Zusammenfassung / Abstract

Why do we make things and places?

Dialogue of a young man with things in his room

An eco-semiotic perspective on persons and their environment

References

Zusammenfassung

Über das Wissen in den Dingen und Orten. Wir pflegen davon auszugehen, dass das psychologisch interessierende Wissen in den Köpfen der Menschen liegt, während das extern in strukturiertem Raum, gestalteten Dingen, in Schrift und Bild gespeicherte Wissen der Gegenstand anderer Wissenschaften, der Kulturwissenschaften, darstellt. Der Beitrag untersucht in strukturaler und funktionaler Hinsicht Gründe dafür, dass diese Trennung mit einiger Willkür verbunden ist, und skizziert eine alternative Konzeption. Anhand eines Beispiels wird die Handlungsrelevanz externalisierten Wissens oder externaler Erkenntnisstrukturen aufgezeigt und eine psychologische Interpretation der Semiotik bezogen auf Mensch-Umwelt-Transaktionen oder ökologische Einheiten vorgeschlagen.

Abstract

On the knowledge in things and places. We have a habit of assuming that psychologically interesting knowledge is in the head, while knowledge stored externally in the structure of places, the design of things, as well as in pictures and scripts is given over to other, cultural, sciences. This contribution reasons on structural and functional levels for the arbitrariness of this separation and sketches an alternative conception. With the help of an example, the relevance of externalized knowledge or external cognitive structures for acting is demonstrated. In addition, a psychological interpretation of semiotics is proposed to deal with men-environment-transactions or ecological units.

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Why do we make things and places?

It is the contention of psychology in general that some dynamic structure within living beings is both the resultant as well as the foundation of any process or state called psychological. In particular, every instance of what an individual ever sees, hears, feels, thinks, acts, etc. has a potential of leaving some trace or becoming incorporated in its peculiar way into the psychological organization of that individual. And it is this psychological organization within the individual which in turn determines or codetermines both any further perception or action as well as further internal states or processes of that individual. In fact we all assume that nothing psychological ever happens without the (internal) psychological organization. We call it the psyche, the mind, the content of the psychological blackbox or the cognitive structure: strange indeed that psychologists have never found it worthwile to agree on a single term in order to designate that most fundamental construct of their science.

However, most, if not all, of what people do also has a potential of leaving a trace in the real surroundings of the actor or of becoming incorporated in a peculiar way into the (external) environment of the actor. Be it in a more transient or in more durable way, many of our activities tend to change some aspect of the world, as it exists then independently of their originator.

In turn, this modified environment then has a potential of influencing our further perceptions and actions, those of the originator of the change as well as those of many other individuals. Again we are all inclined to agree that such transformations of the external world are in some way the effects of the psychological organization of the acting individual. And we also agree that behavior and experience of persons is in some way influenced by the situations and events thus created. In fact this is the central thesis of (trans-)action theories. However we do not usually combine the two principles of internal and of external organization into a single coherent construction.

Indeed, also the external environment functions both as a resultant and as a foundation of most processes or states called psychological. Yet effects of behavior, i.e. changes of the world brought about by behavior of persons, are considered not to be psychological in nature. They are generally taken to be objective facts and they do not interest psychologists in any other way than that they can be indicative of psychological processes (responses), or that some of them might eventually play a role as (co-)determinants of other psychological processes (stimuli). However, behavioral effects of the actions of many persons over time, taken in their totality as human culture, are an organized whole of meaning quite comparable to the mind in richness and differentiation and perhaps also in their power to incite and to control behavior.

The traditional separation of the world into the objective or material and the subjective or psychological is apparently self-evident; however, it is not a matter of fact but rather a particular conception or construction of the world. It should be pinpointed as Cartesian dualism, common in Western civilization of the last few centuries. The above examples of mutual effects between "the psychological" and "the material" call for an interactive dualism. Yet most modern psychologists confess to epiphenomenalism which is an asymmetric dualism that accepts body-to-mind sequels, such as from brain to conscious experience, but denies mind-to-body causation. The latter, however, obviously is factual when we think of the consequences on the material world of so many evaluations, plans or decisions which are undoubtedly mental. The preferred solution today is to retreat to monistic materialism which in turn disallows psychology a separate existence.

