.g., Miller, 1975; Reiser, 1930). Gestalt psychology borrowed concepts from physics, for example, field or force. The main representatives of Gestalt psychology, like Wertheimer, Koffka, and Köhler, were either trained as physicists or had interest in physics (Marková, 2008). The holistic conception of quantum physics and relativity theory was highly congenial with Gestalt psychology. Einstein himself acknowledged the epistemological value of the Gestalt-psychological point of view (Miller, 1975, p. 75). Köhler considered that the theory of relativity and Gestalt psychology had some common ground; others referred to analogies between Gestalt theory and the theory of relativity (e.g., Humphrey, 1924). Humphrey (1924, p. 358) thought that analogies between Einstein’s theory of relativity and Gestalt theories were both significant innovations and were parallels that formed “a remarkable chapter in the history of science.” In particular, they both insisted on a holistic approach, rejecting the idea that the whole is made from parts added together, and on processes rather than on stability (see Harré, this volume). But even the idea of this parallel led to disputes. For example, Reiser (1930) rejected the parallel as a superficial analogy. Disputes and references to common ground between the new physics and Gestalt psychology were numerous; this was the environment in which both Rubin and Bohr worked. It is unlikely that they would have been unaware of these events and of questions that were raised. Complementarity as a Solution to the Epistemological Problem McEvoy (2001, p. 4) notes that when science cannot extend existing theories, it turns its attention to epistemology. While this may be generally true, it was not so for Niels Bohr, who was preoccupied, well before turning to theoretical questions in physics, with general epistemological problems concerning the nature of reality, the role of language in scientific communication (Rosenfeld, 1963a/1979, p. 526) and with the epistemol-

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ogy of observation and description in biology and psychology (Favrholdt, 1999, pp. xxviii–xxxii). Rosenfeld (1963a/1979, p. 526) states that Bohr’s preoccupation with philosophical problems did not arise from his physical investigations but from general epistemological considerations about the function of language as a means of communicating experience. Bohr’s concern with language as communication was focused on questions of how to achieve unambiguous descriptions and observation of natural phenomena (see below); in other words, he viewed language and communication as roots for the study of reality (see also Petersen, 1963). When it came to physics, like other physicists of his time, Bohr was interested in the question of how to cope with the profound conceptual difference between the classical description and the quantum description of physical phenomena. Specifically, the question was how to harmonize the theory of Newtonian mechanics and the theory of thermodynamics. This question was one of many problems in physics and mathematics that became the centers of attention in the 1920s. These years witnessed tremendous competition among scientists to solve these problems and resulted in a huge amount of scientific creativity. The complexity of suggested solutions and struggles between “winners” and “losers” (e.g., Beller, 1999; Farmelo, 2009) led some researchers to reevaluate Kuhn’s (1962) perspective of scientific revolutions in terms of the problem of solution of anomalies. According to Kuhn (1962, pp. 51), a “discovery commences with the awareness of anomaly.” Scientists realize that the existing scientific paradigm has been somehow violated and so that it is necessary to explore the area of anomaly. Kuhn characterized a change of paradigm in terms of severe and prolonged anomalies, which he viewed as necessary preconditions of crises and subsequently, of the emergence of new theories. In his critique of Kuhn, Moscovici (1966) rejected the idea of anomalies or deficits as a rather mechanistic explanation of scientific revolutions. Scientific changes do not take place in isolation, but they are part of changes in the world, including economy, philosophy, communications, arts, and technology, which are all in mutual interaction. For example, we have seen in the previous section that physics and Gestalt psychology were viewed as having common features, both rejecting a static perspective of reality. Therefore, it would be wrong to view a scientific revolution in one discipline without relations to other kinds of transformations in other domains, where, too, original ideas are developed and new theories proposed. The revolution changes the structure of thought and practices in all these disciplines: it changes their epistemologies. Thus, Moscovici suggests that “revolutions are made not by default but by excess; not because there are too many unresolved ‘errors’ but because there are too many new ‘truths’” (Moscovici (1996, p. 5). This is why new theories are created by excess of knowledge and they form a “surplus.” Carriers of these new truths are individuals or groups, or minorities that work at the margins of technology and science, and whose “surplus” eventually

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turns them into a cohesive scientific theory and technology. Moscovici’s twist from anomalies to inventions or from errors to truths is not just a language game. It reorients the focus of attention from the solution of existing problems to free inventions that are the driving forces of the scientific revolutions. And a free invention was for Einstein as well as for Bohr something to be taken for granted. Of course, there is always the possibility that both perspectives, Kuhn’s and Moscovici’s, are right. Beller (1999) took a different tack. According to her, Kuhnian paradigms ignore the multiplicity of scientific views, because they legitimate dogma and disregard oppositions among scientists. She suggests that scientific creations result from multidirectional and polyphonic dialogues that play a crucial role in building scientific theories. Scientific theories, rather than being monological enterprises of individual researchers, develop in and through conversations and disputes in which the interlocutors change their perspectives in view of responses from others. These exchanges are flexible, often contradictory and incoherent, because it is not yet clear to the researchers themselves where they are going. Having dismissed wave-particle complementarity as a myth, and lightheartedly ironizing the “Copenhagen’s dogma,” Beller argues for a substitution of paradigms by dialogues. This is worth mentioning for two reasons. First, her so called “dialogical analysis” totally ignores that a dialogue is a slice of life; it has its past, present, and future. A discourse or a dialogue is a cultural process and product, and it cannot be meaningfully reduced to quotes and an exchange of words, whether spoken or unspoken. Moreover, although toward the end of her book Beller refers to Bakhtin, in contrast to Bakhtin, her “dialogical analysis” is “bottom up,” and it deals with the cognitive content of science, paying close attention to details of scientific reasoning (Beller, 1999, pp. 3–4) rather than to Bakhtin’s sociocultural perspective, which involves multifaceted ways of thinking and imagination. Second, and following from the first, Beller ignores that complementarity, just like dialogicality, is an epistemology, that is, a set of presuppositions serving as a guide to developing theories, and not a “thing” to be “precisely” defined. Such a set of presuppositions may state, for example, that knowledge is built up from sensory elements; alternatively, it may state that conditions for the acquisition of knowledge are figure-ground patterns. Or one may assume that knowledge is part of culture rather than a formalized cognitive system independent of culture. While epistemology is Bohr’s fundamental concern, it does not play any role either in Beller’s arguments or in the arguments of those scholars to whom she looks for support. Complementarity of the Subject/Object Although the duality of particle and wave has been well recognized since the beginning of the 20th century, the question as to how these two modes

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of description are related has not been clear. For Niels Bohr, the answer was an epistemological one, and it arose from the fact that old physics and new physics worked with different concepts. In comparing classical mechanistic physics with quantum physics, and in discussing complementarity beyond physics Bohr (1955, pp. 54, 59; 1999) repeatedly referred to “the epistemological lesson” contained in the development of atomic physics or in quantum physics, or to epistemological clarifications in domains beyond physics. What are the features of this ‘”lesson?” Commentators on Bohr’s philosophical thoughts and/or epistemology can hardly avoid Bohr’s focus on the complementarity of subject and object and on language and communication (e.g., Favrholdt, 1999, pp. xxiii–xlix; Katsumori, 2011; McEvoy, 2001). For example, in his substantial volume on Bohr’s reflections on the subject and object McEvoy (2001) pieces together the components of Bohr’s theory of knowledge, emphasizing that the core concepts in Bohr’s thinking include subject/object distinction, observation, description, communication, and conceptual frameworks. In fact, the subject/object distinction pertains in one way or another to all other core concepts. If we start with conceptual frameworks, they amount, on the one hand, to the difference between Cartesian philosophy that views a total separation between the knower and the object of knowledge, and on the other hand, to the specificity of subjects and objects in different domains of knowledge, for example, in psychology, physics, or anthropology. Exclusive separation of the subject and object. In his article on “Science and the Unity of Knowledge” Bohr (1955) questions how the total separation of the subject and object has taken place in the history of science. He exemplifies this separation in biology. Originally, philosophy did not conceive of sharp distinctions between the animate and inanimate spheres. Aristotle emphasized the wholeness of organisms, and he opposed the views of atomists. However, the perspective of wholeness was later on substituted by mechanistic descriptions, which have led to reductionist ideas that searched for explanations based on physics and chemistry, and on isolated physical systems. Such a perspective, Bohr argued, could not be reconciled with the laws of thermodynamics. So, the unity of science, while preserving the detached observation of phenomena, must be specific to different regions of knowledge; this also means that human culture is elevated, becoming the key for universal understanding of the unity of knowledge (Bohr, 1955, p. 62). The total or the exclusive separation (to use Valsiner’s term) between the subject and object was powerfully questioned already by Giambattista Vico in the early 18th century, but it became a central issue in German romantic Naturphilosophie. Bohr’s achievement, too, must be seen in terms of changes that indicated the switch from the Cartesian individualistic epis-

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temology to an interactional epistemology. But while interaction between subject/object was a basic presupposition for Bohr’s epistemology, it was also essential for their distinction. In order to do science, the subject and object must be observed and described distinctly and separately, otherwise one cannot discover anything either about the subject or about the object. However, the subject and object are not separated exclusively, but inclusively (Valsiner, this volume; also 1997, 2001). This distinction to which Valsiner refers with respect to figure and ground, exemplifies the difference between atomistic and holistic metatheoretical frames in science. As he explains, the atomistic frame treats figure and ground as exclusively separated, and the frame is reduced either to the figure or to the ground. In contrast, inclusive separation is holistic or systemic. Although figure and ground are viewed in separation from one another, the separation nevertheless includes one in the other. Figure is understood in and through ground and vice versa. Inclusive separation and the specificity of subject/object in different domains of knowledge. Conceptual frameworks depend upon the conditions for description within the field of experience under observation, and in turn, they themselves set conditions for description. In the above-mentioned article on “Science and the Unity of Knowledge,” Bohr (1955) maintains that he is not searching for a universal description and observation of phenomena, but for specific conditions that apply to specific subjects/objects. Complementarity is applicable to various spheres of life, and conditions for description differ from one domain to another. With respect to physics, Bohr explains that these conditions for description “are dictated by the existence of quantum in action,” and they therefore differ from those that exist in classical physics. In this domain, Bohr’s particular innovation is that complementarity in subject/object relations is concerned with conditions of measurement. He characterizes it as an interaction between the subject (it could be either a measuring device or the human subject) and the object of exploration. The measuring device shows either particle or wave descriptions but not both at the same time. The description depends on the conditions under which the phenomena appear. This is why “evidence obtained under different experimental conditions cannot be comprehended within a single picture, but must be regarded as complementary in the sense that only the totality of the phenomena exhausts the possible information about the objects” (Bohr, 1949, p. 210, Bohr’s emphasis.). Equally, psychological observations, biological and anthropological domains are based on different conditions for observation and description. So, there is no possibility of reducing one field to another. This perspective of Bohr is reminiscent of the one by Heisenberg (2003), who presupposes that dynamic theories are concerned with different “re-

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gions of reality” with respect to phenomena that the science in question examines. Regions of reality are not based on things but on relations (Moscovici & Marková, 2006). While classic physics is based on hypotheses and “precise” concepts, which are in a rigid relation to reality, quantum physics creates hypotheses and relational concepts that form the germs of further hypotheses and concepts within the “region of reality. Heisenberg expresses this idea: Through the various modes of relation one thought combines with another one, producing new thoughts. These give rise to yet other thoughts until the wealth of their content in the space grasped by these thoughts is saturated and gives birth to a faithful portrait of the region of reality to which it aspires. (Heisenberg, 2003, p. 20)

Complementarity is not a reconciliation of oppositions. While in psychology and ordinary language, complementarity, say, between dialogical participants or between political opponents, is often understood as an attempt to reconcile oppositions, Bohr’s concept of complementarity does not deal with a compromise or a fusion of oppositions. Each in the pair of oppositions continues to carry on with their own strategies or speak in their own languages (Holton, 1973, p. 118); it is in and through speaking in diverse languages that the dynamics of complementarity are preserved. One could see a parallel of this position in the Bakhtinian dialogical perspective on dialogue, according to which dialogical relations are not engaged solely in search for intersubjectivity and peaceful contemplation. Instead, cognitions and affects are in tension; they clash, judge, and evaluate one another. Bakhtin (1981, p. 314) foregrounds dialogue as a strife of divergent perspectives, in which “one point of view is opposed to another, one evaluation opposed to another.” According to Bakhtin, oppositions coincide in the world of becoming, in which there are no hard boundaries between objects, words, or cultures. Language as an Essential Feature of Epistemology Favrholdt (1999, p. xxxiii) states that language was an essential feature of Bohr’s epistemology. Language and description constituted a central theme in his work, although Bohr did not write about language systematically. However, he often expressed his views that knowledge is closely associated with “proper use of conceptual means of expression” and that this is important not only for physics but in “clarifying the conditions for objective description in wider fields” (Favrholdt, 1999, p. xxxiii). Having worked with Niels Bohr as his personal assistant, Aage Petersen explains on the basis of his personal experience why for Bohr, philosophical problems were not about metaphysics or the structure and limits of

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reason. Instead, they were communication problems, dealing with general conditions for conceptual communication. Here and elsewhere, Petersen (1963, p. 10; 1968, p. 188) clarifies this issue, quoting from a conversation with Bohr: He was forcefully stressing the primacy of language: “Ultimately, we human beings depend on our words. We are hanging in language.” When it was objected that reality is more fundamental than language and lies beneath language, Bohr answered, “We are suspended in language in such a way that we cannot say what is up and what is down.”

Yet despite being suspended in language—or perhaps because of that— Bohr insisted that description and observation must unambiguously determine the features of the subject and object, which is the guarantee for scientific communication. All scientific results must be communicated in the language of everyday use supplemented by specific terminology built on ordinary language. All words are used in complementary ways, and the recognition of that fact, too, is essential for unambiguous communication. Complementarity of notions, like thoughts/feelings, humor/seriousness, contemplation/volitio permeate Bohr’s work, and they recall the concept of Holton’s themata (Marková, 2003, 2007; Moscovici & Vignaux, 1994/2000; Valsiner, this volume). Having been preoccupied with the freedom of will, Bohr argued that oppositions like “contemplation” and “volition” are requisites of its analysis: “The notion of volition plays an indispensable part in human communication, similarly to words like hope and responsibility, in themselves equally undefinable out of the context in which they are used” (Bohr, 1961, p. 66). Just as there is complementarity in coordinations of time and space, and dynamic conservations laws in atomic physics, “words like ‘thoughts’ and ‘sentiments’[are] equally indispensable to illustrate the variety and scope of conscious life.” This fact involves for Bohr a challenge to formulate precise terminology and to find clear and strict definitions of words (Bohr, 1949, p. 224) Complementarity in Social and Cultural Psychology Although Bohr himself referred to analogies between quantum theory and other fields of human knowledge and interest, and stated that many difficulties in psychology originate in the separation “between object and subject in the analysis of various aspects of psychical experience” (Bohr, 1949, p. 224), one can hardly claim that the Complementarity Principle directly influenced social and cultural psychology. Nevertheless, one can say that whether or not social and cultural psychologists use the term “complementarity” (Marková, 1997; Rommetveit, 1974) the concept of complementarity permeates a number of domains in their work. These domains, which share the same or related philosophical and conceptual background with

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Bohr’s epistemology, would greatly benefit from a careful study of Bohr’s complementarity and his principal concepts in order to develop their own concepts and theories. In his inaugural lecture, Valsiner (this volume) proposes that the concept of cultural psychology will build its knowledge on the basis of the concept of complementarity. His model of semiotic dynamics and irreversibility of time expands the theoretical potential of the Complementarity Principle. Equally, as shown in this chapter, his ideas of inclusive separation of the subject/object (e.g., Valsiner, 1997, 2001), just like Bohr’s complementarity, are based on an interactive epistemology suitable for the study of dynamic systems. In addition to this cultural psychology program, interactive epistemology is the basis of other approaches in which culture and dialogical communication play an essential role, like the theory of social representations (Moscovici, 1961/1976/2008) and the theory of innovation (Moscovici, 1976/1979). The interaction between the subject and object in terms of inclusive separation also forms the basis of dialogism (e.g., Martsin, Wagoner, Aveling, Kadianaki, & Whittaker, 2011), phenomenology and hermeneutics (e.g., Gadamer, 1975/2004), pragmatism (see Innis, this volume), and intersubjectivity approaches (e.g., Gillespie & Cornish, 2010). As a theory of social knowledge, the theory of social representations (Moscovici, 1961/1976/2008) is based on the relation between the EgoAlter-Object, which, together with the focus on primacy of language and communication, constitutes the pillar of its epistemology. The minimum unit in the formation of social knowledge and beliefs is a triadic relation, the Ego-Alter-Object (Bauer & Gaskell, 1999; Marková, 2003; Jovchelovitch, 2007; Moscovici, 1972/2000). In this generalized model, the relation between the Ego and the Alter stands for various kinds of selves and others, however, in concrete and contextualized situations of knowledge production, just like in Bohr’s ideas of the unity of knowledge, there is always the specific Ego and the specific Alter. For example, the Ego can be a child and the Alter can be his/her parents; moreover, this dyad, that is, childparents, could be conceived as an Ego within a specific culture (Alter), and so on. Thus, the formation and maintenance of social representations can be conceived as multifaceted structures of knowledge and beliefs produced by embedded kinds of the Ego-Alter. This epistemology presupposes that Ego-Alter dialogically co-constitute one another. In this dialogical epistemology, social reality results from the interactive forces binding the Ego and Alter, constituting a field. Within the field the parties exert a mutual influence on one another, and they jointly generate an object, that is, new patterns of knowledge, beliefs, and images. The field involves forces (e.g., attraction, volition to communicate, the interest in a particular subject mat-

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ter, repulsion, coordinated attention and intentions, and so on) between communicants (the Ego-Alter) with respect to the object of study. From the beginning of the development of his theory of social representations, Moscovici placed emphasis on the primacy of language and communication: The proper domain of our discipline is the study of cultural processes which are responsible for the organisation of knowledge in a society . . . In parallel more attention should be paid to language which has not until now been thought of as an area of study closely related to social psychology. (Moscovici, 1972/2000, pp. 55–56)

Language and communication as a point of departure in the epistemology of social representations has yet another implication: to communicate means to take diverse routes, leading once to an intersubjective understanding, once to a conflict; to negotiation, compromise, or to an expression of firm convictions. This implies transformation of one kind of knowledge into another one. Transformation of knowledge and messages is pertinent to specific sociohistorical and cultural conditions. Antinomies are features of thinking, language, and communication in all cultures, but different cultures and societies employ their capacity of making distinctions and thinking in antinomies in specific ways. We find them throughout eons of human history both in scientific and in commonsense thinking, although very often they are present implicitly without becoming an explicit discursive topic. Sociocultural changes, however, may bring implicit antinomies to public awareness and into discourses, reflecting societal tensions and conflicts. This means that from that moment on, antinomies turn into “themat,” whether in scientific thinking, where, according to Holton (1973), they generate scientific theories, or in commonsense thinking, where they generate social representations (Moscovici & Vignaux, 1994/2000). Themata that generate most social representations are those pertaining to the Ego-Alter, like private/public, morality/immorality, justice/injustice, and freedom/oppression, among others. Such themata are in the heart of social sciences, and they generate social representations of phenomena like democracy, citizenship, quality of life, and health and illness, to name but a few. Rommetveit (1974, p. 37) characterized complementarity as a mutual engagement of participants in communication, that is, as a “reciprocally cognized asymmetry between I and you with respect to what is already known.” What he means is that complementarity in communication arises from a temporary shared social environment and synchronization of intentions between communicative participants; the speaker is listener-orientated and the listener is speaker-orientated, both attuned to each other. In such situations of a nearly perfect complementarity, words may be superflu-

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ous and participants may communicate by gestures, gaze, and use words only sporadically. Rommetveit (1974, p. 1) explains that in explorations of complementarity in interpersonal relations and communication, he was influenced by George Herbert Mead, Egon Brunswik, Jean Piaget, and Fritz Heider. Complementarity in this sense focuses on understanding and taking the position of the other and is an attempt to reconcile oppositions and synchronize speakers’ intentions. In contrast, we have seen above, Bohr’s concept of complementarity preserves speaking in diverse languages in and through which dynamics of complementarity is maintained. CONCLUSION When textbooks of psychology present particular theories, for example, Gestalt psychology or behaviorism, readers may obtain an impression of a coherent state of a Kuhnian normal science. They learn about the leading figures and followers of the theory, main concepts, about experiments supporting and contradicting the theory, and so on. A textbook account of this kind is understandable. How could one deal, in a brief account, with crises that in reality led to the theory’s emergence and with struggles within and outside the theory in question? And while the textbook heroes are usually presented as rational and consistent in working out details of their studies, in reality, the story can be very different. Readers are left at the mercy of interpreters, of what they understood, misapprehended, and ignored. This chapter has been concerned with some issues that are not usually part of textbook accounts but which are fundamental for understanding about the stagnation and advancement of human and social sciences. Inconsistencies and incoherencies—or apparent inconsistencies and incoherencies—are frequent features of scientists’ thought. Consider the well-known passage from Einstein concerning the relationship between epistemology and science. While he believed that epistemology without science is empty and science without epistemology is primitive and muddled, nevertheless, Einstein comments that the scientist cannot afford to carry out his striving for systematic epistemology too far. While he accepts the epistemological analysis, the facts of experience of external conditions prevent him from fidelity to the epistemology in question: He therefore must appear to the systematic epistemologist as a type of unscrupulous opportunist: he appears as realist insofar as he seeks to describe a world independent of the acts of perception; as idealist insofar as he looks upon the concepts and theories as free inventions of the human spirit (not logically derivable from what is empirically given); as positivist insofar as he considers his concepts and theories justified only to the extent to which they furnish a logical representation of relations among sensory experiences. He may even appear as Platonist or Pythagorean insofar as he considers the viewpoint of logi-

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cal simplicity as an indispensable and effective tool of his research. (Einstein, 1949, pp. 683–684.)

What Einstein calls unscrupulous opportunism may also apply to complementarity, the epistemology of life, attempting to cope with so many diverse phenomena. A centenary volume on Niels Bohr (French & Kennedy, 1985) gives a number of examples of claims that physicists and philosophers cannot agree on a single definition of complementarity (e.g., Graham, 1985, p. 332). McKinnon (1985, p. 101) notes that Bohr presented his mature position on complementarity through popular lectures in which the point seemed to be trivialized. Bohr was bothered by this and shortly before he died, he commented that no professional philosophers had understood complementarity. In contrast, Rosenfeld describes his experience in Japan, where he discussed complementarity with the physicist Yukawa who could not understand why Western psychologists had a problem with complementarity. He added, “You see, we in Japan have not been corrupted by Aristotle” (Rosenfeld, 1963a/1979, p. 522). He comments that the fact that no formal definition of complementarity could be found in Bohr’s writings disturbed many: The French are shocked by this breach of the Cartesian rules; they blame Bohr for indulging in “clair-obscur” and shrouding himself in “les brumes du Nord.” The Germans in their thoroughness have been at work distinguishing several forms of complementarity and studying, in hundreds of pages, their relations to Kant. Pragmatic Americans have dissected complementarity with the scalpel of symbolic logic and undertaken to define this gentle art of the correct use of words without using any words at all. Bohr was content to teach by example. (Rosenfeld, 1963a/1979, pp. 532–533)

Much of his misapprehension is due to the fact that one can hardly provide a definition of epistemology in the way one defines things such as sacks of potatoes, political parties, or even democracy. Epistemologies are sets of presuppositions that serve as guidelines for constructing theories. Therefore, if complementarity is an epistemology in which the main concepts are subject/object distinction, observation, description, communication, and conceptual frameworks, then these concepts serve as guidelines for the development of specific complementarity phenomena. Equally, if social representations are an epistemology in which the set of presuppositions utilizes concepts like ego-alter-object, communication, common sense, imagination, and socially shared knowledge, then these concepts serve as guidelines for research for the study of social representations of specific social phenomena.

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Moscovici, S., & Vignaux, G. (1994/2000). Le concept de thêmata. In C. Guimelli (Ed.), Structures et transformations des représentations sociales (pp. 25–72). Neuchatel, Switzerland: Delachaux et Niestlé. Reprinted in S. Moscovici (2000). Social representations (pp. 156–183). London, UK: Polity. Petersen, A. (1963, September). The philosophy of Niels Bohr. Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, 19(7), 8–14. Petersen, A. (1968). Quantum physics and the philosophical tradition. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press. Reiser, O. L. (1930). Gestalt psychology and the philosophy of nature. The Philosophical Review, 39, 556–572. Rommetveit, R. (1974). On message structure. Chichester, UK; New York, NY: Wiley. Rosenfeld, L. (1961/1979). Foundations of quantum theory and complementarity. In R. S. Cohen & J. J. Stachel (Eds.), Selected papers of Leon Rosenfeld (pp. 503–516). Dordrecht, The Netherlands; London, UK: D. Reidel. Rosenfeld, L. (1963a/1979). Niel’s Bohr’s contribution to epistemology. In R. S. Cohen & J. J. Stachel (Eds.), Selected papers of Leon Rosenfeld (pp. 522–535). Dordrecht, The Netherlands; London, UK: D. Reidel. Rosenfeld, L. (1963b/1979). The epistemological conflict between Einstein and Bohr. In R. S. Cohen & J. J. Stachel (Eds.), Selected papers of Leon Rosenfeld (pp. 517–521). Dordrecht, The Netherlands; London, UK: D. Reidel. Rosenfeld, L. (1969). Max Jammer: The conceptual development of quantum mechanics [Book review]. Nuclear Physics, A126, 696. Valsiner, J. (1997). Culture and the development of children’s action. A theory of human development. New York, NY: Wiley. Valsiner, J. (2001). Comparative study of human cultural development. Madrid, Spain: Fundación Infancia y Aprendizaje. Whitehead, A. N. (1929/1979). Process and reality (D. R. Griffin & D. W. Sherburne, Eds.). New York, NY; London, UK: Free Press.

CHAPTER 3

ONLOOKERS AND ACTORS IN THE DRAMA OF EXISTENCE: Complementarity in Cultural Psychology and Its Existential Aspects Svend Brinkmann

In this text, I wish to offer some thoughts on the concept of complementarity and its relevance for psychology. Jaan Valsiner’s (2013) reflections on Niels Bohr’s notion of complementarity—in relation to cultural psychology specifically—is a highly relevant starting point for anyone who wants to understand the links between conceptual thought in the disciplines of physics and psychology. As Valsiner makes clear, Bohr’s innovative solution to the existence of opposite perspectives on the physical world (e.g., particle-wave aspects of physical objects) was to assert that both perspectives are equally true, although not applicable at the same moment. The physicist can approach the basic physical phenomenon, using her experimental apparatus, either as a wave or as a particle, but measuring the properties of one aspect precludes knowledge of the other. There is no dualism at work here, but, according to Valsiner (and Bohr), a wave-particle duality. Cultural Psychology and Its Future: Complementarity in a New Key, pages 51–60. Copyright © 2014 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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Bohr’s idea of complementarity was not at all limited to the wave-particle duality (in fact, this was probably not even central to his idea, although it is often in relation to this duality that complementarity is discussed), but was more generally expressed by the dictum that “we are both onlookers and actors in the great drama of existence” (Bohr, 1934, p. 119; see also Katsumori, 2011). Thus, in addition to specific problems in physics and quantum theory, Bohr’s development of the idea of complementarity arose from, and was applied to, biology, epistemology, and psychology, and Bohr claimed that the necessity of taking recourse to a complementary mode of description “is perhaps most familiar to us from psychological problems” (Bohr, 1934, p. 96). What is Bohr thinking of here? He is thinking specifically of the perennial philosophical problem of free will and causality. In his own words, we are here dealing with phenomena that are both “experienced as free will and analyzed in terms of causality” (p. 24). For example, uttering the words “I do” in front of the altar during a wedding ceremony is certainly (in normal cases) experienced as an act of free will, but it can likewise be analyzed causally as a result of neurochemical processes in a person’s central nervous system (by the neurosciences), or sociobiologically as the civilized outcome of selfish genes wishing to duplicate themselves (e.g., by evolutionary psychology), or even by certain sociologists who apply economics and game theory to explain romantic relationships. By privileging a description of the situation as one involving free will, we conceive of ourselves primarily as actors, implicated in “the great drama of existence,” whereas we become spectators to the situation if we approach it in terms of causality. In the remainder of this commentary, I shall offer some reflections on the existential aspects of complementarity in psychology in this sense—that we are both actors and spectators—by drawing not just on Bohr but also on the Norwegian philosopher Hans Skjervheim (1926–1999), who introduced the participant/spectator figure into Scandinavian philosophy and human science. Causal, Conceptual, and Normative Relations I shall begin, however, with another (but related) issue, viz. one that concerns the ways that scientific disciplines conceive of the relations that they address in the world. All sciences can reasonably be said to study relationships between different objects, events, and processes. The science of psychology studies many different kinds of relationships. However, many researchers, in what is sometimes known as “mainstream psychology,” are not aware of this, but believe that they are concerned with one kind of relationship only, viz. causal relationships, probably because they want to subscribe to what they believe is “scientific methodology.” Causal relationships, as conventionally conceived, are about how events or processes of one type (e.g., kicking a ball) affect some event or process of another type

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(e.g., a ball moving through the air on a football field). Actually, if we follow Bohr, limiting oneself to applying this kind of causal stance to the world would be equivalent to physicists limiting themselves to studying light only as particles (and not waves, or vice versa), thus blinding themselves to important aspects of reality. But surely, empirical relations conceived causally do remain important as connections between events for psychologists. In addition, however, there are other kinds of relations or connections that often remain in the shadow for psychologists. Among these are conceptual relations, which are wholly unlike causal ones. The relation between “bachelor” and “unmarried man” is not a causal one (there is nothing about being a bachelor that causes one to be unmarried), but semantic. According to Jan Smedslund, psychology is and ought to be interested in conceptual relations, but most of the discipline proceeds by studying these in the guise of empirical/causal relations, often leading to pseudoscience. In his view, there is thus a mismatch between the current (causal) research methods and the nature of psychological phenomena, because of the fact that the latter, according to Smedslund, take part in shared conceptual meaning systems (Smedslund, 2009). It is simply misguided to study meanings causally, and, if one proceeds to do so anyway, the result is what Smedslund calls pseudoempirical work. For example, if psychologists study an alleged causal relation between finding oneself in an unexpected situation (independent variable) and the experience of surprise (dependent variable), they are doing pseudoempirical research, because there is not an empirical but rather a conceptual relation between “unexpected situation” and the emotion of surprise (this is thus unlike the relationship between kicking a ball and the ball’s movement through space): What we mean by surprise is just what we feel in an unexpected situation. There is an internal and conceptual relation between the two, just as there is, Smedslund argues, between a surprisingly large number of other so-called psychological “variables.” In addition to causal and conceptual relations, psychology is also concerned with (or ought, in my view, to be concerned with) normative relations, that is, relations of oughtness. In one way, conceptual and semantic relations are species of normative ones (for if one knows the definition of a bachelor, then one ought to be able to conclude that bachelors are unmarried men), but in the typical case we think of normative relations as moral ones. The relationship between an action (e.g., donating money to charity) and the reason behind (e.g., some people need help and it is worthwhile to help others) is a normative one, whereas the relation between an instance of behavior (e.g., I slipped and fell) and its cause (e.g., the pavement was covered with ice) is not. Within discursive and cultural psychology, Rom Harré has been particularly important in arguing for decades that psychology’s subject matter is normative, in contrast to, say, the subject matter of physiology. An example from Harré (1983) (rehearsed in Brinkmann,

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2011) may illustrate what this means: Although dread, anger, indigestion, and exhaustion all have behavioral manifestations as well as fairly distinctive experiential qualities (qualia), we have no trouble concluding that only the two former phenomena should be included among psychological phenomena, whereas the two latter ones are physiological. Why so? Because, argues Harré, dread and anger are psychological phenomena precisely to the extent that they fall within a normative moral order, where they can be evaluated according to local norms of correctness and appropriateness. Dread and anger do not merely happen, like physiological phenomena, but are done and are therefore subject to normative and indeed moral appraisal. One can feel and express legitimate as well as illegitimate anger, whereas indigestion may be painful and annoying, but it is meaningless to say that it can be legitimate or the opposite. Psychological phenomena—our ways of perceiving, acting, learning, remembering, and feeling—do not simply happen but can be done more or less well relative to local customs, norms, and conventions. In short, they are normative. I do not intend this short list of causal, conceptual, and normative relations to be exhaustive for psychology. I addition to these, there are without doubt also other kinds of relations in psychology, for example, mereological relations (between parts and wholes), many of which were studied by Gestalt psychologists but which somehow do not fit the categories of causal, conceptual, or normative relationships. However, I shall leave this matter here and move on to the discussion of complementarity. For it seems that we have (at least) two diametrically opposed stances in psychology, as perhaps in life itself: the causal stance against the normative (and conceptual) stance (although many psychologists simply ignore the normative stance). What does this signify? Are we dealing with a version of dualism, for example, between how the body operates (causality) and the workings of the soul/mind (normativity)? Or are we dealing with versions of complementarity in the Bohrian and Valsinerian sense? Dualisms, Dualities, and Complementarities Dualism is generally regarded as an expression of problematic or even faulty thinking in philosophy and the sciences, for example, expressed in the Cartesian dualism of res extensa and res cogitans, although we should always bear in mind that Descartes himself was more profound and sophisticated than many of his exegetes, and also than many of his critics. There is even reason to say that he was definitely not a Cartesian himself! (see Robinson, 2008). Dualism normally implies that two phenomena, or two sides of a phenomenon, interact causally. Thus, Cartesianism is premised on the idea that there is some kind of causal interaction between mind and body, so that I can will, for example, that my limbs move whenever I want to go to the refrigerator (mind to body causality), and the chilling effect of

