2020 Sensuality Valsiner

SPRINGER BRIEFS IN PSYCHOLOGY
THEORETICAL ADVANCES IN PSYCHOLOGY
Jaan Valsiner
Sensuality in
Human Living
The Cultural
Psychology
of Affect
123
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Jaan Valsiner
Sensuality in Human Living

The Cultural Psychology of Affect
Carl-Gustav Carus Winterlandschaft mit verfallenem Tor. 1816-1819

Jaan Valsiner
Psychologie and Communication
Aalborg Universitet
Aalborg, Denmark
Sigmund Freud PrivätUniversitet-Wien
Wien, Austria
SpringerBriefs in Psychology
ISSN 2192-8363 ISSN 2192-8371 (electronic)
SpringerBriefs in Theoretical Advances in Psychology
ISSN 2511-395X ISSN 2511-3968 (electronic)
ISBN 978-3-030-41742-0 ISBN 978-3-030-41743-7 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41743-7
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Preface
Some book projects take long time to develop. This is one of those. I can trace its
origins back to year 2000 when—in defiance to the usual preoccupation of child and
adolescent psychologists with the emerging sexuality in adolescence I claimed that
instead it is the heterosensuality (Valsiner 2000, pp. 284–291) that unites the bodily
fascination with sex with the higher affective constructions of new experiences by
the inquisitive youngsters. It was the phenomena of adolescents’ feelings into their
environment—and their bodily relations in traditional Gikuyu ngweko1 practices as
well as living together in the Muria ghotul2—that fascinated me. It led me to look
beyond the trivial “who has sex with whom and when?” gossipers’ question to the
wider issue of affective embodiment in human lives. What is important for general
human psychology of human beings is the meaningful relating with one’s body
from the basic physiological processes upwards to the highest psychological func-
tions of religiosity, ethical reasoning, and devotional practices.
Within the cultural psychology of semiotic mediation—which is the basis for my
analytic efforts in this book—sexuality becomes subsumed into the more general
domain of sensuality. This focus goes beyond the sexual desires—coming into focus
in relating to the beauty of one’s own and others’ bodies, the aesthetics of under-
wear (Valsiner 2019c), and the appreciation of art. In the past, I was (and continue
to be) fascinated by the devotional sensuality of devadasi temple dancers in India
(Valsiner 1996). Those highly educated and dedicated women—dismissed by the
British colonizers as “prostitutes”—were of central relevance for the highest fabric
of societal and personal life organization in Hindu religiously framed lives. To dis-
count the devadasi as “prostitutes” is an example of ideologically based social myo-
pia that stops our understanding of deep sensual experiences of our living. Likewise,
any stigmatizing dismissal of women who are earning their living as “sex workers”
I consider a similar self-imposed limit upon our capacity to understand that only
1
Heterosensual caressing practices of the Gikuyu traditional village relations of adolescents, with
strict prohibition against premarital sexual relations.
2
Muria village dormitory described by Vernon Elwin (1944) and elaborated by Nicolas Prevot
(2014) where children and adolescents were introduced to heterosensual sharing.
v
vi Preface
rarely has been kept open (Albert 2001). Like many artists and literati of the past
and the present, I have deep respect for women in these complicated yet very human
professional roles (White 1990) that play an important role in our bodily experienc-
ing. Psychological research needs to look beyond the social stigmatization of any
social “outgroups” and treat human beings of any professions with respect and
efforts to understand their lives.
My interest in the central role of sensuality has grown in the past two decades in
very concrete ways. Back in 2003, this took the form of a general claim:
Human psyche is culturally constructed subjective reality. Sensuality is the starting condi-
tion for human adaptation, and it becomes the arena for cultural regulation of the human
psyche. Contrary to the traditions of psychoanalysis that have emphasized the unconscious
basis for the human psyche, a cultural-psychological analysis concentrates on the transfor-
mation of the domain of personal affect into semiotic mediation fields that regulate conduct
in toto. (Valsiner 2003, p. 151, added underlining)
This bold claim is in the center of development of ideas in the present book.
Later, in an effort to explain the centrality of affect in cultural psychology to wider
audiences I borrowed from the quasi-autobiographical reported experiences of
James Joyce in his exploration of the urban world of Dublin (Valsiner 2014,
pp. 165–166).
What are the semiotic mediation fields? I have suggested (Valsiner 2006) that
most of our generalizing affective functions are organized by field-like signs that give
flavor to the settings of everyday life. In common sense terms, these amount to the
notion of psychological atmospheres. Our sensual relating with the world creates
continuity across settings. That is encoded in field-like signs and allows for not only
generalization but also hyper-generalization—generalizing affectively beyond gen-
eralized meanings. The key concept of hyper-generalization that is central for the
coverage in this book was already present back in 2003, but its functioning in the
process of modulation between the mundane and the sublime took years to emerge
(Valsiner 2019a). I hope that this little book gives a faithful account of a theoretical
perspective that would escape the routine reduction of complex phenomena of human
ways of living to oversimplified images of hidden and not so hidden sexualities.
On my way to understanding this basic reversal of the habitual focus on sexuality
to that of life-course long sensuality, I have benefitted from many colleagues and
friends. Nandita Chaudhary, Pina Marsico, Luca Tateo, Tania Zittoun, Jensine
Nedergaard, Angela Branco, Maria Lyra, Livia Simao, Eleonora Magomedova, and
Emily Abbey have kept guiding me towards overcoming my own cultural back-
ground limitations and non-poetic tendencies. The “Kitchen Seminar”—first at
Clark University and then in Aalborg—has allowed me to play with constant drafts
of different ideas that transcend the usual trivialities of psychological “literatures.”
Above all I am grateful to the many ordinary women and men who have shared with
me their aesthetic and sensual experiences. Thank you—Vika, Oxana, Christine,
Leticia, Jacira, Ana, Petro, Sylvia, and many others—for letting me benefit from
your struggles for making your ordinary lives extraordinary.
Aalborg, Denmark Jaan Valsiner