Psychologists, so it seems, have carefully avoided dealing with the outgoing branch of the mind-body-problem, although over the centuries a large body of speculation has been directed towards the assumed dependencies of the subjective on the objective. Fechner has posed the psychophysical problem in terms of the psychological being a function of the physical. The program has failed, although variants thereof are still pursued. And the reactive image of man proposed by psychophysics remains to reign over this science. It is obviously conterintuitive. It is incompatible with everybody's daily experience of being a subject, i.e. of being a person capable of deciding and acting, at least within certain restrictions, on the basis of one's own "free will". It is true that important portions of the world surrounding living beings have their characters independent of those subjects. Yet particularly for any human being, most entities, particularly the important ones in everyday life, are the result of human action, of action by the person in question as well as by others. It is human culture, evolved in many particular versions over many generations and supplemented and modified every moment, that is the preeminent determinant of human existence. No psychologist has ever formulated a program complementary to Fechner's psychophysics, i.e. to understand artifacts as a function of the mental. But the fact is that our civilization has simply acted that way: man as a measure for all things; and is on the verge of destroying living conditions.

Psychology, in a way then, has forbidden itself half of its potential subject matter. On becoming an empirical science, it has restricted its endeavor to a cause-effect way of looking at the world of people. Causes are assumed to be givens, they are thought to have effects on people. The business of psychology is understood to find out how these effects on people are brought about. Yet culture is not adequately described as an aggregation of stimuli. The objective is not simply the material, nor is the subjective well enough captured by subsuming it as the mental. Probably, the reverse type of psychophysics would be as much deemed to failure as the traditional one. What is needed is at least a bi-directional or transactional view of the ecological relation or, better still, a conception beyond Cartesian dualism. We live in a world of things and places, i.e. objects and spaces that carry meaning. And things and places form an ordered system which obeys both natural laws and psychosocial determinants.

In a related chapter entitled "The 'concrete mind' heuristic: human identity and social compound from things and buildings" (Lang in press a), I have proposed to give up the venerated separation of the world into the material and the immaterial. As much meaning is "stored" and is available for any individual being in her environment as in his brain. An action or a developmental change of an individual are often and vigorously incited by external structures or processes which have been built up or prepared by the actor himself or by other members of a smaller or larger cultural group. Actions can be controlled by external entities, as much as they are from within.

In fact, the mind as a complex and dynamic structure in continuous change is no less material in character than the totality of the cultural forms incorporated in the objects and spaces of our surrounds is mental, and vice versa, because both incorporate or carry, by means of physical formations, an organization of meaning which is always both, objective and subjective.

In addition, both of these structures, each considered in its own right, are genuine nonentities from a psychological point of view. The internal mind would be empty, if it could not represent the environment of the individual in question; and the cultural environment would be nil, if it were not produced and maintained by people. Human individuals of all societies, if deprived of their material belongings, from clothes to furniture or from tools to houses, would be at pains to acquire and maintain their personal identity. And a human society devoid of common material and symbolic structures from territories to signs of dominance or autonomy, from objects for exchange to cosmic myths, is simply incomprehensible. There must be causes for animals and humans to turn spatio-temporal formations into carriers of meaning. Common answers to this question are mostly precipitate and all too often of an arbitrary "for-this-and-that"-nature. Reasons are not enough. My contention is that the authentic preconditions for things and places are of an essentially psychological nature and that the answer is not completely different from that of explaining the evolution of the mind/brain.

External memory or the "concrete mind" is then a formula I have chosen as a catch phrase to point to the functional equivalence of the (internal) mind and the cultural environment. There is a large thesaurus of knowledge stored in the spaces and objects formed and cultivated by people. If we want to understand it, we have to study people in conjunction with these external structures. Men-environment-systems or ecological units are in my opinion the proper subject of investigation for psychology in an ecological perspective. Such systems are found on a scale ranging from the petty things of everyday settings to dwellings, neighborhoods, cities, institutional settings of all kinds to culture in its entirety.