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the beer on a hot summer day can affect my state of mind (body to mind causality). Descartes famously (and much ridiculed ever since) located the causal interaction point between body and mind in the brain’s pineal gland. This is thus a clear example of dualism regarding the mind’s place in the world, and other examples (from the social sciences) could be theories that posit individuals and societies as distinct entities that are thought to interact causally. Viewing the same matters from the perspective, not of dualism, but of duality gives rise to other (but historically less prominent) philosophies. So-called dual aspect theories of the mind-body problem are alternatives to dualism that go back (at least) to Spinoza in the 17th century. Often, visual analogies are invoked to explain this theory: Just as the same line can be seen as convex from one side and concave from the other, so can the phenomena of the world be seen as mental or physical depending on the viewpoint, although there is just a single phenomenon. For monists like Spinoza, there is just one kind of stuff in the world, but with dual aspects. Unlike the entities of dualism, these do not interact causally but display complementary properties. It makes no sense to say that the convex and concave sides of a line interact causally, just as it does not make sense, from this perspective, to say that the mind and the body interact causally. The same holds for Rubin’s figures that Valsiner (2013) highlights as important in relation to the development of Bohr’s ideas. This is indeed complementarity: Not a causal relation between distinct entities but rather different manifestations of the same thing that cannot, however, be addressed at the same time. Moving to the social plane, Valsiner (2013) makes clear that cultural psychologies take as their subject matter the complementarity of the person and society. There are no persons as such and in themselves (as illusory social atoms in abstraction from social forms), just as there are no societies, as empty forms in abstraction from acting persons. Both make each other up, so to say, and in irreversible time, Valsiner would add, in a process of semiotic mediation. The complementarities of mind and person, and also person and society, are (or ought to be) fundamental for cultural psychology and the social sciences. However, I shall address a kind of complementarity in psychology that might cut across these in being more general. It is the kind of complementarity we get from the fact that we can approach human beings, as I have tried to show above, in a very general sense, using either a causal language that uses a vocabulary of variables, behavior, and causes/effects, or a normative language that invokes concepts like meaning, action, and narrative. The choice between these approaches is routinely seen in psychology as a choice between quantitative and qualitative research methods, although this is not necessarily so, as Harré has argued, and the quantitative/qualita-

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tive distinction is in any case a superficial methodological one compared to the fundamental one between causality and normativity (Harré, 2004). Complementarity in psychology is multilayered, and I believe that there are “local complementarities” within each of the phenomena that I just listed: Concerning action, for example, there is complementarity between the agent performing the action, on the one hand, and the social practice that renders the action meaningful and of which the action is a part, on the other. Without the social practice of celebrating Christmas, the actions of singing and dancing around the tree are just like the twitches and jerks of mad men and women. And concerning narrative, there must certainly be an author that tells or enacts the story through one’s life, but without culturally sanctioned story lines, they are just meaningless movements and sounds in space. The story is always authored, but the author is always storied. Again, to highlight the contrast with causal models (dualism), there is no causal interaction between action and social practice or between author and story line, but rather a duality of perspectives on one process that complement each other. Although this insight is old news in Western philosophy, psychology often forgets it, and it should be highlighted as fundamental for a viable cultural psychology for the future. Participant and Spectator According to Katsumori (2011), the duality or complementarity between the onlooker and the actor stances is the key to an understanding of Bohr’s philosophy, which cuts across physical science, biology, epistemology, and psychology. The onlooker-actor complementarity is also the existential equivalent to the causal-normative (and behavior-action) complementarity. By systematically going through Bohr’s writings, Katsumori shows how an original philosophy is found in the idea of complementarity, which surpasses traditional divisions between realism and antirealism. In this context, however, I wish to point to another philosopher, who is well-known in Scandinavia for introducing the conceptual pair of participant and spectator, which is very close to Bohr’s emphasis on actor and onlooker, viz. the Norwegian philosopher Hans Skjervheim. From the 1950s to his death in 1999, Skjervheim battled positivism in its many guises by insisting on the importance of what he called the participant’s attitude (some of his essays are available in English in Skjervheim, 1996). In his most famous essay, “Participant and Spectator,” Skjervheim finds that there are (at least) three kinds of attitudes human being may have toward one another. If someone says something (his example is “The cost of living is bound to increase even more”), an interlocutor may turn her attention to the subject raised and become engaged in the problem itself (will the cost of living in fact increase and what does this imply for people today?). This, Skjervheim says, is an attitude of participation in which there

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is a triangular relationship between the two persons and the subject matter. However, there is also the possibility of quite another attitude in which the interlocutor simply registers that the other refers to the specific subject matter. The utterance of the other then becomes a report, a fact, or a datum, perhaps to be analyzed sociologically (along the lines of “the subject stated that x”). Thirdly, there is the possibility of simply listening to the sounds produced by the other, thus “rendering the alter a purely physical object in his world,” which, Skjervheim says, is the project of behaviorism (1996, p. 128). With the second and third kinds of attitudes, the interlocutor in fact stops being an interlocutor, in the sense of participating in the conversation, and instead becomes a spectator, able to register the fact that someone is saying something or even simply recording the physical properties of the sounds. Skjervheim’s essay was a critical commentary on the objectifying tendencies in the sociologies and psychologies of his day (which, alas, remain with us today). These sciences, he says, are sciences about facts and thus treat human opinions and utterances as facts (e.g., in psychoanalysis, as discussed by Skjervheim as a school of thought that takes objectification to its extreme) rather than as propositions or invitations to further conversation, making it possible to “participate in people’s judgments” (p. 133). The objectifying attitude is “essentially offensive” (p. 130), according to Skjervheim, because it is essentially an attack on the freedom of the other. It is possible to distill a number of principal points from Skjervheim’s essay, but I shall here limit myself to just one: In principle, one cannot objectify oneself. What Skjervheim says is this: I can rightly enough regard myself as a fact, but it is not denoted in the fact I register and ascertain, that I register and ascertain. I may in the next instance correctly ascertain my ascertaining, but this ascertaining, which is often grasped by reflection, is something other than what I live in the moment. (Skjervheim, 1996, p. 129)

There is an “I” that objectifies, but which always itself escapes objectification. This is the subjective, agentive side of the human being (close to the phase of the self process called “I” by George Herbert Mead and which the phenomenologists sometimes call the transcendental ego). This is where freedom lies, but not as a fact, Skjervheim says (for with facts, we are in the realm of observation rather than participation), but as a possibility. Now, we can see that the idea of complementarity in relation to physics developed by Bohr is really a manifestation of a general, indeed existential, idea of humans being capable of taking the two stances of participant (or actor, as Bohr said) and spectator (or onlooker). As participants in the lives of and with other human beings, we regard them as actors, who author their own utterances, and who can therefore be held accountable for what they say and do. We regard the mental life of others as something they

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do rather than something that merely happens as parts of causal chains of events. But as spectators to the lives of others, we approach them causally, regard their movements and utterances as behavior, and think of this behavior as something that happens—as a fact—in the world. From a Spinozist perspective sub specie aeternitatis, it might be that these complementary perspectives—the spectator and the participant—are symmetrical, since both are necessary (but cannot be employed simultaneously). But I believe that existentially, they are not symmetrical, for it is not possible for us (as Skjervheim pointed out) to take the spectator’s stance toward our own lives, and furthermore, we also need to let the participant’s stance be primary in our dealings with other human beings. Why so? Why cannot we just opt for the onlooker’s stance, if not toward ourselves, then toward others? Part of the answer is developmental and was given expression in the work of Lev Vygotsky (see Brinkmann, 2010, on which the following paragraph is based). According to Vygotsky, the higher mental functions of human beings are formed in the course of ontogeny when adults interpret, and act upon, the child’s nonsocial behaviors, thereby transforming biological dispositions into social acts. The famous example discussed by Vygotsky (1978) concerns what happens when a child is trying to reach something by performing a grasping movement. Adults may subsequently bring that something to the child, who thereby learns to perform a pointing gesture. Learning to use social signs, such as intentionally pointing one’s finger, means developing a kind of second nature and enter a space of human communication. The crucial point is that more capable humans, normally adults, have to interpret the child’s behavior as if it signifies pointing, before it signifies pointing, in order for it to become pointing. More generally, adults have to engage with children as if they are persons (with some degree of responsibility and autonomy), before they are persons, in order for them to become persons. This is what Vygotsky meant when he argued that development takes place twice; first interpsychologically, between persons in social situations (in which some persons are more capable than others), and second, intrapsychologically, when individuals learn to control their behaviors by using the signs that were first meaningful in social situations. Using the language of Bohr and Skjervheim, this means that we have to engage with developing persons as participants—and as if they are participants—in order for them to become participants. Limiting oneself to being onlookers or spectators to the lives of children (if one can indeed imagine such a thing), without any social responsitivity (perhaps the horrors of postcommunist Romanian orphanages is the closest we come to finding such environments), would seriously stifle human development. We become persons only by being treated as persons by other persons, in contexts of participation. If this argument is valid, it means that the participant’s stance

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is primary in human lives and development—existentially and practically speaking—and that the spectator’s stance is secondary and derived and something we normally invoke only when the participant’s stance fails (e.g., in cases of severe psychopathology). Also, a number of other philosophers have pointed to the importance of what I here call the participant’s stance, for example, dialogical thinkers such as Martin Buber, who famously invoked the I-Thou relationship as fundamental (however, without stressing its developmental significance). CONCLUSION In conclusion, we can say that, scientifically, causal and normative approaches to psychology are complementary. We can view a certain social process either as the result of causal operations (in the brains and/or environments of organisms) or as human actions subject to normative appraisal. In the first case, we consider it as a process that happens, while in the second case, we consider it as something that is done. It is a matter of behavior versus action; of a spectator’s versus a participant’s stance. However, as complementary, they rule each other out in the sense that choosing one stance blinds one to the other, just as we find in Bohr’s physics. However, existentially, as I have argued, the two stances are not equal, for approaching others as acting persons, as participants, has a certain primacy, both logically (in normal human encounters) and ontogenetically (in the course of human development). We must regard others normatively, as acting persons, even before they are so, in order for them to become so. A pure causalistic look at others, were it possible, would not create persons but, at best, machines. Furthermore, in our own actions and self-reflections, it seems impossible, as Skjervheim argued, to take the spectator’s stance toward ourselves, at least fully. For the I that takes this position (as spectator of the self) is exactly in the same moment acting, or participating, toward the self. Again, there is an existential primacy of the participant’s stance. Perhaps this is what Lévinas (1989) meant when he claimed that ethics is first philosophy. For human beings, the first and primary relation we have to one another is ethical, it is the participant’s stance. While much of psychology has blinded itself to this fundamental idea, a cultural psychology for the future is in a unique position to make this its fundamental premise. REFERENCES Bohr, N. (1934). Atomic theory and the description of nature. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Brinkmann, S. (2010). The ethical subject: Accountability, authorship and practical reason. SATS: Northern European Journal of Philosophy, 11(1), 75–89.

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Brinkmann, S. (2011). Towards an expansive hybrid psychology: Integrating theories of the mediated mind. Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science, 45(1), 1–20. Harré, R. (1983). Personal being. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Harré, R. (2004). Staking out claim for qualitative psychology as science. Qualitative Research in Psychology, 1, 3–14. Katsumori, M. (2011). Niels Bohr’s complementarity. New York, NY: Springer. Lévinas, E. (1989). Ethics as first philosophy. In S. Hand (Ed.), The Levinas reader (pp. 75–87). Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Robinson, D. N. (2008). Consciousness and mental life. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Skjervheim, H. (1996). Selected essays: In honour of Hans Skjervheim’s 70th birthday. Bergen, Norway: Department of Philosophy. Smedslund, J. (2009). The mismatch between current research methods and the nature of psychological phenomena: What researchers must learn from practitioners. Theory & Psychology, 19, 778–794. Valsiner, J. (2013, March 15). Cultural psychology and its future: Complementarity in a new key. Inaugural lecture of the Niels Bohr Professorship Centre of Cultural Psychology, University of Aalborg, Denmark. Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

CHAPTER 4

AFFORDANCES, MEREOLOGY, POSITIONS, AND THE POSSIBILITY OF A CULTURAL PSYCHOLOGY A Little Something Complementary to Some of the Themes in Jaan Valsiner’s Address Rom Harré

We should be grateful for the use Jaan Valsiner has made of the writings of Niels Bohr as a philosopher. These are not exactly philosophical writings in the sense that the publications in the professional journals are philosophical. Bohr on a Kantian inspiration, drawing as Steen Brock (2004) has argued, sketches out an alternative conceptual scheme for making sense of the world and of our relation to it, primarily in the context of physics, but in his later writings, of human life itself. His insights are not some patch to be applied to superficial wounds in the varieties of a Newtonian consensus but a grand alternative. Cultural Psychology and Its Future: Complementarity in a New Key, pages 61–73. Copyright © 2014 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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Complementarity à la Bohr However, for the most part, Bohr’s complementarity has been treated as a concept with which to set up an epistemological doctrine as an alternative to the various realisms that have been prominent since the Renaissance. I believe that Bohr’s complementarity point of view is susceptible of a more profound interpretation as a metaphysical stance to the question of how human methods of enquiry can portray the ambient environment, not as it can be known by observation but as it can be thought to be. To begin with a careful account of Bohr’s concept of “complementarity” and of the exemplary experimental set the results which led Bohr to develop his famous concept will be desirable. Complementary Descriptions A complementary description of the results of studying a material setup includes two clauses, each of which draws on independent and irreducible conceptual repertoires and both of which are required to give a comprehensive account of the phenomena or system under study. The Interference Rings Experiment When projecting an electron beam through a small hole sufficiently slowly onto a photographic plate or screen, we observe appearance of dots recording the impact of individual electrons as material entities. Continuing the experiment until a great many electrons have passed through the hole, the dots begin to display the rings typical of interference between waves. It has proved impossible to find attributes of individual electrons that will allow the inference of the point on the screen each will arrive at. This is two experiments in one. Taking electrons one by one, we get a particle display. Taking electrons en masse, we get a wave display. The singleton phenomena cannot be described by the physics of waves, and the mass phenomena cannot be described by the physics of particles. A complete description of the experimental setups (note the plural) requires a complementary description. To bring out the richer implications of Bohr’s way of thinking, we need two further conceptual clusters that had not yet surfaced in his time. These are the mereological rules, that is, the principles of correct part/whole reasoning. There are fallacies to which that kind of reasoning is subject that must be avoided in any discourses in which inferences are made from properties of parts to properties of wholes and properties of wholes to properties of parts. We also need a new and amplified conception of the properties displayed by both inanimate and animate beings when they are subject to various kinds of external treatment. This is the concept of affordance, a

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refinement of the familiar concept of a disposition. With the help of this concept of properties as displayed in an interaction, an investigator can become sensitive to the threat of mistakes in linking wholes to their parts, the mereological fallacies, and circumvent them. SOME RELEVANT MEREOLOGICAL FALLACIES Mereological Fallacy #1 This is the mistake of applying to a part of an entity a predicate that gets its meaning from its use for ascribing an attribute to the whole from which the part comes. The most commonly discussed examples are drawn from issues raised by cognitive “neuroscience.” Is the ascription of a psychological predicate such as “thinking,” which gets its meaning from its use for whole persons to parts of persons, say the left hemisphere of the brain, a mereological fallacy? (Bennet & Hacker, 2003). Turning to the philosophy of chemistry, does the assumption of the entitative nature of molecular constituents such as charged atom-cores exemplify the first mereological fallacy? Is the assumption that electrons are constituents of atoms to commit the fallacy? Mereological Fallacy #2 This is the mistake of inferring that substantive products of an analytical procedure are parts of the substance on which the procedure was performed. Earley’s well known commentary (Earley, 2003) on the mistakes involved in supposing that there is salt in the sea is based on the presumption that to say there is commits the second mereological fallacy. Was the extracted salt from the sea there as salt prior to the implementation of the process of extraction? Does the display of electrons as entitative products of certain experiments in physics, for example, cloud chamber experiments, read back into the theory of chemical bonding as pairing of electrons, exemplify Mereological Fallacy #2? Sometimes attributes of the whole can be ascribed to the parts, sometimes not. What distinguishes the two cases? Proposing criteria for distinguishing those products of enquiry that are not back projectable from those that are is usually taken for granted. The threat of the mereological fallacies should encourage cultural psychologists at least to attend to the explicit formulation of the relevant criteria. Affordances “Affordance” is the word coined by J. J. Gibson (1979) to explain his theory of perception as a radical departure from the sense data theories of, for example, Russell, and constructionism of, for example, Kant. Most

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people can see that a knife can be used for cutting; in this terminology, we say a knife affords cutting. Only in a human context does a certain piece of steel have that attribute. We can also say that a floor affords walking, while a pond (pace Jesus), does not. The sea does not contain salt, only sodium and chloride ions. But as a result of subjecting seawater to a certain procedure, evaporation, it will afford that white crystalline substance we call “salt.” In a certain kind of conversation, a person affords memories, and perhaps in another kind of conversation, solutions to problems. Just as there is no salt in the sea, so there are no memories hidden away in the person to be extracted and displayed. Reminiscing affords memories; there are no memories prior to the memorial activity, though there are no doubt all sorts of dispositions and tendencies to answer questions about the past. It is much the same with “solutions,” which are essentially public items related to and defined by the problems to which they are solutions. In cultural psychology, we hope to elicit affordances, and we aim to avoid the fallacy of projecting these public items back into the mind of the person whose affordances these are, committing a mereological fallacy. A frozen lake has the same molecular structure that affords walking to, say, a wolf, but does not afford walking to a moose. Categories of Affordances The pattern in which the second mereological fallacy can infect the validity of reasoning in chemistry appears in the inferences we are inclined to make, linking the results or products of analytical processes to the material stuff from which they were derived. The methodological question is whether the products of an analytical procedure were constituents of the being on which the process was exercised. In the root procedures in chemistry, do we have analysis of things into their parts or the genesis new beings? To assume that analytical processes directed toward targets always yield constituents is to fall into the “product-process” fallacy, or the second mereological fallacy. The concept of “affordance” can throw light on how this fallacy comes about and in what circumstances it occurs. It is not a fallacy to draw inferences about the molecular weight of a certain compound from knowledge of the atomic weights of the products of its analysis. 1.

2.

Affordances as substances—things and stuff—for example, distillation of wine affords alcohol. There was alcohol in the liquor before it was separated out; so to say that alcohol was a constituent of the liquor is a valid inference. Evaporation of brine affords salt, but the salt was not a constituent of the sea. Affordances as attributes—properties—for example, heating a solid affords liquidity; passing light through a prism affords a spectrum of colors on a white surface. Was liquidity a hidden property

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of the solid? Surely not. But Newton realized that colored rays were a hidden and constitutive property of white light. Affordances as chunks—the parts of the sea extracted by dipping in buckets have the values of certain properties, such as quantity, determined by the choice of bucket. The sea affords buckets full as well as thimbles full. However, it seems that there is no temptation to fall into a version of the second mereological fallacy in these examples. It is not a fallacy to declare that a bucket of water is a part of the sea.

Science progresses by asking whether there is a hidden property of the being which yields the affordance. When subject to the appropriate manipulations, material substances afford spectra. But spectral colors are not parts of the substance that affords them. Nevertheless, the question as to what distinguishes those constituent structures under which a substance affords an atomic spectrum of such and such a pattern and a substance that affords a different atomic spectrum is a legitimate question: the question of the grounding of affordances. According to the Bohr’s theory, spectral affordances are grounded in configurations of electrons considered to be constituents of atoms. When we discover that incandescent sodium affords two yellow spectrum lines by passing the emitted light through a spectrometer, what is affording this phenomenon— sodium atoms having a certain electronic configuration? If this makes sense, how have we managed to outflank the second mereological fallacy? We know there are no colors as constituents of atoms. In the Bohr conception of an atom, it is taken for granted that electrons are constituents of atoms because atoms afford electron phenomena under certain manipulations. Electrons are nothing like spectral colors, so it seems unproblematic to assign them to the category of constituents of the inner structures of atoms. Bohr’s “complementarity” is none other than a consequence of interpreting the experimental procedures of physics as means for eliciting affordances and then making clear that back projection of electrons-as-products into electrons-as-constituents would be the commission of the second mereological fallacy. We now describe Bohr’s atomic theory as a model, and that is indeed what it is. As a general rule in cases in which the affordances of complex setups in which a method of investigation is linked to a certain region of the world could not be constituents of the world slice in question, for example, because they demand complementary descriptions, it is a good scientific procedure to treat them as the constituents of icon models with no implications that one day they will be revealed as realities. However, Bohr himself began the generalization of “complementarity” to other kinds of discourses. The associated concepts of mereology and affordance can also be generalized to topics other than physics and chemis-

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try, particularly those in which methods of analysis of discourse genres are germane. Both of our new concepts can be used to analyze the scope and limits of the field of anthropology as a discursive practice addressed to the study of discursive practices. Reaching Into Another Cultural System Through Language An anthropologist approaching another culture through a study of the symbolic systems of the target culture must use a language with which to conduct the enquiry, even if the target culture is his or her own. The interaction between anthropologist or cultural psychologist and members of the culture in question could and perhaps should be thought of in terms of affordances. The investigations by the anthropologist display the affordances of the target culture that are properties of a complex and indissoluble object: the anthropologist-native member complex. Looked at this way, a cultural enquiry is liable to slip into a version of the second mereological fallacy, namely, assuming that what has been elicited by the enquiry is a constituent of the target culture. Can this threat be bypassed? Treating the various pictures of a culture, local or alien, as complementary descriptions avoids the second mereological fallacy. However, as we saw in discussing that fallacy, sometimes what is elicited is a constituent of the object studied, sometimes not. By what criteria will a distinction be made between those products of enquiry that can be read back as constituents of the object in question and those that cannot? Moreover, by taking account of the fact that ethnography is a description of what the target culture has afforded to the enquiring anthropologist, relative to the concepts of the enquiry, a distinct feature of the culture under study can be revealed. For example, Bronislaw Malinowski’s description of the dominance of ritual exchanges in the life of the Trobrianders reported only exchanges among the men in the Kula Ring (Malinowski, 2002). Annette Weiner (1976) looked at the islanders with another eye, and for her the women’s activities, afforded an image of another symbolic exchange of equal importance for sustaining the culture of the Kula Ring. Her account and Malinowski’s account were complementary in Bohr’s sense, that is, displaying two irreducible aspects of a “something.” Neither Malinowski nor Weiner fell into the second mereological fallacy. To extend this insight, I discuss two ways in which the issue of whether the concept of “complementarity” illuminates the way that the multiplicity of languages enriches cultural psychology. Lutz’s (1988) studies of untranslatable vocabularies shows how words in one culture can be related to complementary clusters of words in another by embedding both in story lines that are familiar to all human beings. This is in contrast to Wierzbicka’s (1992) proposal for semantic primes that might provide a common under-

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standing of the root concepts of the life forms of diverse cultures. Each of these methods avoids the second mereological fallacy, but in different ways. Lutz’s Ethnographic Method Catherine Lutz (1988), in her classic study Unnatural Emotions, made it possible for an English speaker to assemble a group of English words, which when coupled with descriptions of Ifaluk scenes and situations that could have occurred in England or in the United States, allows one to grasp the sense of an Ifaluk emotion word, even though that word does not map onto any single English expression. For example, she shows how the group of words “need,” “compassion,” “love,” “admiration,” “sadness,” and “pity,” without the sense of condescension that often goes with their use in AngloAmerican discourse, can capture the meaning of an untranslatable word in Ifaluk. The word appears as a transitive verb: “I fago such and such a person.” But what is “admiration” doing there? It is particularly pertinent when the person whom I fago is someone with an admirable temperament and socially accomplished. By assembling a cluster of stories in which the Ifaluk speakers use fago, each story using one of the English list, we get a sense of the meaning of the untranslatable word. Helmut Morsbach (1992) has done something similar in his study of the uses of Japanese emotion word amae. How do Lutz and Morsbach know that these are emotion words? The key is also the core of the method; we see and hear these words used in the course of incidents among the native speakers, described in English, situations in which typically an English speaker would use an emotion word. Of course, it is commonplace that we can never be sure that all aspects of the use of a word have been captured, but it is very unlikely that we would be wholly wrong in thinking that such and such a word is an emotion word. Other Ifaluk words of interest are sort (justified anger) and metagu (fear/anxiety/shame). Applying the Lutzian method to these words results in groups of words, some of which are surprising as we enter into a different semantic frame for a different form of everyday life. Interacting with the Ifaluk, Lutz elicits certain affordances of an indissoluble composite of her mindset and that of the Ifaluk. By drawing on common human experiences of the vicissitudes of life in the stories she uses, she passes beyond the veil of the threat of the product-constituent fallacy. Wierzbicka’s Method of Semantic Primes This is the method used by Anna Wierzbicka (1992) to get a “footing” in an alien culture. This is not forcing a translation into English, since the semantic primitives must be language independent, though some language must be used to write them. In each language, they should have the same set of meanings. The seeming English words in the list are “exponents.” I

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take this to mean that they are to be read as expressing the simplest common meaning in English. Here is a recent list of semantic primes. I, you, someone, people, something/thing, body. Kind, part. This, the same, other/else. One, two, much, some, all. Good, bad. Big, small. Think, know, want, feel, see, hear. Do, happen, move, touch. Be (somewhere), there is, have, be (someone/something). Live, die. When/time, now, before, after, a long time, a short time, for some time. Where/place, here, above, below, far, near, side, inside. Not, maybe, can, because, if. Very, more. Like/Way.

For example, suppose we want to set out the meaning of the word “trial” in Anglo-American culture; perhaps the following list would come near it: people, one, want, know, bad, words, where, when. However, if we are trying to capture the sense of “trial” in Stalin’s Soviet Union, we might produce this list: people, words, false, where, when. Wierzbicka’s (1992) semantic primes can be thought of as a device for marking off the affordances that can be projected back onto the culture under study from those that cannot, and that will be prima facie the descriptions of cultural practices in the language of the anthropologist. As noted above, the exponents of semantic primitives have to be detached from their meanings in English, from which the words to express them are taken. To see how this strips down a word into an exponent, consider the first-person pronoun. In English, “I” is a device for self-reference that locks on to the speaker’s bodily presence and carries an important performative function in signaling the commitment of the speaker to the content of the speech act of which it is a part. Its semantics are strictly individual. However, the word watashi, one among many first-person expressions in Japanese, references commitment in a more diffuse way, because the word indexes a reference group. In this case, a high-status one. It is worth noting that “mother” and “father” are not primitives but complexes. And the “I” of Wierzbicka’s list must be devoid of moral implications, in particular, scope of commitment. The way the system works to refine our understanding of even closely similar cultures is illustrated in Wierzbicka’s example of “family” in Polish

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culture and in English culture, though not fully analyzed to the bare bones of semantic primitives. X’s rodzina (Polish): compared with “family.”

“many people; like one thing; everyone is mother, father, etc. of another one of them; X is part of the thing; X’s mother and father are part of the thing.” Y’s family. (English): As above, except “some people,” thus expressing the well-known fact that Eastern European family life ramifies more widely than does the family life of English people.

Linking the extraction of “exponents” to the story lines revealed by the ethnographic method allows us to treat the multiple views of some local way of life that these methods afford as making up a richer and richer mosaic of understanding, with seeming contradictions resolved by treating them as complementary stories in the Bohrian way. Remember that in physics, we take components from each of two incompatible physical theories, mechanics (the particle aspect of the behavior of a single subatomic “entity”) and electromagnetism (wave-like behavior of a stream of subatomic “entities”) and forge a novel theory from the components. Necessarily, such a theory will not be able to be linked to models constructed out of either of the theories. Equally obstructive to clear thinking in cultural studies is tacit adherence to the illusion that only by presenting insights in the current language of science, namely, English, will we be able to free ourselves from cultural particularities. The language with which we approach other cultures constrains what inspecting the practices of that culture affords us. Once again, we return to Bohr’s insight—in the last analysis, it is impossible to detach the instrument from the world it is being used to explore, so we must be content with English ethnographies, Japanese ethnographies, and so on. This insight has been independently reached in considering differences in the primatology of ethologists using different mother tongues. Japanese primatology depends on the “feel together” method, in which Japanese emotional terms are freely used to describe the state of mind of primates, including human beings (Asquith, 1997). Japanese culture does not divide the animal from the human world in the sharp way that the Judeo-Christian tradition has done. There is More to Persons Than Material and Social Beings The development of discursive psychology and its many siblings and versions raises a question that does not arise directly from making use of Bohr’s great insight. Is the domain of cultural psychology to be confined to studies of what people actually say and do in carrying out the tasks of

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everyday life, including telling stories around the campfire, tales of heroes, and disasters of old? Cultures are the products of and the means for the production of persons, as embodied centers of consciousness and morally protected, ceteris paribus, taking the Vygotskian account (Vygotsky, 1978) of the genesis of persons in the cultural (linguistic) practices of the family. By the steps of psychological symbiosis from the Zone of Proximal Development to the Zone of Actual Development, we bring competent persons into being. In the course of this process human beings gain mastery of the first person and with it a sense of self as an individual. However, while the spatiotemporal continuity of persons as embodied beings is reflected in universal features of the use of the first person, as noted in Wierzbicka’s exponents, the second indicial feature of first-person grammar, that is, the moral status of the first-person speaker, differs widely. In some language systems, “I” or the equivalent is indexical of individual and person moral responsibility for what is said and done. In some uses, the first-person device indexes the speech acts so marked by the moral status of the group to which the speaker is seen to belong. Wherever on the scale of individual-to-group responsibility a person’s life pattern lies, traditionally the attributes of persons were those dispositions and histories known in the present and to the families, neighbors, and acquaintances of that person. The attributes of some people of fame become legendary. The principles of discursive psychology would lead us to look for the contemporary cultural realizations of persons in clusters of documents as well as such cultural practices as conversations and games, commercial transactions, and legal standing. While biographies and autobiographies have been widely and deeply studied in their ways of producing representations of persons, the role of personal documents as part constituent of persons has scarcely been addressed. Not only are sets of files apropos of a particular person used in presenting a representation of the person, but more importantly, in many situations, they serve as surrogates for the person him or herself. Just as a woman could marry a crusader by wedding his sword, each of us can be involved in important matters in the form of our files: medical, police, tax, school reports, credit ratings, call-center lists for cold calling us on our cell phones, accounts at Macy’s, and so on. This can often be happening without our being aware of it. It is something like the Freudian unconscious: aspects on one’s “file self” may break through at any time with devastating effect. Think about the logistics of job interviews; perhaps a hundred or more candidates apply, and maybe five are interviewed. How was the fate of the disappointed ones determined? By consultation not with each person as an embodied being in traditional form with arms and legs and tongue, but as a being embodied in files. The “freedom of information” legislation that has proliferated across the world is not unlike the human soul as revealed

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by Freudian psychotherapy. There are innumerable files in my file-self that I have no idea exist and no idea how to access, even if I suspect that are kept somewhere and able to be consulted by secret and privileged people as a kind of memory, though it is not my memory. Behind the files you know about—your bank statements, your medical record, your cell phone records—lie receding ranks of more and more inaccessible files. Ask yourself: have I got a file with Homeland Security or MI5? Positioning, Prepositioning, and the Power of Rights and Duties Once the importance to psychology of the moral status of persons is acknowledged, the research methods of social psychology, in particular, and cognitive psychology in general, must include the role of long- and short-term moral standing of the persons involved in almost any episode and almost any psychological activity. For example, not only should we ask whether someone believes they have a right or a duty to perform a certain kind of action in relation to others, but whether displaying or even feeling a certain emotion is morally appropriate, that is, whether one has a duty or even a right to display indignation, pity, and so on. It is only a few years ago that psychologists began to take notice of the way that beliefs about rights and duties factored into the way people actually performed those actions of which they were capable (Harré & Moghaddam, 2003). You may be able to do something, but without the authorization of a right to do it, you remain still. You may have a capacity to come to the aid of someone, to support a noble initiative, and so on, but without the spur of duty, you may just keep yourself to yourself. What would psychological study of positions, that is, clusters of rights and duties in specific contexts, consist of? There are two main aspects: 1. 2.

What rights and duties are recognized in a particular culture at a particular time and in a particular situation? How are rights and duties assigned, ascribed, taken on, rejected, disputed, and on what grounds in this or that cultural milieu?

Both questions require the resources of discourse analysis to answer. As a branch of social-cognitive psychology, this new field has been called “positioning theory.” It must become an essential dimension of cultural psychology, linked to, but not derivable from, the realization of the importance of making use of the principle of complementarity of descriptions. Research begins with an inquiry into what it is about a person’s capacities, history, temperament, and moral character that fits them or precludes them from accepting a duty or demanding a right. Roughly speaking, a person’s powers and capacities support the assignment to him or her of duties, while a person’s liabilities and vulnerabilities support the claim to

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a right. Positioning Theory studies can range from the idiographic level at which individual’s characteristics are the key to assignment of rights and duties in local contexts, up to assignments and often self-assignments by a group of people to rights, and more rarely to duties. The debates about rights to medical care, on the one hand, and duties to the environment, on the other, engage people in the millions. Needing to make a decision to act, people, I suggest, are not infrequently caught between the practicalities of a certain act and the moral qualities such an act has within the local culture. There is a drought, so should I use the lawn sprinkler to keep the grass nice and green? This common predicament was the core of Kohlberg’s Heinz Dilemma, which he used as a way of determining degrees of moral maturity. Adherence to the principle of complementarity suggests that in cases of moral ambiguity, we choose some of one course of action and some of the other, in such a way that our combined selection is not self-contradictory, though the totality of practices from which each is drawn are incompatible. CONCLUSIONS Sensitivity to the threat of mereological fallacies alerts us to the possibility that different ways of entering into a relationship with another culture (preserving the native environment and/or strip mining for metal ores), or a segregated section of our own way of life (the alien culture of the security services), through the study of the languages with which these cultures or culture-fragments are created and managed, suggest that the project of finding a species wide common culture is an illusion, partly promoted by the rapid spread of one language as the lingua franca of the sciences, business, engineering and so on. But how are we to describe the relationship between the diverse views we can get of a culture we are attempting to study? Bohr’s own extension of the concept of complementarity of views of a version of a natural phenomenon contrived in the laboratory from its role in making sense of quantum mechanics and the wave-particle dualism to the multiplicities of the content and practices of local cultures may be just the right way to go. Combining that insight with the realization that a study of people and the role of the acquisition of local grammars in the development of a sense of self leads to the necessity to pay attention to the diversity of local moral orders in their influence on how real people act, think, feel and even perceive. REFERENCES Asquith, P. (1997). Japanese images of nature: A cultural perspective. Richmond, VA: Curzon.

