NIAS meeting in Sønderborg 4. November 2013

The Power of Culture: What Cultural Psychology can offer for

transdiciplinary study of societies

Jaan Valsiner Niels Bohr Professor of Cultural Psychology

Department of Communication and Psychology Aalborg University

Denmark jvalsiner@gmail.com

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IN THIS PRESENTATION I AM NOT CLAIMING “KNOWLEDGE AUTHORITY” FOR THE DISCIPLINE OF

PSYCHOLOGY BUT RATHER

TRY TO ELABORATE IN WHICH WAYS THE RECENTLY

DEVELOPED HYBRID SCIENCE FIELD

CULTURAL PSYCHOLOGY

CAN ILLUMINATE SOME OF THE EFFORTS TO MAKE SENSE OF PROBLEMS WHICH OTHER DISCIPLINES ARE

TRYING TO SOLVE 2

WHERE CULTURAL PSYCHOLOGY COMES FROM? 19th century Völkerpsychologie (Steinthal, Lazarus, Paul, Wundt) CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY and ETHNOLOGY HISTORY (Wilhelm Dilthey) SOCIOLOGY EVOLUTIONARY THINKING (Lamarck, Darwin, Baldwin, Severtsov) PHILOSOPHY DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY (of social kind) SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY (of developmental kind) IMPORTANT: IT IS NOT CROSS-CULTURAL PSYCHOLOGY

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CULTURE as conceptualized in CROSS-CULTURAL PSYCHOLOGY (A) and as it is viewed in CULTURAL PSYCHOLOGY (B)

OF THE THEMES OF OUR MEETING HERE, the following themes seem to benefit from sharing approaches with cultural psychology: 1. How knowledge power is entangled with other forms of power, configuring a divide between the global knowledge “centre” and the global knowledge “periphery” alongside the global social, economic and political divide. HOW HUMAN BEINGS CREATE BORDERS IN SOCIAL WORLD AND WITHIN THEIR OWN MINDS ·2. How an acknowledged body of knowledge (theories, concepts) travel from one destination to another, being accepted, appreciated, questioned, challenged, re-moulded or even discarded. HOW HUMAN BEINGS RELATE WITH ABSTRACT EXPLANATORY FRAMEWORKS ·3. How the global knowledge “periphery” and the marginalized social groups within a national state contest the hegemony of the established knowledge by claiming and exercising their rights to knowledge production CREATING VALUE-ADDED SOCIAL GROUP BORDERS 4. The politics of representation of/by the “other” SOCIAL REPRESENTATION PROCESSES THAT ANTEDATE POLITICAL PRESENTATIONS OF “THE OTHER” 5

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CULTURAL PSYCHOLOGY DEALS WITH MEANINGFUL HUMAN WORLDS

So-- let us start from the beginning:

WHERE DOES MEANINGFULNESS BEGIN?

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HOW MANY TRIANGLES ARE HERE? ONE? TWO? NONE?

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Gaetano Kanizsa provides us with an answer—

MEANINGFULNESS is already built into the very act of perception.

to which we BUILD UPON

ever-new layers of meaning

AND USE THOSE IN OUR SOCIAL LIVES

FOR EXAMPLE– ALL THE TOPICS DISCUSSED DURING OUR MEETINGS HERE ARE BASED ON THE PROCESSES OF MEANING CONSTRUCTION AND RE-CONSTRUCTION: A. MEANINGS IN SOCIAL LIFE B. MEANINGS USED IN OUR EFFORTS TO UNDERSTAND SOCIAL LIFE (B A) C. MEANINGS USED BY POWERFUL “SOCIAL OTHERS” TO REGULATE OUR EFFORTS TO UNDERSTAND SOCIAL LIFE (POLITICS) (CBA) D. MEANINGS USED TO MODULATE THE NEGOTIATIONS (CBA): PERSONAL, SOCIAL, META-POLITICAL

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CULTURE – AS SEMIOTIC MEDIATION– IS CONSTRUCTED BY THE PERSON, WHO IS THE MAKER OF THE MEANINGS

why so?