Introduction
Sensuality in Focus: The Human Psyche Beyond the Lures

of Sexuality
Sexuality is a topic of never-ending fascination—in ordinary life and in psychology.

Sexual motives are projected into almost anything that human beings do—or do not
do. Almost no oblong object can escape the fate of becoming naively interpreted as
a representation of a penis. We may relate to these in various ways—ranging from
fascinated acceptance to sarcastic denial—but in all cases the suggested centrality
of sexuality is being fortified as a cornerstone of the human psyche and even of
human societies.
In this little book, I distance our theoretical focus from this fixation upon sexual-
ity. I posit that it is the wider affective realm of bodily relating with the world—sen-
suality—that is the core of human psychological functioning. By emphasizing
sensuality rather than focusing on sexuality, I hope to provide a unifying perspective
between the lower and higher psychological functions.
However, this theoretical move is complicated. The notion of sensuality has
established—yet vague—meaning in the common language which makes it easy to
use the term but difficult to give it sufficient theoretical precision. Coming from
French—sensualité—following Latin sensualitas (“sensibility, capacity for sensa-
tion”) the common sense term reaches English in two sub-strains of a noun:
Uncountable: the state of being sensual, sensuous, or sexy
Countable: a preoccupation with sensuous pleasure
The state-of-being notion is tautological (sensuality is being sensual) while the
second meaning—preoccupation—involves an implicit process of striving—hence
potentially productive for theory. Yet a theory of sensuality cannot be built upon
limited notion of pleasure and the marking of insistence (preoccupation). It needs to
take on a general process focus with the whole range of affective phenomena created
vii
viii Introduction
by our senses—from pleasure to non-pleasure—involved.1 So, let me offer a general

definition:
Sensuality is the general and constant relating with the world through affective creation of
meaningfulness in one’s life.
This definition is admittedly recognizing subjectivity (as it is centered on the