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Bennett, M. R., & Hacker, P. M. S. (2003). Philosophical foundations of neuroscience. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Bohr, N., (1958). Atomic physics and human knowledge. New York, NY: Wylie. Brock, S. (2004). Niels Bohr’s philosophy of physics. Berlin, Germany: Logica. Gibson, J. J. (1979). The ecological approach to visual perception. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Harré, R., & Moghaddam, F. M. (Eds.). (2003). Self and others. Westport, CT: Praeger Lutz, C. (1988). Unnatural emotions. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Malinowski, B. (2002). Argonauts of the western Pacific. London, UK: Routledge. Morsbach, H. (1992). Essential Japanese: A guide to language and culture. London, UK; New York, NY: Penguin. Vygtosky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Weiner, A. (1976). Women of value: Men of renown: New perspectives in Trobriand exchange. Austin: University of Texas Press. Wierzbicka, A. (1992). Semantics, culture and cognition. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

PART 3 METHODOLOGICAL EXPLORATIONS

CHAPTER 5

OPEN COMPLEMENTARITY IN CULTURAL PSYCHOLOGY Luca Tateo and Giuseppina Marsico

In his lecture, Jaan Vasiner stresses the notion of complementarity from the point of view of epistemological implications for the future of psychological science. He clearly argues that the use of the notion of complementarity is not a simple translation or reception from quantum mechanics to a different domain of knowledge. “The complementarity argument deals with our conditions for description and is therefore a statement of epistemology” (Favrholdt, 1999, p. XXIV). Valsiner’s notion of Inclusive Separation (Valsiner, 1987) aptly depicts how this complementary relation is made possible, overcoming the paradox of mutually excluded parts of a joint whole, and reaching to conceptualize a “dialectical leap” from the relationship between the two opposites. Further developing Bohr’s theorization, Valsiner (this volume) traces the intellectual plan for contemporary cultural psychology in applying the Principle of Complementarity to the complex case of an open system. Complementarity is not just a simple metaphor that can foster reflection about the study of psychological processes. The unquestionable charm of Cultural Psychology and Its Future: Complementarity in a New Key, pages 77–91. Copyright © 2014 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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the idea, as elaborated by Bohr, requires a reflection on the affordances and limits of using it in psychology. We will not engage in a detailed reconstruction of how Bohr elaborated his concept with respect to human sciences and psychology, in particular through Rubin and James. Other contributors, also in this volume, accomplished this task (Favrholdt, 1999; Katsumori, 2011; Marková, this volume; Valsiner, this volume). If complementarity bears the same meaning across disciplines, it will not be much more than a metaphor. How ought we reach a specific definition in psychology? It is worth starting from this question in order to avoid the fate of other umbrella terms, sometimes drawn from different disciplines, that ended up assuming a general, vague, contradictory, and ill-defined meaning in psychology, thus becoming useless, such as the terms “context” or “representation.” What is Complementarity in Psychology? There are at least four implications of adapting the epistemological notion of complementarity to psychological sciences, including recognition of the object of study as a whole; establishment of a dialogical relationship between subject and object; critical use of language of description; and, finally, epistemological attitude of dealing with inclusive concepts, such as continuity and discontinuity, evolution and adaptation. 1. Wholeness is the object of study. First, it implies the redefinition of the discipline’s object of study. As Valsiner (this volume) points out, what we study is not the person or the single psychological phenomenon occurring in a vacuum or in a neutral context. Persons, psychological processes, and contexts are in a relationship, in the sense of being part of a whole that we can call a phenomenon. Here we have the first dimension of the definition of complementarity in psychology: the relationship between the parts of a whole (see also Harré, this volume). This is a very crucial point to the extent that “a reductionistic approach to science involves an abstraction from wholeness and a focus on smaller and smaller parts, until encountering a part that appears manageable” (Piechocinska, 2005, p. 2). This is the way psychology has generally been pursued since the 19th century, by, for instance, treating memory, perception, language, and emotions as separate processes. Probably, the sharp distinction between lower and higher mental processes, distinguished by the use of symbolic capability and first introduced in early experimental psychology, contributed to speeding up the fragmentation of psychological science (Cole, 1996; Valsiner 2012; Wundt, 1916). According to the quotation attributed to Heisenberg, “There is a fundamental error in separating the parts from the whole, the mistake of atomizing what should not be atomized. Unity and complementarity constitute reality” (Piechocinska,

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2005, p. 3). The idea of complementarity introduces a new look at the epistemological stance in social sciences. It helps us overcome the distinction between scientific and humanistic psychology (Cole, 1996). Such a way to look at the history of the discipline helped the cultural endeavor of “rehabilitating” the neglected approaches that focused on the realm of meaning, context, and wholeness of psyche. Nevertheless, the idea of complementarity in psychology tells us that alternative views of psychological life (e.g., neurobiology and cultural psychology, experimental and idiographic approaches, etc.) can be valid from the epistemological point of view. “The term ‘complementarity’ thus comes to mean—perhaps itself complementarily—both joint completion and mutual exclusion” (Katsumori, 2011, p. 18). 2. Subject-object relations. Second, the principle of complementarity has to do with the subject-object relationship. “The idea of complementarity is suited to characterize the situation, which bears a deep-going analogy to the general difficulty in the formation of human ideas, inherent in the distinction between subject and object” (NBCW,1 1972–2007, Vol. 6, p. 58). As documented, the source of this topic in Bohr’s thought is William James’ psychology (Favrholdt, 1999). The feature of continuity of consciousness makes it difficult to arbitrarily segment it into discrete events or entities, which is apparently the requirement for the scientific study of mental processes (James, 1950). Bohr was deeply convinced that studying living systems implied a different way to understand the subject-object relationship. However, in contrast to open systems in biology, psychology, and social sciences at-large, physicists do not need to assume that their phenomena may “absent-mindedly” ignored, or intentionally neutralize, or even purposefully counteract the scientists’ efforts. Nor would we need to assume that these particles would willfully deceive the researchers. All these possibilities of answerability are there when we start to consider living systems, from viruses upwards to the social systems created by human beings. The basic issues of vitality and intentionality cannot be ignored at higher levels of the organization of the living matter and its emergent reflexivity of the psyche (Valsiner, this volume, p. 10; emphasis in original)

In particular, any experimental intervention that aims at observing the functioning of the brain “will bring an essential alteration in the awareness of volition” (NBCW, 1972–2007, Vol. 6, pp. 216–217). This reflection appears awfully timeless with respect to the attempt to study mental processes just starting by their neurological and physiological basis. Besides, this prin1

NBCW refers to Niels Bohr Collected Works and PWNB refers to The Philosophical Writings of Niels Bohr.

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ciple is valid also for less invasive kinds of studies, such as psychological testing and interviews, as we will argue in the following section. The observation relationship is thus a form of implication between a subject and an object, that in case of psychological processes makes the distinction between the two trickier. Besides, when Bohr himself discusses the possible epistemological implications of complementarity in psychology, he argues that the relationship between the observer and the person observed is not unidirectional, as the most part of experimental psychology presupposes. It is rather establishing a bidirectional relationship between minds, even if mediated by the most aseptic experimental device. For describing our mental activity, we require, on the one hand, an objectively given content to be placed in opposition to a perceiving subject, while, on the other hand, as is already implied in such an assertion, on sharp separation between object and subject can be maintained, since the perceiving subject also belongs to our mental content. (NBCW, 1972–2007, Vol. 6, p. 212)

Then, as a prerequisite of objectivity, we build up research procedures that mark the distance between the researcher and the person observed, disregarding the fact that such procedures establish a mediated relationship between the partners of a research interaction rather than distance them (Tateo, 2013). Thus, subject and object are inclusively separated in an epistemological whole, which constitutes the object of cultural psychology. This is what Marková (this volume, p. 41) calls “interactional epistemology.” A naïve form of realism would claim that, when carrying out a psychological experiment, we are applying a given research procedure to a psychological phenomenon, and that every time we want to study or to confirm that observation we can replicate the experiment on the same phenomenon that exists and persists independently from the experimental conditions (Marsico, 2013a). On the contrary, Bohr has a very different conception of the phenomenon, “related to the whole experimental arrangement” (Shomar, 2008, p. 335). Indeed, Bohr “considers the entire experiment from preparation to detection to be a single phenomenon” (Folse, 1993, p. 132). The point of view and the theoretical and technical apparatus we choose to observe any event is part of the phenomenon itself, to the extent that the observation co-creates the phenomenon. The study of nature is a study of artifacts that appear during an engagement between the scientist and the world in which he finds himself. And these artifacts themselves are seen through the lens of theory. Thus, different experimental conditions give different views of “nature.” (Holton, 1973, p. 156)

The apparatus is also a way to choose between different possible descriptions of the event, thus it implies a selection of certain aspects, sometimes called variables, rather than others. It does not mean, according to Bohr,

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that alternative descriptions must be wrong, to the extent that they are complementary. The second dimension is thus the unit of analysis in psychological processes; not the single subject, but the whole situation of observation, its ontogenesis, development, and follow up. If our ability to collect data about psychological experiences and to draw inferences depended only upon the formal logical structure of inference processes and the correctness of methods, namely inductive and experimental procedures, the region of experience in which we could reasonably apply our conclusions would take the shape of an illuminated circle with us as the center, surrounded by the darkness of ignorance. In other words, we would be able to reach conclusions about the psyche just applying the right reasoning and the right methodology, regardless of the context or the content of investigation. It would be like having the light of science on top of our heads, illuminating the same perfectly round area in the direction of our sight. But our inferences are context and content dependent, implying that the knowledge and the force of our conclusions vary with respect to different phenomena. As Bohr points out, “Ego-centeredness is not individuality at all” (Weber, 1986, p. 30). There are things we are more sure of and things we are less sure of; thus our portion of experience we are able to illuminate by the light of our intellect probably has a very irregular shape. We then turn to others in order to strengthen our knowledge about different parts of the portion of universe, involving the socially organized form of intersubjectivity and interobjectivity called scientific inquiry. We have access to a different portion of the universe, and its area is partly overlapping with another subject or measuring instrument. The increasing number of subjects sharing the same portion makes the conclusions about its characteristics more dense, with the consequence that the overlapping area of knowledge becomes the candidate for generalizing new knowledge. “We generalize from one situation to another not because we cannot tell the difference between the two situations but because we judge that they are likely to belong to a set of situations having the same consequence” (Shepard, 1987, p. 1322). The intersubjective relationship is not to be understood only as a matter of sharing knowledge and practices between researchers. The process also applies to the relationship between the researcher and the participant(s). As in the case of interaction between researchers, in the researcher-participant interaction, an overlapping of knowledge about portions of the discourse universe is achieved; this shared knowledge constructs a “dense” area in which conclusions can be candidates for generalization. This process of intersubjective generalization stems not from formal logic but is rather semiotic. It is not just some formal propriety that makes an inference valid, whether it is the result of a mix of induction, deduction, or abduction, but rather the fact that this process makes sense.

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3. The problem of language. The third point concerns the problem of language. In several publications, Bohr stresses that the language used to describe the observation and to formulate the theory is never neutral and cannot escape the features of every language, that is, being more or less polysemic, ambiguous, conventional, and attached to a certain cultural tradition of use. The concepts and labels we use to define a psychological process or a trait inevitably lead to a specific universe of discourse. “The relative meaning of every concept, or rather of every word, the meaning depending upon our arbitrary choice of view point” (PWNB, 1987–1998, Vol. 1, p. 96). By its nature, language is doomed to reification and ontologization of words. The solution is not to create a specific formal language to describe phenomena, pretending that this is the hard science’s way. We cannot avoid the use of common language in description, thus we cannot completely leave out commonsense knowledge from psychological discourse. It is not yet clear why psychology has instead been trying to do that since the end of 19th century. The linguistic dimension of complementarity is that different linguistic descriptions of a phenomenon, even mathematical descriptions, are complementary, and we should take advantage of them rather than trying to create new words that soon lose their apparent neutrality to reveal their attachment to a specific ideological background. A property of language is that we are “in” it, and we can’t escape the cultural framework it provides. “We are, so to speak, suspended in language, as Bohr loved to say” (Favrholdt, 1999, p. XXXIX). At the same time, language has a generative and creative property that makes it possible to enlarge the framework. We use descriptive, even formal, language, one as an instantiation of a cultural framework from which we start to understand the phenomena. As Valsiner points out in his lecture, “this is the process of creating new knowledge through what we know already” (this volume, p. 4). Despite that “all knowledge presents itself within a conceptual framework adapted to account for previous experience,” “any such a frame may prove too narrow to comprehend new experience” (Favrholdt, 1999, p. XXXVIII). Thus, the inner tension of science is that of dealing with a language of description that is the starting point of knowledge creation, but at the same time is doomed to be overcome if we are authentically looking for new knowledge. This implies an epistemological paradox: We must apply our concepts in a definite way in order to think and speak unambiguously. Even if we tried to imagine a descriptive language different from ours in which all concepts were applied in quite a new manner, we would not be able to understand this “language.” It would not be translatable into our language and therefore we would not be able to characterize it as a language. (Favrholdt, 1999, p. XXXIX)

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This paradox is the dead end of any attempt to formalize and to specialize scientific language in psychology; it leads to increasing incommunicability between different psychological subareas and between psychology and other disciplines. 4. Ontogenesis and time. The fourth point concerns ontogenesis and time. One common feature of quantum mechanics and psychology is that they deal with unique phenomena. One of the reasons for the impossibility to describe a subatomic phenomenon in both wave and particle terms is due to the fact that the atom under observation will only once manifest that specific behavior under the influence of the apparatus. When the experimental situation ends, its complementarity no longer exists. Either because the single atom has been destroyed in the experiment or because it will be in a different condition. Thus, there is a history of the phenomenon, its genesis and end. This is a concept of closed complementarity, because physical objects do not have memory. When we move to living systems instead, complementarity can be considered as an open concept. In fact, any physical knowledge of a living organism “involves an unavoidable interaction with the organism in question” (Katsumori, 2011, p. 20). It means that the organism changes because of such interaction and will adapt and remember the story of this adaptation. In this sense, complementarity with respect to any living system is open and processual, leaving a trace until the death of the organism itself. It is worth thinking about Milgram’s well-known experiment on obedience (Milgram, 1995) or Zimbardo’s experiment on prisons, in which groups of participants were randomly assigned to either guards or prisoner groups in a simulated jail under the researchers’ supervision (Haney, Banks, & Zimbardo, 1972). They are both examples of experiments in which the research interaction had a large impact on all the people involved. It is quite trivial to say that the complementary relationship between researchers and participants did not stop when they exited the experimental situation. In terms of effects and implications, as a matter of fact, it changed their lives forever. Yet psychology often operates as if the experimental situation has no history. Valsiner points out that psychology deals with processes in irreversible time (Valsiner, 2011; Valsiner, this volume). This implies that every psychological event is unique, but it is treated and described as repeating in a similar way. The last dimension of complementarity in psychology is thus that phenomena are characterized by both continuity and discontinuity, evolution and adaptation. This occurs in a “context, for instance the whole experimental set-up that irreducibly influences the behaviour of a particular part” (Piechocinska, 2005, p. 11). As Bohr (1957) points out in his interpretation of quantum mechanics, the properties of observed things and “their very existence as the things they appear to be is intimately de-

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pendent on the surroundings” (p. 146). The context is thus co-constitutive of the thing itself, and when the context changes, so will the thing (Piechocinska, 2005). As we will show in the next section, no observation situation in psychology is never a static context; it is rather a research interaction, an evolving process implying a before and an after. Thus, it makes no sense to look for the static properties of a psychological event at all times. We will argue that the above-mentioned dimensions of the complementarity concept in psychology lead to the elaboration of the concept of open complementarity rather than the closed concept that emerges from the simple introduction of Bohr’s concept to our discipline. In particular, we will focus on the subject-object relationship and the reciprocity of this form of complementarity, which has profound implications for reflexivity in psychology. FROM CLOSED TO OPEN COMPLEMENTARITY In order to use the notion of complementarity as part of the future project of Cultural Psychology, we argue that it is worth stressing some dimensions of its definition in the discipline. As Valsiner points out in his lecture, The unity of the complementary opposites in Bohr’s principle can be safely declared as involving exclusive separation of the opposites—despite the acceptance of the joint completion notion. Bohr came close to overcoming the Kantian dualism between the mechanical and teleological sides of functioning of natural systems—he tried to turn the dualism into a duality. In that he succeeded—the Complementarity Principle is a perfect example of duality in theoretical thinking of scientists. Yet he failed to take the next step—elaborating the various forms of such duality. (p. 8)

We suggest that the next step in the elaboration of complementarity as a dialogical epistemological principle should include the relationship between the parts of a whole, the whole situation of observation, its ontogenesis, development and follow-up, the different linguistic description of a phenomenon as ways to create new knowledge, and the focus on the dialogicality between continuity and discontinuity, evolution and adaptation. So the question here becomes, What form does—or can—this dialogicality take? This pressing question in contemporary cultural psychology leads to the very core of Valsiner’s lecture: how complementarity is built up in psychology and in the social sciences at large. We argue in this section that complementarity is not established “de facto” for the simple co-presence of researcher and object under investigation, rather it is a result of an ongoing process of mutual adaptation that shapes the “complementation process” focused on by Valsiner (this volume, p. 27). It is always ambivalent in its fluidity as it faces the double interwoven “agency” of the researcher and of the object along the irreversible time.

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Surprisingly, this basic assumption, which seems very trivial today in quantum mechanics, is still a controversial point in mainstream psychology due to its naïve idea of “omnipotence” of the researcher himself. The so-called exact sciences of our age have become conscious and incorporated in their conceptualization of the idea that the picture of nature is basically a picture of our relationship with nature and that the researcher, the method, and the object can no longer be separated since all the scientific apparatus (i.e., theoretical framework and methods used) shapes the object of investigation in itself. It is not our intention to enter here into a debate on the historical reasons that make psychology blind—or at least quite myopic—to its own limitations in searching for an independent reality “out there.” Instead, our attempt is to provide some examples of the inherent and microgenetically constructed duality of the complementation process in psychological research that leads to an open complementarity as outcome beyond the temporal boundaries of the research interaction. We will provide an example of the complementation process using some meaningful excerpts from the preliminary analysis of data of a not-yet-published study that Pina Marsico is carrying out at the University of Salerno. This is part of a wider research project on “Make-up and its cultural implications.” Its aim is to explore the immediate feeling emerging from using different lipstick and their interconnections with the culturally guided construction of identity in young women. The participants (40 female university students between the ages of 19 and 24) were invited by appointment to a university lab where they met the researcher (who was their former professor of psychology). They were enrolled in the study at the end of the spring semester. In the first step, during a psychology lesson, participants were asked to select four lipstick colors among a palette of 33 different shades. In the second phase in the psychology lab, participants were asked to sit in front of a mirror, having at their disposal the four chosen lipsticks. A video-recorded semistructured interview was carried out in which each young woman was asked to wear each lipstick and describe her immediate feelings and thoughts. The research setting was composed of several elements (the mirror, the video camera, the participant, and the researcher), which created an articulated configuration of “seeing” and “to be seen” as well as of direct or mediated interactions, as shown in the Figure 5.1. What is reported here is only one of the five options adopted along the 40 interviews in which the researcher modified her position in the space sitting next to the mirror (as in the Figure 5.1), or between participant and mirror, or between participant and video camera, standing behind the video camera, or occupying all the positions over the same interview. Each option creates a relevant modification of the interaction among the elements and different configurations in the same microspace. This complicated research design was implemented in order to achieve the second metalevel

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FIGURE 5.1. An example of the research setting.

goal, which was exactly to understand the impact of the researcher in the research setting or, in other words, the sensitivity of the researcher and his/ her work—a variational sensitivity—on the phenomena investigated. Excerpt #1 shows the interconnectedness of all the elements in place and the complementation process between the persons (both researcher and participant), the psychological process under investigation, and the actual contextual dimensions, including the concrete apparatus used (e.g. the mirror and the video camera). Excerpt 1: Interview # 3 (researcher sitting next the mirror, the participant is in front of the mirror) Researcher: How do you feel? Participant: To tell the truth, ill at ease to look at myself in the mirror R: Yes? P: Yes. R: Because it’s the mirror? P: Because I feel uncomfortable to put on make-up before other people (.) not my friends (0.5) a kind of trying something in a shop (.) and they look at me (.) yes (.) I do that but feel a bit uncomfortable. R: If I stood behind the camera you would have felt more at ease?

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No (.) think even worst (.) because you were far (.) like this instead is more . . . is already different (.) for instance in the classroom you were over there . . . now you are close (.) is already different (.) but if I didn’t know that you are the teacher it would have been different. Better or worse? Mhhh . . . yet it is also good for me to see you closer.

The uncomfortable/comfortable dynamic is the very issue here showing how a specific feeling emerges from the articulation of “to see” and “being seen” by other eyes—the mirror, the video camera, the researcher— while putting on the lipstick and how it is modulated by the proximity to the researcher. It makes evident that the researcher cannot jump from the picture. He/she cannot exclude him/herself from the analysis. He/ she is a component part of psychological phenomena under investigation, which exist thanks to his/her active participation in the research interaction. Bohr’s postulate of the bidirectional relation between “observer and observed” (even if mediated by all the technical apparatus, such as mirror, video camera, lipstick) is well depicted here. All the mentioned aspects form a whole of jointly distinguished parts in a mutual relation. Such a relationship might be properly conceptualized in terms of “inclusive separation” (Valsiner, 1987; this volume, p. 7) based on a complementation process. As Marková (this volume) pointed out, only by virtue of recognizing this wholeness is it possible to achieve scientific knowledge about both the subject and object. Moreover, Excerpt 1 elucidates the role played by some specific preliminary aspects, such us the previous acquaintance between researcher and participant—formerly in a teacher/student relationship—that works in supporting the interaction. Previous history of interaction between the teacher and the student acts like fluidization of complementarity. It seems in line with Bohr’s definition of the phenomena that include all the experimental arrangements, from preparation to follow-up. This question leads to another core topic in the Valsiner’s lecture (this volume) concerning the connection between the Complementarity Principle and irreversible time. As any other kind of human interaction, the research situation is not suspended in time, rather, it happens in a present moment that implies a “before” and “after” along the fixed border of irreversible time (Marsico, 2013b). It means that the complementation process is never complete and does not create a closed loop; instead, it can have reverberations or practical effects in the future, as shown in the Excerpt 2.

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Excerpt 2: Interview #35 (researcher sitting between the camera and the participant who is in front of the mirror) Researcher: Let’s put on the purple. Participant: Pretty . . . (combing her hair) R: Let’s give a touch to the hair . . . P: Here you are (.) I like that! R: Ok (.) want to add something before leaving? P: A peculiar experience (.) maybe I never talked about the make-up (.) how I make-up (.) about why I don’t make-up myself (.) I never gave so many answers (.) but maybe it helped me (.) I found a new lipstick. R: That looks important actually (.) not minor. P: Eh yes . . . pretty (.) I like it! R: All right (.) thank you very much! The dialogical construction of the research interaction built up a unique experience between the researcher and the participant. The latter here seems to find not only a concrete resource (e.g., a new lipstick) in her daily routine, but also a new form of self-consciousness that could be a symbolic resource for the next step of her identity construction. This is a new argument supporting the idea of open complementarity, in the sense that the research interaction is source of change and adaptation for both researchers and participants. Implicitly, psychological science recognizes this characteristic, by building some devices to deal with it, such as the follow-up or restitution procedures. CONCLUSION Once complementarity is introduced in cultural psychology as an epistemological stance, it unveils a number of open issues in the psychological science at large. It radically redefines the borders of the phenomena under study and the role of the researcher. We first argued that complementarity needs further elaboration before being assumed as an axiom of our discipline. The definition of complementarity in psychology implies the recognition of the relationship between the parts of a whole, the unit of analysis in psychological processes as the whole situation of observation, its ontogenesis, development, and follow-up. It makes us understand that the research interaction implies the establishment of a dialogical relationship between the subject and the object. Only this relationship, which comprehends the persons involved in a whole, makes the creation of new knowledge about the subject and the object as distinct but always related entities possible. It also implies that new psychological knowledge is at the same time new ethi-

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cal knowledge and new operational knowledge: “Observation gives way to participation” (Zittoun & Gillespie, this volume, p. 171). The linguistic dimension of complementarity entails that whatever form of description we choose, even statistical description, is a different point of view about qualities that belong to the phenomenon. And the choice of the language of description is attached to a specific frame of reference and ideological background. Psychological processes in irreversible time are characterized by both continuity and discontinuity, evolution and adaptation, implying a “before” and an “after.” Thus it makes no sense to look for static properties of a psychological event once at all times. Piaget, discussing the relationship between psychology and physics, argues that the lesson learned is that we should not understand observables as static entities or “Kantian noumena, because the apparent object of intuition keeps changing into new phenomena as it is studied experimentally” (1979, p. 8). It can be paradoxically said that the knowledge about psychological processes starts with respect to the development of the phenomenon itself during and after the research interaction. Bringing this statement to its extreme consequence, it can be said that scientific psychological knowledge is always oriented towards future development rather than knowledge about similar situations in the past, which is nevertheless the necessary condition for the establishment of a reference framework that, according to Bohr, the subject cannot escape. In this sense, the complementation process is a turning point in the research interaction, to the extent that when the preparation of the observation starts, the researcher is constructing a new wholeness, which will pave the ground for a new phenomenon that will constitute, from that moment on, the observable reality. “Explanation begins only when the operations are not simply applied but are ‘attributed’ to objects in the sense that these then become ‘operators’ and this permits one to understand how they interact” (Piaget, 1979, p. 8). Thus, phenomena are the whole of the conditions that the subject sets up in order to build a research interaction with the object. We, as psychologists, are building playgrounds and establishing the rules of the game. Thus, we must be aware of it and of the fact that people are accepting or rejecting our game and that they can even “cheat.” But from that moment on, we become playmates. Finally, applying the Complementarity Principle to the field of psychology calls for a theoretical revisiting of some of its basic assumptions, such as closeness and temporal limitation of the complementation process in favor of an idea of open complementarity toward the future that seems heuristically more able to grasp the peculiar complexity of humans in interactions.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This work has been funded by the Marie Curie IEF-2012 grant “EPICS. Epistemology in psychological science, the heritage of Giambattista Vico and the cultural psychology.” REFERENCES Bohr, D. (1957). Causality and chance in modern physics. London, UK: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Cole, M. (1996). Cultural psychology: A once and a future discipline. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Favrholdt, D. (1999). Complementarity beyond physics (pp. xxiii–xlix). In NBCW, 10. Folse, H. (1993). Bohr’s framework of complementarity and the realism debate. In J. Faye & H. Folse (Eds.), Niels Bohr and contemporary philosophy (pp. 119–139). Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic. Haney, C., Banks, C., & Zimbardo, P. G. (1972). Interpersonal dynamics in a simulated prison. Stanford, CT: Defense Technical Information Center. Holton, G. (1973). The roots of complementarity. In G. Holton (Ed.), Thematic origins of scientific thought (pp. 151–197). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. James, W. (1950). The principles of psychology, Vol. 1. Mineola, NY: Dover. Katsumori, M. (2011). Niels Bohr’s complementarity. Boston, MA; Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer. Marsico, G. (2013a). Idiographic science. Its polyphonic arena and need for reflexivity. In S. Salvatore, A. Gennaro, & J. Valsiner (Eds.), Making sense of infinite uniqueness. The emerging system of idiographic science. Yearbook of idiographic science, Vol. 4 (pp. 133–146). Charlotte, NC: Information Age. Marsico, G. (2013b). Developing with time: Defining a temporal mereotopology. In L. M. Simão, D. S. Guimarães, & J. Valsiner (Eds.), Temporality: Culture in the flow of human experience. Charlotte, NC: Information Age. Milgram, S. (1995). Obedience to authority: An experimental view. New York, NY: Harper Perennial. NBCW. (1972–2007). Niels Bohr collected works (12 Vols.). Amsterdam, The Netherlands: North-Holland. Piaget, J. (1979). Relations between psychology and other sciences. Annual of Review of Psychology, 30, 1–8. Piechocinska, B. (2005). Physics from wholeness: Dynamical totality as a conceptual foundation for physical theories. Uppsala Dissertations from the Faculty of Science & Technology, 63. Uppsala, Sweden: Uppsala Universitet. PWNB. (1987–1998). The philosophical writings of Niels Bohr (3 Vols.). Woodbridge, CT: Ox Bow. Shepard, R. N. (1987). Toward a universal law of generalization for psychological science. Science, 237, 1317–1323. Shomar, T. (2008). Bohr as a phenomenological realist. Journal for General Philosophy of Science, 39(2), 321–349.

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Tateo, L. (2013). Differently inside. Political psychology and lay thinking. In T. Magioglu (Ed.), Culture and political psychology (pp. 75–83). Charlotte, NC: Information Age. Valsiner, J. (1987). Culture and the development of children’s action. Chichester, UK: Wiley. Valsiner, J. (2011). Constructing the vanishing present between the future and the past. Infancia y Aprendizaje, 34(2), 141–150. Valsiner, J. (2012). A guided science: History of psychology in the mirror of its making. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Weber, R. (1986). Dialogues with scientists and sages: The search for unity. New York, NY: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Wundt, W. (1916). Elements of folk psychology: Outlines of a psychological history of the development of mankind. New York, NY: Macmillan.

CHAPTER 6

FROM DESCRIBING TO RECONSTRUCTING LIFE TRAJECTORIES How the TEA (Trajectory Equifinality Approach) Explicates Context-Dependent Human Phenomena1 Tatsuya Sato, Yuko Yasuda, Mami Kanzaki and Jaan Valsiner

Culture is a difficult term to define. It is similar to any other metalevel notion. We easily use them, but the very moment we are asked to clarify their meaning, we are in trouble. We may end up giving very general explanations. Thus, Klempe (2014, this volume) started his lecture on cultural psychology in Aalborg with the most basic understanding that culture is about everything human beings are experiencing. But how do we experience everything? What is the value of bringing the notion of culture as a general scientific term back to psychology? Crossroad Within Psychology In psychology as a scientific discipline, there are two different approaches to treat cultural phenomenon. One of these is habitually called Cultural Psychology and Its Future: Complementarity in a New Key, pages 93–105. Copyright © 2014 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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cross-cultural psychology and another, cultural psychology. Why this distinction? Cross-cultural psychology often employs (but is not necessarily limited to) the traditional strategy of group comparisons in establishing knowledge about the abstract collective entities psychologists call “cultures” (Valsiner, 2003, Fig.1). Each person in Japan can be said to “belong to” the abstract conglomerate of human beings unified in the label “the Japanese culture.” Similarly, people in Jylland and Saelland are assumed to “belong” to the “Danish culture.” Cross-cultural psychologists would then proceed to compare samples from each with one another, assuming that the “cultures” that are thus compared are qualitatively homogeneous abstract entities. From this viewpoint, we can say that the person “belongs to” culture. Culture exists by itself and people are “bathing in culture.” Human beings in the United States “take a shower” in “American culture,” while the people in Japan “sit in the bathtub” of “the Japanese culture.” And they take into themselves what they are immersed in—they become “American” or “Japanese”—and can be therefore compared as such. This kind of discourse is understandable for us at the level of common sense. But for advancing our scientific knowledge, it may be an impasse. Global migration of human beings makes the previous national borders more unclear. Countries in the European Union open their borders for the movement of labor—the “English culture” seen this way may soon be mostly Polish, in a similar way as the “German culture” may soon gain a strong Turkish accent. From the point of view of cross-cultural psychology, a culture is a kind of salad bowl, and person in it is a kind of vegetable. Persons stay in a culture like vegetables in a salad bowl. ”Culture shock” is a representative phenomenon based on the cross-cultural paradigm. If one person from one culture goes and stays in another culture, s/he may experience a psychological shock in many aspects. In this view, different cultures have existed before the person transits cultures. In contrast, culture in cultural psychology has a different role. Culture can be seen as systemic organizer of the psychological systems of individual persons. So we have to say that culture “belongs to” the person. At first glance, this seems counterintuitive—how can something that designates a collective entity “belong to” each individual person. It is irrelevant to which ethnic group, or country, the persons “belong to,” since culture is functioning within the intrapsychological systems of each person. But how? Cultural psychologists answer that culture belongs to a person through their involvement in social institutions and through the notion of the human use of signs—linking this psychology with semiotics. Thus cultural psychology starts from the sampling of an individual person together with his/her participation in social institutions (Valsiner, 2001, p. 36; 2003).

