How real is “culture”? A painful answer

Dr. Samuel Johnson is known for refuting Berkeley’s idealism by stomping his thumb against a solid stone. Whether this anecdote is historically grounded or not is of minor importance. The lesson, however, is extremely important. Some arguments and ideas are refutable or clearly confirmed when they come up against the solid rock of reality. While a naive materialist would consider stones as the hallmark of reality testing, cultural encounters may provide us with a painful experience that confirms the reality of “culture” no less than the reality of stones.

At this point you may intuitively sense my pragmatic approach: it is pain that defines our boundary in encountering reality. To say it differently, let me recall Terry Eagleton, a nonrepresentative of pragmatism, who in his book How to Read a Poem writes (2006, 8): “Reality is what turns its back upon us, resisting our infantile demand that the world should serve as our looking glass.” Well, as the following example teaches us, the world is not the looking glass of our fantasies.

From the mouse’s nose to Borges’s sculpture

The above quotation from Gulliver’s Travels is funny as it shockingly violates our cultural norms. Swift, known for his wicked sense of humor, has touched on a sensitive point. How can the smell of a beloved one be so intolerable?

For the cultural psychologist there is no greater pleasure than in showing how “natural” biological psychological processes are mediated despite their nonmediated and “natural” appearance. In this context, smell is of specific interest as it is a common belief that we have a poor sense of smell, attributed mostly to our evolutionary heritage, and that smell is such a basic perception that the role of mediation is minimal if any.

Abraham Wald (1902–1960) was an Austro-Hungarian-born Jew. As a Jew raised in a religious family he couldn’t attend school on Saturday and therefore was homeschooled by his parents. This homeschooling was extremely successful as Wald graduated from the University of Vienna with a Ph.D. in mathematics. Wald was forced to flee to the USA when the Nazis came into power and developed his academic career in that welcoming country.

In retrospect, the Nazis’ “thesis” of the Aryan race’s superiority over the Jews was powerfully refuted when Jewish scientists, such as those who led the Manhattan Project, became the cutting edge of the war efforts. We could not imagine the war efforts of the USA without Robert Oppenheimer, Edward Teller, John von Neumann, and many others.

During the Second World War, Wald made his own personal contributionto the war efforts (Mangel and Samaniego 1984 ). The context of his contribution is extremely interesting. The American airplanes that returned from the front were, naturally, damaged by antiaircrat artillery. As a solution the army sought to add armor to the planes. However, covering the whole airplane’s belly and wings with armor would necessarily result in a weight increase that would have fatal consequences. Therefore, as a commonsensical solution, the army considered adding armor only to areas that statistically showed the most damage.

Those who are interested in cultural psychology cannot follow the worldview of generals and mail coach drivers. The complexity of the cultural arena is such that “straight roads” are impossible. The context of culture, as the Latin origin of the word teaches us, is the context of interwoven threads in which evolutionary, ontogenetic, and social-symbolic layers obscure any straight road to understanding. Acknowledging the complexity of the cultural realm does not imply a depressive stance, at least not in the negative sense of the word. The psychoanalyst Melanie Klein has suggested that a depressive stance may be a sign and a phase of mental maturity. As suggested in the introduction, the world doesn’t necessarily adhere to our fantasies. Our wishful thinking is such that we may expect the complexity of the world to be shrunken into very simple models, into straight roads.

The situation of a person seeking understanding reminds me of an insightful lesson taught by the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (described in Avital 2012). Whitehead describes the case of a person who has lost his way in the wilderness. The question the person asks himself is, “Where am I?” However, this is the wrong question, says Whitehead. The real question is, “Where are they?” That is, the person should try to find those who look for him instead of trying to understand his absolute location on the manifold. This story should be qualified, of course. Knowing his location, the person may seek the shortest way to the closest village. However, this is not the point Whitehead is trying to make. The point is about the appropriate frame of reference.