only possible knower—oneself). The theme—sensuality—is necessarily centered
within the person—it is my feeling of the sensuousness of the mountain panorama I
am observing—even if you are standing next to me and observing the same pan-
orama. Furthermore, this definition recognizes the situatedness of subjectivity in
irreversible time (“constant relating”) and the open systemic nature2 of human liv-
ing (“relating with the world”). It is axiomatically built upon the notion of construc-
tion of signs (semiotic mediation—Valsiner 2014, 2019a, b) that sets up the person’s
relation to oneself (“meaningfulness”—accessible only to the introspection of the
person who constructs it). Yet it is a general process—integrating from the flow of
ongoing encounters with the world the hyper-generalized feeling of being-in-a-state
(of pleasure, or pain, or pleasurable pain, etc.). This hyper-generalized (Valsiner
2019b) sign field can be of different range of extension in time—from the moment
of orgasm (see Chap. 2) to that of life-time enduring feelings about one’s life (e.g.,
fatalism).
In everyday life, sensuality comes into function in multiple domains. Sexuality is
only one of the domains of sensuality—there are many others that in our daily lives
are by far more basic for our ways of being. The sensual pleasures of drinking a cup
of coffee or champagne, or eating a gourmet meal, or taking a shower or lazily
immersing oneself in a jacuzzi are all examples of total bodily relating to one’s own
self through bodily experiences that may at times transform into sexual feelings—
but not in an obligatory way. Sometimes drinking champagne is just enjoyment of
the champagne, or of the given moment, without becoming a part of a chain of
seductive acts. Under other circumstances, preparing a meal for somebody else can
be part of maintaining the basis for sexual relationships.3 Feelings of sexual kind
emerge in the context of sensuality. Yet they need not emerge, as sensuality is the
general wholistic field (Ganzheit) that is the basis of our whole being-in-the-world.
1
See the argument for unity of opposites within a whole—A and non-A united and mutually relat-
ing (Josephs et al. 1999) as a theoretical prerequisite for theory building in psychology.
2
Elaborated in Valsiner (2017b) chapter 1. All open systems depend on the constant exchange rela-
tions with environments. This basic feature is known in biology since late nineteenth century but
has not fully entered into psychology even in our time.
3
Clark (1989) shows how for an Asante woman trader in the market cooking a meal for man is the
indicator of sexual relationship and a vehicle for its maintenance. Women express their anger with
husbands “… by persistent carelessness in cooking, or by refusing to cook altogether.. A wife
becomes extremely suspicious if her husband loses his appetite, especially in the evening. She will
accuse him of eating somewhere else (with someone else), or of not liking her food” (Clark 1989,
p. 327). The practice of feeding young males’ semen to pre-initiated boys for promoting growth of
their male bodies in various societies in New Guinea (Godelier 2003, 2011) is a further proof of
the linkages of sexuality and alimentation.
Introduction ix
Listening to Gregorian chants is a deeply sensual experience with no transformation

into sexual feelings. Parents’ deep appreciation of the beauty of their children does
not transfer into sexual feelings in an overwhelming number of cases. In some it
may—with the result that is deeply morally rejected as sexual abuse. In a similar
vein, observing classic nude sculptures or paintings in a museum leads to the trans-
fer of sensual feelings into aesthetic ones, rather than to a desire to imagine the
muscular David of Michelangelo’s as a partner in the intimacy of one’s bed. Eating
raw oysters can be a sensual experience of tasting exquisite gourmet rather than
intake of aphrodisiacs for improving one’s sexual performance. And so on.
Looking at the fixation on sexuality by psychologists and anthropologists, the
French anthropologist Maurice Godelier pointed out that the fascination with sexu-
ality is not that of actual inter-coital experiences but that of a symbolic remove:
When asked to define, on the basis of their professional experience, what a sexual act is for
them, the anthropologist and the psychoanalyst apparently find themselves in distinct, but
from a certain standpoint, similar, situation. Neither is the habit of observing sexual acts
directly in the course of their practice. At first sight, it seems that their experience consists
of how people do or don’t talk about sex. But the two probably do not receive the same
discourse and therefore are not interpreting the same realities. (Godelier 2003, p. 179)
In addition to no direct access to sexuality in practice, there is a lack of concep-