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Dialogue of a young man with things in his room

In the following section, a pilot study is briefly summarized which has been directed at understanding person-thing-relationships in the context of private rooms. Credit and thanks for the study go to Silvia Famos (1989) who did it under my direction as a Diplomarbeit. The method used combines a survey of (arti)facts and their topography in the present and in the former private room with a structured interview about the personal history of five important things in the rooms of four young men. Facts and transcripts have been grouped and interpreted in the form of parallel case studies. This method, of course, is a provisional one, because it is restricted to reflections on objects and people; it will have to be supplemented by methods directed at person-environment-systems in transactional development. Theoretical guidelines are gathered from the symbolic action theory of Ernst Boesch (1980, 1982, 1983, 1989), the psycho-sociological study on the meaning of things by Csikszentmihalyi & Rochberg-Halton (1981) and the author's regulation theory of dwelling activity (Lang 1987, 1988, in press a).

The study illustrates that objects important for a person are placed at non-arbitrary points within a room and in relation to each other. Placement and the resulting thing-topography is only partially determined by the functions or the outside features of the objects, they are rather part and parcel of a complex ensemble of meaning which is most readily made explicit in terms of psychosocial identity of the person involved. Although most of the things picked by the person as "special" are functionally passive objects, they enter a thing-person dialectic which can only be understood in a developmental perspective. The relative placements of the things is subject to subtle changes, and so does the relationship between the things and the person.

Although our material is, in the main, verbally communicated, it is apparent that much of the meaning of these things and their topography is not primarily of a planned character, nor is all of it spontaneously conscious. In the process of talking about these objects the persons involved are repeatedly surprised and amazed on the rich network of relations connecting their things with their room in a system of meaning. Indeed, much more is known to the person than they can and do talk about; but repeatedly new facets or new ways of understanding surface with the intensive engagement with these ordinary, everday, self-evident matters of course.

Fig. 1 a. Floor plan and important things in the present room of B.

Fig. 1 b. Floor plan and important things in the former room of B.

In an attempt to relate here some insights into the essence of the study, one of the cases (B) in Famos (1989) is briefly summarized and illustrated in Fig. 1.

B is a 25 year old machine construction engineer who also semi-professionally plays the violin in an orchestra and in a string quartet. After the recent death of his mother he moved from the parental home (Fig. 1a, former room) to a one-room apartment in another city, but in the vicinity of one of his two older sisters (Fig. 1b, present room). He is described as a good-natured and joyful person with an open mind, but socially well-mannered and rather cautious. A penchant for religious, naturistic or artistic experience dominates over social interests, although he can be an ardent debater of topics of interest to him.

The five things chosen to talk about by B are: the violin, the bed, his plants, a picture and a crucifix. In the following, in order to be brief, data and interpretation cannot be separated in a desirable manner. Obviously, in both rooms the violin takes a particular place near the bed in a most personal corner. While it has taken the central floor (note stand) in the former room, at present it seems more integrated, both with musical equipment and with other professional and social items. Violin playing has been and is an important vehicle for finding personal identity for B; although not by family tradition a musical milieu, B's father induced and supported this interest. B has long considered a professional career but has recently settled for a high amateur level and sees his music in a complementary, rather than in the former competitive relation to his engineering talents and activities.

The bed is an important place in the room for B. As a slightly closed off space behind the entrance, it affords rest, regeneration, security; as an object with family history, it also reminds one of the continuity of generations. Plants have always fascinated B, but in his parental home, house plants were cared for by his mother, while B pursued his almost religious relation with nature preferably outdoors. After her death, and in his new room, he has developed his small set of cactuses to a rich collection of different plants spreading over large parts of the room. On the pretext of asking for her advice and help, the plants also help carry B's relation with his sister.