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Cultural Psychology and the Importance of the Promoter Sign We need authentic methodology for cultural psychology. Cultural psychology is developmental in its core: it studies people of any age level as a developing system within a developing social context (Valsiner, 2007). And the notion of the human capacity to construct signs is key to its methodology. The relationship between a subject and an object is mediated by a medium such as language and sign. Even though this tradition of thought extends back at least to figures such as Wundt and Peirce, Vygotsky’s triangle has a glorious position in cultural psychology (Figure 1). However, we should point out that this famous scheme of the triangle is rather static, not dynamic. From our point of view, the Vygotskian triangle is timeless and seems to be based on the closed systemic view. So it is a stable model. The means— tools or signs—are presented as if these are given. Yet they are not—they are created. People create artificial signs. Artificial signs make it possible for indicating adequate and/or inadequate behavior. Of course, various kinds of natural stuff might work as a sign in some situations, but the act of sign construction is that of creating human artifacts. Anything from inventing baby diapers to that of clothes shown off at fashion shows are human constructed objects—functional, yet with meanings that go far beyond their use value. One of the important characteristics of the sign-mediation process is its redundancy. There are so many signs around one person in his/her life. Though we are surrounded by signs, almost all signs are selectively utilized. A sign affects a person in a particular way at one place and at one time. Even though one sign may affect many persons, this is not essential for thinking about the sign. It is important that irreversible time is introduced into this picture— a sign is created by a person within a chronotope. The notion of chronotope was coined by Bakhtin for purposes of literary criticism in the 1930s (Bakhtin, 1930s/1981). Here we use the notion of chronotope to indicate

FIGURE 1. The Vygotskian triangle (Subject-Means-Object).

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FIGURE 2.

Finding the rabbit.

the complementary nature of time and place. Time and place are not opposite components in human lives. In philosophical thinking, we can divide the two notions in the sphere of ideas. The notion of chronotope expresses the complementary nature of time and place. Furthermore, the notion of promoter sign (a sign that provides metalevel guidance for approaching the future) is suitable for explaining the nature of the chronotope in cultural psychology. The promoter sign is novel and innovative for both person and environment. It is not the “stimulus” of unconditioned reflex—the same objective thing/event rarely activates/inhibits the same actions of different people. For example, can you find the rabbit on the mountain in the photo below (Figure 2)? The mountain is Azuma Fuji in Fukushima prefecture. The snow that remains on the mountain in the photo takes on the form of a “rabbit.” Farmers in Fukushima call it the “seed-planting rabbit,” because it represents the climate favorable for planting and informs the proper temperature for the start of spring rice crop. Whenever rice farmers see the snow rabbit, they start the planting. Farmers never obey the calendar time. That means farmers start their work on a different day each year. The shape of the rabbit is a promoter sign for Fukushima farmers (Sato & Valsiner, 2010).

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Not all outer events stimulate the person to action. Sometimes a sign emerges and sometimes a sign promotes conduct. Vygotsky’s triangle of sign-mediated process fails to express the dynamic aspect of the sign. Hence, we admit the need to introduce the notion of “promoter sign” (Valsiner, 2004; 2007, Ch.1). The promoter sign is not an immediate sign a person uses to act, but a metalevel sign that guides the direction of use of other signs that in their turn guide actual conduct. Complementary Equifinality With TEA (Trajectory Equifinality Approach). Cultural psychologists have to abandon the simple “cause-effect” kind of explanation. Elementalistic causality (factor X causes Y; e.g., “intelligence” causes success in problem solving) is not important for cultural psychology. Instead, cultural psychologists take systems theory seriously for constructing new methodology, theory, and epistemology. The Trajectory Equifinality Approach (TEA) is such a methodological, theoretical, and epistemological construct, invented in 2004 and developed gradually since then. This accomplishes three tasks that psychology has had difficulties in conceptualizing: A.

B.

C.

Uniting the psychologically real and the imaginary through the construction of a model of life trajectories within irreversible time; Creating molar (Gestalt—“analysis into minimal functional wholes”—in the words of Lev Vygotsky) units of analysis rather than moving to the reductionist “analyses into elements,” and Creating the arena for developing ways of analyzing oppositions (tensions) that cross the line of past and future.

TEA is a triarchic construction in cultural psychology, which consists of three subcomponents. These are the Three Layer Model of Genesis (TLMG), Historically Structured Sampling (HSS) and Trajectory Equifinality Model (TEM). As we would explain later, TEM is the flagship of TEA, which is a methodology for describing life within irreversible time (Kadianaki, 2009; de Mattos & Chaves, 2013; Sato, Hidaka, & Fukuda, 2009; Sato et al., 2012). It has some basic notions, such as Bifurcation point (BFP), Equifinality point (EFP), and Trajectory. The notion of irreversible time, which originates in Henri Bergson’s philosophy, is a premise of TEM. In fact, there can be no TEM without irreversible time. In Figure 3, BFP is depicted as an ellipse and EFP is depicted as a rectangle. Simply speaking, BFP is a point that has alternative options to go,

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FIGURE 3.

Basic notions of TEM within irreversible time.

and EFP is a point that multiple trajectories reach. Later, these notions will be discussed in a more theoretical way. Historically Structured Sampling (HSS) is a methodology of sampling for qualitative inquiry (Sato et al, 2007; Valsiner & Sato, 2006). HSS is inevitably related to EFP as a research focus. Researchers set their spontaneous interesting research focus by themselves (neither obeying professor’s instruction nor reading antecedent references). Then, HSS makes it possible to pick up participants who experienced an Equifinality point while arriving there through very different life course trajectories (neither random sampled people nor college students). On the other hand, the Three Layer Model of Genesis (TLMG) is related to BFP. TLMG is a framework for understanding the transactional nature of signs as they are organized into a working dialogical self system at the levels of microgenesis, mesogenesis, and ontogenesis (Figure 4). Here, the authors imply that the self is not a homogeneous entity but a complex process of different voices. TLMG makes it possible to understand how signs emerge at a particular time and place (i.e., at bifurcation) in a life trajectory. The human immediate living experience is primarily microgenetic, occurring as the person faces the ever-new moments (Valsiner, 2007, Ch. 7). The mesogenetic process is activity-context dependent, and the mesogenetic level consists of relatively repetitive situated activity frames, or setting. The ontogenesis level is the most enduring aspect of human (cultural) life. In this level, some selected experiences come into relatively stable meaning structures that guide the person within his or her life course (Valsiner, 1998). So the ontogenetic level is a kind of value system of person.

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FIGURE 4. ese).

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Relation between ontogenesis, mesogenesis, microgenesis (Aktualgen-

In Figure 4, the dash line expresses the process of microgenesis (in German, Aktualgenese), the ellipse in the middle expresses the mesogenetic level, and the half ellipse on the top expresses the ontogenesis. Here, the mesogenetic level is a really interesting focus for cultural psychology. Neither direct living experiences nor stable value and/or personality is suitable for TEM in cultural psychology. TEM in cultural psychology tries to depict the transformation of person at the mesogenetic level by paying attention on the promoter sign. EFP is a point where/when activities are guided to move in one direction. And the central issue is that of mesogenetic selectivity. Irreversible and pervasive time becomes asymmetric after the moment the promoter sign emerges in EFP. Restating it from the reverse perspective, BFP is a moment of “broom of time” (Figure 5) (Anisov, 2001), which

FIGURE 5. Anisov’s model of “broom of time”: Past and future are asymmetric.

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FIGURE 6. The TEA complex.

makes PRESENT time a boundary between half past and half future within irreversible time. The notion of irreversible time derives from the phenomenology of Bergson in the first place. This notion may here approach the existentialism of Søren Kierkegaard through the notion of the “broom of time.” The triarchic scheme of TEA is depicted as a figure (Figure 6). HSS, TEM, and TLMG are indispensable wheels of a triarchic scheme for understanding the human life course within irreversible time. TEM is the flagship of these three subcomponents of TEA. Trajectory Equifinality Model (TEM) is a new proposal to describe human development from the perspective of cultural psychology. Simply speaking, TEM focuses on the human experience of transformation within irreversible time in an individual’s life course. And TEM expresses the idiographic life trajectories using many conceptual tools. TEM aims to describe the transaction between human and environment. People construe their life courses by selecting one possible option from a range of options at one time. The TEM relies heavily upon the notion of equifinality that originated in the general systems theory (GST) of von Bertalanffy (1968) and is rooted

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in the early biological work of Hans Driesch. Von Bertalanffy pioneered the organismic conception of biology from which GST developed (Valsiner & Sato, 2006). He regarded living organisms, including human beings, as open, not closed, systems. Equifinality means that the same state may be reached from different initial conditions and in different ways within irreversible time. The notion of equifinality implies the multicourses for the same equifinality point (EFP). The equifinality point (EFP) is the research focus in which researchers have interests in comparing different developing systems—people, entering higher education, the infertile experience of married women, an occasion for authentic reflection of delinquent adolescent, decision to go study abroad, and so on. All these examples involve the convergence of different unique developmental trajectories temporarily to one area—EFP—through which they need to move in order to develop further (Figure 7). EFP sets the stage for bifurcation—trajectories of different developing systems need to first converge in order to have a possibility for further divergence. EFPs are the places where cultural processes can be studied precisely, because EFP is the common ground for construction of new divergence between different life courses. TEM is not usable across different developmental courses, but within each of them—looking at tensions that are present at the given moment, generated across the boundary between the past and the future of the given developing system. As shown in Figure 8, TEM involves comparison of two tensions—one in the past (real A and B—the imagined past of “what could have happened had circumstances been different”) and one in the future (C and D, both imaginary projections into the future). Based on the metalevel coordination of the two tensions (AB and CD), we can analyze the development of the system toward its future. A complementary notion to EFP is its imaginary alternative: Polarized Equifinality Point (PEFP). This is an alternative equifinality point to which

FIGURE 7. The basic notion of bifurcation as it emerges after EFP (Equifinality Point).

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FIGURE 8. The minimal basic unit of TEM—an idiographic analytic scheme at the border of time between past and future.

the different trajectories could have converged had the past imaginary trajectory (B in Figure 8) been selected. It creates the contrast—real EFP hereand-now with that of its polarized counterpoint (PEFP). Finding oneself in the middle of a joint productive seminar (EFP) can be contrasted by one participant with the polarized opposite of “what a miserable day it seems to be” (PEFP) that s/he felt in the morning waking up. The contrast of the productivity at the seminar is made with another state—“miserable day”— which could have happened but did not. This process of finding appropriate PEFP is neither inductive nor deductive, it’s abductive. In this case, “miserable daily life” may be a PEFP. Or “fruitful work at home” may be another. Another participant could feel “the seminar is interesting (EFP), but I could have been more productive staying at home and working there (PEFP).” These are only abductive hypotheses, so researchers think deeper and deeper both inductively and deductively. And at last, researchers end up with an abductive thinking to find an appropriate concept of EFP and PEFP in the given case. Because this is an imaginary example, we cannot go further. What we want to say is that PEFP represents not opposite but something complementary and is a core of TEM (and TEA). In this imaginary case, the person had difficulty deciding and fluctuated between two complementary PEFPs. The generalized notion of complementarity2 leads us to look at the other side of experiences, contrasting the realized with the unrealized. Realized

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experiences and unrealized experiences should not be exclusively divided. Rather, complementary experiences are under a condition of inclusive separation (Valsiner, 1987). These experiences have boundaries that function as a psychological membrane (Marsico, Cabell, Valsiner, & Kharlamov, 2013). In an analogy with biological membranes, psychological boundaries are structures that enable the maintenance and development of the human psyche in its cultural organization. Signs people create regulate the conditions of such membranes. This is similar to the experience of looking at Rubin’s classic “vase versus faces” figure. Vase and profile of two faces emerge in our perception moment to moment and fluctuate back and forth. Nevertheless, Rubin’s base figure doesn’t express time itself.3 The triarchic frame of TEA (TEM, HSS, and TLMG) in cultural psychology directs us to describe the moment-to-moment fluctuations in irreversible time. And such an approach leads cultural psychology toward a Wissenschaft of human experience. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The authors especially thank Brady Wagoner and Nandita Chaudhary for their communication during the writing process. NOTES 1.

2.

3.

This chapter is based on the lecture at Two Seminars in Aalborg: Inauguration of the Niels Bohr Professorship, on March, 15, 2013—“Methodological affordances of TEM (Trajectory Equifinality Model)” The notion of complementarity is, first and foremost, a meta-theoretical notion that was arrived at by Niels Bohr inductively, as an effort to make sense of experimental evidence (Valsiner, 2013). Gestalt psychology originated in Ehrenfels’ essay “On Gestalt Qualities [Über Gestaltqualitäten]”(Ehrenfels, 1890/1988). From his perspective gestalt qualities are not structure but process. In other word, if time doesn’t exist, gestalt qualities cannot be perceived by person. REFERENCES

Anisov, A. (2001). Svoistva vremeni [Features of time]. Logical Studies, 6, 1–22. Bakhtin, M. M. (1930s/1981). The dialogic imagination. Austin: University of Texas Press. de Mattos, E., & Chaves, A. M. (2013). Semiotic regulation through inhibitor signs: Creating a cycle of rigid meanings. Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science, 47, 95–122.

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Kadianaki, I. (2009). Dramatic life courses: Migrants in the making. In J. Valsiner, P. C. M. Molenaar, M. C. D. P. Lyra, & N. Chaudhary (Eds.), Dynamic process methodology in the social and developmental sciences (pp. 477–492). New York, NY: Springer. Klempe, S. H. (2014). Kierkegaard, Kitchen, Complementarity and Cultural Psychology: A Thought Experiment. In this volume (pp. Marsico, G., Cabell, K. R., Valsiner, J., & Kharlamov, N. (2013). Interobjectivity as a border: The fluid dynamics of “betweenness.” In G.. Sammut, P. Daanen, & F. Moghaddam (Eds.), Understanding self and others: Explorations in intersubjectivity and interobjectivity. London, UK: Routledge. Sato, T., Fukuda, M., Hidaka, T., Kido, A., Nishida, N., & Akasaka, M. (2012). The authentic culture of living well: Pathways to psychological well-being. In J. Valsiner (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of culture and psychology. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Sato, T., Hidaka, T., & Fukuda, M. (2009). Depicting the dynamics of living the life: The trajectory equifinality model. In J. Valsiner, P. Molenaar, M. Lyra, & N. Chaudhary (Eds.), Dynamic process methodology in the social and developmental sciences (pp. 217–240). New York, NY: Springer. Retrieved from http://www. bath.ac.uk/csat/davidparkin/documents-nov09/Paper3_13-11-09.pdf Sato, T., & Valsiner, J. (2010). Time in life and life in time: Between experiencing and accounting. Ritsumeikan Journal of Human Sciences, 20, 79–92. Retrieved from http://www.ritsumeihuman.com/uploads/publication/ningen_20/ p079-092.pdf Sato, T., Yasuda, Y., Kido, A., Arakawa, A., Mizoguchi, H., & Valsiner, J. (2007). Sampling reconsidered: Idiographic science and the analyses of personal life trajectories. In J. Valsiner & A. Rosa (Eds.), Cambridge handbook of socio-cultural psychology (pp. 82–106). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Valsiner, J. (1987). Culture and the development of children’s action. Chichester, UK: Wiley. Valsiner, J. (1998). The guided mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Valsiner, J. (2001). Comparative study of human cultural development. Madrid, Spain: Fundacion Infancia y Aprendizaje. Valsiner, J. (2003). Culture and its transfer: Ways of creating general knowledge through the study of cultural particulars. In W. J. Lonner, D. L. Dinnel, S. A. Hayes, & D. N. Sattler (Eds.), Online readings in psychology and culture (unit 2, ch. 12). Center for Cross-Cultural Research, Western Washington University, Bellingham. Retrieved from http://www.wwu.edu/culture/Valsiner.htm Valsiner, J. (2004, July 12). The promoter sign: Developmental transformation within the structure of dialogical self. Paper presented at the biennial meeting of the International Society for the Study of Behavioural Development (ISSBD), Gent, (Symposium on developmental aspects of the dialogical self, Hubert Hermans, Convener) Valsiner, J. (2007). Culture in minds and societies. New Delhi, India: Sage. Valsiner, J. (2013, March 15). Cultural psychology and its future: Complementarity in a new key. Paper presented Inaugural Lecture of the Niels Bohr Professorship Centre of Cultural Psychology, University of Aalborg, Denmark.

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Valsiner, J., & Sato, T. (2006). Historically structured sampling (HSS): How can psychology’s methodology become tuned in to the reality of the historical nature of cultural psychology? In J. Straub, D. Weidemann, C. Kölbl, & B. Zielke (Eds.), Pursuit of meaning (pp. 215–251). Bielefeld, Germany: Transcription. Retrieved from http://dl.dropbox.com/u/21182085/valsiner2006.pdf von Bertalanffy, L. (1968). General systems theory. New York, NY: George Braziller. von Ehrenfels, C. (1890). Über Gestaltqualitäten. Vierteljahresschr für Philosophie, 14, 249–292. von Ehrenfels, C. (1890/1988). On “Gestalt qualities.” In B. Smith (Ed. & Trans.), Foundations of Gestalt theory (pp. 82–117). Wien, Austria: Philosophia Verlag.

CHAPTER 7

DEVELOPING IDIOGRAPHIC RESEARCH METHODOLOGY Extending the Trajectory Equifinality Model and Historically Situated Sampling Eric Jensen and Brady Wagoner

Research in cultural psychology, like any other discipline, is developing norms and models of how best to conduct research consistent with its guiding theories. In Jaan Valsiner’s inaugural lecture, he advocated the “Trajectory Equifinality Model” (TEM) as a framework for conducting social research with high validity, in line with the guiding theories of cultural psychology. The TEM provides a framework that centers on key episodes in individuals’ life trajectory, focusing on one shared Equifinality Point (i.e., life outcome, stage, stopping point, etc. such as having a child or graduating high school) per study. The framework has been developed by Tatsuya Sato, Jaan Valsiner, and colleagues (Sato, Hidaka, & Fukuda, 2009; Sato, Yasuda, Kanzaki, & Valsiner, this volume). It represents a radical departure from conventional approaches to social research in psychology, sociology, and other disciplines. It is more structured than an anthropological approach, yet more open than a conventional social psychology study. Cultural Psychology and Its Future: Complementarity in a New Key, pages 107–118. Copyright © 2014 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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This chapter reviews and critically evaluates the TEM, its tenets, and its methodological implications. The model very helpfully emphasizes the importance of not turning processes into things and the role of alternative possibilities in a life lived forward in irreversible time. However, we will argue that the TEM underplays the role of external, constraining factors in social life, downplaying the power of context in favor of a subject-centered model of social life. This chapter recommends extending the model and data-collection methods in a number of ways. We seek to clarify the point that individual transformation and decision-making processes are more continuous and externally influenced than is typically highlighted in TEM. We advocate extending the analytical emphasis of the TEM from the Bifurcation Points to a more continuous form of microgenetic data collection, which identifies decision-making processes as they develop over time (Wagoner, 2009; Wagoner & Jensen, in press). From this perspective, forks in the road of one’s life (i.e., bifurcation points) are the visible manifestation of a process that may have been set in motion some time before. Lastly, we recommend employing a broader range of data-collection methods to fill in important details that are not fully addressed by retrospective qualitative interviews, which has generally been used in TEM research. Moving Beyond Bifurcation Points Sato et al. (this volume) define TEM’s focus with the concept of equifinality, which is drawn from general systems theory (von Bertalanffy, 1968): “Equifinality means that the same state may be reached from different initial conditions and in different ways within the irreversible time.” In any given research project, the researcher can set an Equifinality Point (EFP) (e.g., university graduation) based on his or her interest. Research participants will then be selected based on having arrived at the EFP rather than randomly sampled from a population. This is what Sato et al. (this volume) call Historically Situated Sampling (HSS). The research then considers the “complementary set” of alternative possible outcomes between the EFP (e.g., graduating) and the Polarized Equifinality Point (PEFP) (e.g., not graduating). The key operational concept is Bifurcation Points (BP), that is, forks in the road along one’s life trajectory, which become the battlefield of social guidance. The strength of the TEM model lies in its modeling of the life course in irreversible time, its unification of the real and imaginary, and its shift from a cause-effect model (e.g., A causes B) to one in which the person is considered an active agent in their own development. Moreover, the TEM highlights the incredibly important fact that social reality is contingent: We travel one pathway (at the individual, organizational, and societal levels), but there are many other possible pathways that we could have taken. Without diminishing these considerable accomplishments, we

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wish to make a number of criticisms and clarifications with the aim of contributing to the further development of the approach. A point left unelaborated by TEM (though hinted at with the notions of “social guidance” and “social direction” along a trajectory; Sato et al., 2009) is that life transformations may begin much earlier than the point in which they become externally visible (i.e., BP) to the researcher or even the person themselves. An individual may begin to internally undergo a transformation or make a decision presaging a transformation at any point, not just at bifurcation points. Moreover, the development of “choices” is grounded in prior personal history and situational influences broadly defined. At the level of situational influences, we are exposed to a variety of factors contributing to our perspectives and decisions. At the level of one’s personal decision-making, a selected trajectory will be the product of factors that have developed over time paired with an improvisational and idiosyncratic dimension that would be more resistant to prediction. Many of these factors may not be visible to the individual in question, who instead constructs plausible explanations to rationalize apparent “choices.” For example, Moscovici (1980) describes how contact with alternative social suggestions can cause change in the person through an unconscious “sleeper effect.” This internalization of situational influences over time should be contextualized within societal and physical structures. Classical sociology made its mark in the 19th and early 20th centuries in part by revealing the contingency of societal development, as well as the idea that our “chosen” pathways may be driven by unseen social and economic forces that systematically benefit certain individuals while disadvantaging others. From this perspective, what appears at first glance to be the result of “choice” is in fact primarily driven by larger social and personal factors that may not even be fully recognized by the person. Zittoun and Gillespie (this volume) point out how this can underplay the role of external, constraining contextual factors that delimit individuals’ options without their consent, prior involvement, or sometimes even conscious awareness they are being affected. For example, if you are using the TEM to study the EFP of morbid obesity among poor minority children, many of the precipitating factors may operate at a metatrajectory level. The EFP of obesity may be affected by a plethora of external constraining factors such as the relatively low cost of high fat, high sugar foods compared to healthier options, socalled food deserts in low income neighborhoods where only fast food restaurants are operating (no grocery stores) and economic reliance on free or reduced cost school-provided meals that are high in fat and sugar, low on nutrients. There will be some choices and potential alternative pathways along the way for these children, but many alternatives are precluded due to socioeconomic circumstances. Moreover, if you asked these individuals themselves, they would probably not be fully aware of these constraining

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factors leading them to obesity. This means that the equifinality point is reached not merely through the individual negotiating a series of potential pathways as they travel through irreversible time, but also a gauntlet of circumscribed options and closed doors. If one only considers the decision points and ignores the constraining role of this kind of context, the resulting picture of the phenomenon under study will be skewed in such a way that macrolevel structural factors are hidden by the appearance of individual choice. Developing the Methodological Toolkit for the TEM This chapter now turns to a more critical consideration of some of the specific methods of sampling and data collection that have been proposed to operationalize the TEM. Sato et al. (this volume) highlight the problem that “researchers tend not to pay attention to unrealized experience.” Consideration of alternative pathways is indeed highly limited in much social research (to its detriment). However, the TEM, as it is currently articulated, suggests that the realized and unrealized can be analyzed in the same way. This raises methodological issues in terms of how unrealized experience can be validly identified. While realized experiences are more likely to leave a kind of observable wake that can be used to verify their status, unrealized experiences can only be accessed by the individual who took a different trajectory. Given that our memory is constructive rather than reproductive (Bartlett, 1932), faithfully accessing unrealized experiences is a fraught undertaking. A researcher seeking such data is likely to encounter the full range of methodological limitations affecting retrospective autobiographical accounts. In such accounts, the beginning and end of a process tend to be privileged at the expense of the unfolding dynamics between. Furthermore, remembering is now widely considered to serve the function of constructive adaptation to the present circumstances rather than simply being a static register of past experiences (Wagoner, 2012, 2013). Moreover, the construction of the past is conducted with the help of cultural tools (such as narratives), which shape the way a memory is reported. As such, what appear to be similar life trajectories for several people who have reached a particular EFP may in fact represent a shared narrative of the past that operates as a resource at the EFP to help individuals cope with the present and orient to the future. In sum, what retrospective accounts give us is not so much an accurate description of what really happened but a semiotic tool we use in the present to rationalize the past and live forward in time. Given these reconstructive processes, we contend that contemporaneous data collection about an ongoing decision-making process should supplement retrospective data. In Figure 1, we adapt Sato et al.’s (this volume) framework to highlight where external influences should be envisioned

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FIGURE 1. volume).

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Extending the TEM Research Focus (adapted from Sato et al., this

and the points at which contemporaneous data collection could be targeted. The rectangles in the revised model identify where we recommend placing the primary focus for data collection rather than relying purely on reconstructive memory processes by using interview-based accounts long after the key events or processes have taken place. The arrows highlight the role of external influences, which may apply pressure without being explicitly recognized by the subject. For example, we are subject to economic and political forces, many of which exist without our knowledge or consent. These arrows point to the influence of external forces that are internalized within an individual as they make their way in life, as well as their influence constraining or reinforcing particular possible future trajectories. For example, rising tuition fees may exert a constraining external influence on the possible future trajectory of going to university. The Risks of Historically Structured Sampling (HSS) The sampling method associated with the TEM is referred to as a “historically situated sampling,” involving nonrandom selection of a small number of individuals who share an equifinality point. In this section, we will critique HSS for only working backwards from an EFP and an overreliance on retrospective accounts. Only sampling those who reach a shared EFP can yield an incomplete picture of the phenomenon under study. This approach means the researcher would be leaving out the individuals who ended up taking alternative tra-

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jectories, leading them to other EFPs (and therefore outside the scope of a project based around a particular EFP). This sampling approach of starting with individuals who have reached a particular end point and working backwards can lead to specious inferences about the phenomenon under study. For example, if we were researching university dropouts, we might find a consistent movement down the pathway of heavy drinking. This would suggest that decisions about whether or not to drink and how extensively are key BPs in the trajectory toward dropping out. However, we may find the same decisions being made by those who do not drop out, suggesting that other factors would provide a better explanation. If the researcher also conducted data collection on those who did not reach the EFP (e.g., graduating), they would have a clearer view of the distinctiveness of certain pathways. The solution is to conduct some research in a forward direction (contemporaneously and with the participant projecting forward) to reveal the variegated EFPs that can emerge from the same trajectory. Another issue with starting from an EFP and working backwards is that the same life pathway can be viewed in radically different (even incommensurable) terms from different individual vantage points. Many of us travel life pathways that are similar to others at points in our lives (e.g., attendance at a university, driving the same stretch of road, watching the same television program). What is similar about those pathways and what is different is essential for us to understand. Yet the diversity of these life pathways would not be fully revealed using a historically situated sampling. This would be most effectively established using contemporaneous data collection focused around the bifurcation points. The risk that the researcher will get a skewed overall understanding of the phenomenon under study (even as the identified trajectories could still be validly analyzed) due to a restricted sample that does not reveal important possibilities and alternative pathways. This criticism of a historically situated sampling is not based on the quantitative (statistical) concern about sampling bias resulting in failure to accurately represent the distribution of particular attributes in a population. Rather, this criticism stems from the qualitative research concern about representing as much diversity as possible within the phenomenon under study (e.g., see Bauer & Aarts, 2000). By limiting the research to those who have reached a defined EFP, the potential diversity of trajectories and intratrajectory perspectives represented in the study may be undermined. Unlocking the Data Collection Toolkit for the TEM A specific data-collection approach for conducting TEM research studies was proposed at the seminar led by Tatsuya Sato. Sato advocates conducting data collection for each individual through retrospective qualitative interviews that aim to develop intersubjectivity between researcher and subject.

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We contend that this proposed method’s reliance on postexperience retrospective interviewing is unnecessarily limiting and should be extended substantially to enrich TEM-guided research. Specifically, we recommend employing contemporaneous data collection that allows the researcher to see processes of trajectory development as they unfold. Zittoun and Gillespie (this volume) rightly point out that researching the postexperience process of “translating that experience in further modalities and communicating to or with others” leaves out crucial aspects of the experience itself: “Using interviews or recording more naturalistic discussion, it is relatively easy to have access to peoples’ attempts to assimilate experiences verbally. What has proved more difficult to access and thus study is the initial embodied experiences.” The photographs they include in their chapter highlight some of the embodied dimensions that could be left out of a purely retrospective interview-based study of art experiences. To these examples, we can add the following image from a study of socially excluded young mothers entering an art museum for the first time as part of an “outreach” program (Figure 2). Clearly, being told that these mothers and their children participated in a storytelling activity held within the art gallery does not fully replace being able to see it as it occurred: However, as we go on to argue below, this is just scratching the surface of the crucial empirical details that can be lost from view through overreliance on postexperience interviews as the default data-collection method. Relying upon retrospective accounts of key decision-making points (i.e., Bifurcation Points within the TEM) is also likely to distort the temporal

FIGURE 2.

Storytelling activity in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, UK.

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aspects of the decision-making process while collapsing the process into a narrow range of possibilities that are evident to the interview participant at the time of the interview. Such accounts are likely to distill slowly developing insights reinforced over time into epiphanies and crystalizing moments in a subject’s retrospective narrative, reinforcing an unrealistically discontinuous vision of life trajectories. This exacerbates the issues with the current articulation of Bifurcation Points identified earlier in this chapter. Beyond the methodological concerns expressed by Zittoun and Gillespie (this volume), the limitations of retrospective interview-based accounts of experiences or life trajectory episodes extend well beyond their difficulties capturing embodied dimensions of such experiences. Limitations can include ex post facto rationalization processes, memory failures, as well as unintentional reconstruction of the past, thereby distorting the representation of possible trajectories and decision-making processes. In order to illustrate some of the limitations of exclusive reliance on retrospective self-report, we present a detailed example below from a study of young mothers engaged by the aforementioned outreach program, who became enmeshed in arts and craft activities during the outreach experience at the art museum. In Figure 3, a mother can be seen working on the craft activity with a smile on her face while the child is looking away. In Figure 4, another mother is completing the first craft activity while her child has moved to the next table to begin the second craft activity.

FIGURE 3.

Mother enjoying craft activity (11-24-2009).

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Mother completes craft activity (11-24-2009).

Such observational evidence of direct enjoyment of the art and craft activity by participating mothers could be missed by a purely retrospective research study. This gap between word and deed can be seen in the self-reports provided by mothers during their postexperience (retrospective) interviews. The retrospective interview data painted a different picture, with the participants reluctant to admit their participation and enjoyment of the experience. For example, in the following interview extract with one of the mothers, she appears to have trouble with her pronouns due to her efforts to retrospectively frame the art experience as for her 3-year-old child, not her. ”Liz” brought her 3-year-old son to this event. Interviewer: What did you think of [the experience]? Liz: I love it. Well, I say I love it: [My son] loves it, I should say. But yes. Interviewer: What do [son’s name] and you like about it? Liz: I like the fact that you can just—know he can’t—but you can just wander around and look at things. And you go and do the arts

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class, which he enjoys and I do as well. . . . I think these [family outreach visits] are a good idea, these groups [visiting the art museum]. And it’s just really good for him, so we [keep] coming along . . . He loves it. (Interview at Fitzwilliam Museum on Day of Visit, November 24, 2009; emphasis in original) In the extract above, the participant hesitates to admit that she enjoys the art and craft activities, quickly correcting herself to say that it is actually her son who “loves it.” This shows the reconstructive process in this mother’s struggle to present her preferred narrative of this visit being for her child (despite the observed enjoyment in Figures 3 and 4). If this research study did not have the observational and within-experience interview data, the results would only reflect the mothers’ retrospective rationalization of their experience based on factors such as social desirability. While such rationalizations are interesting, they hide the details of the unfolding experience, which may explain its value for the participants. Thus, the examples above highlight the importance of gathering data at multiple points within an experience, not just at the end (or at a set “equifinality point”). Without these additional data points, the qualitative researcher is trading the cause-effect model for a differently limited set of retrospective subjective viewpoints. There are a number of ways that cultural psychologists could expand their research perspectives, taking greater account of “inprocess” developments. Two major options we will suggest here are ethnography and microgenetic research. However, there are certainly a range of other methodological options to achieve the goals of (a) contemporaneous research analyzing transformations in life trajectories while they are still developing, (b) making visible the distinction between internally and externally visible transformations, and (c) broadening the analysis to include external, observable factors that may not be visible to the individual. Ethnography is a well-established qualitative research method favored by social anthropologists and some sociologists. The data-collection method of participant observation includes contemporaneous qualitative interviewing and open-ended observation of the phenomenon under study. Interviews are generally conducted either during or around key events. The goal of ethnography is to illuminate the “imponderabilia” of life. These are “phenomena . . . which cannot possibly be recorded by questioning [i.e., interviewing] . . . but have to be observed in their full actuality” (Malinowski 1922, p. 18). As such, this method would build a fuller picture of the developing life trajectory or particular life episodes than a purely retrospective account. Microgenetic research involves data collection at multiple time points, not just the start and finish of a process (Wagoner & Jensen, in press). It can be conducted with questionnaires, collecting responses to the same open-

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ended items repeatedly. However, questionnaires may not be the most effective means of collecting microgenetic data. Even with multiple data-collection points, the discontinuous nature of questionnaire data-collection results in the persistence of a degree of uncertainty about the process of development within the phenomenon under study. The optimal data-collection model for this methodological approach is continuous, for example, first-person video or audio recording of participants’ experiences during key social events. Such continuous recording would preferably be paired with methods requiring participants to make visible their thought process, such as capturing naturally occurring pair or small group interactions, collecting questionnaire data at key points, and qualitative interviewing immediately following key events. Such integrated continuous and discontinuous data collection within a microgenetic framework could add considerable detail, enabling a better understanding of the distinction between internally and externally visible transformations at the level of individual cases. CONCLUSION In this chapter, we have attempted to extend the TEM to more fully account for the rich details of life trajectories. We have highlighted the role of situational influences within trajectory development both in orienting the individual and circumscribing the range of available life options. Structural factors and continuous development over time are key factors that underpin and sometimes presage the configuration of pathways available to the individual. Methodologically, the TEM needs to acknowledge the special challenge posed by the idea of researching unrealized life pathways. The methodological solution we argue for is contemporaneous data collection. By only looking retrospectively, the researcher lacks important details about the setting, the range of options under consideration prospectively, and the complex set of factors (including embodied dimensions of an experience) that affect how a life trajectory develops. To reveal the multifaceted nature of experience, including embodiment and meaning-making, we need to see the empirical details of how trajectories unfold across a number of different cases, ideally with people of very different backgrounds. By only focusing on those individuals who reach a specified EFP, one loses access to those who took other pathways or for whom the specified EFP was never a viable option. Thus, while the projected possibilities are important, they should be investigated contemporaneously to gain a fuller understanding of the range of options and the decision-making process of the individuals. Moreover, a broader perspective is needed to account for structural/contextual constraints on action and possibilities. This is essentially the qualitative research approach in disciplines such as sociology and communication to addressing phenomena of this kind: Cultural psychologists need to either

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demonstrate in which ways the TEM and similar models offer advantages over well-established qualitative approaches or to find a way to incorporate the qualitative research paradigm into the TEM, as has been suggested in this chapter. In this chapter, we have argued for extending the methodological toolkit envisioned for the implementation of the TEM beyond retrospective qualitative interviewing. Essentially, we contend that a model that seeks to analyze lives lived forward in irreversible time should not restrict itself to methods that look backwards through the haze of time to reconstruct a narrative about past trajectories and events. The most obvious data-collection method to employ is ethnography, although other options such as surveys could be used within a microgenetic methodological framework. Perhaps the rigorous theoretical demands of the TEM call for a new method of data collection we might call “process ethnography,” which integrates the context-sensitive contemporaneous observation and interviewing of ethnography with the repeated collection of key qualitative data associated with microgenetic research. REFERENCES Bartlett, F. C. (1932). Remembering: A study in experimental and social psychology. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Bauer, M. W., & Aarts, B. (2000). Corpus construction: A principle for qualitative data collection. In M. W. Bauer & G. Gaskell (Eds.), Qualitative researching with text, image and sound (pp. 19–37). London, UK: Sage. Malinowski, B. (1922). Argonauts of the western Pacific. New York, NY: Dutton. Moscovici, S. (1980). Toward a theory of conversion behavior. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology, Vol. 13 (pp. 209–239). New York, NY: Academic. Sato, T., Hidaka, T., & Fukuda, M. (2009). Depicting the dynamics of living the life: The trajectory equifinality model. In J. Valsiner, P. Molenaar, M. Lyra, & N. Chaudhary (Eds.), Dynamic process methodology in the social and developmental sciences (pp. 217–240). New York, NY: Springer. von Bertalanffy, L. (1968). General systems theory. New York, NY: George Braziller. Wagoner, B. (2009). The experimental methodology of constructive microgenesis. In J. Valsiner, P. Molenaar, N. Chaudhary, and M. Lyra (Eds.). Handbook of dynamic process methodology in the social and developmental sciences (pp. 99–121). New York, NY: Springer. Wagoner, B. (2012). Culture in constructive remembering. In J. Valsiner (Ed.), Oxford handbook of culture and psychology (pp. 1034–1055). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Wagoner, B. (2013). Bartlett’s concept of schema in reconstruction. Theory & Psychology, 23(5), 553–575. Wagoner, B., & Jensen, E. (in press). Microgenetic evaluation: Studying learning in motion. Yearbook of idiographic science: Reflexivity and change in psychology. Charlotte, NC: Information Age.

