Cultural Wholes on the Move: Maintenance and Crossing of Boundaries in the Semiotic Universes
摘要
In this chapter, we view society as a hyper-structure of signs that is guided through the whole structure of communicative messages—while the person remains the center of cultural construction. The personal-cultural side of the human psyche is guided by the meanings encoded into the persons’ life environments by different social institutions that are in need for participation by persons in their goals-directed activities. The whole cultural set-up of our environments is suggesting one or another kind of acting—using the combinations of various signs. Human environments are socially suggestive environments. Their structural forms suggest different directions for feeling and acting. Human beings—young or old—are surrounded by a great variety of goals-directed efforts to tell stories. They do it themselves, and are listeners to others’ stories. The developing person—and that is a person from beginning to the end of one’s life course—is faced with an excessively explained and meaningfully overdetermined environment. All that myriad of meanings pretends to operate as if it were rational. Human rationality is perhaps one of the major myth stories invented by human beings in their desperation about their own facing of the never-ending uncertainties of the future. Cultural psychology finds out how mediation of rationality and irrationality works both in minds and societies.