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I Activate You to Affect Me

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A volume in
Annals of Cultural Psychology
Carlos Cornejo, Giuseppina Marsico, and Jaan Valsiner, Series Editors

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I Activate You to Affect Me

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edited by

Carlos Cornejo

Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile

Giuseppina Marsico

University of Salerno (Italy)

Jaan Valsiner

Aalborg University, Denmark

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

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ISBN: 978-1-64113-070-7 (Paperback)

           978-1-64113-071-4 (Hardcover)

           978-1-64113-072-1 (ebook)

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Printed in the United States of America

Contents

1     I Activate You to Affect Me: Affectivating as a Cultural Psychological Phenomenon

Carlos Cornejo, Giuseppina Marsico, and Jaan Valsiner

Part I

Theoretical Considerations and Affectivating

2     Affect, Semiotics, Volition: Heteroregulation and Affectivating

Steve Larocco

3     Affectivating: In the Middle of Power and Pleasure in Psychology and Music

Sven Hroar Klempe

4     Affectivating Signs: On Semiotic Interruptions

Robert E. Innis

5     Commentary: Affectivating, Normativity, and Subjectivity?

Lars Christian Sønderby

Part II

Everyday Phenomena and Affectivating

6     Everything Was [Not] Beautiful At the Ballet: Children Affectivating Educational Contexts Outside School

Lia da Rocha Lordelo, Anna Paula Brandão, and Camila S. M. Bezerra

7     “Freedom is Not Free”: Slogans Becoming Affective in Memorial Landscapes

Zachary Beckstead

8     Understanding Silence-Phenomena through the Boundaries of Speech: Semiotic Demand Settings Regulating Felt Experiences

Olga V. Lehmann

9     An Expressive Approach to Affect and Musical Experience

Pablo Rojas

10    Poetics of Affectivating

Emily Abbey

11    Expressive Dimension of Human Experience and Affectivation Process: A Commentary on Everyday Phenomena and Affectivating Section

Pablo Fossa

Part III

Person–Environment Relationship and Affectivating

12    Affectivation: A Cut across The Semiotic Hierarchy of Feelings

Danilo Silva Guimarães

13    Affectivating Home Environments: Active and Affective Relations to Objects

Amrei C. Joerchel

14    Affectivating Environments in Creative Work

Vlad Glăveanu

15    Spaces, Sites, and Subjectivity: A Commentary

Wanderlene Reis and Ana Cecília Bastos

Part IV

Building a General Framework for Affectivating

16    New Theoretical and Methodological Ways in the Study of Affectivating

Leidy Evelyn Díaz Posada and Lilian Patricia Rodríguez Burgos

17    What is Affectivating? Elements for a Definition and Critical Comments for the Future

Alaric Kohler

18    Conclusions: Affectivation as a Return to Vitality

Carlos Cornejo, Giuseppina Marsico, and Jaan Valsiner

About the Editors

About the Contributors

Chapter 1

I Activate You to Affect Me

Affectivating as a Cultural Psychological Phenomenon

Carlos Cornejo

Giuseppina Marsico

Jaan Valsiner

The second volume of Annals of Cultural Psychology is dedicated to the affective nature of human social relationships with the environment. The chapters here included explore the historical, theoretical and practical dimensions of the concept of affectivating originally introduced by one of us (Valsiner, 1999), as a potential tool of inquiry into the affective-sensitive dimension of psychological life within a cultural-psychological framework.

Why this new term? And why dedicate a whole volume of the Annals to contributions that, in one way or another—use the term for some theoretical purposes? The slightly awkward notion of affectivating brings the affective dimension of the human experience into the center of the scope of cultural Psychologies, which have usually focused on the social side of human experiencing. Insofar as different versions of Cultural Psychology have fostered a view of the mind as socially constituted, aspects of the mind traditionally understood as individual have been minimized or even neglected. This has distinctively been the case of affects in social conceptions of mind.