PART 4 INTERPRETATION, IMAGINATION, AND ART

CHAPTER 8

VALSINER’S HORIZONS TOWARD BOHR’S TRADITION Lívia Mathias Simão

But it seems to me that there can be no doubt that the great horizon of the past, out of which our culture and our present live, influences us in everything we want, hope for, or fear in the future. History is only present to us in light of our futurity. Here we have all learned from Heidegger, for he exhibited precisely the primacy of futurity for our possible recollection and retention, and for the whole of our history. ——Gadamer, 1977, pp. 8–9 Valsiner’s dialogue with tradition—as it is understood in philosophical hermeneutics—has caught my attention for years. At the opportunity of writing this chapter, I sought to approach his Inaugural Lecture of the Niels Bohr Professorship accordingly. With this aim, I will first highlight some dimensions of the related notions of tradition and horizons in Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics. Next, I will take some selected passages of Valsiner’s Lecture, seeking to illustrate how this kind of dialogue plays an important role in strengthening his proposal for a “Psychology in the new key of Cultural Psychology”. Cultural Psychology and Its Future: Complementarity in a New Key, pages 121–129. Copyright © 2014 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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HERMENEUTIC UNDERSTANDING: A TRANSFORMATIVE DIALOGUE BETWEEN ONE’S HORIZONS AND TRADITION “Tradition encompasses institutions and life-forms as well as texts” (Gadamer, 1977, p. 96). It is both a multivoiced and pluritemporal construction, usually bringing about conflicting perspectives regarding a plot. As such, tradition works necessarily through critical human reflexivity (Davey, 2006; Gadamer, 1996). Gadamer has intensively explained his conception of tradition (Überlieferung) as part and parcel of the hermeneutic understanding of human experience. In this context, he critically discusses both Illustration and Romanticism in their approaches to tradition, pointing that both left us the inheritance of inadequate perspectives regarding it: naturalization of tradition and sovereignty of free will over tradition, respectively. Although different in their philosophical and sociocultural concerns, both ways disregard cultivation as a central aspect for understanding the role of tradition in human experiences. Being cultivated in one’s tradition, instead of fixity and passiveness in face of it, means continuous changes of our actual perspective as demanded by one’s reflexive encounter with tradition. Even when “confirming the past,” the attitude of the person who is cultivated and formed in her tradition is never of mere distance or naïve freedom concerning what is claimed by it. On the contrary, as we are always inside our tradition—therefore not being “insiders above it”—nothing that arrives from it can be felt as radically strange or alien to us. Rather, it will always “sound to us” maybe as an exemplar, maybe as boring, or not fair, or auspicious. As explained by Davey (2006), “what tradition transmits is not so much a body of work but more a manner or style of becoming engaged with those sets of questions or subject matters that are communicated by a body of received work” (p. 50). In this movement in between the person and her tradition, the comprehension of an event/text/other is once and for all instructed by the perspective brought by the person to the situational interaction, through which she aims to arrive at some understanding, while also being understood. All this forms what Gadamer calls our present and ever-changing horizon, a metaphor pointing to our personal, contextual, and temporal perspective regarding a situation. The horizon is the range of vision that includes everything that can be seen from a particular vantage point. Applying this to the thinking mind, we speak of narrowness of horizon, of the possible expansion of horizon, of the opening up of new horizons, etc. (Gadamer, 1985, p. 269)

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The notion of horizon was born in Husserlian phenomenology. In Gadamer’s hermeneutics, it accounts for a perspectival displacement that happens as a person changes through the dialogue with tradition, in the face of experiences and projects. Moreover, as far as the perspectival displacement happens, it invites the person to keep entering into it (Gadamer, 1996.). Essentially, our present horizon, in which our opinions, values, preunderstandings, and prejudices take part, is not a fixed patrimony, as sometimes and in some circumstances it might appear. Horizons are always in formation, in one or another direction, as we are constantly constrained to check them in encountering the alterity of the past and the other in the tradition to which we belong, and in the perspective of our futurity. This means experiencing a rupture that is immediate, felt and reflected on by the person. This is particularly characteristic of human beings, thanks to their spirituality and rationality (Gadamer, 1996). To this extent, the quest for meaning will be based on the only framework possible, that of anticipations arising from cultural tradition and situated in personal circumstances, seeing from the situation of our present horizon (Gadamer, 1992). Furthermore, the encounter with tradition is a process concerning not only the rationally conscious level of knowledge, as it also and mainly transforms the person in unnoticed ways, while it can slowly transform her tradition as well.1 Encountering tradition always implies being confronted with it, meaning the recognition of ourselves in our limits, as for our movements in between horizons and tradition do not mean to be secure in the knowledge that a change toward any standard of “best direction” will actually happen. It means, rather and only, that changes will happen. Scientific knowledge construction is not apart from or above this puzzling process, with its “inconsistencies and incoherencies—or apparent inconsistencies and incoherencies,” as pointed out by Marková (this volume). Herein Valsiner’s “artistry” in creating his movements, facing barriers, and crossing frontiers (Boesch, 1991) in his dialogue toward Bohr’s tradition, arriving at a new contemporary position for Cultural Psychology. The Hermeneutic Understanding of a Text Hermeneutic understanding happens according to a question-answer structure. The hermeneutic understanding of a text implies inquiring tra1

A detailed discussion of the relationship among the notions of tradition, cultivation, and Bildung (formation) can be found all over Gadamer’s oeuvre; also in Davey (2006) and Warnke (1987), among others. A discussion of the relationship between Gadamer’s hermeneutics and Cultural Psychology can be found in Simão (2005, 2010, 2013).

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dition in its possibilities for answering a question previously posed by the interpreter to himself. From this perspective, whenever a text reaches hermeneutic interpretation, a horizon of interrogation was behind it. This is a process that demands an interplay between the interpreter’s horizons, from which the interrogation arrives, and his openness to new meanings brought by the text as an expression of the multivoiced and pluritemporal character of tradition. Gadamer (1985) states that, just as a word cannot constantly be misused in a conversation without its meaning as a whole being affected, in the same way we cannot cling blindly to our preconceptions if we want to arrive at an understanding of a text. If, on the one hand, the only possible point of departure for getting involved in a dialogue with a text is our own horizons, on the other hand, we must be open to the possibility that the text may bring forth new meanings that may call ours into question. In this way, the emergence of a new comprehension of a text does not result from the suppression of our preconceptions. On the contrary, it is reached by transformation and selective reconstruction of horizons in the ongoing dialogical confrontation with the tradition brought in the quest for understanding. This is where the dialogical dimension of the hermeneutic process is based, as it presupposes that all comprehension is a circular reaction in which the whole is understood from the particular, and vice versa, thanks to the anticipation and readjusting of meanings by the interpreter (Gadamer, 1992). In sum, meaning construction is ruled by expectations derived from a context that is previous to the encounter between the interpreter and the object of interpretation. However, this anticipatory comprehension will be submitted to rectification during their actual encounter, where expectations are then readjusted. Comprehension may then flow in a unity of thought, generating new meanings, which by their turn bring new expectations and so on. Any understanding—of a text, of other’s talk— in a dialogue will thus pass through a negotiation between their respective horizons in their traditions. The success of that negotiation results in what Gadamer calls fusion of horizons, thus emerging a broadened field of meaning. Besides, the hermeneutic understanding of a text can unfold in the understanding of oneself. In Gadamer’s words, To understand a text is to come to understand oneself in a kind of dialogue. This contention is confirmed by the fact that the concrete dealing with a text yields understanding only when what is said in the text begins to find expression in the interpreter’s own language. Interpretation belongs to the essential unity of understanding. One must take up into himself what is said to him

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in such fashion that it speaks and finds an answer in the words of his own language (1977, p. 57)

Within this context, Davey (2006) points out that hermeneutic understanding embraces an imbalanced movement of transformation—formation in individual and collective horizons, whose importance lies in differentiating the elements that enter into productive relation with the event of understanding. . . . On the one hand, the possibility of individual understanding is preconditioned by a set of transformative relations that constitute the given cultural horizon within which that understanding takes place. On the other hand, the horizons that facilitate understanding cannot remain in being unless engaged with and transformed by individual acts of understanding (Davey, 2006, p. 43)

In such a way, understanding a text embraces the fusion of horizons, in the reflexive encounter with tradition, as for it is in its domains that the old and the new always grow up together, forming a tensional whole. Hermeneutic task consists not of dismissing that tension but rather of giving place for its unfolding into the newness. Here is the key role of the reflexive encounter with tradition as a condition for hermeneutic understanding: The hermeneutical problem only emerges clearly when there is no powerful tradition present to absorb one’s own attitude into itself and when one is aware of confronting an alien tradition to which he has never belonged or one he no longer unquestioningly accepts (Gadamer, 1977, p. 46)

From the perspective laid out herein, I will try to illustrate Valsiner’s dialogue with Bohr’s tradition, pointing to some selected passages of the Inaugural Lecture I believe to be key points for Valsiner’s proposal for a “Psychology in the New Key of Cultural Psychology.” Departing from Bohr’s Principle of Complementarity, Valsiner (re)proposes the relationships between Science and Culture, lived world and Psychology, making some of his horizons explicit while questioning for new possibilities in psychological comprehension of our humanity. SELECTED HERMENUTIC DIMENSIONS OF VALSINER’S DIALOGUE WITH BOHR’S TRADITION Opening Passage: “Bohr’s imperative for interpretation was ahead of his time. It breaks out of the tradition of constructing ontological accounts” (Valsiner, this volume).

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Valsiner begins his dialogue pointing to the fact that Bohr broke out of the tradition of his own times, which put him ahead of those times. This could happen thanks to Bohr’s imperative for interpretation, which allowed a rupture and a creative shift in Science. From this initial moment, a hermeneutic aspect is already clearly present in Valsiner’s dialogue with Bohr, the principle of interpretation in its centrality for the scientific construction of knowledge. Anticipatory passage: “While our statements are about ontologies, the reasons for our making them are epistemological. We want to know about how we might get to know something we do not know yet. But how do we know what it is—that we do not know yet? Creativity—both in science and in everyday life—begins here” (Valsiner, this volume).

In this passage, Valsiner emphasizes an aspect of Bohr’s account that first deserves our attention. This makes an important connection between Bohr’s tradition and Valsiner’s own horizons concerning science construction. In doing so, Valsiner situates us—the readers, who may be the third party (Marková, 2006) in this dialogue—regarding the issue that will orient the dialogue as a whole, the relationship between epistemological and ontological levels in scientific knowledge construction. At the same time, he nicely puts in relief one of the most important aspects of hermeneutic construction, in respect to which Science is no exception: all comprehension departs from an anticipatory understanding in a creative movement toward the future. Hermeneutic condition passage: “Psychology at our time is at a turning point—whether to continue the application of ‘purely formal procedures’ (Toomela & Valsiner, 2010) and accumulate further empirical data of low generalization potential or to advance theoretical perspectives that would allow for a new look on the basic features of the human condition. The (re) emergence of interest in psychological issues claiming the links with the imprecise but appealing notion of culture is the indicator of striving toward such a new look. Cultural psychologies of today—results of interdisciplinary efforts that gathered momentum since the 1990s—constitute the fourth time a similar focus has come into being in the history of psychology over the past two centuries. Can it survive? And provide us with deeper understanding of the human lives than that achieved by artists?” (Valsiner, this volume).

At this moment, Valsiner makes the tension brought by the dilemma of choosing different ways of tradition in psychological construction explicit. In doing so, he begins a critique against the scientific tradition of exclusive and excluding empiricism in Psychology. Indeed, this critique begun with the beginning of Valsiner’s oeuvre itself, being then part and parcel of his scientific horizon and formation (Bildung).

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With this movement, Valsiner allows the real emergence of the hermeneutic problem in the dialogue, as he reaffirms the impoverishment of a tradition that cannot “absorb his attitude into itself,” and to which “he has never belonged” (cf. Gadamer, 1977, quoted before). The dialogue is then pushed toward its core: A new direction for overcoming the formerly installed impasse is now claimed, challenging Psychology in the face of the Arts. This will be the centripetal force of the dialogue, feeding it with many imbalanced movements (Davey, 2006, quoted before) to flowing into the proposal of a cultural psychology of semiotic dynamics. From this moment on, the dialogue enters the general process of dynamic hierarchical sign construction in irreversible time (Valsiner, this volume, especially Fig. 8). In this part of the dialogue, some of the notions already present in Valsiner’s work are recontextualized, here appearing in different ways and relationships, as if, on one hand, nothing that arrives from tradition is radically strange or alien to us, and, on the other, perspectival displacements happens when new meanings are generated. It is also worth noting the double tensional role of Bohr’s tradition in this semiotic constructive dialogue. In what I have called the Opening passage of the Lecture, Valsiner states that “Bohr’s imperative for interpretation was ahead of his time. It breaks out of the tradition of constructing ontological accounts” (Valsiner, this volume, p. 3). Later, he also reveals to us that Pivotal Passage: “However, in contrast to open systems in biology, psychology, and social sciences at-large, physicists do not need to assume that their phenomena may ‘absent-mindedly’ ignored, or intentionally neutralize, or even purposefully counteract the scientists’ efforts. Nor would we need to assume that these particles would willfully deceive the researchers. All these possibilities of answerability are there when we start to consider living systems, from viruses upwards to the social systems created by human beings. The basic issues of vitality and intentionality cannot be ignored at higher levels of the organization of the living matter and its emergent reflexivity of the psyche. “The unity of the complementary opposites in Bohr’s principle can be safely declared as involving exclusive separation of the opposites, despite the acceptance of the joint completion notion. Bohr came close to overcoming the Kantian dualism between the mechanical and teleological sides of functioning of natural systems; he tried to turn the dualism into a duality. In that he succeeded—the Complementarity Principle is a perfect example of duality in theoretical thinking of scientists. Yet he failed to take the next step—elaborating the various forms of such duality. To be fair, he did not need to do that. Arriving at the Complementarity Principle was sufficient for the tasks he had set up for himself in physics. The question of the relationship between the two forms is not necessary to ask and hence, that

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question did not need an answer in the physics of the 1920s–1930s. Yet it is a pressing question for contemporary biology, moving actively from the orthodoxy of genetics to the elaboration of processes of epigenetics” (Valsiner, this volume, emphasis in original). In few words, and in hermeneutic terms, the above passages as taken in their interrelationship and in the context of the dialogue here in focus, reveal that tradition is also submitted to the Principle of Complementarity, that is, both opposite perspectives (Bohr’s proposals as innovative and as limiting) are equally true, yet not applicable at the same moment of the scientific construction, as these moments mean different imbalances among contextual anticipatory comprehensions, horizons and traditions (Davey, 2006, quoted before). We can call, then, the second of those passages a Pivotal passage, as it operates a shift in the dialogue in face of the insufficiency of Bohr’s innovative tradition when brought to the issues posed by the Humanities. Bohr’s Principle needed to be reframed and reintegrated in the new whole constructed by Valsiner; new avenues for research are then opened up for cultural psychology, as pointed out and developed by Zittoun and Gillespie (this volume). From this point on, I would like to leave us in Valsiner’s companionship: Through a process like this, it is possible to unite episodic and transitory meaning constructions and longlasting emergent meanings (prejudices, deep convictions, affective fascinations, devotions). The scheme itself remains analogous to a biological (genetic) self-regulation process. It is here where natural science meets the poetic premises and romantic roots of Naturphilosophie (Valsiner, this volume, p. 20).

Also bringing Gadamer back: In making art my starting point, I was, in truth, responding to the experience I myself had in my teaching, namely, that my real interest in the so-called Humanities (Geisteswissenschaften) was not in their character as sciences (Wissenschaften) but rather in how they dealt with art—art in all its realms: literature, the visual arts, architecture and music. For I believe that the arts, taken as a whole, quietly govern the metaphysical heritage of our Western tradition. And the Humanities (Geisteswissenschaften) stand in a particularly close and interactive relationship with receptivity and sensitivity to art. (Gadamer, 2006, p. 57)

REFERENCES Boesch, E. E. (1991). Symbolic action theory and cultural psychology. Berlin, Germany: Springer-Verlag.

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Davey, N. (2006). Unquiet understanding—Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics. Albany: State of New York University Press. Gadamer, H.-G. (1977). Philosophical hermeneutics (D. E. Linge, Ed.). Berkeley: University of California Press. Gadamer, H.-G. (1985). Truth and method. New York, NY: Lexington. Gadamer, H.-G. (1992). Verdad y método II. Salamanca, Spain: Ediciones Sígueme. Gadamer, H.-G. (1996). Verdad y método I. Salamanca, Spain: Ediciones Sígueme. Gadamer, H.-G. (2006). Artworks in word and image “So true, so full of being!” (Goethe) (1992). Theory, Culture & Society, 23(1), 57–83. Marková, I. (2006). On “the inner alter” in dialogue. International Journal for Dialogical Science, 1(1), 125–147. Simão, L. M. (2005). Bildung, culture and self: A possible dialogue with Gadamer, Boesch and Valsiner? Theory & Psychology, 15, 549–574. Simão, L. M. (2010). Ensaios dialógicos: Compartilhamento e diferença nas relações eu-outro [Dialogical essays: Sharing and difference in I-other relationships]. São Paulo, Brazil: HUCITEC. Simão, L. M. (2013). The contemporary perspective of the semiotic cultural constructivism: For a hermeneutical reflexivity in psychology. In G. Marsico, R. Ruggieri, & S. Salvatore (Eds.), YIS: The yearbook of idiographic science, Vol. 6, Reflexivity and change in psychology. Charlotte, NC: Information Age. Toomela, A., & Valsiner, J. (Eds.). (2010). Methodological thinking in psychology: 60 years gone astray? Charlotte, NC: Information Age. Warnke, G. (1987). Hermeneutics, tradition and reason. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

CHAPTER 9

ON NOT BEATING ONE’S WINGS IN THE VOID Linking Contexts of Meaning-Making Robert E. Innis

The reconfiguration of psychology that is taking place under the banner of “cultural psychology” is not just a matter of psychology’s own understanding of itself and of its proper goal. It offers new possibilities for integrating our ways of understanding the matrices and contexts of meaning-making quite generally. Cultural psychology, as proposed in Jaan Valsiner’s Aalborg inaugural lecture, looks to (re)appropriate conceptual tools from very diverse sources. Of special importance, as evidenced on practically every page of his stimulating text, are the linkages to philosophy and to semiotics, and their linkages to one another (see Innis, 2012). The appropriation of conceptual tools clearly does not run in only one direction. In the course of a single lecture, even of such density as the Aalborg inaugural lecture, it is impossible to specify, much less develop, all the multiple historical and conceptual strands that must be woven together to situate or place the cultural psychology project and to move it forward with the proper analytical tools. But it is eminently clear, to take over a phrase from John Dewey (Dewey, 1931a), that Valsiner is not beating his wings in Cultural Psychology and Its Future: Complementarity in a New Key, pages 131–149. Copyright © 2014 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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the void of empty generalizations and programmatic manifestos. According to our cultural psychological test pilot, the air is thick and the runway long enough to supply the conditions for “lift.” Valsiner’s voice from the flight deck addresses us directly: “cultural psychologists, and all you students of meaning-making, prepare for take-off.” Of course, there is the matter of the preflight and in-flight checklist and of the flight plan. Here, it must be admitted, there is still no standard or uniform procedure that will guarantee perfect working of the system while in flight with no adjustments on the fly. But is that not what a test flight is for? At the same time, failure to follow the already foreseen essentials will entail crashing and burning on take-off. This selective list of essentials is what Valsiner has taken upon himself to construct, with different degrees of emphasis and of sense of urgency. While it must be admitted that cultural psychology is obviously not a flying machine, we can follow up our idea of a check-list to determine just what weight is to be given to the various items and why they are essential. And further, are there other items that must be put on the list or perhaps be given a different level of importance? It was no part of Valsiner’s task to do all the work for us. His task was, and is, to put us to work. Valsiner foregrounds and rotates the complex notion of context. I want, first of all, to focus on a different aspect of this notion and to illustrate the affinities and mutual interlocking between a certain type of philosophical reflection and the type of cultural psychology Valsiner is proposing. In “Context and Thought,” John Dewey (Dewey, 1931a) claimed, against the then-current background of psychology and anthropology, that “the most pervasive fallacy of philosophic thinking goes back to neglect of context” (p. 207). He calls it first and foremost the “analytic fallacy” (p. 208), that is, taking the results or “last terms” of experiments or field study observation as isolated original units “out of which mental life is constructed” instead of focusing on the “inclusive mental life” with all the “habits and present disposition of the subject” (p. 209). It is this inclusive mental life, and its background conditions, that cultural psychology, as proposed by Valsiner, puts at the forefront of its concerns. Secondly, since Valsiner’s proposal is, at its core, semiotic, I would like to indicate very schematically how the choice of a semiotic frame has consequences and advantages for the types of investigations and types of issues that cultural psychology will engage if it wants to grasp the core of this inclusive mental life in semiotic terms. Different frames have different analytical powers and foreground different features that define the groundlines of our engagement with the world. These are just two of the many possible points of entry into the problemspace constructed by Valsiner’s proposals.

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On Context and Background: Thinking With Dewey Dewey’s seminal essay, “Context and Thought,” to which I have already referred, explores a fundamental fact about our inclusive mental life that exemplifies an important philosophical dimension of cultural psychology. It also indicates how cultural psychology can materially supplement the more formal procedures of philosophical reflection. It deals with the general problem of the “background” of thought, certainly a concern of cultural psychology. A background, Dewey writes, is implicit in some form and to some degree in all thinking, although as 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. (Dewey, 1931a, p. 211)

Dewey speaks of the “immanent presence of the contextual setting of a moving experience” that provides connection in all our thinking. Inquiry is into which connections these are and where they come from. The temporal, or historically effective, background of thinking has, on Dewey’s account, an intellectual as well as an existential component. The intellectual component encompasses culture in its entirety as well as the more specialized domains of theory. Together they make up traditions, the diachronic dimension of our inclusive mental life. “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, 1931a, p. 211), whether to continue it or, to allude to Valsiner, to resist it. The existential component pinpoints a deep fact about the embodied nature of our multileveled cognitional way of being-in-theworld, where perception, action, and signification are indissolubly intertwined. Dewey writes, 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, 1931a, pp. 211–212)

This is why Dewey says that we can never objectify or make totally explicit the “whole contextual background” of our thinking. Cultural psychology, as Valsiner sketches it, takes as one of its tasks to discover the contextual backgrounds of the meaning-systems within which human beings live and in this way to make available to them an “outside view” that increases their reflexivity or the emergence of “critical selfhood.” Selfhood arises in the

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processes of being engaged by structures, many of which we have produced while not being aware of their enabling conditions. These conditions, as Dewey rightly says, 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, 1931a, p. 211)

That is why, as Valsiner shows, we need “the other” to mediate our selfknowledge. Such notions describe both the object domains studied by cultural psychology but also its own paradoxical cognitional standing. It is itself a meaning-making structure and is subject to the very conditions it is studying. So, cultural psychology needs “the other” to become aware of its own contexts. The primary theoretical “others” for Valsiner are philosophy and semiotics, but, in light of cultural psychology’s putative subject-matter, it is the semiosphere itself, every domain of lived-meanings, that confronts us as meaning-makers with our “others.” 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, 1931a, p. 212). Alluding to, but with no explicit mention of, James’ 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, 1931a, p. 212). This vagueness, however, is no defect, but the rich field that situates and contextualizes the thematic focal points of our attention. In this way, Dewey appropriates and applies James’ theme-field-margin/fringe schema to the discussion of content. Dewey’s vague contextual setting is James’ field, and it appears to me 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 (habits and motoric propensities, feeling-schemas, conceptual frameworks, and so forth), to determine the thematic cores of the various fields, and further, to study the fringe of relations that function as a kind of omnipresent “halo” of resonances and reverberations. This synchronic background, of course, has its own historical or diachronic background, which cultural psychology not only will study but within which it itself is found. Dewey uses the notion of “selective interest,” which James also explored, to introduce another central idea of his own philosophical project. Dewey remarks that there is “selectivity (and rejection) found in every operation of thought” (Dewey, 1931a, p. 212), at every level and, by extension, in the various disciplines of inquiry, one of which is cultural psychology. From this rather bald statement, which is scarcely disputable, Dewey introduces some-

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thing of critical importance for the study of meaning-making that cultural psychology proposes to undertake. It is the notion that every thinker is “differentially sensitive to some qualities, problems, themes” (Dewey, 1931a, p. 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 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 (Polanyi, 1958, 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, 1931a, p. 212), a point argued vigorously by Michael Polanyi under the rubric of intellectual passions, to which Valsiner alludes. One main question is, then, why do we have the interests that we de facto have? What are the “roots” of interest? While clearly we are interested “vitally” by reason of our indwelling in our bodies and its attendant habits, the very matrix of existential self-preservation, we are also interested “semiotically” by reason of our indwelling in our exosomatic organs, the sign and tool systems that mediate between us and the objective field of resistances that both enable and constrain us. Cultural psychology will help us to mediate our mediational systems. Of course, as cultural psychology is well aware, this is precisely the research project exemplified in the work of Vygotsky, where signs and tools are brought together, just as they are in Ernst Cassirer’s path-breaking essay “Form and Technics” (Cassirer, 1930; see Innis, 2002, ch. 8, for an analysis of this essay and its contexts), which must be read against the background of his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. In this way, which is by no means unique, we can clearly see how cultural psychology is linked in essential ways with philosophy and semiotics. 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, 1931a, p. 212). In this way, individuality and uniqueness enter into the very heart of our meaning-making engagement with the world. An important question facing cultural psychology, then, is to what degree it concerns itself with the individual worlds unique to each individual as opposed to the shared meaning-frames that the individual is necessarily situated in and which defines for him or her the “limits of their worlds.” There can be no “science” of the individual, since individuals are not generals or universals as such. Nevertheless, in order to avoid the “fallacy of premature generalization” that Dewey so fears as one of the fatal flaws of philosophy, cultural psychology has already taken the path trod by pragmatism and

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phenomenology to keep close to exemplifying instances to reach some systematic knowledge of the objective frames in which all individual processes of self-formation take place (see Kitayama & Cohen, 2007; Valsiner, 2012). The “upper blade” of theory must be joined to the “lower blade” of thick descriptions of embodied lived meanings. Linkages: Philosophy and Cultural Psychology What Dewey says about philosophy can be reinterpreted 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 Valsiner’s schematization of the tasks of cultural psychology. 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, 1931a, p. 215). Cultural psychology, as delineated by Valsiner, points back to experience itself as the last inclusive context of all the objectified contents that both emerge from our meaning-making activities and confront us as “resistances” and “furtherances” of the open helical spiral of self-reflection. In Dewey’s words, philosophy’s main task is criticism, broadly understood: 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 so intended or not, in a projection of them into a new perspective which leads to new surveys of possibilities. (Dewey, 1931a, p. 215)

Philosophy, as Dewey puts it, employs a method of “reconstruction through criticism” (Dewey, 1931a, p. 215), the upshot of which can be both positive and negative. We employ such a method at our peril. Cultural psychology intersects with philosophy in that it can supply essential descriptive components to our understanding of what Dewey calls the “generating conditions” of beliefs, which, as Valsiner’s discussion of public sculpture shows, are embodied in artefacts of every sort, and not just ideas. So, cultural psychology has a genetic component, a structural component, and a critical component. 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 not only face them as objective structures (structural aspect) but forces them to higher levels of reflexivity when the associated subjects cannot either face the implications of these objective structures or find that they have unexpected implications that they wish to develop further (critical aspect). For cultural psychology, these resistances are first and foremost facts that are described

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and explained. For philosophy, these resistances are matters not primarily 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. As Dewey says, “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, 1931a, p. 215). Of course, this entails an adequate conception of experience, Dewey points out, for the significance of experience for philosophy and by extension, for the type of cultural psychology Valsiner is constructing, is “after all, but the acknowledgment of the indispensability of context in thinking when that recognition is carried to its full term” (Dewey, 1931a, p. 215). Dewey distinguishes what he calls three “deepening levels or three expanding spheres of context” (Dewey, 1931a, p. 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 is subject to bias, one-sidedness, systematic distortion. The individual needs acquaintance with the experience of others through “sympathetic inter-communication” (Dewey, 1931a, p. 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 philosophy. 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. But it is clear that this is precisely one of the ways Valsiner is prescribing it be used in cultural psychology, but with the proviso that it be primarily thought of in semiotic terms. Culture is made up of interlocked systems of semiotic embodiments. The difference between a pragmatist philosophy, whether explicitly semiotic or not, and a cultural psychology as Valsiner projects it is that, in the last analysis, philosophy, as Dewey puts it, is devoted to the “universal,” but cannot reach it on its own. “A universal which has its home exclusively or predominantly in philosophy is a sure sign of isolation and artificiality” (Dewey, 1931a, p. 216). Where is philosophy to look? Dewey answers: in “the significant features and outcomes of human experience as found in human institutions, traditions, impelling interests, and occupations,” whose generative matrices cultural psychology will be studying in concreto and, if Valsiner is right, sub specie semiotica.

