Hamlet: Do you see nothing there?
Gertrude (The Queen): Nothing at all, yet all that is I see.
HAMLET, Act III, Scene IV
Although over the past decades culture can be said to have re-entered psychology,
one can only be puzzled by the fact that material culture did not receive the same
attention and has been neglected by both ‘mainstream’ and cultural-historical traditions.
To counter-balance this strange absence, the assumption I start from in this editorial
is that material culture and material objects are at the heart of human developmental
processes, conditioning our everyday relationship to the world, and influencing how
we live, act, think and develop as human beings from an early age. This view bridges
the gap between what is traditionally identified as, on the one hand, symbolic and,
on the other, material culture. In psychology, on-going scientific work is being undertaken
to unpack the role of material culture for the developing subject and the way in which
it elicits and transforms his/her psychological processes in a dialectical movement
of appropriation and transformation of culture through innovation. This emerging field
extends the psychological to the mundane world, which becomes an essential player
in the area of psychological development.
Considering the fact that our daily lives are characterised by innumerable encounters
with material objects that obviously, in a way or another, organise our relationship
to the world, the very first question is why psychology has been so silent concerning
this crucial issue and why it has taken so long to inscribe material culture into
its scientific agenda. Even in the emerging stream of research in psychological development
where materiality is now being considered a crucial actor, a second very important
question arises: how can we progress in the problematisation of material culture and
its objects for a better understanding of the evolution and transformation of psychological
processes?
Why such a lack of interest for material culture in psychology? In ‘mainstream’ psychology
and in the field of developmental psychology, the reality (also called the real) refers
to an objective world that the subject thinks about. Inaugurated by Piaget’s (1952,
1954) seminal research, this conceptualisation of the object refers to it as ‘what
is placed in front of’, ‘which exists independently from the mind’ (from the Latin
objectum). It conceives objects in terms of their physical properties, as a result
of an attribution by the solitary subject. This view is grounded in the classical
subjectivity orientation within philosophy, inspired by Descartes and Kant, in which
the world is theoretically defined as an objective entity. From that time onwards,
the object has been limited to the rational and consequently, its historical, cultural
and semiotic features have been overlooked or naturalised. To come back to the example
of early development, besides Piaget, this is also the case for subsequent inneist,
computationalist and social cognition perspectives (e.g., Baillargeon, Spelke, & Wasserman,
1985; Leslie, 1987, inspired by Fodor; and Tomasello, 1999, inspired by Gibson).
The same surprising absence applies, but for different reasons, to the cultural-historical
developmental tradition which has some difficulties in placing the issue of material
culture on its agenda. Why such a lack of consideration of the cultural status of
the object in the cultural-historical framework? Representing this tradition, Vygotsky
(1962; Vygotsky & Luria, 1994) attributes a considerable role to language, considered
as the semiotic system par excellence in human development. We assume that this pre-eminence
of language is the consequence of a focus on social relations grounded in the legacy
of Marx’s anthropology (cf. The 6th Thesis on Feuerbach) where it is asserted that
the humanitas de l’homo, i.e., “[…] the human essence is no abstraction inherent in
each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of social relations” (Marx,
1845 [my emphasis]). If we do agree with this conception of external human essence
as expressed by Marx, we consider that the identification of the culture to the social
in Vygotsky's framework leads to neglecting the intrinsic meaning of the object as
related to its conventional use in favour of an extrinsic meaning, over-determined
by the linguistic device.
As a consequence, in the above positions, the object is invisible and the role of
material culture for human development is under-theorised. The aim of making visible
material culture in psychology brings us close to the field of Material Culture Studies
(e.g. Hicks & Beaudry, 2010; Tilley, Keane, Küchler, Rowlands, & Spyer, 2006) in which
materiality is a growing research topic emerging at the frontier between archaeology
and anthropology. This new, interdisciplinary field, unbounded and unconstrained,
reconsiders material culture as “an integral dimension of culture, and that there
are dimensions for social existence that cannot be fully understood without it” (Tilley
et al., 2006, p. 1). The domain of things or objects is the principal concern but,
alternatively, material culture studies can also take the human subject or the social
as their starting point (Tilley et al., 2006). This field of research is animated
by substantive debates and, amongst them, the utility of creating a separate category
of the ‘material’ that is not materially enacted (Hicks, 2010, referring to Ingold,
2007). This question is intrinsically linked to the definition of material culture
and material objects, even if some scholars refuse to consider it (see Miller, 2010).
