Theo Verheggen

Enactivism and the Experiential Reality of Culture: Rethinking the Epistemological Basis of Cultural Psychology

The key problem of cultural psychology comprises a paradox: while people believe they act on the basis of their own authentic experience, cultural psychologists observe their behavior to be socially patterned. It is argued that, in order to account for those patterns, cultural psychology should take human experience as its analytical starting point. Nevertheless, there is a tendency within cultural psychology to either neglect human experience, by focusing exclusively on discourse, or to consider the structure of this experience to originate in an already produced cultural order. For an alternative approach, we turn to the enactive view of cognition developed by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela. Their theory of autonomy can provide the epistemological basis for a cultural psychology that explains how experience can become socially patterned in the first place. Cultural life forms are then considered as consensually coordinated, embodied practices.

The Double Center of Gravity in Durkheim's Symbol Theory: Bringing the Symbolism of the Body Back in*

By studying Dürkheim through a Schopenhauerian lens, the one-sidedly cognitivist and functionalist reception of his social theory can be balanced. Durkheim explicitly rejected such monistic interpretations. His dialectical approach was always aimed at an essentially dualistic perception of man and society, wherein the lower pole, the individual, is central. In Durkheims symbol theory, this position leads to two kinds of symbols: those that are bound to the human body, here called “this and that” symbols, and those people can choose freely, here called “this for that” symbols. This twofold symbol theory can already be found in medieval philosophy (e.g. Dante Alighieri) as well as in the work of Paul Ricoeur. For Durkheim the human person is the symbol par excellence. By implication the rituals in which the person is (re)constructed, that is the rites of passage, should be central. The interpretation here opens up new perspectives for a more psychological interpretation of Durkheims sociology.

From Shared Representations to Consensually Coordinated Actions: Toward an Intrinsically Social Psychology

A concern in contemporary social psychological theory is to reestablish its intrinsically social or cultural dimension, since psychology (even social psychology) has been too much a science of self contained individuals. We argue that current approaches to this “restoration” — focussing either on social cognitions or on aggregate features people appear to have in common — cannot present an intrinsically social psychology either. A different approach can be found in social representation theory. We address Wolfgang Wagner’s approach and his notions of social representations as processes of concerted interaction and as world constituting “enactions”. It, however, also holds a problematic notion of social representations as shared representations. As a promising alternative, we present the enactivism framework. While preserving the notion of concerted interaction, it can avoid the epistemological and conceptual pitfalls of “sharedness”. In addition, it can offer a criterion for identifying intrinsically social phenomena.

Human Experience and the Enigma of Culture: Toward an Enactive Account of Cultural Practice

This paper deals with the way cultural psychology should deal with human experience. The common view about the relation between culture and experience holds that experience becomes “cultural” when people internalize or appropriate ready made cultural meanings. We contend that cultural forms themselves need to be dealt with in experiential terms. To this end we propose an “enactive” approach to cultural psychology. A central claim of enactivism is that experience is rooted within the organizational and operational autonomy of an acting system. Enactivism considers human experience to be constitutive for social and cultural phenomena. The main question of an enactive cultural psychology relates to the way human action becomes consensually coordinated. Both social psychologists who stress “sharedness” as the distinct mark of the social, and evolutionary psychologists who consider culture to derive from a uniform human mind, are criticized for overlooking the ongoing mutual tuning processes that give rise to socially and culturally patterned conduct.