The neologism affectivating indicates that affect can and should be considered in relation to the actions that the affected organism establishes with its environment. Thus, instead of being a passive happening into the individual organism, affect is tightly bonded with the actions the same organism performs in relation to others. In the case of humans, affectivating reveals the two-sided (Person → Environment and Environment → Person) process of relating—treating that relating as primarily an affective (and secondarily cognitive) process. A person is affected by aspects of their environments that previously have been made meaningful and therefore salient by that very person. So, people actively make certain aspects of their environment become affectively significant for them, and that significance feeds forward to their further relating with their Umwelts (Chang, 2009). In other words, affectivation refers to the process by which people act upon the environment turning it into their own environment, and therefore, becoming themselves sensitive—affectively tuned—to it.

The concept of affectivating involves two psychological dimensions often undervalued or even obliterated from contemporary cultural psychology, namely the affective involvement and the agentivity of people in their social encounters. The very neologism affect + activating reflects indeed both aspects. Importantly, affect and agentivity have been foregrounded several times throughout the history of the discipline. However, as the Geisteswissenchaft-versions of psychology progressively separated themselves from the physiological-experimental approach of the “new psychology” by criticizing the Cartesian view of mind (Dilthey, 1894/1977), dimensions of human mind that were seen as individual—such as affect and agentivity—lost their centrality. This battle of the Naturwissenschaft and Geisteswissenschaft in psychology that started in the 19th century (Valsiner, 2012) continued through the 20th century and continues in ours in the form of “the neurosciences” to take over psychology as a science in its whole. The human mind becomes reduced to beautiful colored pictures of the images of the brain—much to the fascination of journalists and the lay public. This of course leads to new versions of fascination science that builds on the sensationist “making of the news” in our contemporary mass media. What becomes overlooked is the perseverance of the very traditional individualistic model of the mind.

In opposition to the individualistic concept of mind that characterizes most of psychology, the newly emerged1 versions of cultural psychologies emphasized from its beginnings the social constitution of the human mind. Society and culture had a primacy in the explanation of the individual mind. Although this framework situated psychology within the social sciences, it had at the same time the negative effect of disregarding those psychological processes that are innerly felt and therefore less socially bounded.

In this context, it is worth remembering the historical grounds of affect and agentivity. In the case of affect, the basic orientation can be traced to Theodor Lipps and his re-introduction of the concept of Einfühlung [in-feeling]. Introduced during the Romantic era by Johann Gottfried Herder, Einfühlung originally worked as a methodological proposal for a non-rationalistic approach to foreign cultures (Musa, Olivares & Cornejo, 2015). The real knowledge of a different culture requires the temporal abandonment of the observer’s own conceptual schemas, replacing them by the viewpoint of the observed culture. The way to do this is to enter into the foreign culture (i.e., to feel into oneself their form of life). The process implies an affective involvement—hence the term Ein-fühlung—rather than a rational procedure. Thus, according to Herder, the knowledge of people requires the reverberation into oneself of the alien affects while living like others.

Herder’s look at the “feeling-into” was expanded about a hundred years later, when Theodor Lipps reintroduced it on the dawn of modern psychology. Lipps (1900) conceives the process of feeling into the world as a basic process behind the feeling of vitality immediately perceived in the ordinary encounter with objects and people; thus, Einfühlung is applicable to persons, objects, and places. It certainly explains the affective impressions we feel in front of things primarily intended to fulfill an aesthetic purpose, such as works of art; but, more importantly, it explains the permanent vital (micro-)adaptations of the organisms to the features of their environment: the pleasantness of sea landscapes, the fear in darkness, the gracefulness of a subtle gesture, and so forth. By using Einfühlung in this way, Lipps is not only grounding an aesthetic theory in psychological soil, but he is showing the ubiquity of aesthetics in any material form of our environment. Sounds, colors, proprioceptions, forms, pitches and tones turn out to be expressive of aesthetic feelings, which, mixed in ordinary life, have consequences for our perception and for our action upon our environment.

