Imagining cultural psychology

The affective intentionality of mental life

In her comparative reading of Vico and Thomas Hobbes, Tuuli Pern (2015) highlights the role of imagination in sensemaking. According to Pern, both Vico and Hobbes approach imagination as having a sensory basis, and, for Vico, sense itself is a form of thought. Pern generalizes this idea to all mental activity and says that sensory perception is the source of all mental life. This is well known in the case of Hobbes, who, as an empiricist of sorts, believed that all our ideas are derived from sensation, but the idea is present in Vico in its own way. For Vico argued that feelings precede perceptions, which again precede reflections. At the bottom (if this is a useful metaphor) of mental life lies affectivity. Importantly, this is not, however, a brute and blunt form of affectivity, but rather one that bestows the world with meaning. A body-based affect is what enables objects and situations to appear as meaningful for experiencing human beings. This idea was also developed by pragmatist psychologists such as John Dewey, and, in recent years, by people like Mark Johnson (2007). Like Vico, Johnson is also interested in the role played by metaphors in mental life, and Pern refers to Vico’s characterization of metaphors as “fables in brief.” A metaphor is thus a way that meanings are organized based on affective semiosis. Pern quotes Salvatore and Freda saying that affective semiosis operates through as well as of the body. As Johnson also argues, there is a bodily basis of metaphors and thus of meanings. We imagine through and with our bodies, because metaphors are grounded in embodied experience. It means that imagination “is the active force of sensemaking, tied to the environment by the affect and kept in contact with the past states by memory” (Pern, 2015, p. 172).

The first aspect to single out—going back to Vico but with important consequences for cultural psychology—is thus that mental life is grounded not in passive, intellectual observation of the world (to which affect is added as in Descartes’ philosophy), but rather in affective sensemaking, out of which more reflective ways of relating to the world may grow. If (cultural) psychology should take this Vichian starting point seriously, it would have to begin its investigations of mental life with “affective intentionality,” recognizing that things are meaningful because they matter to people, and they matter because we are literally affected by them. Human beings, from this perspective are not disembodied, reflecting intellects (like in the model favored by many cognitive scientists over the past decades), but flesh-and-blood creatures, who primarily know the world through feeling, properly conceived, i.e. feelings not as mechanical reactions, but rather as sensemaking processes. If so, we must discard stimulus-response models of mental life and instead posit a view of human beings as actively (and affectively) making sense of the world, and, in the process, creating what we might think of as “stimuli,” something that was also long emphasized by Dewey (see the famous article on the reflex arc, Dewey, 1896).

The expressivity of mental life

The next term that I will focus on is expressivity, which is a term in genetics, but here I use it to refer to the idea that mental life is not based on some inner mental representations, but instead lives in the ways in which it is expressed—bodily, verbally, and by all kinds of other mediators. In his study of the engagement between a musical practitioner and her instrument, Pablo Rojas (2015) directs our attention to the idea of practical topography—an orientation to the “landscape” (or perhaps “taskscape” to borrow a term from Tim Ingold, 1993, referring to the pattern of dwelling activities) afforded by the practical contexts in which we live. In the case of music making, the practical topography is built upon the gestures and movements afforded by the instrument, as Rojas makes clear, and it goes hand-in-hand with the idea of a continuous field between instrument, sound, and auditory imagination. Playing an instrument is clearly an expressive process, and it may serve as a paradigm for numerous kinds of human activity. Ultimately, mental life is not based on rule-following, but rather on embodied skills, as also Hubert Dreyfus has argued for decades now in his phenomenology of skills acquisition, with particular inspiration from Heidegger (Dreyfus, 1991). Rojas writes that the development of a skill is grounded in the appropriation of a tacit structure where tools become an extension of one’s own corporality. When a novice is taught to play an instrument, for example, the learner will initially learn rules and procedures, and these can even be written down explicitly in a book. But once the learner becomes more skilled, the practice of playing can no longer be expressed as explicit rules, and this is particularly evident (for obvious reasons) when considering improvisational playing, e.g. in jazz. The melodic structure is here created as the musicians go along, playing together, and although they have learned techniques and scales beforehand, these are transformed from fixed routes into invitations afforded by the music in a temporal process: “The scale becomes less of a stable route to be followed, and more of an enabler to go from place to place,” says Rojas (2015, p. 210), and he continues with the observation that whether some note in a solo is heard as a mistake or not, for example, will depend on the subsequent notes that feed the phrase. Nothing simply is a mistake—considered in and of itself—but can appear to be so—or the opposite—depending on the order of music unfolded around it. Good musicians, perhaps, are able to make what could have been mistakes into creative potentials in the melodic structure. Generalizing this point to mental life as such, we can say that something never simply is this or that thought, emotion, or action, for it all depends on the order unfolded around it. We must give up all forms of essentialism concerning mental life and see it as embedded in social, practical, and temporal contexts.