Both the picture and the crucifix are recent additions. The placement of the crucifix is an intentional and "displayed" effort to confess his spiritual engagement and, at the same time, somewhat paradoxically, to cultivate relations with religious family ancestors as well as to confirm religious attitude and find distance to the church as an institution. The picture, on the other hand, seems primarily to be a private dialogue of B with himself. Apart from the admission that the picture must have originated out of a mental constellation similar to his own, B only reluctantly and indirectly talked about details; from the facts that it is actually a photograf of a painting by an absent friend, showing a sleeping pair in a somehow spheric setting, and from the confession that B has selected it because of its content rather than its artistic value, one can conclude that B alludes to and reminds himself of his life situation as a somewhat solitary young man in search of personal relationship. An additional remark on the social functions of the rather big round table supports this line of interpretation.

Seen as carriers of meaning, each of the 5 things thus refers to one of the paramount domains of B's personal constitution and actual preoccupations: home base (bed) and fulfillment (violin) seem securely settled in the room, whereas the social (plants), partnership (picture) and spiritual (crucifix) yearnings for belonging each take their separate section of the room. In addition, these domains together form an ensemble of relationships which, especially when considered in their development, do not appear random nor entirely determined by functions or room architecture. While, for example, in the former room the home base (bed) was found at the far end, at present it is near the entrance; yet in both situations it is protected from immediate intrusion by the opening door. Items referring to personal and social relations, as good as absent in the parental home room, now nearly mushroom in the upper left half of the room; they appear to represent both factual and hopeful associations, the former mostly to kinspeople, the latter oriented towards deep and personal relations.

This short summary of one case cannot give more than a crude illustration of our contention that things are more than objects. Evidently, methodology and theory have to be elaborated in conjunction.

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An eco-semiotic perspective on persons and their environment

The main purpose of the present pilot study was to help sharpen conceptual tools with the objective of an improved methodology. The last section therefore is a brief attempt to elaborate a conceptual perspective for dealing with ecological questions such as those in the above example.

Two markers can be used to characterize this approach: (a) it investigates men-environment-systems or ecological units in evolution; (b) it applies triadic semiotics as a conceptual tool for description and explanation of psychological process and structure.

Enough has been said in the first section on (a) and it should also be clear by now that our approach to persons in their environments is neither materialistic nor mentalistic. Psychology on the whole is no great success and probably cannot gain on one of the traditional platforms, be it behavioristic or cognitivistic. I propose semiotics in the tradition of Charles S. Peirce as a candidate for a new platform, because as a general logic of representation it perfectly fits the ecological problem. I hope to give more than the present sketchy impression elsewhere.

In semiosis, understood as a general logic, something stands for something to somebody. Semiosis, understood as a process, describes the encounter between two entities from which a third entity results. Semiotic terminology, and sometimes also conceptions, unfortunately are rather variable. Let me use the term referent (object, source etc.) for the first or originating entity, interpretant (subject, agent, etc.) for the second or mediating instance, and representant (sign proper or in the narrow sense, sign carrier etc.) for the third entity resulting from the process. The psychological interpretation of semiotics proposed here thus, in some way, deviates from the Peircean conceptions of interpretant and representant; here is not the place to give the reasons.

We have seen that a person selects and places furniture and related items in a particular ensemble. And we have tried to understand these actions as a result of a particular constellation of a given person and his social and cultural environment in a certain stage of joint evolution. In general then, we conceive of a system of separate but interrelated parts, some of them individual and social beings, some of them objects and spaces with certain physical, spatial, temporal, functional, formal etc. characteristics. In semiotics, every single entity that can be differentiated against others and that is also capable of entering a relationship with some other entity, can become a sign.

On the surface, semiosis or the sign-process is the process of using and producing such signs. Through semiosis sign-structures are created by some agent on the basis of sign-structures. Functionally, semiosis is a triadic representational logic that relates a referent to a representant by mediation of an interpretant.

