Human experience and the enigma of culture: Towards an enactive account of cultural practice
Paper presented the NCPG on the 8th conference of the International Society for Theoretical Psychology (ISTP), April 25-28, 2000, Sydney
Cor Baerveldt, Paul Voestermans, & Theo Verheggen

The problem: why bother about experience?
In this paper we are concerned with some compelling questions regarding the way cultural psychology should deal with experience. We claim that an adequate view of culturally patterned human action requires a fundamental revision of the way we think about experience. Although cultural psychology has always been concerned with human experience, up to now the common approach has been to consider 'culture' as something which is already known and to evoke cultural norms, models, stories and ideologies as an explanation for the observed patterns in human conduct. In our view this approach runs the risk of producing post hoc explanations. One of the main things to be understood by cultural psychology is why human conduct appears to be culturally patterned especially when the people in question act on the basis of their own 'authentic' experience (Baerveldt & Verheggen, 1999a, 1999b). Apparently there is something about culture itself that has to be explained in experiential terms. Cultural norms, for example, are norms because of a particular configurations of feelings involved, so we have to be careful not to uncritically use those norms as an explanation for the cultural forms of feeling (Voestermans, 1991). Moreover, norms, models, stories, and ideologies cannot explain their own force and persuasiveness. The fact that some stories are more forceful or than other stories, or that they are compelling to some groups, while being meaningless or reprehensible to other groups, demonstrates that they rest on experiences that are already culturally orchestrated (ibid.).

We belief that the idea of culture as a pre-existing symbolic order that needs to be internalized or appropriated by its participants denies both the inherently social character of human psychological processes and the psychological or experiential character of cultural entities. The human mind does not become social only after swallowing certain culturally fabricated meanings (Baerveldt, 1998; Baerveldt & Verheggen, 1999a, 1999b). Instead, the mind is always social because it evolves in dialogical relations to other minds right from the beginning. As we have elsewhere claimed, "the basic question of cultural psychology should therefore not concern a presumed dialectical or dialogical relation between personal sense and ready made cultural meanings, but the issue of how personal sense becomes coordinated in such a way that it gives rise to cultural meanings" (Baerveldt, 1998, p. 9). So, 'culture' in the sense of an already established symbolic order cannot be an explanation of meaningfully patterned actions, because culture itself asks for a psychological explanation. We maintain that instead of taking for granted the meaningfulness of already produced cultural entities, cultural psychology should investigate how cultural meanings are actually produced. The notion of 'production' brings to our attention the need for an adequate theory of 'action' or 'agency'. What is it that enables human beings to act in meaningful ways? What constitutes their actions as social actions? How is it that people's actions become culturally patterned, while those people nevertheless act on the basis of their own personal experience? Of course these are profound problems, which will not be solved overnight. However, one of the mainsprings of cultural psychology in the past ten or fifteen years has been the perceived need within the social sciences to ask such old questions in renewed ways.

Enactivism and experience
In order to meet the challenge of accounting for culturally patterned meaningful action, we have tried to sketch the outlines of an 'enactive' cultural psychology (Baerveldt, 1998; Baerveldt & Verheggen, 1999a, 1999b). The enactive paradigm has an important part of its roots within the epistemological work of the Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela (Maturana, 1978, 1980; Maturana & Varela, 1980; Varela, 1979). The word "enactivism", however, was introduced more recently by Varela, Thompson, and Rosch (1991) in their attempt to apply those epistemological insights to cognitive science.

A central claim of enactivism is that the neural system, like any other architecture embodying some kind of cognition, is 'operationally closed'. An operational closed system is a system that is capable of maintaining it's own internal coherence, which means that we cannot not sufficiently account for its operations by reference to its environment . The notion of operational closure has often raised confusion, especially among those cognitive theorists who uncritically assume that the brain is some kind of computational machine that operates on the basis of informational input from its environment. Paradoxically, however, it is exactly the notion of closure that brings this environment into focus again, not as just a source of neutral information, but as a lifeworld charged with significance. According to Maturana a system is operationally closed when its operations are not instructed by its environment, but determined by its own structure and organization (Maturana & Varela, 1980). Although an operationally closed system can be perturbed by its environment, its environment cannot force the system into a particular course of action. The environment has only a triggering role in the realization of cognitive acts, which means that it can not be conceived of in terms of pre-existing information. The world in this sense has no prefixed properties. Instead, a cognitive system enacts its own domain of significance, or its own domain of distinctions. As such a cognitive system is necessarily an experiencing system.