Rojas ends his phenomenology of musical practice by arguing in Vichian mode that the constitution of a practical topography entails an imaginative exercise. We orient ourselves in the world in general—and not just when playing a musical instrument—by way of imagination. Through imagination things present themselves “in their animated, expressive modality,” as Rojas (2015, p. 224) says. Thus, the affective sensemaking that Pern thematized in her paper must be seen as always already expressive; there is an expressive character of experience, and this can be seen as a second very important point for (cultural) psychology. It was also made by Ludwig Wittgenstein, for example when he tried to demonstrate that language (e.g. “I am in pain”) does not represent an inner, psychological reality, but rather is an expression of the phenomenon it is concerned with (Wittgenstein, 1953). Thus, saying “I am in pain” is, on Wittgenstein’s analysis equivalent to saying “ouch!,” and it “represents” the pain just as little as the “ouch!” does (namely not at all). And so it is with many (perhaps most) dimensions of mental life—it is deeply expressive (rather than representative), but although its expressivity is normally meaningful, its meaning cannot in most cases be described in terms of rules or mechanical procedures. Like when playing improvisational jazz, we make up the script of mental life as we go along. This does not happen in a void or out of the blue, for there are of course rich repertoires (i.e. historical traditions) of scales, techniques, harmonies, etc. to invoke, but the point is that these do not determine their own application (just as Wittgenstein would insist that no rule dictates its own application). Returning to Vico, Rojas argues that “expressivity serves as an invitation to reclaim a sensorium commune” (2014, p. 17)—an affective togetherness that is clearly evident in collective musicking (to borrow a term from Small, 1998).

The creativity of mental life

So far, we have seen that the analyses of Pern and Rojas (on my reading) invite us to think of mental life in terms of affective intentionality and expressivity. This is quite different from the standard psychological picture, according to which the mind (as some “inner thing”) is conceived as a representational device, i.e. as some kind of cognitive apparatus operating according to certain rules. On the standard account, as favored by many cognitive scientists, it seems that we have bodies and sociocultural life only by accident, whereas we in fact have mental life (as we actually know it) only because we have bodies and sociocultural life. On the Vichian account, it turns out that imagination is the faculty we use to construct a meaningful world, as Granatella (2015, p. 190) emphasizes, and thereby a foundational psychological process. Imagination is not some psychological icing on a cognitive cake, but rather like the flour that goes into baking a cake (mental life) in the first place. Granatella shows how this goes counter to a foundational idea in Western philosophy inaugurated by Plato, who placed imagination at the bottom of the epistemological hierarchy, furthest away from proper knowledge (2014, p. 5). We must thus “pass beyond the historical duality between science and imagination” (p. 8), and the Vichian notion of “imaginative universal” is crucial in this regard, pointing toward a felt, lived, and experienced meaningful reality. Granatella links this idea with cultural psychology and its emphasis on the fact that culture is what we ourselves make (p. 20). A science of culture in this sense is of course itself cultural, explaining the process of self-constitution. Granatella quotes with approval Valsiner, who says that “We create culture and—through it—ourselves” (p. 22). Vico argued similarly that the world of civil society has been made by us, which is why its principles are to be found “within the modifications of our own human mind” (p. 22).