In the present psychological context, the interpretant can be a person or any subsystem thereof. Seen from the outside by the researcher for instance, the person is of course the referent of the researchers semiosis and also a sign, viz. the representant of a highly complex and lengthy sign-process. Signs proper, i.e. representants, as well as referents are always physical structures that carry meaning. There is no meaning without a physical carrier; even the most abstract idea must be incorporated somewhere and sometime, be it in a brain structure or process or in a linguistic structure, spoken or written (see Lang in press b). Otherwise it cannot become a component of semiosis and is without effect or nonexistant. Hardly any physical structure is without meaning as soon as it enters a semiotic relation and thus automatically produces a representant for that interpretant; but it has no meaning as such. Signs are always incorporating aspects from both their referent and their interpretant. To describe a sign, it is meaningless to give nothing but the specifics of its physical properties; you have to include its referent as well as its interpretant, because any given object can get various representants for different interpretants and thus also may incorporate different referents.

In a psychological interpretation of semiotics, perception as well as action are considered indeed prototypical sign-processes. Both build (sign-)structures that refer, for the particular perceiver or actor, to other (sign-)structures. Perceptions or intro-semioses build them in the brain, actions or extro-semioses in the world; perceptions have their referents in the world, actions in brain structures. And since any sign proper or representant can become the referent of another semiosis, a psychological interpretation of semiotics seems to fit the known facts about people in their environment particularly well.

We also might conceive of inner-brain neural or humoral processes in semiotic terms. Thinking or feeling, conscious or unsconscious "mental" streams or states could in principle be understood as chains or nets of semioses. But we know nothing directly about the respective sign-structures used as referents and formed as representants in the brain/mind, except when some of them serve as referents in additional semioses resulting in external (verbal or behavioral) referents. I propose therefore to concentrate on those sign processes that result particularly from encounters between persons and their surrounding world, i.e. the ecological semioses. An eco-semiotic approach to person-environment-systems thus is an attempt to treat structure-formation processes within the person and some structure-formation processes outside in similar terms, and thus to emphasize the functional equivalence of sign-processes originating in the mind with those based on things and places (Lang in press a and b).

An important advantage of a semiotic conception of the ecological relation is that there is no need to make any one of the two partners completely dependent on the other. One need not assume that an animal incorporates nothing but the natural laws that govern the surrounding world. Vice versa, man's rationality is not self-sufficient and limitless. In addition, representants, in semiotic parlance, are to be sharply distinguished from the common idea of (symbolic) representations of something, because the latter are dyadic, the former include a triadic relation. The question of whether a representant is a true or false representation of a referent is meaningless in a semiotic perspective, except when a particular interpretant is specified. This is not to say that sign systems would not vary in ecological efficiency or pragmatic value.

Of course, semioses occur in never ending chains or nets including circular references. Every representant which is a component of one semiosis can become the referent in another. Any given sign-structure stands at the apex of a double "pyramid" of semioses extendend in time. It has on the one hand a history of preceeding semioses, all of which have contributed in various ways to the coming into existence of the given sign. At the same time the sign-structure considered is also at the root of a similar tree of semioses spreading into the future; and this, of course pertains to any sign-structure.

It is meaningful then to investigate the chaining of semioses; the minimal target is a pair of succeeding semioses. Whereas psychology has interested itself in certain aspects of the chaining of a perceptive or intro-semiosis followed by an extro- or behavioral semiosis, it has, except in some fields of social psychology, neglected the pairing of an extro-semiosis followed by an intro-semiosis. One could say that in the former case, the world "speaks" to itself by mediation of a living agent. In the second case, a person "speaks" to themself or to other persons by external channels and using messages carried by objects with their potential of representants to become referents. The latter then points to the fact that communicative acts in a very general sense presuppose two chained semioses.

Such considerations lead to the feasibility of semiotically understanding a person's intercourse with places and things and thus going beyond the specific material, formal or functional features of a given object or space. As a part of a sign-process a representant turned referent might carry a general communicative function. In a study by Daniel Slongo (in prep.) it has proven useful to interpret things and places in the home in terms of six general sign-functions; they have been defined in reference to Karl Bühler and Roman Jacobson and are briefly described in the following paragraphs.