Within the enactive paradigm 'cognition' and 'experience' are two sides of the same coin. It should be stressed again that the properties of this experience cannot be derived from what an observer claims to know about a world preceding this experience. Any representational account of cognition and experience falls short, since it confuses the descriptive domain of an outside observer and the phenomenal domain of the acting system. Instead of representing or mapping the informational properties of a pregiven, 'out there' world, a cognitive system enacts its phenomenal domain on the basis of its own closed organization. Therefore the notion of operational closure has a phenomenological counterpart in what could be called 'experiential closure'. Each cognitive system is a system that lives in a world of its own experience, a phenomenal world to which an external observer has principally no access. A cognitive agent is a meaning-producer rather than an information processor (Baerveldt & Verheggen, 1999a, 1999b).

The enactive notion of operational and experiential closure has far reaching implications for the way we look upon social interaction. Since the conduct of neither of the interacting systems can be 'in-structive' or 'in-formative' for the other, enactivism conceives of social interaction as a constant mutual co-adaptation, or a consensual coordination of actions between meaning-producers. When such interactions acquire a recurrent character, the interactors may create a domain of interlocked conduct, or what Maturana an Varela have called a "consensual domain". Contrary to one of the most prevailing intuitions with regard to the social enactivism claims that such consensual domains do not involve a sharing of experience. Countering individualistic trends within dominant social psychology some social psychologist have come to use the notion of 'sharedness' in order to indicate what is thought of as a central feature of social phenomena. It is assumed that the intrinsically social or cultural dimension of the mind has something to do with mental representations that are shared by the members of a certain community. The paper of Verheggen and Baerveldt elsewhere on this site deals with the epistemological and psychological problems associated with such a notion of 'sharedness'. It demonstrates that not 'sharedness' is the defining property of social phenomena, but the fact that people come to coordinate their own actions with respect to each other. Since each social actor acts on the basis of her or his own personal experience, in a sense all social phenomena can be said to involve a coordination of interpersonal differences rather than correspondences.

One brain is no brain
Although enactivism is thoroughly rooted within biological insights in the origin of meaning and cognition, it entails in no way a kind of biological reductionism, neither does it comprise a view that is antagonistic with regard to culture. In our view it is exactly the radical opposition of nature and culture that has proved to be rather counterproductive for the scientific study of meaning. As our insight in the biological foundations of the mind advances, the biological and cultural psychological view seem to converge in many respects, for example in their rejection of the essentialism and objectivism contained within present day cognitive functionalism, and in their shared concern with meaning as opposed to a merely formal 'syntax of mind' (Bruner, 1990; Edelman, 1992). Now, forty years after the cognitive revolution it is becoming more and more clear that 'die hard' cognitivism falls hopelessly short as a theory of meaning, since it passes by both the embodiment and the social embeddedness of the human mind (Bruner, 1990; Edelman, 1992; Lakoff and Johnson, 1998; Baerveldt, 1998; Baerveldt & Voestermans, 1996; Baerveldt & Verheggen, 1999a. 1999b).