In the spirit of Vico (I hope), I would like to end with a bit of metaphorical thinking, building on the imagery of humans creating culture—and thereby themselves. An important word here is “create.” If the ability to create is fundamental for mental life in this way, then how should this kind of creativity be understood? What does it mean that humans “create culture” (and themselves)? With reference to Lewis Mumford (1961), Zygmunt Bauman has argued that there are two radically different ways of conceiving of creating the new (Bauman, 2004). The first way is captured by the metaphor of mining. When mining, the new “cannot be born unless something is discarded, thrown away or destroyed” (p. 21). One finds the pure metals by removing what is around them, and this process does not change the metals in any way. It only purifies by discarding what is not needed. Bauman refers to the famous answer given by Michelangelo when he was asked how he obtained the beauty of his sculptures: “Simple,” Michelangelo replied, “You just take a slab of marble and cut out all the superfluous bits” (p. 21). This statement from the great Renaissance artist can be seen to capture the mentality of the modern world that followed (at least on Bauman’s reading): Creation is related to destruction and waste.

This is wholly unlike the other metaphor of creation and creativity articulated by Mumford and Bauman, which is farming. Unlike mining, agriculture is a process in which humans cultivate nature in order to obtain in benefits, and this cannot simply be done by discarding or removing elements. It is done by attending to the land in a cyclical process of fertilizing, harvesting, etc. If mining is purely interactional (the human subject interacts with the metals), farming is transactional in the sense that subject and object are co-constitutive and mutually dependent, both changing (themselves and the other) in the transactional process. The farmer survives by consuming the products of agriculture, which grow the way they do because of the activities of the farmer and so on….

To farming and mining we may add a third metaphor of creativity, which comes easily to mind in our times: Designing. When designing—especially when a design process in architecture is abstracted from concrete materials and done through computers—we think of creativity as a purely intellectual exercise. The designer has “something in mind” and designs it (and it may subsequently be produced and consumed). Designing emphasizes the cognitive capacity of the subject to freely create.

The three metaphors each emphasize an aspect of the creative process in particular, and express different views of the relation of human beings to their worlds in general. With reference to Dewey, the three views can be called self-action (designing), inter-action (mining), and trans-action (farming), respectively (see my analysis in Brinkmann, 2013). They also more or less correspond to the different philosophies of constructivism (the powers of the self-enclosed mind to design reality), realism (the essence of things are “out there” and can be mined with relevant methods), and what we may term mutualism (subject and object, knowing and the known, each make each other up; see Still & Good, 1998, who discuss the ontology of mutualism).

The first view (designing) focuses on what is “inside” the subject (e.g. an idea) and which is then realized more or less unidirectionally while the second (mining) approaches subject and object—creater and world—as separate, yet interacting, entities. In my view, both of these capture only moments in the life process, which, as a whole, must be characterized as transactional (cf. farming). As Vico and the cultural psychologists rightly claim, we create culture and are created by culture—or, to go back to the metaphor expressing the transactional viewpoint, we “farm” culture (build it, use it, live on it, tend to it), which simultaneously support our lives as resources that enable us to think, feel, and act. As a fundamental feature of mental life, creativity thus never happens “out of the blue,” but always in a transactional process, and I believe that this is something Vico would accept, and definitely something that should inform the kind of cultural psychology that we need to imagine. We have plenty of psychologies built upon the metaphors of designing and mining, and it is now time to turn to farming and respect the mutualism of mental life and world, however difficult this is after centuries of misguided philosophical thinking. Perhaps Vico would be one author to turn to for a more adequate view of imagination, culture, and mental life.