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The third context, for Dewey, is “the context of the make-up of experience itself” (Dewey, 1931a, p. 216). Dewey thinks it is very dangerous for philosophy to start here, with a model constructed without wide attention to “the boundless multiplicity of the concrete experiences of humanity” (Dewey, 1931a, p. 216), what Valsiner calls the 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, 1931a, p. 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, 1931a, p. 216). Cultural psychology is one of the prime material sources of these indications for philosophy. But, in Valsiner’s opinion, semiotics is a prime analytical source for cultural psychology. Linkages: Cultural Psychology and Peirce’s Semiotic Frames Semiotics studies the systems of sign-configurations, the objective frames of self-formation, within which meaning-making takes place and which make up what Ernst Cassirer in his trilogy on the philosophy of symbolic forms called the “form worlds.” Each form world is defined by a semiotic logic that shapes it as an “access structure” that projects a system of relevant units and patterns of relations onto and into experience, which never comes “raw” or unfiltered. Within these form worlds, all meaning-making and engagement with subject matter leave what Dewey calls “a qualitative impress upon it” (Dewey, 1931a, p. 213), ultimately due to what Peirce described as the “material quality” of the sign-configurations in which they are signified. Each sign-configuration has a distinctive “feel,” which is proper to it, a point that is essential in understanding artworks. This point is extensively developed by Dewey, with reliance on Peirce (see especially Dewey, 1930, 1934/1987, 1935; Innis, 2011). Such a qualitative impress, however, is due not just to the general semiotic frame within which any sign-configuration is located but to the permeating presence of a kind of coefficient of subjectivity, a subjectivity that is the ultimate context in all of what Dewey calls “the material of thinking” (Dewey, 1931a, p. 213). Dewey thinks of individuality and by extension, the individuality of distinct form worlds, as a quality “found in the subject-matter of all genuine thinking” (Dewey, 1931a, p. 213). Individuality is not subject-matter itself, but “a mode of selection that determines subject-matter,” and as a consequence, subjectivity, in the sense defined, “is contextual in all the material of thinking” (Dewey, 1931a, p. 213). The question, then, is, how to understand the semiotic contexts of subjectivity, which is not private but intrinsically social, a principal thesis, of course, of cultural psychology and its brother, social semiotics. For it is not just the world that is accessed through a semiotic frame but subjectivity

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itself, the reality of which is manifested in the objectifying flux of our lives. A semiotic frame “refers down” to the world, but it also “refers up,” in the sense that it exemplifies a sign-based mode of apprehension. While human meaning-makers function and dwell in the frame as part of their exosomatic bodies, which function as subsidiaries for bringing the world into focus (see Polanyi, 1958, ch. 5), cultural psychologists need to establish just what the ultimate explanatory frame is that is being exemplified. Such a frame would supply the final context within which the activities of the meaningmaking subject are to be understood. Valsiner assumes for the most part the primacy of the Peircean schema as the most heuristically fertile of the available semiotic frameworks for the purposes of cultural psychology (see Valsiner, 2007, ch. 1). Valsiner does not allude to the fact that Peirce’s triadic schema is based on a system of ontological categories, enumerated by Peirce, laconically, as firstness, secondness, and thirdness. It is not clear whether cultural psychology has to take on, for analytical purposes, the rigid demands of an ontological scheme, a problem for philosophers, but the Peircean logic of signs and the accompanying phenomenology of signs (and sign types) are another story altogether. Cultural psychology studies the actual placement of meaning-makers in the universe of signs, but it takes its semiotic analytical tools from semiotics. A major problem, of course, is that there is no universal agreement about just how we are to divide the semiotic continuum into its ultimate units, with later differentiations being derived from this upper level. Peirce’s triad of icons, indices, and symbols has been taken as a kind of gold standard for schematizing the logic of signs. Peirce’s schematization of the typology of signs and of the work of signification relies on certain permanent features of our experiencing, which Peirce thought could be verified by anyone willing to reflect on common experience, a task assigned to “phaneroscopy,” his word for what we could call phenomenology. In this recourse to the structures of experience, one can see a possible deep connection between the logic of signs and cultural psychology. Peirce pointed out that (a) we recognize resemblances in the flux of experience (ground of iconicity), (b) we follow trails of existential connections (ground of indexicality), and (c) we form general conceptions (ground of symbolicity) that bind experience into unities and types. This gives rise to the fundamental Peircean semiotic triad of icons, whose objects are resemblances; indices, whose objects are existential connections; and symbols, whose objects are general conceptions. A central consequence, or at least claim, of the Peircean approach is that reflection on sign-types leads us back to the fundamental forms of meaning-making, the wide variety of which cultural psychology engages on the genetic and structural levels in all their empirical and variable detail. This is the descriptive task that cultural psychology faces. The real test of a comprehensive semiotic model will be its heuristic fertility and its ability

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to guide empirical research. At the same time, the “political” dimension of cultural psychology makes an appearance, since the vast differences in indwelt semiotic frames can lead to irreducible differences, even among researchers. After all, if the experience of meaning-making is always framed, so is inquiry into the experience of meaning-making. The inquirer is also in a frame. Cultural psychology in the Peircean mode, as alluded to, but not developed explicitly in the seriation of themes and issues limned in Valsiner’s lecture but that inform, though not exclusively, his work elsewhere, will accordingly investigate the power of recognizing resemblances as objectified in every type of image or image-based sign, the major exemplars being pictures, diagrams and graphs, and metaphors. It will follow the widely branching trails of existential connections that both “lead us on” and “resist” us, that is, interrupt us and indeed divide us from one another. These real connections manifest the “otherness of the world” and show that we are also the world’s “other,” although we belong to it just as much as it belongs to us. This “other” cannot be “thought away,” although it can be “thought about,” indeed necessarily so, either to take possession of or to repudiate. In this sense, a cultural psychology will engage, and be based upon, recognition of “differences.” Why else would there be a cultural psychology if there were not profoundly different cultures? And a Peircean-inspired cultural psychology, as “cultural,” will contribute to the detailed study of the defining mark of humans, their symbolic capacity or power, the formulation of general conceptions, and their articulation in systems of arbitrary or conventional signs. Now, while cultural psychology will certainly foreground this third dimension of semiosis, proper to the symbolic species, and while it must be affirmed, as Terrence Deacon (Deacon, 1998) has masterly shown, that the symbolic dimension presupposes, appropriates, and transforms the prior dimensions, it is important to avoid reifying or radically separating these sign types or semiotic powers. Every sign-configuration produced by humans will be constituted, in different measures, by a mixture of iconic, indexical, and symbolic factors. What Peirce calls thirdness or mediation marks every type of sign, or sign-configuration. It is the job of cultural psychology, on its semiotic side, to study sign-using processes in actu and in their results. From this point of view, which seems to be Valsiner’s, cultural psychology would be parasitic on semiotics. But, it must be said, and Valsiner has shown, that semiotics without the type of investigations into the semiotic matrices of consciousness undertaken by cultural psychology will be malnourished by a too-steady diet of pure theoretical schematizations and classificatory schemes. It too, in an important sense, would be beating its wings in the void.

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Peirce, in a move of possibly great value for cultural psychology, correlated his triad of sign-types, or sign-configurations, with categories of consciousness, which Peirce calls “constant ingredients of our knowledge” and “congenital tendencies of the mind” (Peirce, 1932, ¶ 374). Moreover, Peirce calls them, in a mixture of scholastic and contemporary language, “three parts or faculties of the soul or modes of consciousness” (¶ 374). Peirce delineates them in the following way: 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. (¶ 377)

Peirce offers in this way a categorial framework for empirical investigations and for a phenomenology of consciousness that allows its investigations to take the “long route through signs,” in Paul Ricoeur’s words. Feeling is the psychological correlate of the “iconic” moment of the sign-configuration, sense of resistance and of otherness is the psychological correlate of the “indexical” moment, and time-binding or synthesis the psychological correlate of the “symbolic” moment. A cultural psychology informed by Peircean semiotics, then, would not be logocentric, but it would recognize the plurality of forms of mediation in all their concreteness. It would recognize that humans exist in highly complex and differentiated worlds of feeling, are interrupted, on all levels, by material connections, each with their own affective tone or qualitative determination, and articulate their life worlds in very different diaphanous webs of intelligible symbols, in the Peircean sense. Cultural psychology and the Peircean schemata mutually confirm one another. The Peircean sign typology is also a typology of forms of consciousness and of the domains of “reality” accessed through them. Valsiner emphasizes the power of resistances to force or enable various forms of critical reflexivity. I see this as an extension of Peirce’s notion that while other animals use signs, only humans are (or can become) aware that they do so. Being interrupted forces us to confront the question of our semiotic rationality, which has as its accompaniment, of course, its derangement, semiotic irrationality. Derangement can lead to pathological forms of violence if the interruptions challenge the very foundations of one’s conceptual scheme. 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 destroy not just themselves but others. Having spun the symbolic net out of ourselves, we proceed to spin ourselves into it and identify with it as the only possible framework of meaning. Cultural psychology can contribute to our permanent task of criticism and of semiotic reflectivity (not just re-

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flexivity) by showing the dynamics of this process and their workings out in practice. But of course, this shows that cultural psychology is by no means a value-free form of inquiry. The inquirer must become aware of his or her own commitments. This is abundantly clear in Valsiner’s own presentation, which grinds no axes but still manages to split the logs. It is critical, however, to recognize that different typologies of signs can also function as heuristic devices for cultural psychology and furnish other items to the collection of what Valsiner calls our “analytical tools.” They can foreground, in overlapping ways, rather different aspects of the semiotic continuum, which makes up the ultimate semiotic context of human meaning-making. It would be a mistake, which Valsiner does not make, to think that Peircean semiotics is the only or, in some cases, even the best frame in all circumstances to inform or direct cultural psychological inquiry or that it can do all the work, with minor supplementations. Semiotics, which is a disciplinary big tent, presents a wide array of putatively comprehensive models of semiosis, or sign-action. Nevertheless, Valsiner projects a cultural psychology that, while deeply empirical, is quite clearly dependent upon philosophical and semiotic concepts derived from Peirce (Valsiner, 2007, pp. 19–74). The Ultimate Context: Langer on Feeling and the Symbolic Transformation of Experience The Peircean semiotic schema clearly furnishes a powerful formal frame with great analytical and classificatory power. Peirce’s main thesis, which has a metaphysical or cosmological side to it, is that there is no “outside” to the play of signs, a theme I have explored in my Consciousness and the Play of Signs (Innis, 1994). The universe is “perfused” with signs. Experience, therefore, is to be understood in semiotic terms, that is, by systematic correlation of a sign-typology to a typology of forms of consciousness. Peirce’s main argument is that the forms of human consciousness must be described in terms of his three ultimate categories. Consciousness is to be understood in terms of processes of signification by which we appropriate the world and, as Peirce puts it, “every kind of cognition enters into cognition” (Peirce, 1932, ¶ 381). Although, according to Peirce, feelings “form the warp and woof of cognition,” and while “the will, in the form of attention [to the other], constantly enters,” cognition, and hence signification, is neither feeling nor the polar sense for him. Rather cognition is “consciousness of process, and this in the form of the sense of learning, of acquiring, of mental growth.” It is “the consciousness that binds our life together. It is the consciousness of synthesis” (Peirce, 1932, ¶ 381). Peirce’s radical claim is that the three categories of consciousness are comprehensive and exclusive. They are “three radically different elements of consciousness, these and no more”; that is, immediate feeling, the polar sense, and syntheti-

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cal consciousness, “the consciousness of a third or medium” (Peirce, 1932, ¶ 382). Can we take this notion of a medium further and see whether it allows us to develop a model of sign-configurations that can not only reconstitute Peirce’s basic distinctions but also foreground differently and at the same time deepen the status of a ”form of feeling” to function as the “warp and woof “ of a type of cognition and meaning-making that is dependent upon a nongeneralizing form of symbolization? In this form of symbolization, experience turns back upon itself, exploiting its own symbolic pregnance, and embodies itself in rituals, sacraments, mythic narratives, and artworks. Such is the scope and thrust of Susanne Langer’s great intellectual project, which fuses philosophical and semiotic analyses in ways that intersect with cultural psychology’s need for adequate and heuristically fertile analytical tools. Langer’s approach “starts low” and ascends to “higher” levels in a way that supports the general semiotic framework outlined in Valsiner’s lecture, but is devoid of the systematic recourse to ultimate ontological categories such as firstness, secondness, and thirdness (which still have descriptive psychological use) and the classificatory drive of Peircean semiotics, with its attempt to diagram the 10 classes of signs, the relative value of which is not our concern now. The logic of signs and symbols that Langer works with in the whole expanse of her work is based on two dualities, not upon a complex web of triadic relations (see Innis, 2009, chs. 1, 2). This duality is developed with clarity and precision in her classic Philosophy in a New Key and never abandoned, informing her masterful study in the philosophy of art (Langer, 1953) and cognate writings, and more implicitly, her culminating Mind trilogy (Langer, 1967, 1972, 1982). I will restrict attention here to how the issues are broached in the accessible account given in Philosophy in a New Key. The first duality Langer uses to divide the semiotic continuum is the distinction between “indication” and “symbolization” as the two ultimate frames for classifying processes of signification. Indication, as used by Langer, defines a mode interacting with objects that is proper to all sentient beings. They are “affected” by and recognize qualities and types of resemblances in their environments, and they “connect,” positively or negatively, with them through action, which is steered by their indexical properties. In this way Langer, establishes the Peircean iconic and the indexical dimensions of sentience. Symbolization, as used by Langer, likewise defines a mode of interacting with objects, but through ideas, concepts, and conceptions that transcend mere recognition of types of things and experienced interruptions, whether felt as autogenic impulses or as exogenic impacts. This is clearly Peirce’s realm of thirdness or mediation, the “logical” or intelligible order. Unlike Peirce, however, Langer will divide the symbolic continuum into two parallel and autonomous forms, neither reducible to the other, but clearly intertwined.

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This second duality is the distinction between presentational and discursive symbols or presentational and discursive forms. This distinction is of monumental importance for Langer and of great importance as an analytical tool for cultural psychology. By means of the distinction between presentationality and discursivity, Langer wants to establish two authentic symbol systems with very different “logics.” Peircean semiotics would claim that Langer’s presentational symbolism is an instance of iconic symbolism, and that, after all, the development of existential graphs and the logic of diagrams already has established an equivalent of a presentational symbol. But for Langer, such graphs, diagrams, mathematical notations, and so forth, whose logic Peirce so creatively explored and developed, are discursive forms and ultimately are symbolic in the way that propositions are. They have, to allude to Peirce’s factors of semiosis, fundamentally, “logical” interpretants, even if their medium seems to be fundamentally visual or pictorial. By discursive, Langer means that they have a translation and interpretation key that specifies the role of various units, the set of conventions being used, the syntax, and so forth and so on. Moreover, they are symbolic either of the forms of thought or are oriented toward abstract entities and patterns of relations independently of the flux of experiencing itself. The distinguishing feature of Langer’s approach, however, is to establish the cognitive status of presentational symbols. These types of symbols give us knowledge not of the abstract entities and patterns of relation that define “the world” and that can be true or false, but construct, in all sensory modalities, objective symbolic correlates to forms and patterns of feeling in the continuum of experience and in this way formulate ideas or an “import” that transcends the realm of discourse and where there is no alternative formulation. The relation between the symbol and its import is not in itself true or false but rather “fitting” or “adequate.” Langer’s approach to presentational symbolism is grounded in two pivotal theses, which have deep resonance for cultural psychology: Meaning, Langer says, “accrues essentially to forms” and “a mind that works primarily with meanings must have organs that supply it primarily with forms” (Langer, 1942, p. 90). The flow of experiencing itself is conceived by Langer as “a process of formulation” due to the organism’s “unconscious appreciation of forms” (Langer, 1942, p. 89), certainly one of the focal points of cognitive psychology as a component of cultural psychology. The result of this process of formulation is the selection of “certain predominant forms” (p. 89), “the primitive root of all abstraction” (Langer, 1942, p. 89). Langer’s concern with form adds a third component to the duality of sign and meaning, something that Valsiner implies in his discussion of Rubin and the contextual lability of perceptual forms. For Langer, form, meaning, and sign are indissolubly connected, and in a way, form is perhaps more fundamental than sign. At any rate, following Langer, there is no form without mean-

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ing of some sort, especially the felt significance manifested in the form itself, and there is no sign without form. Signs are first and foremost distinctive kinds of forms, meaning-bearing structures encountered in and immanent in the flux of experience. As forms of order they have what Michael Polanyi (1958, p. 58) called “existential meaning,” as opposed to “representative meaning.” Without form, there is no experience in the sense of grasp of units, however defined, and patterns of relations between these units. Langer developed her semiotic framework in close connection with empirical research, and specifically with the findings of Gestalt psychology. Forms are figures emerging out of grounds, which they both assimilate and from which they distinguish themselves. Langer, in my opinion, shows us more effectively and in more empirical detail than Peirce how to “push meaning down.” For Langer “all sensitivity bears the stamp of mentality” (1942, p. 90; see also the extensive discussion of this in Langer’s Mind trilogy [1967, 1972, 1982]) and the sense organs furnish abstractions for construing the real world, but in a way different from language or its scientific extensions. Langer holds that there is such a thing as sensuous conceptions, that is, “forms of direct perception” that furnish “genuine symbolic materials, media of understanding” (1942, p. 92). These symbolic materials express, or are used to express, ideas or meanings “too subtle for speech” and give rise to what Langer calls a “non-discursive symbolism” (1942, p. 93). Sensory forms are “abstractable and combinatory” (1942, p. 94) and they can be used to present a vast array of “forms and qualities,” functioning as symbols of “entities which exceed and outlive our momentary experience” (1942, p. 93). In Langer’s semiotic schema, any perceptual form—visual, auditory, motoric, and so forth—can become or be used as a symbol and enter into complex combinations with other symbols. The symbolic relevance of these forms is recognized, but symbolization is a constructive activity. Langer’s point is that we not only recognize forms, we create forms whose only function is to “present” or show what they are “about.” They have an intrinsic “import” or “expressivity” or defining “quality” that cannot be separated from their material form, belonging to what Cassirer (1930) called the expressive order. The “order of presentational forms” turns sense-experience itself, with its objects, relations, and patterns, into a “possible principle of symbolization” of the “impulsive, instinctive, and sentient life” (Langer, 1942, p. 99). Such a life is nourished by participation in what Langer called “life-symbols,” captured in significant forms. The deep meanings of our lives are, in the sense defined by Langer, “feeling-meanings,” meanings that we desperately need. Our symbolic need cannot be satisfied by discursivity alone. For Langer, feelings, the felt qualities of existing in all its modes, “have definite forms, which become progressively articulated” and this process of articulation encompasses all processes of symbolic embodiment. These

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embodiments in forms of feeling make up the realms of ritual, sacrament, myth, and art, all of which Langer subjected to careful and nuanced analysis in multiple formats. Valsiner is therefore right to highlight the importance of art, especially as a transcript of the forms of feeling that bind a community together and that make manifest the community’s deepest ideals and concerns, allowing it to feel at home in the world or to establish visible embodiments of its pivotal moments and personages. The plastic space of communal sculpture and the construction of an ethnic domain in architecture are clearly legitimate subject matter for a cultural psychology that wants to increase our awareness of and participation in the “open ambient” within which our signifying practices occur and which they construct. And civic rituals and celebrations are likewise. Feelings, according to Langer, have definite structures, physiognomical properties, that confer on them a suchness or material quality all their own. Langer proposes, in a theoretically deep comment that intersects with Peirce’s reflections on iconism, that what definite forms of feeling are like “determines by what symbolism we might understand them” (Langer, 1942, p. 100). The symbolic articulation of these feelings, their embodiment, must have an appropriate form. The symbolic articulation of feelings in presentational forms displaces discursive forms as the unique locus of the paradigmatic forms of meaning-making, although discourse clearly engages presentational forms in an interpretive struggle for adequacy. Presentational symbols do not name nor do they describe. Rather they exemplify what they are about, even if, as Langer openly admits, they are surrounded by an elaborate discursive frame, which situates and defines their point but which cannot supplant their operative semiotic force or fully capture their import. Ritual sacrifice, for example, in pre-Rabbinic Judaism is surrounded by a very different discursive frame than Mesoamerican or Vedic sacrificial rituals, just as early Christian images of the Good Shepherd or Christ as Apollo are embedded in and are explicated by different discursive practices. And, as Langer pointed out, every attempt to explicate the significance of a symbolically pregnant image runs up against the essential surplus of significance embodied in and expressed by the image itself. Such situations have importance for how cultural psychology would engage this domain as it tries to navigate between symbolic modes and perhaps meet one of its limits. It is the symbolic pregnance of life symbols and actions, their immanent expressivity, that grounds the processes of presentational symbolization. Thus, the incorporation of deep resemblances into symbols that convey an “unspeakable import.” Langer thinks that rationality is “embodied in every mental act” (1942, p. 100), and that one of her tasks to establish “just how can feelings be conceived as possible ingredients of rationality” (1942, p. 100). Her proposal is that “feelings have definite forms, which become progressively

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articulated” (1942, p. 100). It is another task of cultural psychology, then, to attend to the symbolic embodiments of our affective attunements and, if Valsiner is right, to subject them to a kind of immanent criticism. But cultural psychology does not have the task of constructing an aesthetics or theory of life symbols on its own, but of studying the cultural variations in the psychological appropriation and creation of these forms as well as the shaping of the panorama of symbolic environments in which people live their lives. CONCLUSION: LINKING BEGINNING AND END I have only outlined some supplementary observations about the linked philosophical and semiotic contexts of meaning-making that an engaged reading of Valsiner’s lecture brought to mind. The main thesis of the projected cultural psychology, which it shares with a philosophically oriented semiotics and with which I am in fundamental agreement, is that human beings are meaning makers and sign users on all levels of their existence. What are they making meaning about and “where” are they doing so? The ultimate “objective” context of meaning-making is what Dewey called “problematic situations” in the life-world that have distinctive “feels” and that have to be resolved, dealt with, or mediated in some way or the other by the construction of appropriate symbols. Peirce schematized the frames of these engagements with the world on multiple levels by means of his triad of the modes of consciousness: feeling, the polar sense, and thought. These, on Peirce’s account, are the essential factors in ultimate “subjective” or experiential contexts in what Dewey called the “inclusive mental whole,” the flow of experiencings and signifying processes that make up the qualities of our lives and that function as the access structures to the world. The flow of experiencings, embedded in habits and traditions, goes out into new symbolizations as we attempt to orient ourselves in a universe marked by what Dewey called the “moving unbalanced balance of things” (Dewey, 1925/1988, p. 314). This “going out into symbolization,” I have suggested, is precisely and carefully charted by Peirce’s semiotic triad of iconicity, indexicality, and symbolicity. I have indicated some aspects of it that Valsiner in the lecture did not thematically develop, specifically the categorial contexts and psychological implications of Peirce’s multiply linked triadic schemata. I have also indicated that Peirce’s seemingly closed schema of sign-types and their possible combinations, interesting as it is, presents a danger to cultural psychology’s own tasks, especially as regards the “lower thresholds” of our signifying practices. Recognizing the heuristic power of the Peircean schemata does not entail the conclusion that it is the only way of relating or deriving the fundamental factors of semiosis or sign use. Of special relevance, I have argued, is the work of Susanne Langer and her elegant and rich

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reconstitution of the Peircean distinctions and her development of a way of understanding the processes by which feeling takes on form and form takes on symbolic value. Cultural psychology does not have to choose its analytical tools out of only one philosophical and semiotic box. But it is clear that cultural psychology has deep connections with philosophy and with semiotics and with the variegated traditions of its own history. After first freeing itself from philosophy and the logical schemas of semiotics, by its own internal turning, it now finds itself working shoulder to shoulder with them. Cultural psychology, then, nourished at the founts of multiple contexts of inquiry and proceeding by conceptual sophistication and empirical detail, is certainly shown by Valsiner’s example that it is not beating its wings in the void. REFERENCES Cassirer, E. (1930). Form und technik. Symbol, Technik, Sprache (E. W. Orth, J. M. Krois, & J. Werle, Eds.). Hamburg, Germany: Felix Meiner Verlag. Deacon, T. (1998). The symbolic species. New York, NY: Norton. Dewey, J. (1925/1988). Experience and nature. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Dewey, J. (1930). Qualitative thought. In L. A. Hickman & T. M. Alexander (Eds.), The essential Dewey, Vol. 1. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Dewey, J. (1931a). Context and thought. In L. A. Hickman & T. M. Alexander (Eds.), The essential Dewey, Vol. 1. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Dewey, J. (1931b). Affective thought. In J. Dewey (Ed.), Philosophy and civilization. New York, NY: Putnam’s. Dewey, J. (1931c). Philosophy and civilization. New York, NY: Putnam’s. Dewey, J. (1934/1987). Art as experience. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Dewey, J. (1935). Peirce’s theory of quality In L. A. Hickman & T. M. Alexander (Eds.), The essential Dewey, Vol. 2. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Hickman, L. A., & Alexander, T. M. (Eds.). (1998a). The essential Dewey, Vol. 1. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Hickman, L. A., & Alexander, T. M. (Eds.). (1998b). The essential Dewey, Vol. 2. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Innis, R. E. (1994). Consciousness and the play of signs. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Innis, R. E. (2002). Pragmatism and the forms of sense. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Innis, R. E. (2009). Susanne Langer in focus: The symbolic mind. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Innis, R. E. (2011). The “quality of philosophy”: On the aesthetic matrix of Dewey’s pragmatism. In L. A. Hickman, M. C. Flamm, K. Skowro ski, & J. A. Rea (Eds.), The continuing relevance of John Dewey: Reflections on aesthetics, morality, science, and society (pp. 43–60). Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Rodopi.

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Innis, R. E. (2012). Meaningful connections: Semiotics, cultural psychology, and the forms of sense. In J. Valsiner (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of culture and psychology (pp. 255–276). New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Kitayama, S., & Cohen, D. (Eds.). (2007). Handbook of cultural psychology. New York, NY: Guilford. Langer, S. K. (1942). Philosophy in a new key. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Langer, S. K. (1953). Feeling and form. New York, NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Langer, S. K. (1967, 1972, 1982). Mind: An essay on human feeling (3 Vols). Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Peirce, C. S. (1932). Collected papers (2 Vols.). Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Polanyi, M. (1958). Personal knowledge. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Polanyi, M. (1966). The tacit dimension. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Valsiner, J. (2007). Culture in minds and societies: Foundations of cultural psychology. New Delhi, India: Sage. Valsiner, J. (Ed.). (2012). The Oxford handbook of culture and psychology. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Valsiner, J. (2013, March 15). Cultural psychology and its future: Complementarity in a new key. Inaugural Lecture of the Niels Bohr Professorship Centre of Cultural Psychology, University of Aalborg, Denmark.

CHAPTER 10

KIERKEGAARD, KITCHEN, COMPLEMENTARITY AND CULTURAL PSYCHOLOGY A Thought Experiment Sven Hroar Klempe

Cultural psychology is to be regarded as an alternative in psychology. Valsiner’s paper on “Cultural Psychology and Its Future: Complementarity in a New Key” is an example of this. How important this is, is probably not to be easily noticed, because cultural psychology is apparently both marginal and modest. But in fact this lecture, and Valsiner’s extensive intellectual activity for some decades, represents an epistemological change in the understanding of psychology in general. The provided understanding can be summarized in different ways, but based on this paper, one version could be: “the unification of stability and instability by means of complementarity.” These thoughts are not completely new, yet they have rather formed a type of undercurrent in the development of the intellectual modernity for the last 300 years. What can be regarded as new however is rather the fact that the substantial consequences of this undercurrent are brought up to the surface. In this respect, Denmark and its intellectual history has Cultural Psychology and Its Future: Complementarity in a New Key, pages 151–166. Copyright © 2014 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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played an important, but slightly ignored role in the effort of shaping this undercurrent. Thus in this chapter, I will take a look at a quite unique phenomenon in academic psychology that may illustrate this undercurrent. This is labelled as the “Kitchen-seminar,” which is a series of seminars that was launched by Valsiner and has run for a number of years at Clark University until now. These seminars, but also Valsiner’s role at them, may tell us something about how cultural psychology is to be approached. It is hard to define cultural psychology, but let us just start with the most rudimentary understanding of this, which says that culture is about everything human beings are creating, and psychology is about the human being’s notions of his or her surroundings, which include the actual spectator her- or himself. Yet the phenomenon of the Kitchen seminar will here be presented as a thought experiment. And this brings us immediately back to Denmark, yet not necessarily to Niels Bohr, but rather to Søren Kierkegaard. Although Kierkegaard is now so famous that I once even happened to end up in a discussion about him with a taxi driver on a ride in Worcester, Massachusetts, he has probably been ignored when it comes to his substantial contribution to psychology. What have been highlighted are rather his religious ruminations, his miserable life, love affair, and the role of subjectivity in philosophy—as if he was just a tragic forerunner to Martin Heidegger and the theological movements that came in his wake. But Kierkegaard was something more, and I would say he was first of all a critic of philosophical systems. And on this point, he is completely different from Heidegger, which Heidegger also himself admitted. Yet the substantial difference between the two concerns first of all their understanding of psychology. Kierkegaard highlights psychology as a necessary condition for the understanding of theology, metaphysics, and philosophy. Although psychology stands in opposition to all of them, their objectivity is not able to be grasped without being contrasted to subjectivity, which is provided by psychology. This type of complementarity has no room in Heidegger’s philosophy, in which psychology is completely marginal. Yet this brings us immediately back to the main point in Valsiner’s paper, specifically, the role of complementarity in grasping the world into which human beings are involved. In this respect, to look at the Kitchen seminar from a Kierkegaardian perspective could hopefully tell us something about how old problems in psychology can be approached in a new way by means of cultural psychology. Yet to go into the details in a Kitchen seminar can be extensive, but hopefully the details may reveal some intriguing tendencies in cultural psychology. The Kitchen Seminar as a Phenomenon My first meeting with the Kitchen seminar was in September 2010, and one of the strongest impressions that took hold in my spinal cord for still

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to be there, was the categorical banishing of PowerPoint presentations. This stands more or less as a compressed expression for the premises that guided the Kitchen seminar: The presentations should be distributed in advance and the presenter shall just make an introduction to the paper and then open up for discussion. The group shall take an active part by bringing in whatever they may associate after having read the paper in advance, and the aim is to start up a real dialogue. The furniture is exactly what the name indicates, specifically, a kitchen table with 8 to 10 kitchen chairs, a kitchen counter with a sink, some kitchen cabinets, a refrigerator, and a coffee machine. The only deviation from being an ordinary kitchen is the 50 inch television screen with a camera on the top and a microphone placed in the middle of the table. This equipment connects the room with two or three other universities around the world. Another extraordinary thing for the kitchen is of course the fact that this is located in the middle of the main building at Clark University. One may also highlight the fact that one of this university’s most profiled and renowned professors has dedicated his international seminar to probably the second most informal place for gatherings. The most informal room in such an institution is presumably the restrooms, which actually are the two next doors. And the conductor himself is modestly placed in the background, normally outside what the camera is able to cover, and fully occupied with serving the participants coffee while listening intensively to both the presenter and the discussants. Valsiner participates by posing questions, summarizing and highlighting the other’s points with a voice that always comes through, which compensates very well for not being in the center of the limelight. The Thought Experiment On this background, the conductor’s role in the Kitchen seminar can probably be compared with a kind of Socratic spiritual midwifery or maieutic. This is a role apparently executed by Socrates, but retold by Plato: My art of midwifery is in general like theirs; the only difference is that my patients are men, not women, and my concern is not with the body, but the soul that is in travail of birth. And the highest point of my art is the power to prove by every test whether the offspring of a young man’s thought is a false phantom or instinct with life and truth. I am so far like the midwife, that I cannot myself give birth to wisdom; and the common reproach is true, that, though I question others, I can myself bring nothing to light because there is no wisdom in me. (Cornford, 1973, p. 26) (Thea:150b-c)

This is the irony of the Socratic spiritual midwifery, specifically that presumably one of the wisest men in history proclaims “there is no wisdom in me.” This was exactly why Kierkegaard adopted this maieutic of Socrates

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and stated, “Yet it is possible that there was more truth in Socratic ignorance than in any objective truth of the entire system that flirts with the demands of the time and accommodates itself to privat-docents” (Kierkegaard, 2009a, p. 170). And then Kierkegaard formulates the thesis that formed the premise for his investigations, but which also can form a type of suggested premise for how cultural psychology is to be understood: “The objective accent falls on what is said, the subjective on how it is said” (Kierkegaard, 2009a, p. 170). This formulation of Kierkegaard may form a methodological point of departure for a closer investigation of the Kitchen seminar. Thus, it will be natural to follow up the Kierkegaardian procedure for investigation, which is a thought experiment (Kierkegaard, 1988, 2009b). A thought experiment is exactly what the term says, specifically, an imaginary construction of a situation. This is what the authors of novels do. They construe imaginary situations that are more or less fantastic or likely. To what extent they are likely or not depends completely on how the story develops, that is, if the story is guided by some likely constraining factors or not. In this respect, Plato’s dialogues can be regarded as the first thought experiments with scientific validity. And the constraining factor that guides these conversations is logic. That is why Socrates can say what he says in the quotation above, specifically to “test whether the offspring of a young man’s thought is a false phantom or instinct with life and truth” (Cornford, 1973, p. 26). In other words, when an ordinary, but sane person encounters the logical reasoning of Socrates, he or she is forced to end up with a clearer understanding of what is right and what is wrong. In this sense, Plato’s dialogues may even count as a kind of crucial test (Hempel, 1966) for certain widespread contemporaneous notions. And historically, the results of Plato’s thought experiments in terms of his dialogues actually counted as true scientific knowledge for centuries, and to a more limited extent they still count today. Yet the kernel formulation of Kierkegaard quote above reveals why Plato’s dialogues are not so valid anymore. They focus on what is said instead on of how this is said. This is the aspect of logical terms. They focus on what is said by specifying the content by means of making distinctions. However, by focusing on how something is said, a completely new dimension is brought in, which is the situation. This is not just a question about bringing in the context. The distinction between what and how is much more radical than that. This is a movement from the abstract to the concrete, from thinking to actuality and from generalizations to the particular. This is why what is related to objectivity, and how, is related to subjectivity. Thinking is general and in this sense, objective, whereas the particular is something we experience through sensation. Sense impressions are of course subjective, and the particular is therefore highly associated with subjectivity. The latter was historically associated with empirical psychology, and the em-