We think that one of the main obstacles for a psychology of meaningful action lies in the persistent inclination to play off biology against culture. After all, even the human brain evolved most dramatically in a period of time that human beings lived in close-knit social communities. This is a point largely overlooked by many self-proclaimed evolutionary psychologists, who trivialize culture in favor of a uniform human mind (see Voestermans & Baerveldt, this site). Evolutionary psychologists consider the human mind a complex computational machinery that was designed by natural selection to solve the kind of adaptive problems our ancestors had to face (Cosmides & Tooby, 1994). Voestermans and Baerveldt argue, however, that in its attempt to dispute a rather outdated metaphysics of meaning, evolutionary psychology submits itself to the same limited notions of causality that keeps traditional Turing machine functionalists from dealing with meaning in an adequate way. In our view an enactive approach to psychology inevitably leads to an inherently social or dialogical account of meaningful action. Although a full account of human conduct does indeed involve the biological study of the body and the brain and their evolutionary development by selective pressure, Voestermans & Baerveldt suggest that distinct psychological phenomena which are related to meaning, intentionality, consciousness, and self-awareness can only emerge within consensual domains that comprise the socially coordinated actions occurring within 'communities of experiencers'.

The consensual constitution of reality
A cultural psychology that radically starts from experience will have to indicate how a consensual coordination of actions can give rise to certain 'frames' of action which appear as independent contexts for those actions. Gregory Bateson was probably the first to realize that the framing of social interactions contains a paradox analogous to the kind of paradoxes that has been bothering logicians for centuries (Bateson, 1972). The best-known paradox is the classical paradox of Epimenides, also known as the 'paradox of the liar'. In its modern form this paradox is most often represented in the statement "this statement is not true". The problem is of course that if this statement were true, it should be untrue and if it were untrue, it should be true. In their classical work on the logical foundations of mathematics Whitehead and Russell (1910-1913) tried to demonstrate that such paradoxes emerge as a consequence of confusing different logical types. A statement belonging to a certain 'class' of statements can not simultaneously contain a truth about this class. In other words, a statement can not tell the truth about itself, without creating a paradox, and rendering itself senseless.

What Bateson demonstrated is that in spite of this logical prohibition these kinds of paradoxes emerge time and again in the communication between people and even between social animals¹. The expressive style involved in complex behavioral phenomena like 'play', or 'threat', or 'deceit' seems to violate the Whitehead and Russell prohibition of self reference. A monkey that playfully bites a congener, or two dogs showing off fangs while keeping clear of an actual fight are somehow able to communicate a message of the kind: "the actions I perform do not mean what they mean". In other words, those animals are capable of interacting with their own interactions, thereby setting a 'context' or a 'frame' in which those actions can be understood as meaningful. This is why Bateson uses the word 'framing'. Framing is the creation in the interaction of a context for that very same interaction.

Human communication is characterized by endless possibilities for second and even higher order coordinations of actions. We can signify things like "this is not a joke" or "don't you think I'm not serious" or "stop lying to me" to mention only a few examples. What those higher order consensual coordinations of action have in common is that they are, what could be called, 'reality constituting practices'. By interacting with their own interactions people are able to consensually establish what ought to be taken as real. A central claim of the enactive paradigm is that objective reality, that is, a reality consisting of 'objects', does not precede human interaction, since objects can only emerge within a domain of coordinations of coordinations of actions (Maturana, 1978, 1980, 1988; Maturana & Varela, 1980; Baerveldt & Verheggen, 1999a, 1999b). Words are of course the means par excellence to perform such higher order coordinations of actions. The word "table", for example, does not only coordinate the possible ways in which we can interact with an entity in the world, but it also coordinates those possible interactions with respect to other actors. Calling something a table presupposes the existence of other actors, of whom we assume that they experience the table in somewhat comparable ways. This implies that the table is already part of a consensual domain, a co-operative domain of interactions which we ourselves help to constitute. The table as an objective entity does not exist apart from our own conduct, neither does it exist apart from the way we coordinate our conduct with respect to other actors.