Relatively few things in a room, so it seems in a certain contrast to linguistic communication, become a component of a sign process exclusively by their notative or referential function as pointed out by Bühler. Nevertheless, in many rooms we could identify things that in a way stand for or symbolically represent some other persons to the inhabitant or to some of her visitors. Much more prevalent are appellative and expressive functions of things: chairs invite one to sit down, plants or pets call for regular attention etc.; and many items including decorations, pictures, trinkets, plants etc. placed in neat or sloppy arrangements tell something about their owner.

Preliminary evaluations of the data in the study by Slongo in addition reveal a rather important role of what Jacobson called the phatic function of things and places. It is common-sense that things and their arrangements contribute to create atmosphere; but it is an open task to understand how this is brought about, under what circumstances it works, and how recipients of these messages are affected. Furthermore, a reflexive (or metacommunicative) and an autonomous (or esthetic, poetic) sign function could be distinguished.

In fact no systematic surveys of these functions of household items are available. Csikszentmihalyi & Rochberg-Halton (1981) have sampled the field and also placed the cultivation of things in the context of personal and social identity. Although they interpret their social meaning, they have classified things mostly by their use rather than by their communicative function. Investigations into the psychological process of interacting with and by things and places are wanting.

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References

This chapter is a major rewrite of the paper presented at the congress in September 1989. Some of the theoretical considerations presented at the meeting have been elaborated in Lang (in press a), the empirical material has been enhanced, and a sketch of an outlook into further developments of the approach has been added. The author gratefully acknoledges the active cooperation of Daniel Slongo who is actually engaged in elaborating the conception of things as "concrete mind" in his thesis work.

References to Peirce, Bühler and Jakobson have been omitted, since they can be found in major reference books, e.g. in Nöth 1985.

Boesch, Ernst E. (1980) Kultur und Handlung: Einführung in die Kulturpsychologie. Bern: Huber. (270 pp.)

Boesch, Ernst E. (1982) Das persönliche Objekt. In: E.D. Lantermann (Ed.) Wechselwirkungen: Psychologische Analysen der Mensch-Umwelt-Beziehung. Göttingen: Hogrefe

Boesch, Ernst E. (1983) Das Magische und das Schöne: zur Symbolik von Objekten und Handlungen. Stuttgart-BadCannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog. (335 pp.)

Boesch, Ernst E. (1989/90) Symbolic action theory for cultural psychology (Provisional Draft 1989/90). Saarbrücken, by the author (to be published 1991 by Springer in Berlin).

Csikszentmihalyi, Mihalyi & Rochberg-Halton, Eugene (1981) The meaning of things -- domestic symbols and the self. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press

Famos, Sylvia (1989) Dialog junger Menschen mit Dingen im Zimmer: Bedeutung und Topographie wichtiger Objekte im Lebenszusammenhang. Diplomarbeit, Seminar für Angewandte Psychologie Zürich.

Slongo, Daniel (1991) Zeige mir, wie du wohnst, ... -- eine Begrifflichkeit über externe psychologische Strukturen anhand von Gesprächen über Dinge im Wohnbereich. Diplomarbeit, Psychologisches Institut der Universität Bern.

Lang, Alfred.; Bühlmann, Kilian & Oberli, Eric (1987) Gemeinschaft und Vereinsamung im strukturierten Raum: psychologische Architekturkritik am Beispiel Altersheim. Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Psychologie 46 (3/4) 277-289.

Lang, Alfred (1988) Die kopernikanische Wende steht in der Psychologie noch aus! - Hinweise auf eine ökologische Entwicklungspsychologie. Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Psychologie 47 (2/3) 93-108.

Lang, Alfred (in press, 1991) The "concrete mind" heuristic -- human identity and social compound from things and buildings. Pp. xx-xx in: C. Jaeger; M. Nauser & D. Steiner (Eds.) Human ecoloty: an integrative approach to environmental problems. London: Routledge.

Lang, Alfred (1991) Was ich von Kurt Lewin gelernt habe. In: K. Grawe et al. (Eds.) Über die richtige Art, Psychologie zu betreiben. Göttingen: Hogrefe.

Nöth, Winfried (1985) Handbuch der Semiotik. Stuttgart: Metzler.

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