In the Einfühlung tradition, affect is tightly tied in with action. The reason for that is this: Affect is constituent of the vitality that animates every living organism. Rather than being an event that organisms undergo, affect is part and parcel of the continuing adjustment of sentient organisms to their respective environments. From this perspective, to separate affection from effection turns out to be an arbitrary scission between the organism and its environment. Again, this point has historical roots. One of the most conspicuous expressions of the holistic conception of the organism–environment relationship was Jakob von Uexküll’s organism-centered concept of Umwelt in the early 20th century (Chang, 2009).

Originally developed for providing a theoretical framework to biology, the notion of Umwelt [literally: surrounding world] was introduced in counterdistinction to the empiricist idea of an objective, neutral environment that inadvertently is assumed as common to all species inhabiting it. For there is a crucial difference between environment and Umwelt: while the first refers to the milieu which allegedly is the same for every organism, Umwelt corresponds to the environment as it is lived by a specific organism. Thus, each animal has its own Umwelt, depending on the specificities of its biophysiological organization: “The Umwelt is always that portion of the environment that has an effect upon the sensible part of the animal body; the simpler the constitution form of an animal, the simpler the constitution form of its sensible parts” (von Uexküll, 1909, p. 249). What aspects of the environment are relevant for a given organism—that is, to what aspects of the environment is this organism sensitive and reactive—will depend on the constitution of the animal proper (or the Bauplan, according to von Uexküll’s terminology). The Umwelt does not preexist the morphological features of the animal; rather, the Umwelt emerges as long as the organism expresses its physical characteristics. Thus, Umwelt and organism are from the start both co-constituted thorough a long developmental process. Far from being a passive receptor of environmental forces, the organism’s organization plays a main role in the constitution of its Umwelt. This approach overcomes the old-established distinction between perception and action, for to be perceptually sensitive to some aspects of the environment presupposes specific modes of action upon it. The conceptual turn from environment to Umwelt implies accepting that every organism actively co-creates its own surroundings, to which it becomes perceptually sensitive.

Understanding the extension of von Uexküll’s biological approach to the human sciences requires the introduction of meaning as the properly human way of constructing Umwelt. Thus, human Umwelt corresponds to the meaningful environment. People move and act in an always meaningful world, where meaning is both symbolic and expressive. It is symbolic since it is semiotically constituted; each color, gesture, verbal expression, and so on, conventionally stands for something else. But at the same time, the human world is always expressive since it is affectively perceived by people. Social and natural worlds do not appear as a set of physical stimuli, affectively neutral, ready to be captured or interpreted by people. Instead, social and natural worlds are immediately perceived as being pleasant or unpleasant, soft or rude, grumpy or kind. It is the blending of both dimensions—the sociosymbolic and the psychological-expressive texture of human environment—that composes the human Umwelt.

Affectivating in Cultural Psychology Perspective: Our Major Question

An axiom in Cultural Psychology is that we experience by proactively establishing affective relationships with the world. We make the world around us “our own familiar world” and thereby humanise it! However, we also create symbolic worlds that are developmentally grounded in the world as we perceive and move in it, but for which the metaphor of containment becomes inadequate. These symbolic worlds don’t simply contain “us”: they are us (Benson, 2001). According to Casey “Where we are—the place we occupy, however briefly—has everything to do with what and who we are (and finally, that we are)” (Casey, 1993, p. xiii).

The two main and complementary general processes through which we affectivate the environment are “Bordering” and “Decorating.” By making borders, humans try to define and hierarchically organize the world around them in order to understand it (Marsico & Varzi, 2016). In this vein, borders are conceptualized as the outcome of culturally organized processes which are not fixed, but based on a continuous organization and reorganization of the I-Other-World relationship (Simão, 2012, 2016). Borders are in fact not rigid and durable delimitations, but they are processes of semiotic configuration that make possible human actions in a given environment. The capability to create borders is strictly connected with the semiotic ability to produce “devices” for defining contextual occurrences (De Luca Picione & Freda, 2016).

Humans are also “decoration makers” and by doing so, they transform, modify and (re)invent the environment. These decorations are not merely a way to embellishing or “beautifying” our life-worlds, but they encapsulate meanings that we project into the environments and that they guide, in return, our feelings and regulate our emotional states. Thus, decorating ourselves and our environments is an act of externalization that feeds a process of constructive internalization.