Enactivism and the discursive thesis
Although objective reality is socially constituted it would be a mistake to conceive of all reality as only a matter of free floating discursive construction. Since the consensually coordinated actions that give rise to reality remain firmly rooted within human experience, we should be careful not to derive the whole world from what we claim to know already about discourse. Our argument against such discursive relativism is not that it passes by a real world that precedes human discourse, but rather that it passes by experience. So, far from intending to evoke some naïve realistic argument again, our focus concerns the way in which experiencing human agents coordinate their actions such that it gives rise to objective reality. This becomes particularly important when the 'reality' concerned is not that of tables, rocks and trees, but that of cultural entities like 'marriage' or 'motherhood' or 'the constitution'. Such entities obviously belong to what Shweder (1991) has called "intentional worlds". Their reality is assembled out of the elements of people's very own experience, as Von Glasersfeld (1991) has phrased it.

According to Shweder, our socio-cultural environment is intentional "(…) because its existence is real, factual, and forceful, but only as long as there exists a community of persons whose beliefs, desires, emotion, purposes, and other mental representations are directed at, and thereby influenced by, it" (Shweder, 1991, p. 74). But in spite of his eloquence, Shweder skirts around the central question rather than elucidating it. After all, we call something 'marriage' or 'motherhood' because of a particular configuration of beliefs, desires, emotion, and purposes that is involved. It therefore hardly makes sense to maintain that such intentional realities influence those same beliefs, desires, emotion, and purposes. As soon as we ask the empirical question how those beliefs, desires, emotion, and purposes acquire their particular form, Shweder's assertion appears to be no more than a tautology. The observation that all mothers gave birth to one or more children is not an empirical observation, because the fact of having given birth to children is already included in the word "mother". Likewise, the assertion that people do certain things because they are influenced by, for example, the institution of marriage or motherhood is not an empirical assertion, because 'marriage' and 'motherhood' are themselves no more than words for what people do in apparently patterned ways. As such, cultural entities like 'marriage' and 'motherhood' can not function as explanations of patterned conduct. They are realities that have themselves to be cultural psychologically understood. An empirical account of meaningful human actions asks for an explication of the principles that are involved in the coordination of those actions, that does not already include the outcome of those very same actions.

Elsewhere we have argued that a consensual coordination of actions is not necessarily discursive in nature (Baerveldt 1999a, 1999b). Although discourse is certainly most conspicuous in this respect, discursive patterns are themselves to be understood in terms of the mutual tuning processes by which 'personal' experience becomes consensually validated. Most discursive psychologists are mainly concerned with the way people account for their own and other people's actions, but remain neutral with respect to the experiential basis of such accounts. An enactive cultural psychology tries to do justice to experience while avoiding the pitfalls of essentialism. It's main focus is the way in which experiencing persons coordinate their actions with respect to other experiencing persons. Neither 'true' experience nor a pre-established cultural world can provide us with a substantial ground for understanding patterned conduct. As for culture, our aim is to study how persistent patterns in human action are brought about in a dynamical process that involves nothing else than action itself.

References
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Baerveldt, C (1998). Culture and the consensual coordination of actions. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Nijmegen.

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Baerveldt, C., & Voestermans, P. (1996). The body as a selfing device: The case of anorexia nervosa. Theory & Psychology, 6, 693-713.

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Maturana, H., & Varela, F. (1980). Autopoiesis and cognition: The realization of the living. Dordrecht: Reidel Publishing Company.

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Varela, F.J., Thompson, F., & Rosch, E. (1991). The embodied mind: Cognitive science and human experience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Voestermans, P. (1991). Alterity/Identity: A deficient image of culture. In J. Leerssen & R. Corbey (Eds.), Alterity, identity, image: Selves and others in society and scholarship (pp. 219-250). Amsterdam: Rodopi.

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1. In fact, the Whitehead and Russell theory of logical types is a prohibition of self-referential statements. This is particularly interesting because self-reference is a core concept in the theory of autopoiesis. However, rather than proving their theory, Whitehead and Russell posed it as a rule. As such, it was later contested by several mathematicians and philosophers of mathematics, among who were eminent thinkers like Wittgenstein and-less well known-G. Spencer Brown. Spencer Brown developed a calculus of distinctions (Spencer Brown, 1969) which is the basis for a calculus of selfreference further developed by Varela in his 'principles of biological autonomy' (Varela, 1979).

Last updated: August 2000
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