Introduction

The Glass Menagerie illustrated family dynamics in action. Family dynamics is only one instance of small-group dynamics. The study of small-group dynamics has long been of interest to psychologists and psychiatrists. From Bion (1961) to Foulkes (1964; see also Pines 2000), Yalom (1995), and others, the dynamics of small groups, such as the Wingfield family, have been carefully studied and mapped.

However, despite the rich insights gained into group dynamics, the techniques through which we can identify structural units of meaning (i.e., themes) emerging at the group level of analysis have remained largely unstructured. This observation is evident, for instance, in a wide range of the publications dealing with group psychotherapy from different theoretical and practical perspectives (e.g., Barnes et al. 1999; Berg-Cross 2000; Christner et al. 2007; Goldenberg and Goldenberg 2004; Rutan and Stone 2001).

We should remember here that in practice the therapist or group mediator observes the group dynamics in real time, and therefore the cognitive load under which s/he works impedes his/her ability to identify themes in a valid and empirically grounded way. Moreover, as the dynamics unfold, a complex network of signs is generated by the group. The complexity of this network imposes signii cant constraints on the ability of the group mediator to identify themes emerging from the discussion.

Cultural psychology as the study of symbolic systems mediating the variety of human forms of thought and practice (Valsiner 2007) has always been interested in the symbolic value of food and food-related practices (Rozin 2007). Paraphrasing Freud, a food is never just food but always a psychocultural object loaded with meaning derived from associations, connotations, metaphors, and cultural practices in which those senses are embedded and materialized.

Despite the great interest in the symbolic value of food and its related practices, studies that use computational tools to examine the semiotics of food are rare. In this chapter I aim to address this challenge. The chapter is based on a paper I co-authored with my colleagues Daniel Unger, who is an art historian interested in the visual representation of food, and Norbert Marwan, a physicist who has developed sophisticated methods for analyzing dynamic processes. More specifically, we focused our study on one main practice of food consumption: dinner, the main meal of the day in the West.

“Man is never coincident with himself”

I concluded the previous chapter by suggesting that the modern representation of love is comprehensible only as synergetic threads. The gentle love described by Parton can be traced back to our most basic embodied patterns of attachment to significant others. However, locating the peak of those metaphors in Romanticism suggests that our concept of love has been somehow transformed by culture and at a specific point of our cultural history. I have suggested that love has become more relational and sublime. However, the meaning of this term “relational” should be explained. To explain the relational nature of modern love and its very specific sense, I first dedicate this “noncomputational” chapter to explaining the meaning of our relational self. In trying to explain the relational nature of the self and to introduce the methodology through which we expose relational patterns in text, I first explain an important aspect of our language and our “trust” in guiding us to deep layers of meaning.

From the perspective of semiotic cultural psychology, relations are exposed mainly by analyzing the language of those who establish relations. Understanding the relations of Harry and Sally in When Harry Met Sally is impossible without paying close attention to the things the characters say and of course avoid saying. Understanding family as a relational system is impossible without carefully analyzing the verbal communication patterns between members of a family. However, analyzing language in order to expose deep layers of meaning assumes basic trust in the way language can guide us, whether to expose the deep psychological layers of a person or of a given culture.

Dolly Parton is one of the most famous singers in the USA and is known as the queen of country music. She is well known not only because of her songs but also through her unique physical appearance: her feminine aspects are grotesquely overemphasized, the most salient of them being her huge (artificial) breasts and lips.

One of Parton’s albums, released in 1974, is titled Love Is Like a Butterfly after one of the album’s songs. The first lines of the song, written by Parton herself, go like this:

1. Love is like a butterfly

2. As soft and gentle as a sigh

3. The multicolored moods of love are like its satin wings

If we carefully analyze the song, we may identify words and phrases describing or associated with the experience of love: soft, gentle, sigh, multicolored, satin, wings, heart, feel, strange, inside, flutters, flight, rare, with me, kiss me, touch, warm, tender, with you, laughter, bring me, sunshine, spring, happy, by my side, precious, share, sweet, together, belong, daf odils, butterfly.