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pirical therefore stands in opposition to thinking. Yet also psychology as such was so highly associated with sensation that Cassirer even called the old Aristotelian empirical thesis the “psychological axiom”: “Nothing is in the intellect which was not first in sense” (Cassirer, 1968, p. 99). Kierkegaard shares this understanding of psychology, and in this sense, psychology stands in opposition to all objective sciences and is to be defined as the science of subjectivity. So when Kierkegaard makes a psychological thought experiment, it appears as a mixture of objectivity and subjectivity. It is of course subjectively construed, and furthermore, it takes place as an imaginary construction, and in this sense, a thought experiment is about the particular. On the other hand, the imaginary construed situation is given by thinking, which is general and governed by the same constraining factors that govern the objective sciences, specifically, theoretical considerations, logic, and other compelling circumstances of general validity. Thus, the Kierkegaardian thought experiment is very different from Plato’s thought experiments as they cannot count as crucial tests, but rather focuses on the consequences of a scenario in which a certain situation is encountering general considerations. The Kitchen Seminar as a Thought Experiment This is what I would like to do by turning the Kitchen seminar into an imaginary construed situation. The aim is to look at how thoughts presented by one person in a certain situation are received by other providers with different backgrounds and different thoughts. This will hopefully tell us something about cultural adjustments and the processes in which specific notions and ideas are transformed into a general common understanding, and not least if that achievement is attainable at all. Some of the initial conditions are already described in terms of the very special environment, which now is turned into an imaginary construed situation. In addition, there is a cast of characters involved. It is important to underline that none of the characters in this thought experiment have anything to do with real persons that have participated in any Kitchen seminars. This is also true for the conductor. Nevertheless, the two main characters in the cast are of course the conductor (C) and the presenter (P). In addition, we have two professors affiliated with Clark University (CP1 and CP2), we have two graduate students (GS1 and GS2), two doctoral students (DS1 and DS2), one visiting professor at Clark (VCP), one professor on the screen sitting in South America (SPSA), two professors on the screen sitting in Europe (SPE1 and SPE2), and one professor on the screen sitting in east Asia (SPEA). The topic of the paper is “Minorities in American public schools analyzed from a semiotic perspective.” The scenario: The time is 9 a.m. on a Wednesday morning, and the presenter is sitting at the end of the table facing the screen, which is black and

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empty so far. The presenter is looking through her paper, which has been distributed through a “Kitchen email list” in advance to potential participants. The conductor came early. She has just prepared coffee and poured it into a can and made it ready to be served. The two graduate students are sitting along the long side of the table, reading through their own copies of the paper. The first doctoral student has made the electronic transference equipment ready and is now sitting on the other long side of the table, near the counter and the conductor. The conductor is serving the four guests coffee in small espresso plastic cups—or maybe the cups are originally made for fluoride rinsing of teeth—it is hard to say. On the table there are some chocolates brought back from one of the conductor’s longdistance travels. The first Clark professor is showing up, and the conductor embraces him with a warm welcoming “Hello,” accompanied by offering him a cup of coffee. In his wake, the visiting professor shows up, and at the same time, the first call sounds from the screen, and the professor from east Asia is also connected. They are all welcomed in the same warm way. The two other connections are also completed immediately after the first one. The time is now almost 9:15 a.m. and the presenter asks the conductor if she can start up, which is replied with a “Whenever you want.” The presenter decides to start up. P:

In my paper, I want to look more closely on the role of minorities in the public schools in the U.S. Yet it is hard to say who are the minorities and in what sense here in the U.S., I just want to focus on the fact that Afro-Americans and Hispanics are underrepresented in higher education, and I want to look at this phenomenon and try to explain why. Although Afro-Americans and Hispanics are underrepresented in higher education, they are overrepresented in the North American prisons and highly visible in criminal statistics. In this sense, to define a “minority” is to be regarded as an issue by itself. Some are minorities in one respect, and others represent [The other doctoral student enters the room highly visible, but quiet and finds a seat along the wall behind the presenter near the door, while receiving a cup of coffee from the conductor. The presenter makes a short pause, follows the intruder with her eyes until he sits down. Then she continues.] and others may represent the minority in other respects. The point is that the minority is used here more or less as a synonym for underprivileged groups of the population in the U.S., specifically Afro-Americans and Hispanics. My suggestion is that these groups are underprivileged for several reasons. One aspect is of course the economical background and so forth; however, I am not primarily interested in these as-

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pects. As you may know, the British researcher Paul Willis made a study on British lads at the beginning of the seventies, which was published under the informative title, Learning to Labour. What he found was quite interesting and is probably [The other Clark professor enters the room, not only highly visible, but also attracting all attention by saying quite loudly, “Hi guys, sorry for coming late, but it was a terrible traffic jam out there today.” He finds one of the empty seats along the long side of the table in front of the presenter. The presenter stops her presentation and waits until the professor has finished picking up his computer from a toonarrow computer bag, and then she continues while the professor receives a cup of coffee and examines the chocolate on the table before he indiscreetly unwraps the chocolate and eats it with great appetite.] What Paul Willis did find is probably still valid forty years after this investigation. He found that the labor class in England in the seventies was reproduced not by their economical conditions, but rather by their communicative acts. By means of their very certain clothing, hairstyles, comments, and slogans written on walls and blackboards, alternative musical styles—these guys were the forerunners to the Punk music—they managed to build up a protecting wall around themselves to stem the establishment. Thus, this wall was made of aesthetical symbols—of art—and the wall was not only against the authorities in school, but authorities in the whole society. So what I would like to do is to find out to what extent a similar communicative ‘wall’ exists around the AfroAmericans and Hispanics to stem the European successors—those who dominate the higher education institutions here in the U.S. This is an investigation on a microgenetic level, and I would like to make interviews with representatives from the specified groups, both youngsters and adults, and my theoretical approach will be based on a Peircian understanding of semiosis. It seems to me that the tripartite division of the sign is quite applicable here as it also underlines the complexity of the aspects of communication. And hopefully you have all got my proposal, so I would be happy to hear your comments on this now. SPE1:“Let me start up . . . I actually found this paper very interesting in the sense that you problematize some issues about minorities. I think you are right by making nuances in this understanding, and I think also that applying Peirce’s theory of semiosis is appropriate in this case. However, I would like to focus on how the aspect of microgenesis is applied in your proposal. In my understanding, microgenesis does not only refer to some actual informants, but also to the actual development and changes the informants go

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through. You also have some suggestions about the explanation for how these persons reproduce their underprivileged position. In my opinion, those suggestions reflect already some theoretical abstractions, even in reversible time, which may in fact contradict the actual changes your informants go through. So my point is just that you have to make a choice: Either develop the theoretical aspect based on Peirce or take the actual microgenesis into account and on its own premises. DS2: Well, . . . I don’t know if this is right . . . You have to combine the actual with theoretical reflections anyway. When I came into this room a bit late this morning, it was definitely an event on a microgenetic level, and probably some of you at the same time thought that this person always comes a bit late to get the attention—or whatever you may have thought. My point is that you thought something, and some of you understood the event as a confirmation of my late comings in general. However, maybe some of you also became aware of the fact that I had some stains of oil on my hands, and by this information explained my late coming by having had some problems with my bicycle on my way to Kitchen this morning. In other words, our preunderstanding is there, but it can be adjusted due to the awareness one has to details in the process of microgenesis. C: That is right, but SPE1 is addressing an important point, which is also emphasized by DS2: The awareness of microgenesis and its irreversible timeline is crucial to get any understanding at all. [Some seconds of silence.] DS1: However, what I found interesting in the proposal is the will to develop and apply a structured approach. And in my opinion, Peirce’s semiotic is definitely applicable, although I don’t think this is elaborated clearly enough. To what extent does semiotics affect the investigation? I think you have to define in what sense semiotics forms a kind of premise for this investigation. This will have a lot of consequences for how the interviews are worked out. You have to be explicit about your own conjectures, not least what you think are the crucial aspects of the semiosis that are going on between the underprivileged groups and the authorities. On this basis, you may find some interesting processes that actually do highlight certain signs that count as factors in the process of reproducing an underprivileged situation. SPEA: Let me follow up this. I am sure the TEM analysis [Trajectory Equifinality Model] will help you a lot here. According to this model,

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you may detect different perspectives that govern the informant’s reflections around a situation. Although the result is a certain act, it includes the underlying ambiguity of the informant’s actual acts. VPC: Well, this is something I am quite curious about. In my understanding, this project aims to find explanations for how underprivileged groups reproduce themselves. However, the TEM analysis seems just to describe the considerations the informants may have and then it describes the actual outcome of these considerations. Thus, I cannot see that a TEM analysis explains the choices one makes. C: In one sense, you are right. However, what SPEA is emphasizing is that TEM analysis also grasps the process in which different perspectives are included at the same time, and in this sense, it is impossible to make a clear distinction between descriptions and explanations. First of all, because explanations presupposes lack of ambiguity, which does not exist, and second because descriptions will always by necessity include a horizon of understanding. CP1: Exactly! And this horizon is not just about intellectual understanding of the situation, but it is rather examined on the basis of values. CP2: It is probably true that values can be included in the horizon of understanding in one or the other sense. However, according to William James, values are nothing but an evaluation based on feelings, which are primarily a bodily reaction to a sensational approach to our physical surroundings. In other words, what counts is the radical empirical basis for our understanding. This does not imply that an explanation is not ambiguous, rather the opposite, to which James’ understanding of feelings is the best example. The point is that values as such do not explain anything, but rather form the aspects that have to be explained. SPSA: Let me come in here . . . I am not sure, but when you refer to the ‘basis,’ what do you actually mean by that? To me, it seems to imply a sort of additive way of thinking—that you start with something that counts as the basis for the next argument, which should be a new empirical finding. This is how ‘normal science’ works, as if we can add a certain type of knowledge to the other, and by this, achieve a full understanding of something. However, what von Ehrenfels, the founder of the term ‘Gestalt,’ actually did find was that the whole was something qualitatively different from its parts; that it is impossible to deduce the whole from its parts. In this sense, there is some kind of ‘glue,’ or what we should call it, that binds the parts together. Ehrenfels referred to music and

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the relations between the tones. But that was between the tones, and when Felix Krueger talked about ‘Wertganzheit,’ he assessed values to be the same kind of ‘glue’ as Ehrenfels attributed the relationships between the tones. SPE2: Let me also come in here and just add that it strikes me that when we talk about ‘the border’ between something, we are referring to the same kind of glue that brings things in connection with each other, but seems to be impossible to define by means of additive forms of reasoning. GS1: For me, this all sounds very interesting, but I am quite confused now. I am working on a term paper about attitudes to green buying among students, but my question is, how can I approach this topic at all without building up knowledge step by step, by just adding the findings I do get to findings others have got earlier? SPEA: I am sorry, but here in Asia it is too late now, and I just have to break up and actually go to bed. And the European participants follow up this as well, because they have to go home for dinner. The discussion continues almost to lunchtime in the Kitchen room at Clark University, but also there, the assembly dissolves gradually. The second graduate student still remains silent while the other participants partly continue a common discussion and partly start up discussing issues in smaller groups. Some continue their discussion on the way out of the Kitchen room and others end up discussing in the corners. But the activity fades out while the first doctoral student and the conductor dismantle the electronic equipment and bring it back to the place where it is stored. Findings From a What-Perspective There are several aspects one could highlight from this scenario of an imaginary Kitchen seminar. First of all, I would like to draw attention to the two graduate students. One of them remains silent during the whole discussion, and the other opens her mouth at the end, and then she reveals that she is quite frustrated about what to do with her own project. The frustration is likely connected to all the different inputs, but even more to all the different and partly contradicting stands that came up during the discussion. However, the frustration is probably also connected to the fact that the discussion does not give her any practical advice for how to follow up her own research question. There are of course several types of approaches, like the Trajectory Equifinality Model, which one of the discussants referred to. However, her frustration is that she has probably planned to make a survey, and she does not see how this survey eventually could be combined with a TEM analysis. Without going further into her dilemma, which we definitely

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would have if this had been a real scenario, this tells us that the final word about methodology is not said when it comes to psychology, but even more that the methodological considerations are still fragmented and not easy to unite, which is very often the case in conflicts between quantitative and qualitative approaches. So one conclusion to be drawn from this discussion is that psychology is characterized by methodological fragmentation. However, this does not have to be a drawback. The dialectical approach rather presupposes a sort of embedded conflict. And this is exactly what characterizes the whole scenario: Very many of the participants just refuse to agree. Thus, we have several stands presented, although it is hard to tell exactly how many. Some share the same position, but still do not agree, and some apparently support each other, but for contrary reasons. Hence, it would help to sort out the positions that are in fact different. The first professor from Europe on the screen (SPE1) primarily focuses on actuality. She blames the presenter for not including the aspect of development. She even recommends refusing theoretical abstractions. This can be understood as a clear expression for radical empiricism. In this sense, the second doctoral student (DS2) stands in opposition to her. By emphasizing the unclear distinction between theoretical and empirical statements, radical empiricism is hard to advocate, and this person seems to highlight the theoretical considerations as a point of departure for scientific approaches. Thus, the position of the conductor is different from both of the two. Her effort is rather to unite the two more or less contradicting positions. Yet it is not said in what way, and the effect of this is a sort of bifurcation. On the one hand, the conductor’s stand encourage both positions to continue developing their thoughts, but on the other hand, this also causes the discussion to apparently meet a dead end for a short while. However, the first doctoral student (SD1) tries to bring the discussion back on track again by focusing on structure. This is a highly appropriate comment since the Peircian perspective is quite scantily mentioned in the introduction. However, by emphasizing the presenter’s “own conjectures” and what she thinks is crucial in the semiosis, he is highlighting the theoretical aspects as superior to the empirical. In this sense, the two doctoral students seem to share the same position. Although the professor on the screen from east Asia (SPEA) wants to follow up, the TEM analysis is actually bringing in something else, specifically the “underlying ambiguity.” This may very well stand in opposition to theoretical considerations, which strive for avoiding ambiguity by means of distinctiveness of terms. The visiting professor at Clark (VPC) is trying to underline the need for distinctiveness in the use of terms by highlighting “explanations” as standing in opposition to “descriptions.” Yet the conductor, who stresses the problematic distinction between explanations and descriptions, corrects this.

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Already on this point we can see the tendencies in this discussion. There are basically two different stands that are implicitly presented: the empirical and the ideal. Yet there is also one more stand provided by the conductor. The normal understanding of the two positions is that they are in conflict. This is also more or less articulated by the participants. However, when the conductor emphasizes that both are right, the positions are not regarded as mutually excluding each other. Yet they are not united either; they are rather regarded as being complementary to each other. This is actually a third and independent stand. These three positions seem to dominate the following discussion as well. In this sense, it is interesting that the first Clark professor (CP1) is highlighting values, because values are partly ideal and partly empirical. They are, on the one hand, guiding our thinking, but they appear through our actual acts. This is why the second Clark professor (CP2) can say that it is the actual acts that can tell us something about the values rather than the opposite. We can articulate some certain values, but we may in reality act contradictory to those values. In this sense, the values are crucial, as the professor on the screen from South America (SPSA) also hesitates. However, what she advocates is basically close to the conductor’s position, specifically, that the whole is a quality that is quite different from the quality of the parts, and the one cannot exist without the other. This is also a sort of complementarity. The same could also be said about the second professor on the screen from Europe (SPE2), when he states that a border should be comparable with a gestalt. So what we stand left with in this analysis of the experiment is that we have three different positions: The ideal, the empirical, and what could be called “the unification approach.” The latter formulation is already an accepted term applied in the meaning that “an event is explained by deriving the occurrence of the event using a theory that unifies many diverse phenomena” (Strevens, 2004, p. 155). However, the unification in this context is slightly different. It is not so much to depict that the positions are united, but rather that their conflict is not a hindrance for accepting both. This is a core aspect of complementarity as well. So the third position here is rather a type of unification that appeals for complementarity. In this sense, the ideal and empirical positions can never be united in the sense of being reduced just to one position. Yet they can both be acceptable to describe a phenomenon, albeit being mutual exclusive to each other. Value is probably the best example to illustrate this, because it is, on the one hand, ideal, but on the other hand, manifested in a certain act or certain goods. American values are, for example, sometimes expressed by pointing at apple pie or Coca-Cola. But on the other hand, they are also expressed by referring to the idea of democracy. The examples represent two different spheres, which are pointing at each other but cannot replace each other. The apple

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pie is primarily an actual thing that has to be consumed in a specific situation, whereas democracy is primarily an idea about how the power among people should be distributed. We hope that a just distribution will become real after a democratic election, but this is very often not the case. In other words, the complementarity is a kind of dialectics without the mediation— the tensions will remain. Findings From a How-Perspective If we now go back to the questions posed initially, we have to look more closely at the interaction between the participants in the thought experiment. The three positions that basically came up concern primarily what was said and not so much how this was said. By taking into account the how, we will be able to bring up some aspects of the microgenetic processes. In this sense, the very beginning of the experiment could tell us something about the dialogue between the presenter and the conductor. The conductor is supposed to be the leader who actually decides when to begin a seminar. Thus, seen from a what-perspective, the conductor does not do the job by not telling when to begin. However, from a how-perspective, the conductor performs the job alternatively, which tells us that she opens up for some tacit guidelines. These imply that she goes out of her role as a conductor and rather invites the presenter to take over as the leader. In other words, the how-perspective on this microgenetic process tells us that the presenter is invited to take the leading role, and the conductor and all the others have to be humble and show respect to the important message the presenter is supposed to bring with her. During the presentation, there is a certain thing happening, which is interesting too. This is the entrance of the second Clark professor, who says, “Hi guys, sorry for coming late, but it was a terrible traffic jam out there today.” However, this formulation is not interesting because of its content and therefore is of course completely ignored from the what-perspective. Seen from the how-perspective, on the other hand, this tells us that the professor feels at-home and comfortable in this seminar and trusts that all the participants are welcoming him and even have missed him. And they actually seem to have done so. And this is despite the fact that it is exactly this professor who heralds the perspective of radical empiricism. So the fact that this person, who apparently contradicts many of the group, feels he is very welcome—and he actually is—tells us to what extent the nonconclusive atmosphere is dominating, and opens up for inclusion. This atmosphere is something that cannot be unveiled from the what-perspective. This is probably the best example of what we may call a “radical unification approach”—just to discern it from the “unification approach” referred to above, in which the contradictory positions are united as if they could merge and be reduced to just one theory. The unification approach be-

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longs to the what-sphere, whereas the radical unification approach belongs to the how-sphere. Yet the term “complementarity” is also to be reassessed due to this distinction, and then we will see that it does not belong to the sphere of how, but to the sphere of what. Complementarity concerns the theoretical stands that contradict and not the actual uniting atmosphere. In other words, the radical unification approach is primarily revealed through the way something is articulated. On this background, the conductor must be said to practice a radical unification approach. The statements coming from the conductor, which seem to be hanging in the air, demonstrate this. From a strict theoretical perspective, they even make the conductor look like being without any certain opinions. So the radical unification approach is not revealed in what is said, but what the conductor actually does. However the effect may highly influence the what-sphere in the sense that if all the other perspectives are highlighted, then something new and unexpected will come out of it. This is the aspect of the modern midwifery that this conductor is practicing. So when it comes to adjustments and agreements, we have to say that not too many accept the others’ positions in this thought experiment. Although we can trace three main stands in the discussion from a what-perspective, not all the participants would probably agree with that. This is also something we can read out of the experiment from a how-perspective. The way everyone is arguing underlines that each one is inclined to protect his or her own private opinion, which is supposed to be different from the others’. On this basis, the how-perspective does not solely end up with unification and harmony, but rather greater discrepancies than what we found from a what-perspective. The actual statements articulated by each one stand in opposition to almost all the others’. Thus, the actual discussion in this sense is apparently chaotic. We manage to achieve some kind of order from a what-perspective, but even this reveals some deep and fundamental contradictions. In this sense, we have actually found both some unifying and some diversifying tendencies in both the what-perspective and the how-perspective. Yet these are to be regarded as different in the sense that statements seen from a what-perspective may contradict, whereas statements from a how-perspective stand in opposition to each other. This implies that contradictions and oppositions are two different types of diversities, which even belong to two different spheres. Contradictions belong to the theoretical and general sphere, whereas oppositions belong to the actual sphere. The same has to be said about the aspect of unification as well. An inclusive attitude to contradictory statements is basically different from merging statements that apparently stand in opposition to each other. Contradictory statements are by definition mutually exclusive, whereas oppositional statements are not. In other words, contradictory statements can never merge

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whereas oppositional statements can, and merging statements are radically different from accepting contradictions in terms of complementarity. Some Conclusive Comments So what we have found by going through this thought experiment is that the old and fundamental distinction between thinking and acting, between the general and the particular, the theoretical and the empirical, is still valid in an imaginary discussion about approaches within the framework of cultural psychology. This makes the introductory suggestion about the close connection between Valsiner and Kierkegaard highly actual. Kierkegaard did not say very much about culture, but he said a lot about psychology. For him, psychology was primarily about sensation and therefore the science of the particular. Yet he had a problem with this, which he also admitted. If science is about the general, then psychology as a science is a contradiction in terms. And this contradiction is exactly what is disclosed through this thought experiment. Yet we have found something more, specifically, that this theoretical contradiction can be united in the sphere of actuality by means of an inclusive attitude among stakeholders in the field of cultural psychology. In this sense the Socratic method in terms of midwifery or maieutic seems to be the appropriate method, although this is based on other premises than the Platonic version of it. Thus, the understanding of science today is quite different from how it was conceptualized by Plato. Yet it is probably even different from how Immanuel Kant and the contemporaries of Kierkegaard actually did understand science. Kant talked about pure science, which is exclusively looking at knowledge generated from a priori activities. In this sense, the neoKantians, and especially Ernst Cassirer, introduced culture as the sphere in which general thinking and actual experiences are united (Cassirer, 1961). Yet general thinking is something different from the Kantian pure thinking. This is exactly what Wilhelm Wundt early realized and therefore separated the investigation of language and thinking from experimental psychology. On this background, one may say that there is a continuous line from Kierkegaard, partly via Wundt and German experimental psychology, to Cassirer. If we in addition take into account that the Clark psychologist Heinz Werner was a former colleague of, and highly influenced by, Ernst Cassirer, the cultural understanding he advocated is something that Kierkegaard previously had formed a basis for. By showing an admiration for Werner by Valsiner, we may say that the circle is closed when Valsiner is now having a chair in Denmark. Yet the real basis for this chair is to be found much earlier than Nils Bohr. So if we take this imaginary construction of a Kitchen seminar as a basis for how to understand cultural psychology in the future, we have to slightly adjust the aspect of complementarity and reformulate the initial summary of Valsiner’s academic activity by saying that

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it is characterized by “the unification of stability and instability by means of focusing on actuality.” REFERENCES Cassirer, E. (1961). The logic of the humanities. New Haven, CT; London, UK: Yale University Press Cassirer, E. (1968). The philosophy of the enlightenment. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Cornford, F. M. (1973). Plato’s theory of knowledge. London, UK: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Hempel, C. G. (1966). Philosophy of natural science. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: PrenticeHall. Kierkegaard, S. (1988). Stages on life’s way (H. V. Hong & E. H. Hong, Eds. & Trans.). Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press. Kierkegaard, S. (2009a). Concluding unscientific postscript (A. Hannay, Ed. & Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Kierkegaard, S. (2009b). Repetition and philosophical crumbs (M.G. Piety, Trans.). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Strevens, M. (2004). The causal and unification approaches to explanation unified– Causality. Noûs, 38(1), 154–176. Valsiner, J. (2013, March 15). Cultural psychology and its future: Complementarity in a new key. Inaugural Lecture of the Niels Bohr Professorship Centre of Cultural Psychology, University of Aalborg, Denmark.

CHAPTER 11

SCULPTURE AND ART INSTALLATIONS: TOWARD A CULTURAL PSYCHOLOGICAL ANALYSIS Tania Zittoun and Alex Gillespie

In his paradigm-setting inaugural lecture, Jaan Valsiner proposes a method for developing “new knowledge through what we know already—by feeling into the not-yet-known” (Valsiner, this volume). Exploration of unknown future insights is nourished by interdisciplinary dialogue with Niels Bohr’s complementarity principle and the Danish tradition of arts and humanities. One of the avenues for research opened up in this exploration is a cultural psychology of sculpture. Valsiner considers the bronze sculpture by Galata Morente, a lounging elongated figure situated in a public park. The sculpture is an attempt to make certain meanings persist in time, to prevent forgetting. Sculptures are also interactive, inviting tactile and ambulatory exploration. The question is, what role does such art have in human meaning-making? And more specifically, what can cultural psychology learn from examining such sculpture as meaning-making? Cultural Psychology and Its Future: Complementarity in a New Key, pages 167–177. Copyright © 2014 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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Our aim in this chapter is to pursue these ideas, that there can be a cultural psychology of sculpture and that cultural psychology can learn from sculpture. To do this, we take a broad understanding of sculpture, which goes beyond the classical bronze or stone figurative (Zuckert, 2009) work considered by Valsiner, to include more contemporary forms of three-dimensional art, such as installations. Following in Valsiner’s footsteps, we will focus on Danish public art, specifically public sculpture in Aalborg, in its parks and in the Kunsten Art Museum. Valsiner begins by discussing Niels Bohr’s complementarity principle, and so do we. Central to the complementarity principle is a perspective switch, which puts either particles or waves in the foreground. This psychological figure/ground shift is also evident in sculpture, in terms of the relation between the subject and its context. Classical figurative art puts the sculpted figure in the foreground, with the ground being the context in which the sculpture is placed (such as a public park or a private living room). Art installations are interesting because, in contrast, they create a ground or context in which the viewer enters as the experiencing subject (Moszynska, 2013). While the viewer can walk around a figurative sculpture, installations tend to surround the viewer, creating an immersive experience that the participant walks through. Thus, broadening our definition of sculpture to include installations allows us to make something of a perspective switch, putting the context in the foreground and enabling an interrogation of the viewer as an experiencing subject. We emphasize the figure/context complementarity in sculpture to make a direct link to the personality/environment complementarity in psychology, or the psyche/ culture complementarity emphasized for which cultural psychology tries to account. Any behavior can be understood either in terms of personality or environment, and sometimes it is difficult to do both simultaneously—it is akin to a Necker Cube illusion, first bringing one aspect then the other aspect into focus. Sculpture and art installations are cultural means not simply of communicating, but of creating experiences. Great art expands our experience, playing with the complexity of being human and sometimes stimulating us to reflexive insights. Accordingly, if cultural psychology is the science of human experience as culturally constructed through the semiotic and material environment, then a cultural psychological analysis of sculpture could lead to insights. Art, after all, is a much longer established tradition aimed not at analyzing experience, but creating experience. So how does traditional sculpture and more contemporary art installations create experiences? Our aim in this commentary chapter is to address this question. Taking Valsiner’s lead, we utilize ideas from cultural psychology to analyze sculpture and art installations in order to try and unpack this time-honed technique of experience creation. Our analysis yields six aspects of the con-

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struction of experience through sculpture, especially installations, which we will discuss in turn. EXPERIENCE IS EMBODIED AND MULTIMODAL Artistic installations tend to be more than something to view; rather, they increasingly tend to be multimodal, entailing multiple senses and engaging us at an almost corporeal level. Manipulating the audience’s environment can make them “feel” things that it are difficult to put into words, or even identify the modality of. Consider the “Lava Floor” by Olafur Eliasson (2002) presented in the Kunsten Art Museum in 2013. The viewer enters a large quiet white room with a high ceiling. The floor is covered with various size lava stones; these are a peculiar type of stone, quite porous and light, with a reddish charcoal hue, reflected by the walls. The so-called viewer (maybe better termed “experiencer”) is invited to walk on the floor. If the experiencer accepts that invitation, then a specific experience unfolds. The stones “crunch” with a deep hollow sound, shifting underfoot, moving more than stones of a regular weight would. Some stones are so large they need to be walked around. Moving into the center of the room begins to feel like a lunar expedition. The feeling is very peculiar, somewhat surreal and “out of this world.” What causes the experience? Is it the sound, the sight, the

FIGURE 1.

Experience of weight on the lava floor (photo by Susanne Togeby).

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touch, or one’s own gradual progress toward the center of the landscape? Maybe it is the violation of the art gallery norm “do not touch,” as there is generalized feeling of “walking on art.” Is it OK to “touch” this art? Where does the freedom end? Can the audience move the stones around (see Figure 1)? Maybe the peculiar feeling is the vacuum of cultural guidance. Not only can the feeling not be put clearly into words, but the very source of the experience is difficult to locate. At best we can say that it works on our corporeality, on our very bodies, creating generalized feelings. Thus, contemporary sculpture is not about explicit “meaning” symbolized in words, or to be decoded (as when flying Angels symbolize “love”). A piece such as the Lava Floor primarily demands an immediate, embodied engagement, before or below its interpretation. Because the experience is embodied, its semiotic nature is multimodal. We do not understand only words (e.g., the title of the sculpture); we have to “read” a great diversity of elements, which then become semiotic: the color of the environment, the light, the pressure on our skin, the noises, the smell in our nose, the physical distance between our body, and that of other persons in the room. EXPERIENCE TAKES PLACE IN A SPECIFIC SOCIAL ENVIRONMENT Experience always occurs in an environment that is socially defined and that frames the experience. At the Museum’s entrance, in the corridor, one is in the mode of everyday life: walking, talking, texting, and paying fees. The Museum creates the threshold where the art experience starts. Entering into a new experiential world (Schuetz, 1945) is marked by the change of light and sound, and the change of behavior observed. In the room with the lava floor, an empty space offers plastic sandals and the inscription “Please feel free to enter.” Entering is accepting to physically step on the lava, but also to enter in an art-experiencing mode—that of, precisely, being open to and aware of the nature of the experience. Every cultural experience sets an entry threshold, such as entering into the movie theater or the reading of a novel (Zittoun, 2013). Public sculptures and installations are also social in a more obvious sense, in that there are usually other people engaging with the art at the same time. Thus, the art can become a shared object, or a shared experience, creating new forms of sociality. One could be with other people in a small room, feeling either intimacy or entrapment. In public spaces, we can feel free, precisely because the space is open to us, but equally we can feel constrained by norms, such as not talking too loud in an art gallery. In the garden of the Kunsten Art Museum, the piece “Water Pavilion” by artist Jeppe Hein (2011) is made by three concentric circles of water fountains, which gush up from a grated floor (Figure 2). The fountains turn on and off, with entry points appearing intermittently, inviting the audience in. But

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FIGURE 2. The Water Pavilion; Jeppe Hein (2011); Aalborg. Pictures 2 and 3: press pictures available at http://www.kunsten.dk/Default. aspx?ID=4094

these entry points also close, leaving entrants encircled by walls of water. The public (and especially children) are enticed in by the thrill of nearly getting wet; they explore, with delight, becoming trapped, being isolated, and being put in the same surreal space as a stranger. People get wet; the norms of gallery propriety give way to screeches of joy and fear. Social connections are made. All the time, those interacting with the Water Pavilion are, arguably, the subjects within the art for more distal observers. It is the so-called audience that brings this installation to life. EXPERIENCE DEPENDS ON ONE’S UNIQUE TRAJECTORY Once we have accepted to engage in the experience proposed by the art piece, various things occur. On the one side, we experience, in an embodied way, a complex environment, which we perceive through a multiplicity of sensory modalities. Yet we also accept to follow “what they do to us” and “what they mean to us” as semiotic guidance. In some sense, we enter into a playful attitude: things are not only what they are, but they are experienced in a what-if mode (Boesch, 1991; Vaihinger, 1924): what if I were on the moon? What if the fountain was trying to keep me prisoner? Hence, in the

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process of making sense of the situation, we draw on our previous experiences. These are linked to our personal trajectories and include our early traces of bodily sensations, childhood fantasies, and memories, our experiences of places, people or emotions, our past fictional experiences—of films, stories, or music—our imagination of the world, or our knowledge of other art pieces and their history, and so on. Altogether, engaging with the art piece opens an intermediary type of experience: it is both “real,” because of its materiality and the social nature, yet unreal, because it is inhabited by our inner lives. In that sense, experiencing contemporary art becomes a form of transitional experience (Kuhn, 2013; Zittoun, 2012)— never totally disconnected from the engagement with the world, it can get the thickness that one allows by letting inner experience flow. Hence, the meeting between this flow of thoughts and images, and the experience triggered by the sculpture allow a unique meaningful, cultural experience—on the lava floor, we can feel lonely, or like-on-the-moon, or in a dream, or sharing beauty; through the Water Pavilion, we might think of lost gardens, waterfalls, or Kafkaesque labyrinths. In addition, experiencing contemporary sculpture, as any other form of cultural experience, takes place at a unique point on a given person’s trajectory. How she or he will respond to that piece depends as much on the length and nature of that past trajectory, and the forthcoming one. The playfulness required by art requires imagination, which itself deploys according to a person’s other masteries of semiotic system, abstract thinking, and so on (Vygotsky, 1931). And of course, someone who has a long experience with artwork does not only freely associate to early childhood memories, but to the more formal field of art history or critique. Such experiences, because they might open new ranges of feeling or images, might then open possible future experiences—trivially, by inviting the experiencer to learn more about an artist, or engage in more sculpture; but it might also change his or her attention to the environment—the texture of other stone floors, the implicit architecture of rain, or the labyrinthine nature of one’s workplace. In addition, because of their unique resonance, experienced art installations might in the future come back to mind and constitute more or less important memories, knowledge, or symbolic resources, which can be used later on. EXPERIENCES TAKE PLACE IN A SOCIOCULTURAL, HISTORICAL, AND POLITICAL ENVIRONMENT Contemporary artists’ ambitions are usually not to approach eternal forms of beauty, but rather, usually, to address the social and cultural world in which they live and to which they react. This includes often preoccupation both about the state of the society at-large and of their own environment and of the current state of arts. The art spectator may be more or less open

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to these wider streams of meanings and connotations related to the art piece. Olafur Eliasson has, for instance, a project to create art pieces as environments in which people might feel related and establish a sense of community, and sees it as a form of personal democratic commitment (Jørgensen & Lundø, 2009). The viewer might be sensitive to that aspect, or, depending on his or her awareness of current issues in the world or in the art debates, see how, beyond his or her personal experience, the piece raises a question or proposes an answer, or more generally, dialogue with the social and cultural world. Hence, with time passing, aging contemporary pieces that may allow a ludic personal experience might lose their addressivity to the social and political world and refer to art in general only as historical piece. The contemporary sculpture might thus be seen as the crystallization of various forms of dialogicality (Linell, 2009): dialogue with other pieces of art, dialogue with the social and political actuality, dialogue with the art business—in addition to the inner dialogue described above. The experiencing person might, more or less consciously, follow the threads of one or the other dialogical stream; these, in turn, might be in opposition or contradiction and create additional layers of tension. EXPERIENCES HAVE A DURATION AND A MOVEMENT Obviously, because these sculptures and installations entail experiencing in space, they demand time and movement. They are about moving through space (circumventing the statue, running through the water curtains, and walking on the lava floor), and thus they also have duration. Most of the time, the very movement through space and the duration are part of the experience itself. The Water Pavilion changes meaning for the viewer with time: first observing others engage with it, and second, engaging with the installation directly. First, one is an observer, in the classical sense, ”viewing” the installation, such as watching children playing in the Water Pavilion. One can, from an observer’s point of view, empathize and participate vicariously in their interactions. This is in much the same way as one might empathize with the character depicted in classical figurative work. However, art installation allows for a second mode of engagement: One can become the hero in the scene, one can enter into the installation, and one can become the experiencing body, feeling one’s subjectivity totally delocalized or absorbed by the installation itself (Benson, 1993, 2001, ch. 12). Observation gives way to participation. Like the children fully engaged in avoiding the intermittent spurts of water, trying to predict a route out of the maze, the participant is wholly engaged in the art (see Figure 3). As we will see below, a third phase to the experience might be afterward: drying ones clothes in the sun and reflecting upon the experience, which again brings back an observational mode (in this case, reflecting upon one’s own past interaction). It is interesting to note that while classical art tends to fix the audience in

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FIGURE 3.