In psychology, an increasing stream of interdisciplinary work dealing with objects,
things, artefacts, etc., reflecting various orientations of research and using different
conceptual and theoretical frameworks one can identify. These works broadly originate
in cultural-historical perspectives without excluding the interconnection with other
psychological traditions such as (without being exhaustive) cognitive perspectives,
biological theory, neurosciences, etc., and making use of semiotic, phenomenological,
ecological or anthropological approaches. These studies are trying to reflect on what
was a taken-for-granted issue, insisting on the significance and importance of investigating
material domains to understand human development (e.g., Andrén, 2010; de La Ville
& Tartas, 2010; Glăveanu, 2014; Moro, 2011; Moro & Muller Mirza, 2014; Moro & Rodríguez,
2005; Muller Mirza & Perret-Clermont, 2008; Rickenmann, 2014; Sinha, 2005) with topics
concerning, for example, early development, creativity, the work of art, consumption,
education, professional practices, gestures, among others.
In this strive to reintroduce materiality in psychology and to explore its cultural,
historical and semiotic status in human development, it is interesting to turn, once
again, to philosophy. In particular towards phenomenology and to Heidegger who challenged
the Kantian doxa by reintroducing a reflection on things and objects in the ordinary
world. His perspective is filling, in a certain way, the gap left opened in cultural-historical
theory (cf. Vygotsky) concerning the material world. We choose to address this approach,
in the end, as it is an illustration of the perspective of ordinariness also evoked
by Schütz and Luckmann (1973) and Searle (1995) and because that it might constitute
a new and fruitful perspective for psychology (cf. also Wittgenstein, 1961 and Cavell,
1986).
Challenging the Kantian doxa by rethinking the world and things in their ordinariness
– within which, since the beginning, human relationships are embedded – the conception
of phenomenology sheds new light on the issue of ‘Wordliness’ of the world through,
inter alia, a reflection on the ‘Thing’. In Being and Time, Heidegger (1996) goes
beyond Kant’s classical subjectivity by exploring the Wordliness of the world in order
to understand what it means to be a world for the Dasein. Etymologically, Dasein (German
neologism) means ‘Being-there’ and is usually translated by ‘Being-in-the-world’.
What is interesting for the question of materiality is that the world is reintroduced
in its ordinariness and is considered as a significant whole in relation to the Dasein.
The world in which one dwells may be accessed through activities, by how one engages
with things in the world in a pragmatic mode. This contrasts with Kant’s doxa, where
the world is only accessible in the mode of knowing. As an example, in The Thing,
Heidegger (1971) is interested in that sort of things of the world that can be used
such as a jug. He takes the example of a handmade ceramic jug and asks ‘what is a
jug?’ in its fundamental Thingness. The jug then can be defined through the void inside
it whose basic function is ‘to hold’, which is the way of being of the jug for the
Dasein. The advantage of engaging with Heidegger’s views is that we are immersed into
the world of things; in it, we live, encounter and experience things through how we
perceive and use them ordinarily.
The reflexion on the Worldliness of the world provides new insight on the issue of
materiality by making us aware of the conventional use of things. Pursuing cultural-historical
perspectives which focus on explaining the practical and historical relationship of
the developing subject to the world, one of the questions raised is how this world
and its realities are appropriated by the subjects and how psychological processes
are elaborated thanks to this appropriation, considering that these relationship are
constantly re-qualified by the developing subject in the course of his/her interactions
with the world and other people. Here the question of meaning is crucial to consider.
Material culture has a double nature. It is material but it is also a site of public
meanings through the conventional uses of objects. How people access these public
meanings and how do they transform them? How to understand then the question of affordances?
As a starting point or as the point of arrival for the reconstruction of the intrinsic
meaning of the object? And how to redefine the question of intersubjectivity? How
to speak of meaning-making processes in relation to the activity of the subject concerning
the object? And how to link these meanings to other forms of meanings, including those
concerning corporeity and language, in a multimodal perspective of meaning-making
processes?
The reintroduction of the material world of culture (and conventions) at the very
core of the object (or the thing), by contrasting classical subjectivity, where objects
are reduced to the subjectivity and representation, increases the complexity of our
relationship with the world and with other people, making obvious the new challenges
introduced in the study of human development thanks to materiality.