From this list I have chosen fifteen words as best representing this experience: soft, gentle, sigh, wings, inside, rare, touch, warm, tender, sunshine, spring, happy, precious, sweet, together. I call this list Dolly Parton’s love lexicon.

“Eat your lasagna!”

In 2010 I was invited to participate in a joint seminar for Israeli and American researchers. During the opening dinner, as the only social scientist in the group, I was seated near an old professor of linguistics from the hosting university, who was almost immediately proud to introduce herself as one of Chomsky’s students.

After positioning herself as a direct descendant of the guru, she asked about my field of expertise. I humorously apologized for not having one but expressed my long-lasting interest in issues of language and thought. “Of course,” she said. “Sapir–Whorf hypothesis regarding the influence of language on thought.” I explained that neither Sapir not Whorf ever presented such a “hypothesis” and never ever presented any simple causal link between “language” and “thought.” “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “This hypothesis has been experimentally refuted.” I tried to explain that the “hypothesis” is really a theoretical assumption and to support my argument made the mistake of bringing to my help several (dead) soviet colleagues such as Lev Vygotsky and Valentine Volosinov.

In May 2011, Wired magazine published a paper under the provocative title “Spies, meet Shakespeare: intel geeks build metaphor motherlode.” This title generates curiosity, as spies and Shakespeare belong to two different “semantic fields.” Although some notable writers, particularly British writers such as W. Somerset Maugham and Graham Greene, belonged to the intelligence community, Shakespeare was probably not one of them.

The author of the article, Lena Groeger (2011), introduces the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) – “the mad science unit of the intelligence community” – and its metaphor project, which aims to “exploit the use of metaphors by different cultures to gain insight into their cultural norms.”

In fact this project has drawn wide attention; The Economist joined the celebration by publishing the article “Metaphors we do everything by?” (R.L.G. 2011), and other newspapers have published similar stories.

IARPA is a relatively new American agency that was established to develop “the next generation of spycrat technologies” (Bhattacharjee 2009).

In the context of “spycraft,” metaphor identii cation isn’t the most salient tool. Our images of the spy world are nurtured by Hollywood rather than by the real world. We can imagine agent 007 – James Bond – driving a car that turns into a war machine. We can imagine the tech geeks who operate the most sophisticated technology to locate the place where Jason Bourne, the hero of The Bourne Identity, is calling from. However, we would hardly imagine a spy movie in which a secret agent bursts into the technology geeks’ oi ce shouting, “Urgent! I need the metaphors used by the Iranians to describe the United States.”

Preface

For Lord Byron, who was an adventurer and probably a thrill seeker, the pleasure in the “pathless woods” may have been the result of the thrill associated with the uncertainty, promise, and danger of traveling in an unknown territory. I am neither an adventurer nor a thrill seeker. However, from a very young age, I have found great pleasure in traveling the pathless woods of knowledge. A kind of a wimpy adventurer, you may call me. These travels have led me to very varied territories of human knowledge, from experimental psychology (Neuman and Weitzman 2003) and psychoanalysis (Neuman 2009a) to mathematical modeling (Neuman et al. 2012); from theoretical biology (Neuman 2008) to semiotics (Neuman 2009b); and from discourse analysis (Neuman et al. 2001) to innovative information technologies (Neuman et al. 2013b). What is interpreted by some of my colleagues as a symptom of an academic multiple personality disorder is for me a natural and legitimate expression of a deep intellectual passion.

Knowledge is not naturally demarcated by borders, and wherever borders exist in our minds they indicate our tendency to force order in a simplistic way and to follow the social power relations of academic politics. Physicists who study the semantic networks of language are not linguists, but their contribution to our understanding of human language is indispensable. Should this work be appreciated despite the fact that it transcends disciplinary boundaries? My answer is: yes!