Children running through the Water Pavilion.

the observation role, installations seem more likely to encourage position exchange (Gillespie & Martin, 2014), where the viewer at one point in time becomes the participant-hero at the next, as the installation draws people through spheres of experience (Gillespie & Zittoun, 2013). It is this “laying up” of experiencing the art from both the outside (as observer) and the inside (as participant) that gives interactive installations a defining semiotic particularity beyond classical forms of sculpture. EXPERIENCES BECOME HISTORICAL Experiences of contemporary art are embodied and multimodal; they have duration and trigger complex perception, images, sensations, or thoughts, located and dialoguing with others and the world. Yet once the viewer passes the threshold that brings him or her out of that experience into mundane everyday reality (Schuetz, 1945), there is often a possible next step—that of translating that experience in further modalities and communicating to or with others. Families or friends leaving the museum might discuss what they saw or felt, viewers might write in a visitor’s book, teachers might discuss with their class the experience shared in a school visit. More formally, journalists and art critics reflect, translate, name, and reconnect sculptures one to the others, add new lights to these experiences, inscribe them in history, and thus participate in making them cultural objects. All these in-

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terpretative works, which occurs after the cultural experiences, add to it, yet will never replace it. Research on meaning-making has been relatively good at understanding these more reflective processes. Using interviews or recording more naturalistic discussions, it is relatively easy to have access to people’s attempts to assimilate experiences verbally. What has proved more difficult to access and thus study is the initial embodied experiences. Openings We have begun to sketch a cultural psychology of sculpture and art installation, and in so doing, we have returned some of the basic assumptions of the cultural psychology perspective. The six aspects of art experience that we have highlighted (experience is embodied and multimodal, socially situated, personal yet in dialogue with the sociohistorical environment, it has a duration of its own and is inscribed in a longer temporality) are constitutive of any experience we have as humans participating in our complex world. The cultural psychology of sculpture and art, but more generally of human life, has to examine all of these aspects, and does so. Yet our analysis also suggests two aspects that are specifically triggered by installation art, and often undermined in current social sciences: the multimodal and embodied aspect of experience and its active and dynamic aspect. First, cultural psychology has gone very far in trying to account for the complexity of human experience in its social and cultural world. However, cultural psychology still very much—and necessarily—uses words to translate our experiences of the world, and verbal language to describe the processes it tries to capture. Doing so, it can be communicated and accepted in the scientific community. Yet reversely, it probably misses many of the important components of our experience of the world. In that respect, contemporary sculpture humbles our theoretical ambitions: it reminds us of the embodied nature of our experience and of the multimodality of our sense-making of the world. It might also question whether verbal language is the only and best semiotic modality to communicate and translate all the shades of situated human experience. If psychology has always used graphs and figures, it is now exploring again the use of daily images (Valsiner, 2013; Zittoun et al., 2013) and inviting us to refer to objects and situation of the mundane (Brinkmann, 2012); it has still difficulties to go beyond words. Recently, scholars in the social sciences have engaged (again?) in interdisciplinary work with artists, searching to create multimodal experiences to communicate complex theoretical ideas (Mitchell, Gillespie, & O’Neill, 2011). For instance, the sociologist Bruno Latour works with actors and dancers around, among others, his Gaia project; Luc Boltanski, writes theater pieces next to his sociological work, and directs them; reversely, theater director Adeline Rosenstein has collaborated with sociologist Jean-Michel Chaumont or historian Mas’ud Hamdan to inform her work with, or to give

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life to historical, sociological, or psychological enquiries. We do not say that such collaborations are the future of cultural psychology, but rather that they may point to some of our blind spots. Finally, our account of experiencing installation emphasizes how much such art depends on the active commitment of the person, in the actual environment; meaning is not in one’s mind, it unfolds as the person moves through space, touches, smells, communicates to others. Meaning is a process, and it has duration within a social space. If cultural psychology is by definition a genetic and developmental science, it needs to represent people in their social, institutional, and semiotic frames and, moreover, in their movement between those frames. Not only do we still fail to fully capture the codetermination of time and space (which is at the heart of the complementarity principle), but we still have a lot of work to do on how to convey and analyze the feeling of emerging meaning and experience. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT The authors would like to thank Pernille Hviid for her fine suggestion to focus on sculpture for this commentary. REFERENCES Benson, C. (1993). The absorbed self. Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire, UK: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Benson, C. (2001). The cultural psychology of self: Place, morality and art in human worlds. London UK: Routledge. Boesch, E. E. (1991). Symbolic action theory and cultural psychology, Vol. 4. New York, NY: Springer-Verlag. Brinkmann, S. (2012). Qualitative inquiry in everyday life: Working with everyday life materials. London, UK: Sage. Gillespie, A., & Martin, J. (2014). Position exchange theory: A socio-material basis for discursive and psychological positioning. New Ideas in Psychology, 32, 73–79. Gillespie, A., & Zittoun, T. (2013). Meaning making in motion: Bodies and minds moving through institutional and semiotic structures. Culture & Psychology, 19, 518–532. Jørgensen, J., & Lundø, H. (2009). Olafur Eliasson: Space is process [documentary]. JJ Films. Kuhn, A. (2013). Cultural experience and the gallery film. In A. Kuhn (Ed.), Little madnesses: Winnicott, transitional phenomena and cultural experience (pp. 159– 172). London, UK: Tauris. Linell, P. (2009). Rethinking language, mind and world dialogically. Interactional and contextual theories of sense making. Charlotte, NC: Information Age. Mitchell, R., Gillespie, A., & O’Neill, B. (2011). Cyranic contraptions: using personality surrogates to explore ontologically and socially dynamic contexts. In Procedings of the second conference on creativity and innovation in design (pp. 199–210). ACM.

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Moszynska, A. (2013). Sculpture now. New York: Thames & Hudson. Schuetz, A. (1945). On multiple realities. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 5(4), 533–576. doi:10.2307/2102818 Vaihinger, H. (1924). The philosophy of “as if”. A system of the theoretical, practical and religious fictions of mankind. (C. K. Ogden, Trans.). London, UK: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Valsiner, J. (2013). An invitation to cultural psychology. London, UK: Sage. Vygotsky, L. S. (1931). Imagination and creativity of the adolescent. Retrieved July 22, 2010, from http://www.cddc.vt.edu/marxists/archive/vygotsky/ works/1931/adolescent/ch12.htm#s02 Zittoun, T. (2012). The art of noise: Comment on the sound of silence. Culture & Psychology, 18(4), 30–41. Zittoun, T. (2013). On the use of a film: Cultural experiences as symbolic resources. In A. Kuhn (Ed.), Little madnesses: Winnicott, transitional phenomena and cultural experience (p. 135–147). London, UK: Tauris. Zittoun, T., Valsiner, J., Vedeler, D., Salgado, J., Gonçalves, M., & Ferring, D. (2013). Human development in the lifecourse. Melodies of living. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zuckert, R. (2009). Sculpture and touch: Herder’s aesthetics of sculpture. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 67(3), 285–299. doi:10.2307/25622078

PART 5 REPLY

CHAPTER 12

COMPLEMENTARITY TRANSFORMED Constructing Freedom on the Border Jaan Valsiner

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 not only face them as objective structures (structural aspect) but forces them to higher levels of reflexivity when the associated subjects cannot either face the implications of these objective structures or find that they have unexpected implications that they wish to develop further (critical aspect). For cultural psychology, these resistances are first and foremost facts that are described and explained. For philosophy, these resistances are matters not primarily for description and explanation but for criticism. —(Innis, this volume, p. 136) Different objects of investigation require different ways of making sense. Niels Bohr’s solution—the Complementarity Principle (CP)—was both sufficient and heuristically productive in the physics of the 20th century. It Cultural Psychology and Its Future: Complementarity in a New Key, pages 181–193. Copyright © 2014 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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showed the sciences a way to overcome the confines of the classical logic— moving from the rejection of the truthfulness of negation (if A is, then nonA cannot be true) to that of complementarity of opposites (A can be true under conditions X, and non-A under conditions Y, with both views being complementary to each other). It is important to locate Bohr’s efforts in their historical context—still dominated by acceptance of the Aristotelian/ Boolean classical logic, with new versions of logics—multivalued, deontic, temporal (Valsiner, 2009)—not yet being developed. One could consider Bohr’s solution a major revolution in logic carried out in one science— physics—under the conditions of the ways of knowledge construction in that discipline. However, the importance of the CP does not stop in physics. Bohr facilitated the efforts to move the CP beyond the boundaries of physics of his time—to biology and psychology, among other sciences. The CP was general metalevel principle of theoretical tolerance of opposite positions (Brinkmann, this volume)—a kind of equality of opportunity for ideas— but it purposefully did not include a focus on relationships between them. This is a major difference, both with the common language notion of complementarity and with the needs of our social sciences’ use of CP. In this volume, Marková points to the difference between our commonsense and psychological meaning of complementarity—an effort to reconcile opposite perspectives. When we encounter a difference in our everyday life, we are drawn to it. Often we try to overcome it. Psychology aspires to make peace and solve conflicts, usually without success. Physics can look at the world in terms of tensions that do not need “conflict resolution” or any kind of moral treatment, and that is simply part of the reality of physical being. There was no reconciliation implied in Bohr’s CP, nor any other form of relationship between alternative positions. It is only in the case of open systems in biology, psychology, and social sciences where the need to consider the relational aspect of complementarity emerges How to Build the Complementarity Notion Beyond Physics? Can CP be extrapolated beyond the physic-chemical domains of science? If we look from the perspective of psychological and social phenomena, CP can only be productive if elaborated so as to fit the nature of such phenomena. This entails considerations of the multilevel complexity of the systems involved, as well as their inherent intentionality (Brentano, 1874). Niels Bohr was in a lucky situation (theoretically) that he did not need to consider the possibility that the electrons would intentionally act upon the system of their orbits and change them. Instead, it was sufficient to assume that they “jump” between the orbits as the physical circumstances demanded. This is not so simple in the human sciences, where the intentional and context-bound dynamic systems of social and psychological kind axiomati-

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cally imply intentionality of the objects studied. If an electron can be assumed to “jump” from place A to place B due to the forces operating within the physical field, a human being may do it under conditions of the forces of the social field, but might also do that based on one’s own will. Given the possibility for such intentional action, the probability of it cannot be derived from the past observations. The personal will—a systemic organizational state of the agent—may continue on the past course, or may deviate from it. Furthermore, it (personal will) may grow out of the former (social field conditions) as an emergent regulatory mechanism that revamps the whole social field structure. These three axiomatic conditions—intentionality within the system, possibility with indeterminable probability, and emergence of new forms—make it necessary to consider Bohr’s CP for use in the social sciences once it is transformed into a new abstract form. That form embeds complementarities into temporary hierarchical orders, hence the relationship between these orders needs to be elaborated. Contributions to this volume give us some hints as to what kind of form this might be. I try to take these a step further here to combine the various ideas that have been presented in this volume. COMPLEMENTARITIES IN THE HUMAN CONDITION Human beings are intentional actors in irreversible time. As Niels Bohr did not have to posit any intentionality to be present in the parts of the atomic universe, neither did he have to deal with the characteristics of irreversibility of time. The luck of a physicist is in working on relatively simple problems where the struggle is with one’s limited capacities to grasp the general principles of the phenomena rather than worry about the perspectives the phenomena might take on their hypotheses. The latter may end up being wrong—most scientific hypotheses share that fate—but they are not “insulting” to the phenomena. There is no ethical normativeness in the physical world. The whole situation is different in the case of human systems. We have to axiomatically assume some features of the phenomena that complicate our efforts of understanding them. Svend Brinkmann expressed it most concisely: Complementarity in psychology is multilayered, and I believe that there are “local complementarities” within each of the phenomena that I just listed: Concerning action, for example, there is complementarity between the agent performing the action, on the one hand, and the social practice that renders the action meaningful and of which the action is a part, on the other. Without the social practice of celebrating Christmas, the actions of singing and dancing around the tree are just like the twitches and jerks of mad men and women. And concerning narrative, there must certainly be an author that tells or enacts the story through one’s life, but without culturally sanctioned story

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lines, they are just meaningless movements and sounds in space. The story is always authored, but the author is always storied. (Brinkmann, this volume, p. 56)

The agent acts, and the author tells the story about the act. Social practices of intentional human beings call for looking at actions as they are done rather than as they are caused by some presumed “independent variables”: We can view a certain social process either as the result of causal operations (in the brains and/or environments of organisms) or as human actions subject to normative appraisal. In the first case, we consider it as a process that happens, while in the second case, we consider it as something that is done. It is a matter of behavior versus action; of a spectator’s versus a participant’s stance. However, as complementary, they rule each other out in the sense that choosing one stance blinds one to the other, just as we find in Bohr’s physics. However, existentially, as I have argued, the two stances are not equal, for approaching others as acting persons, as participants, has a certain primacy, both logically (in normal human encounters) and ontogenetically (in the course of human development). We must regard others normatively, as acting persons, even before they are so, in order for them to become so. A pure causalistic look at others, were it possible, would not create persons but, at best, machines. (Brinkmann, this volume, p. 59, emphasis added)

Psychology has desperately—and irrationally—been holding on to the analyses of its phenomena in terms of causality. It has been an epistemological impassé over the past century (Toomela, 2012; Toomela & Valsiner, 2010). The normative nature of psychological phenomena leads our search for adequate theory building away from quantification of “variables” and attributing causality to these constructed entities. How Normativity Undermines the Habit of Quantification It is the very foundation of the trust in quantified reconstruction of qualities that hinders the progress in the field of psychology. As Lee Rudolph has put it succinctly, psychology cannot be done using real numbers (Rudolph, 2006). Normative and nonnormative phenomena look indistinguishable when quantified—a rating of “7” on a rating scale of SADHAPPY continuum can mean “very happy” (nonnormatively) or “very happy but I do not think this can last as I do not deserve it” (normatively). As is obvious, just recording the number (7, or any other number on a scale) does not tell the difference. Limits of naïve quantification—assigning real numbers to phenomena that may have imaginary components—become particularly important if we move into analyses of normativity of human conduct. Normativity includes in the same whole what is and what ought to be. Its complexity calls for the use of different abstract symbols than real numbers—formal depic-

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tions that represent the present state of affairs together with marking the direction of moving further toward the future. The Unbearable Oughtness of Being The normative stand is complex. All our human lives are filled with normativity, encoded in various kinds of signs. Yet that normativity can be of various forms and can be up- or down-regulated by the application of signs to the very normative process. The norm has its counternorm, and the actual conduct emerges from the tension between these. “I should do X but it is against social norms to do X,” so I invent a new norm that counters the other norm and allows me to pursue X. Norms (and counternorms) are being constructed as regulatory devices. They are supposed to mark the borders, creating the tensions that lead to their own replacement. Normativity is paradoxical. Alice Lakwena could build the whole military operation of her religious cult around the adopted Christian maxim “you should not kill!” (Behrend, 1999). Killing under the conditions of prohibition against killing is perhaps the ultimate example of the power of cultural regulation of life. This of course is corroborated in any society within which war and peace are complementary human activity settings. Hence, to borrow from Milan Kundera, the oughtness is as unbearable as it is ordinary. We feel we ought to be not what we are and through that contrast of AS-IS AS-SHOULD-BE opposition we develop (Boesch, 1991). How is the notion of ought operating within the human psyche? It is in Fritz Heider’s (1958, ch. 8) legacy that we can find elaborate efforts to make sense of values-based normativity of the human lives. Values are the catalytic condition for the oughts to lead both to the fulfillment of the social order— internalized by the person—and of barriers that block such fulfillment. The ought represents field force oriented toward a particular objective—“I ought to do X”—which can be supported by a positively valenced value field (“because X is good for our environment”), or nonsupported (“but X is not popular in society”). In both cases of the condition of the value field, the action may happen (“I will do X . . . because Y.. or despite Z”). The power of the ought is in the internalization of the external action imperative (“you should do X”) into the personal culture, where it acquires a united power of the self and the Other. The SHOULD to OUGHT transition constitutes the moment of personal takeover of social control over one’s life-world, Local Complementarities As Brinkmann (this volume) points out (bringing Skjervheim’s idea to bear on our discourse), human beings are constantly located in between the roles of an actor and that of an observer. Thus, all our existence is liminal, located on the border of these two complementary roles (Marsico,

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Komatsu, & Iannaccone, 2013; Tateo & Marsico, this volume). The border is conditionally permeable—at times we act as agents, at other times as observers in relation to others. Social psychology has been dealing with bystander (non)intervention in situations where, by social norms, such intervention should be obligatory. Yet it does not happen. At the same time, the world is filled with persons who are ready to poke their nose into the lives of the neighbors, be these gainfully employed spies, self-appointed vigilantes for moral purity, or citizens of the “neighborhood watch” who more than happily intervene into the lives of fellow human beings. I would add here temporal liminality—the actorobserver duality—is constantly set into tension on the border of the present facing the future. “Should I act here-and-now?” or “Should I delay my action, waiting what comes” is always the question. Furthermore, if I act, I also observe my own action as it is in the process of being done (Mead, 1912, 1913). The first interlocutor of my communicative efforts—tentatively finding words to express my thoughts—is myself. I may find the immediate feedback from my own speaking effort deeply disconcerting despite the loud ovations by the listeners. We can move in and out of the spectator’s roles into that of actors. Experiencing scenes of an aesthetic kind of observation gives way to participation and vice versa (Zittoun & Gillespie, this volume). There is some entry threshold into any experience—cultural organization of the actorspectator relation. The specific conditions of that threshold are the locus for triggering or inhibiting social participation. In other terms, joining a looting or revolutionary crowd and bystander nonintervention are the results of the functioning of one and the same cultural-psychological system. This means that any participation has its limits, and these limits are constant targets of renegotiation. I can observe my own unfolding action, but I cannot look upon myself from a different position than the one I occupy. It can take a special reflective tool—a mirror or video camera—to extend our observer/actor position to that of another’s observational perspective. Here, the mirror is such tool (Marsico & Tateo, this volume). It makes me observer of myself, and that transposition of locus can be disturbing. My observation of myself in the mirror forces the spectator role upon me, while I am in reality the primary participant in my own life. An outsider—a spectator of my encounter with myself in the mirror—can be perceived as an unwanted participant in my life. Marital relations can undergo changes that turn participants in joint efforts into spectators of each other’s ways of coping with the tasks of living (Thapan, 2009). Disappointment and divorce may follow from this transition. The reverse may be the case as well—efforts to find a participant in my life—a spouse, a child, a pet, or a therapist, who may nevertheless attempt to stay in a spectator role. A therapist is another person, an external spectator of my life, whom I try to invite into becoming a participant in it. The

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great skill in therapists’ preparation is to avoid being made into a full-scale participant and to keep balancing on the border of being an actor and a spectator. Participation is thus a deeply ambivalent act. It has interesting limiting conditions—walking on the replica of a painting on the wall drawn on the museum floor in front of it creates a special situation. We encounter turning an object designated for viewing suddenly into one that is walk-on-able (as the floor affords it) but not necessarily walked-on (Yaneva, 2003). The concept of affordance itself affords always a semiotically constrained set of ways on how to apply it to real-world objects (Harré, this volume). Normativity of the human psyche narrows down the range of possible actions into a subrange of expected ones, thus immediately establishing the neighboring subranges of unexpected-but-wonderful as well as that of unexpected-and-disturbing. Observing a complex routine of a circus artist lets us consider it a wonder, while a similar act in a department store would lead us to a diagnosis of some version of insanity. In either case, we are far from ready to move into the participant role. FROM MEREOLOGICAL FALLACIES TO MEREOLOGICAL OPPORTUNITIES Is water in a bucket a part of the sea from which the water is taken? Or of an ocean, with which the sea is interconnected? If so, then all of us are also half-ocean, given that the human body consists of more than 50% water. Furthermore, is the mineral water we have purchased in a store a part of the natural spring from which it is supposed to originate? Or part of the Coca Cola (or Nestlé) company that has taken over the control of its production? Does it become part of me if I drink it? This leads us to the question, what is “the whole?” By what criteria so we select what constitutes “the whole” for a part that can simultaneously “belong to” different “wholes?” Especially as the parts can migrate between various wholes. I move from North America to Denmark; am I “leaving” the “America culture” and becoming a part of “the Danish culture?” Or would a plasmodium that a mosquito has successfully inserted into my body become a part of my body after having been that of the flying insect? Judging by the malaria fever I develop, it is surely the case, yet it was not part of me in the first place. Receiving a donated kidney is also not part of me initially, but grows into it and becomes that. The partswholes relationships need not be fixed, and most of them are fluid. Such fluidity may be the potential for adaptation to new demands for living. Rom Harré in this volume guides us to think about different interpretational fallacies that relate to part-whole (mereological) relations. Mereology has been largely an ontological discipline; the part-whole relations within it are static givens that can puzzle us in our efforts to make sense. As Harré points out, there are two fallacies:

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Mereological Fallacy 1 “Applying to a part of an entity a predicate that gets its meaning from its use” (p. x). The brain (part of our body) can be claimed to “think” (use of brain). Or our “feeling into others”—empathy—may be claimed to be in the brain (Kupferschmidt, 2013). Most of the contemporary popular appeal for the promises of the neuroscience are in the hope of gaining seemingly solid knowledge through insisting upon the adequacy of this Fallacy 1. Mereological Fallacy 2 Inferring that substantive products of an analytical procedure are parts of the substance on which the procedure was performed” (p. x). Harré’s example is that there is no “salt” in the seawater (it can emerge from such water through extraction routines). Neither is there “creativity” in the person, but it is an emergent from person-world relations (Gla˘veanu, 2014). That these two (and maybe other) mereological fallacies are rampant in our popular and even scientific discourses is no surprise. The issue of conceptualizing wholes that defy any reduction of those into the mere accumulation of their parts has been the major unresolved conceptual problem for over a century (Diriwächter & Valsiner, 2008). But can such fallacies be turned from vice to virtue? Can a dynamic realignment of parts within wholes (or between them) make the wholes resilient? Practices of organ transplants and all kinds of technological devices that substitute and expand our psychological characteristics speak of that. The human being of today cannot be considered to be a whole without a cellphone, breast implants, and dieting pills. All these are inserts into the ordinary lives of human beings, yet ones that have become parts of the whole. There are many kinds of wholes. Starting from their minimal version— the whole that consists of some parts—the wholes imply a hierarchical order. The whole is necessarily of a hierarchical level that is superior to its parts: Fundamental to understanding the whole is its hierarchical nature. That is, the whole can be layered, with each layer representing a sub-whole that is nevertheless dependent on the larger whole in which it belongs. For example, if we can say that the cosmos represents the infinite nature of the whole but for social sciences there is little utility in trying to incorporate the entirety of the universe in theory construction. Our planet’s ecosystem is relatively self-contained yet dependent on the outside influences of larger cosmic events (e.g., our sun, asteroids, etc.). As we move down the hierarchical ladder, we eventually arrive at the domain to which the social sciences have devoted themselves: human life and society. (Diriwächter, 2013, p. 191)

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Thus, the whole is not only different from its parts; but different wholes embed other wholes in their structures. The usual mereological concern— partswhole relationship—becomes turned into the issue of wholes wholes relationship. This is a result of the open systemic nature of complex biological, psychological, and social systems that exist only thanks to their exchange relations with their environments. Where does a whole begin? An element that “stands alone” is also a whole—the minimal one. We could consider it a Zero Whole (ZW)—a whole (in fact the only whole) in which the number of the parts equals itself (1) and the single part equals the whole. When the part of ZW disappears (equals 0), so does the whole. In contrast, if one part of a whole with N parts disappears, the whole survives (consisting of N-1 parts now), still not reducible to a conglomerate of its parts. If a few of the (so far) known 20,470 genes in the genome of the C. elegans were to be “knocked out” or disappear for whatever reason, we can still speak of the genomic system as a whole as guiding the life of the whole nematode (consisting of 959 somatic cells). However, if 20,469 genes were to disappear, the nematode would remain with a system of one gene that is equal to the gene itself. This situation is similar to the Sorites Paradox—is one grain a heap of grain, while 2 and any number above that surely can be (Dzhafarov & Dzhafarov, 2013). Psychology has habitually, by way of using quantification, reduced all wholes of any complexity to the qualitative characteristics of the ZW. This is natural if the number of parts is 2 and one of these disappears. Here, the ZW emerges by necessity as the whole history of rhetoric efforts to prove that the “whole is not a sum of its parts” (i.e., claim reiterated by all Gestalt traditions) and the repeated use of the water analogy (water is not a mixture of two gases—oxygen and hydrogen—but a compound with its own properties) since Thomas Brown in the 1820s to Lev Vygotsky 100 years later—has been aimed at restoring the centrality of wholes that go beyond the ZW and bring to the focus of attention the new qualities that each of the layers of the infinite hierarchy of wholes entails. The wholes can grow ever-new qualities. When combined with other elements, they form a composite whole, and the elements become mutually linked parts of the new whole. The whole can become bound with other wholes and so on. The hierarchical order of wholes can grow (or decline) in the open systems. Maybe, instead of mereological fallacies that pertain to static partwhole relations, it could be more productive to talk about mereological opportunities. This may be the way to open complementarity (Tateo & Marsico, this volume). In the creation of a meta-order between various wholes in their hierarchy, it is semiosis that plays such organizer role. Being open to mereological opportunities is crucial for the survival of the whole. If a part of a whole remains fixed within only that whole, it perishes with it. If it can dynamically move to become a part of another

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whole, it can survive. Viruses survive with remarkable vitality in our biological world, while dinosaurs become extinct. Human beings are more fortunate than dinosaurs, having invented ways that can counteract biological and environmental challenges by cultural means. They do not just adjust to these challenges but reflect upon them before they come, and distance from them, if needed, for psychological survival. All this is made possible by the move beyond the biospheric dependence upon the here-and-now to that of the infinite arenas of the semiosphere (Lotman, 1990). Signs make us free so that we can create our new confines through them. Dynamic Self-Regulation by Signs How can such realignments of the parts in various wholes be legitimized? An effort in this direction comes from the semiotic dynamic perspective within cultural psychology: Creation of dynamic sign hierarchies that regulate themselves (and conduct) and that can be demolished any time is one possible way to observe the unfolding parts-whole relation. This theoretical construction is based on Charles S. Peirce’s triangular notion of sign processes where the interpretant opens the door to innovation (Innis, this volume). Yet Innis, looking with a philosopher’s gaze on the emerging synthesis of psychology and semiotics, leaves us with a caution: Peirce’s seemingly closed schema of sign-types and their possible combinations, interesting as it is, presents a danger to cultural psychology’s own tasks, especially as regards the “lower thresholds” of our signifying practices. Recognizing the heuristic power of the Peircean schemata does not entail the conclusion that it is the only way of relating or deriving the fundamental factors of semiosis or sign use. (p. 147)

Innis offers a new look at Suzanne Langer’s theoretical contributions due to their basis in affective functions. According to Langer, feeling has structure. This resonates with my focus on the primacy of affective relating with the world due to the irreversible nature of the time we live in. The notions of apperception and Einfühlung (“feeling-into-the-other”; Lipps, 1903) are needed to conceptualize the future-oriented nature of the human psyche. It is time to return to the point, made by James Mark Baldwin over a century ago, that affective processes are teleological. Einfühlung (sembling in Baldwin’s terms; Baldwin, 1911, p. 94) is central for such teleology. This teleology can occur through processes of affective generalization, ejection, and idealization. Affective generalization entails the distribution of a particularly established emotional tone from the object (or context) of its original emergence, to other objects and their contexts. A person is social not by way of “succumbing” to “social influences” from outside, but by actively feeling into the “social others” on the basis of one’s own affective understanding of the world. Kierkegaard’s legacy (Klempe, this volume) can remind us in

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psychology where the natural sciences of the 19th and 20th centuries have failed. A new approach is needed, and cultural psychology of semiotic mediation offers it through construction and destruction of dynamic sign hierarchies. Innis’ caution about the loss of the power of semiotic models through “lower sign thresholds” can be bypassed by focusing on the process of semiosis far above the minimal sign thresholds. Innis’ concern is important— relabelling the whole human world by the coverage of some of Peirce’s sign types does not clarify but muddles our picture of the whole. Hence, the starting point for any analysis is crucial. What cultural psychology offers is the look at the psyche from above, starting from higher psychological functions of a willful and aesthetic kind. Rats, mice, pigeons, and dogs have little to offer the science of human psychology. GENERAL CONCLUSION: WHERE DOES FREEDOM BEGIN? Zittoun and Gillespie (this volume) ask the complementary question, where does freedom end? In everyday life it can begin (and end) from a walk on a new surface: lava floor in a museum or where the asphalt ends and a gravel path begins, ending up in a jungle. In this volume, our interest is in the freedom of thought in science and in social practices. Various forms of “schools” in science have erected barriers around their territories, with “no trespass” warnings and elaborate inclusion rituals. But these are defensive ways to keep the purity of the inner sanctum rather than explore movement toward new horizons. Following the general ideas of complementarity, the answer to the question, where does freedom start? is simple. It begins precisely where it ends—on the border. And as the border is constantly moved forward, it never ends, without a restart. That border is synthesis of the inevitable constraints of time—the present, which is the border between the past and the future—and the constant tension between participation and nonparticipation. While facing the future, we hesitate at the threshold of moving from the spectator role to that of the actor—and vice versa. The contributions to this volume have picked up my assumption that the Überlieferung1 (Simão, this volume) of the notion of complementarity to the realm of the human sciences can open some new and creative alleys for our understanding of the human psyche. By inserting tradition into the making of the future, the present horizon is extended to a new form, motivating our movement toward it. We are constantly searching for new ways of making sense, confronted all the time by the opposition between tradi1

“Tradition”—yet better viewed as “providing a tradition” or “bringing something over from the past.”

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tions of the common language and the need for abstracting generalization (Rudolph, 2013). It is in the realm of mereological opportunities—new ways of looking at the dynamics of parts within a whole and the emergence of a new whole by realignment of previous parts—that cultural psychology of semiotic dynamics is focusing on the movement of the meaning-makers, always within their immediate context, across the boundary of the Present in the flow of irreversible time. The latter focus is new, and in many ways theoretically highly challenging. How can one understand in a universal, time-free, manner, phenomena that are in principle momentary, unique, and transient? We can see here theoretical complementarity of the universal theoretical thinking and always local empirical investigations. Yet this complementarity is not that between equal partners; the universal principles of ever-new uniqueness in the reality of human relating with the World makes cultural psychology a part of the search for knowledge of universal kind. It is through generalization, based on the seemingly nongeneralizable particulars, that our knowledge of the eternal creativity of the human mind proceeds. REFERENCES Baldwin, J. M. (1911). Thought and things: A study of the development and meaning of thought, or genetic logic. Vol 3. Interest and art being real logic. London, UK: Swan Sonnenschein. Behrend, H. (1999). Alice Lakwena and the holy spirits. Oxford, UK: James Curry. Boesch, E. E. (1991). Symbolic action theory. Berlin, Germany: Springer. Brentano, F. (1874). Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkte. Leipzig, Germany: Duncker & Humblot. Brinkmann, S. (2011). Towards an expansive hybrid psychology: Integrating theories of the mediated mind. Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science, 45, 1–20. Brinkmann, S. (2012). The mind as skills and dispositions: On normativity and mediation. Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science, 46, 78–89. Cabell, K. R., & Valsiner, J. (Eds.). (2013). The catalyzed mind. New York, NY: Springer. Diriwächter, R. (2013). Structure and hierarchies in Ganzheitspsychologie. In L. Rudolph (Ed.), Qualitative mathematics for the social sciences (pp. 189–226). London, UK: Routledge. Diriwächter, R., & Valsiner, J. (Eds.). (2008). Striving for the whole: Creating theoretical syntheses. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Dzhafarov, E., & Dzhafarov, D. (2013). The Sorites paradox: A behavioral approach. In L. Rudolph (Ed.), Qualitative mathematics for the social sciences (pp. 105–136). London, UK: Routledge. Gla˘veanu,V.-P. (2014). Thinking through creativity and culture. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Heider, F. (1958). The psychology of interpersonal relations. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Kupferschmidt, K. (2013). Concentrating on kindness. Science, 341, 1336–1339.

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