BECAUSE WE ARE ALWAYS IN MOVEMENT FROM SOMEWHERE IN OUR LIVES TOWARDS SOMEWHERE ELSE WE DESIRE IT– SET GOALS, WORK TOWARDS THEM

But at the same time

WE CONSTANTLY FACE UNCERTAINTIES

as we live in IRREVERSIBLE TIME (Bergson)

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CULTURE COMES TO US IN DIFFERENT FORMS OF

NOISY SILENCE -- church bells -- smell of incense or food -- touch -- a tank parked on the street corner (or a news kiosk in the same location) -- monuments -- architecture of functional buildings -- rice or potato fields -- a railroad track with a train passing by, from time to time -- the number of your “facebook friends” on your computer screen -- the cacophony of human talk at cocktail parties AND SO ON AND ON AND ON…

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TO SUM UP:

NOISY SILENCES ARE WITH US EVERYWHERE

OR

ALL WE DO IS EMBEDDEDE IN OUR SEMIOSPHERE (Juri Lotman’s term)

HOW IS IT ORGANIZED?

A CENTRAL CLAIM FROM SEMIOTIC CULTURAL PSYCHOLOGY:

CULTURAL NEGOTIATON OF MEANINGS

HAPPENS THROUGH SIGNS OF DIFFERENT GENERALITY, IS BASED ON AFFECTIVE

PROCESSES (RATHER THAN COGNITIVE RATIONALITY)

AND

THIS NEGOTIATION OF MEANINGS GUIDES OUR ACTIONS

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WHAT ARE THE SOCIAL IMPLICATIONS? 1. TALKING (personal or social) IS INTERMEDIATE IN IMPORTANCE 2. “FREEDOM OF SPEECH” IS A PHENOMENON OF POLITICAL REGULATION OF VERBALIZATION THRESHOLD (compare with “freedom of thought”) 3. IT IS THE HYPERCONSCIOUS THAT MAKES A HUMAN BEING “free”

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LEVEL 4: Hypergeneralized field signs

LEVEL 3: Generalized verbal signs

LEVEL 2: Verbal signs (schematizations)

LEVEL 1: Pre-verbal signs (iconic, Indexical, hybrid)

Range of function of all (VERBAL AND NON-VERBAL) signs

Range of function of VERBAL signs

FOUR LEVELS OF SEMIOTIC PRESENTATION AND GENERALIZATION

CULTURAL

PHENOMENA

OF THE

PSYCHE

PHYSIOLOGICAL = NON-CULTURAL LEVEL OF OUR BODILY FUNCTIONS

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HOW DOES

CULTURAL PSYCHOLOGY OF SEMIOTIC REGULATION

make sense of

CULTURE? THROUGH A LOOK AT DYNAMIC SIGN HIERARCHIES THAT ARE CONSTRUCTED AND DEMOLISHED USED MAINTAINED OR ABANDONED

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WHAT IS A SIGN?

SIGN is something hat “stands in” for SOMETHING ELSE presenting the latter’s selected features in the current context, facing the future C.S.Peirce: ICON– direct image of the something else INDEX– direct impact left by that something else SYMBOL– arbitrarily coded (word, logo, etc)

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SIGNS are CONSTRUCTED to REGULATE THE FLOW OF PSYCHOLOGICAL PROCESSES AND ACTIONS– all in irreversible time

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A SIGN THAT IS CONSTRUCTED FEEDS FORWARD (not back!) TO THE FUTURE

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NEXT LEVEL of generality of signs OPERATES AS REGULATOR OF THE EMERGED SIGN

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BACK TO THE ISSUES OF OUR MEETING: 1. MAKING OF the global knowledge “centre” and the global

knowledge “periphery” IS AN ACT OF POSITIONING THROUGH THE HIERARVY OF SIGNS that has been constructed institutionally

2. THE TRAVEL OF knowledge (theories, concepts)-- from one destination to another, being accepted, appreciated, questioned, challenged, re-moulded or even discarded IS AN EXAMPLE OF THE SIGN HIERARCHY MEDIATION. Here the scientist and institution are in a serious dialogue.

3. ANY EFFORT TO contest the hegemony of the established knowledge by claiming and exercising their rights to knowledge production IS AN ACT OF RE-CONSTRUCTING EXISTING SIGN HIERARCHY.

4. Political presentation is INSTITUTIONAL PROCESS OF SIGN HIERARCHY CONSTRUCTION

THANK YOU!