One of the most illustrative example of both bordering and decorating process is represented by the garden that is the quintessential expression of the affectivating process. This is very evident especially when we consider home gardens. They are Border Zone (Marsico, 2016) of “cultivated nature” between public/private, inside/outside and natural/artificial. According to Lotman:

The outside world, in which a human being is immersed in order to became culturally significant is subject to semioticization, i.e., it is divided into the domain of objects which signify, symbolize and indicate something (have meaning), and objects which simply are themselves. (Lotman, 1990, p. 133)

Thus, garden encodes a primarily cultural border between semiotized and not semiotized objects: the plants and flowers of which it is composed can be seen natural object independent by human cultural meaning. Yet, the intentionality of the plants arrangement and their localizations

betrays the meaningful projections of the gardener at every turn . . . Which plants are intended as the focal point of particular vistas? Which foliage serves only to highlight more prestigious flora as its background? Which plants are acceptable garden material and which remain uncultivated? To each of these question could, and should, be added the attendant “. . . and why?” (Kaczmarczyk & Salvoni, 2016. p. 64)

Gardens are liminal spaces—they exist in between indoor and outdoor architecture. Thus, they are influenced by the house (the ultimate interior) that gives a structural form to the garden space and by the outdoor environment (the ultimate exterior) like the public street or another private house, etc. The garden is a cultural border “object” whose main purposes are mainly enjoyment, relaxation, and contemplation. However, it shows the highly sophisticated human capability of decorating spaces and, in doing that, affectively semiotize them for the sake of making them our own space. Garden, then, is a human arena (among many others) to explore the phenomenon of affectivation form a cultural psychological viewpoint and, therefore, illuminate the underlying dynamic process of affective semiosis (Innis, 2016; Tateo, 2016). Last—but not least—every human being carries a garden on one’s own body. The constant dialogue of the natural growth and its cultural reorganization is present in each and every act of grooming one’s hair, and the specialists in creating ever so fascinating hair styles are gardeners of the human bodies. The profession of hairdressers continues in human history as long as culture prevails and the desires to present our hair in ever new versions remain. Robots (at least so far) do not need hair salons—human beings do. Needless to add that “doing one’s hair”—like grooming any other part of the body—is a primary affectivating experience.

Overview of the Structure of the Volume

The first three chapters of the present volume concern the theoretical delimitation of affectivating. In the first chapter, Steve Larocco puts into question whether the notion of affectivation implies a certain subject-centricity as expressed in the notion of volition. If this is the case, argues Larocco, affectivating should be complemented with the idea of hetero-affectivation, developed by him in this chapter. There are many ordinary social situations in which affectivation is “transpersonal,” so that the “Self” that feels the world is no longer the origo of the feeling it lives by. Affect can, from Larocco’s viewpoint, be milieu-based and consists in what he calls “semio-affective nodes.” Hroar Klempe’s chapter offers a historical context of the concepts of affect and feeling. Based on Baumgarten’s works on metaphysics and aesthetics, Klempe delves deeper into the affect part of affectivation, highlighting that a fracture between feelings as immediate and preverbal bodily reactions to sense impressions and affects as categorized emotions that can be differentiated by the intellect is visible from the early 18th century. Klempe observes that these important distinctions tend to be omitted by contemporary psychology, reducing affective phenomena to the verbalized emotions. Robert Innis points to that same duality of affectivating, when he describes it as a “Janus-faced concept.” On the one hand, affectivating refers to the irreducibly individual inner feeling of being in the world, which is partially ineffable. On the other hand, it denotes the social nature of sign generation. From a semiotic point of view, Innis emphasizes that the typically human way of living in the world is through an endless play of signs, so that every human encounter is symbolic. To the same extent, Innis argues, the semiotic nature of the social world is phenomenologically experienced by people. The value of the notion of affectivation would therefore lie in capturing the very essence of Cultural Psychology. Christian Sønderby ends the section of theoretical considerations by evaluating the appropriateness of affectivation to overcome the classical objections of subjectivity against (cultural) psychology.

