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Introduction
Cultural psychology is understood and pursued as a twofold project: on the one side, through historical, theoretical, and epistemological reflections on psychology in its existing mainstream forms and on the other side, through attempts to develop psychology able to do both epistemological and sociopolitical and indeed moral justice to human beings’ thinking, feeling, acting, living in human-made historical, social, cultural, and subjective worlds. To argue for cultural psychology as a human science means to argue for a break, rupture with regard to the dominance of natural science model in psychology.
Writing a few years ago, Rom Harré (2012) stated: “The main-stream among psychologists in the United States still depends on a tacit presumption that psychology is a causal science and that the proper methods are modeled on the experimental procedures of a rather narrow part of physics” (Harré, 2012, p. 191). Contrary to such a psychology, Rom Harré refers to “the New Paradigm” of cultural or discursive psychology:
The reflection on the old paradigm is led by a knowledge interest in revealing and evaluating omissions, biases, limitations, and obstacles in existing dominant versions of psychology. There is a tradition of understanding such intellectual operations of detecting obstacles, which prevent further and broader development as constituting a stronger concept of critique, whose most prominent authors are Hegel and Marx. The revealing of obstacles which prevent full development or development of all, not just a minority, is followed by a rational urge to remove them and to open up new prospects for development. Relying on that tradition I would characterize this reflection as a critical reflection. Beyond that I would argue for an activist cultural psychology.
Needless to say, critical interest should be followed also when assessing present forms of cultural psychology and envisaging its future developments.
The reflective journey should start with the very term cultural psychology (Kulturpsychologie). By characterizing psychology as cultural, it is implicitly assumed, by the very logic of semiosis, i.e. selective labeling which is inherent to signification as such, that there is or rather there are other non-cultural psychologies. Even though psychology is not limited to psychology of human beings, in this context it is referred to psychology of human beings only. What would then a non-cultural psychology of human beings mean? Where does its characteristic “non-cultural” come from? There could be two possible sources, which could be only analytically separated – ontology of human beings or epistemology of psychology. The claim that there are non-cultural human beings cannot be justified by theoretical, rational grounds. To claim that there are human beings that are non-cultural beings would be contradictio in adjecto. Indeed, culture makes up human beings to human beings as
But in spite of a lot of evidence supporting the claim that human beings are per definitionem cultural beings, there is nevertheless a lot of evidence demonstrating that human beings were and are conceived of and treated as if they were non-cultural beings. Such a cognition (and consequently also practice) is an outcome of the assimilation of cultural beings into a-cultural or non-cultural cognitive schemas, which transform cultural beings as object of cognition into a-cultural beings, beings with no reference to culture, as the subject-matter of psychological knowledge.
As assimilation schemas in the Piagetian sense are not innate, but outcomes of development, i.e. of previous cycles of interaction between cognizing subject and objects, it follows that the origin of both cultural and a-cultural conceptions of human beings lies in interaction. Interaction itself is a multidimensional process influenced and shaped by many proximal and distant processes, including those that are not immediately visible in the interaction itself. To be sure, there is no form of interaction in which all processes involved in its genesis could be represented. What sociologist Niklas Luhmann said about society – “there is no binding (obligatory) representation of society” (Luhmann, 1992, p. 7) – is valid for interaction as well. At the same time, this does not mean that all representations have equal status and, before that, that each of them had equal chances to be constructed and included into communication. There are indeed struggles for representations; there are struggles among representations, on up to struggles to impose a binding representation. Fortunately, there is also resistance against such impositions, against non-representability, against silence, repression. And this is also a battlefield for development and recognition of cultural assimilation schemas that would be able to conceive of human beings as essentially cultural beings and consequently their psychic functioning as a cultural process – even when it comes to satisfaction of biological needs.
But does the claim “no binding representation” imply that different representations – of society, human being, interaction or any other object – are available for a free choice and that the preference is the only criterion to assess their worth? I would argue against such reductionist and myopic evaluation of representations. Needless to say, representations and interpretations have practical implications, but even regardless of that, it is important to assess their status as tools of thinking.
Representations of any object can be objects of evaluation also depending on their usefulness for specific purposes – practical, scientific, religious, political. But they can also be objects of evaluation of a different kind, or of second order, or strong evaluation, as understood by Harry Frankfurt and Charles Taylor. Even though Taylor, like Harry Frankfurt whom he uses as a starting point, refers to evaluation of desires, I don’t see any reason to limit evaluation to human desires only.
I think that this differentiation of evaluations and their relation to defining human agency as a person could be fruitful for the task of examining foundations for cultural psychology as a human science. In both Frankfurt and Taylor the main figure is a human agency evaluating his or her desires. Within the framework of examining foundations for cultural psychology, the situation of evaluation is much more complicated. But it is clear that moral evaluations cannot be excluded from descriptions of human activity – as argued by Rom Harré explicitly for social psychology, but it is understandable that it is no less valid for cultural psychology.