The second section of our book covers several chapters working on everyday situations and events that evidence affectivating phenomena. Lordelo, Brandão, and Bezerra explore the developmental dimension of affectivation through two case studies of children in the process of constructing their respective Umwelten. Both cases illustrate very clearly the ever-changing morphology of the Umwelt as people—in this case, children—make personal choices in a socially defined situation (e.g., educational contexts inside and outside schools). The examples show also how individual feelings about social instances (e.g., soccer training, ballet classes) change according to the actions and decisions children actively take by negotiating with others. Zack Beckstead inquires into the dynamic of affectivating through the study of memorials. These cultural devices correspond to material constructions heavily laden with symbolic values, so that they conform a case of socially configured Umwelt, which constrains and guides personal feelings and even the kind of movements and gestures people display in front of them. Beckstead exposes the features of this kind of affectivating and contrasts it with other social devices, such as slogans and idioms. By analyzing these cases, Beckstead shows the revelatory and prescriptive character of cultural artifacts: they suggest not only how the environment is to be experienced, but also orient people’s future actions concerning them. Olga Lehmann describes the regulation between speech and silence in human conversations as a consequence of socially guided instances. By extending the concept of Semiotic Demand Settings (Valsiner, 2000, 2006, in press), she develops the idea that affectivating processes take place in material and symbolic cultural spaces that promote certain behaviors, beliefs, and feelings while prohibiting or diluting others. The tacit instructions of whether, when, and about what to talk—as well as whether, when, and about what to keep silent—would be socioculturally circumscribed. Pablo Rojas’ chapter connects the discussion on affectivating to the long tradition of the expressivist approach in human sciences. He describes the animated interiority implied in every musical experience, which includes feelings, motion, and participatory engagement. The connection of affectivating with the notion of expression brings light to the question on individuality versus collectivity raised in the previous section of this book: as expression, argues Rojas, affectivating should not be considered as a subjective source from which meaning is granted to an objective but inert outside world; since such an inexpressive world is a theoretical axiom rather than an empirically grounded fact. In her chapter, Emily Abbey analyzes the microgenetical construction of affectivating processes such as poetic lecture and feeling at home. She makes the case that the temporal structure of human experience influences the way in which semiotic meaning fields permanently evolve. By identifying the future-oriented feature of human experience, she differentiates a double function of signs: representation of the here and now; and presenting future possibilities—what could come next. Finally, this second section of the book concludes with a general commentary by Pablo Fossa.

In the next section, different aspects of the person-environment relationship are analyzed from an affectivating point of view. Danilo Silva Guimarães explores, through the case of inter-ethnic dialogue, the self-other relationship. By analyzing interviews with members of a Mbya Guarani Amerindian community, Guimarães illustrates the centrality of affective involvement with the other in order to construct and negotiate a common world—a centrality which, even though it may be more obvious in distant cultures, is also always present in modern cultures. Amrei Joerchel applies the notion of affectivating to shed light on the process of construction of a home—and the feeling of being at home. By using Lipps’ concept of Einfühlung as well as von Uexküll’s Funktionskreis, Joerchel describes how the modification of the immediate material environment is semiotically guided. The transformation of an environment which becomes a home is guided by material alterations that induce (and are induced by) affective states. Vlad Glăveanu relates affectivating with creativity. In his chapter, Glăveanu develops through the case of craftsmanship—the decoration of Easter eggs by Romanian folk artists—the thesis that affectivating is situated at the core of creative production by affectively relating creators to their context and by prompting actions by creators in these contexts. The section ends with a commentary by Wanderlene Reis and Ana Cecilia Bastos.

Evelyn Díaz Posada and Lilian Rodríguez write a synthetic commentary on the whole book, as does too Alaric Kohler. In both cases, affectivating is highlighted as articulating the individual and collective dimensions of the human Umwelt. The importance of affectivating as an integration function between the symbolic and pre-symbolic, both representational and presentational; personal and social, etc., lies at the heart of the concluding remarks we extract in our general conclusions.

Note

1. Since 1990s, as they are visible in the leading journal in the field, Culture & Psychology, published since 1995.

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