Evaluating human agency is a subject facing another human agency or human agencies as objects of representation and evaluation. But human agencies as objects of representations and evaluations are themselves self-representing and self-evaluating agencies. The question to be raised is how human agency endowed with capacity for reflective evaluation conceives of another human agency or rather, how it occurs that the human agency as self-reflective subject of evaluation (mis)represents another human agency as deprived of those capacities of self-reflective evaluation. What are reasons for that? What are consequences? What kind of “epistemic positioning,” as Rom Harré (2012) called it, is at work here? How are rights to know and duties to know distributed? How are potential bodies of knowledge assigned to rights or duties? Or to rights to ignorance? Certainly, there are also broader historical epistemic positionings, not just interpersonal ones. For example, the Modern Age has a different epistemic positioning compared to medieval times with regard to right or even duty to acquire knowledge about nature. These questions of positioning and evaluation map also the domain of cultural psychology. Cultural psychology certainly presupposes that humans are evaluative and self-evaluative beings, in weak and even more in strong senses, according to the distinction made by Charles Taylor.
Thus, the question to be raised is: what conditions are necessary in order to make it first of all epistemologically possible to reach humans as evaluative and self-evaluative beings? The next question would be then: under what historical conditions were discursive means developed which allowed construction of both figures in the epistemic situation, epistemic subject and its objects, inasmuch as they are humans, as evaluative and self-evaluative agencies? The history of social and human sciences proves that these were long-term processes. But their genesis cannot be reduced just to a history of ideas. The ideas themselves are a product of plurality of processes of different kinds. The evaluative capabilities and signifying processes, which they presuppose and on which they rely, are at the root of culture, they are contents of the history of culture. I shall map the main points on the trajectory of developing discursive means to conceive of human agency as cultural being. On this trajectory lay conditions of possibility of cultural psychology. At the same it would be necessary to define distinctive criteria for cultural psychology with regard both to psychology and other established discourses on culture.
The Oxford Handbook of Culture and Psychology, edited by Jan Valsiner, has impressively documented “the effort to re-unite two large domains of knowledge – one covered by the generic term psychology, and the other by the equally general term culture. When two giants meet, one never knows what might happen” (Valsiner, 2012, p. 3).
Granted, the task is to unite, or rather reunite, psychology and culture. That task cannot be entirely fulfilled if psyche and psychology are conceived of as just externally influenced by variables of culture. Psyche and psychology are fundamentally constituted, not just influenced by culture. If we would, in a thought experiment, remove culture from human psyche, we would no longer have human psyche or human agency. If we would, again in a thought experiment, remove culture from the human world, we would no longer have the human world.
To unite psychology and culture is a different task than to introduce culture into minds as a subjective, cognitive trait – this would just reproduce the existing cognitivist fallacy of psychology and the subjectivist reduction of culture. Instead, to unite psychology and culture ought to be a means of overcoming reductionism on both sides, psychology and culture.
At the same time a task no less difficult, in my view, is not to let distinctive potentials disappear or become inhibited, but rather to show how they can become enriched and capable of further development. Cultural human agency should remain differentiated human agency and not swept away by culture. In that regard, mass culture is a good counterexample. In mass culture both human agency and culture are lost. Surely human agency needs culture as an intentional object. But culture also needs human agencies as subjects of representation, interpretation, evaluation, and innovation. Referring to the original meaning of “culture” as cultivation, taking care – and that meaning is still in use in defining culture, as Gustav Jahoda reminded us (Jahoda, 2012) – the goal could be described as developing a cultural, cultivating psychology that would be capable of cultivating minds, and actions, of human beings. The second task would be to psychologically cultivate culture itself, i.e., to cultivate places and means in culture for cultural, cultivated human agencies.
I will approach these goals by analyses at two levels: first, at the level of psychological processes which constitute both human agency and culture; second, at the level of broader historical processes which constituted life worlds where needs, motives, and means for construction of different discourses, including scientific ones, were produced. Psychology emerged out of such a social genesis as well. And cultural psychology also has a social genesis – it was not developed out of ideas only, even though ideas, especially critical ones, were very important in its genesis. For example, among other conditions, the 1990s in the politically dominant hemisphere of the world were characterized by widespread beliefs – both scientific and lay ones – that humanity has found the best solution for organizing society on the basis of capitalist principles of private property in the means of production, free market economy, and a representative form of democracy. Thus, the new, larger space was promised for postmaterialist attitudes and values, whose primary home is culture. I would think that these conditions, among others, could have served as an impetus for development of cultural psychology.
Culture in psyche
Signification
I will start the first level of analysis – analysis of psychological processes, which constitute both human agency and culture – with an analysis of the basic process of signification. Insights into role of signs in human life have a long history – from ancient times through medieval to modern times and our own age. They are not restricted to sophisticated philosophical and scientific discourses, but are part of everyday practical knowledge and activities.
The first philosophical reflections on signs are found in ancient Greek philosophy, but other forms of dealing with signs are evidently much, much older than that. Plato, quite in accordance with his general philosophical views, stressed the weak aspects of signs, their incapability to represent the true nature of things and considered knowledge mediated by signs as inferior to immediate know...