tual access due to the different kinds of signs that could be used or are used to depict
sexualities. While common sense depictions are made in categorical language with
precisely determined signs (point-like signs), the whole sexual encounter is present-
able in different kinds of signs (field-like signs) which may have vague borders. The
sensual encounter that may lead to sexual relationship is ambiguous as its situa-
tional features allow for multiple pathways of meaning construction. It is only very
rarely when scientists have attempted to enter the deeply private domain of actual
inter-coital acts that evidence about the psychological processes involved is recorded
(see Chap. 2 for an elaborate analysis).
To summarize—in this book I look at the semiotic organization of sensuality in
general terms. This makes affective life the center of the psyche and lets it be of
importance in varied domains of human experiences. These domains are subjec-
tively organized in hierarchical orders. For our purposes in this book sexuality is not
only one domain of sensuality, but a subordinated domain that serves the general
role of sensuality in the human psyche. Its closest parallel among different everyday
life domains is alimentation—we not only take in nutrients but enjoy (or hate4) eat-
ing different foods based on our hyper-generalized value systems.5
Sensuality is the general term to cover the whole array of hyper-generalized
affective complexes. Fields of sensuality can be transformed into differentiated
opposites—sexuality on the one side and deep morally felt-through ways of conduct
4
The conversion of people into vegetarian or vegan eating prescriptions for oneself is a good
example of the specific hyper-generalized affective rejection of specific categories of possible
nutrients.
5
Additional proof of this closeness is the similarity of lexicon used in discourses about both ali-
mentary and coital acts (Stone 1954).
x Introduction
on the other. It is the processes of such transformation that constitute the core of
specifically human higher level psychological processes built on intentionality and
aided by cultural guidance (Valsiner 1998, 2007, 2014, 2019a, b). These processes
include resistances of various kinds (Chaudhary et al. 2017) and—at the level of
persons in their life contexts—illustrate the deep dialogicality of human psycho-
logical existence (Hermans 2001; Zittoun et al. 2013a). What needs to be accom-
plished is to find out about the dynamic organization of the human psyche—including
the totality from lowest (close to instinctive) to the highest (values and appreciation
of aesthetic feelings) levels. The relationships between these levels are usually con-
tradictory. In this small book, I have the aim of elaborating the various pathways of
transformation of sensuality into specific—often mutually opposed—forms.
Contents
Part I Living by Affective Hyper-Generalization

1 Theory of the Dynamic Sublime �� 3
The Sublime: Dramatizing the Mundane�� 4
Erhabene (the Sublime) as an Affective Drama�� 5
Translation Paradoxes: Forgetting the Time�� 6
Erhabene in Everyday Experiences �� 7
Borders in the Imagination Process �� 8
Schematization and Pleromatization�� 14
Varieties of the Affective Construction in the Sublime Zone�� 17
Conclusions: Conceptualizing the Emerging
Complexity of the Psyche�� 22
2 Embodiment in Action: The Making of the Body �� 23
Looking at the Body: All Around�� 23
Cultural Body in Action: The Role of Dance�� 29
Part II Feeling into the World

3 The Romantic Encounters�� 37
Basis for Romanticism: Intense Expression of Feelings�� 39
Romantic Devotion in Indian History: The Bhakti Movement�� 42
From the Sublime to the Sensual: The Tantric Love Ritual�� 43
Conclusion: Sensuality in Society �� 44
4 Sensuality in Seeing Through�� 45
Conclusions: Sensuality Is a Border Process �� 55
Part III Theoretical Proliferations

5 Sensuality In-Between: Dialogical Negotiation of Feeling Fields�� 61
Living Under Ambiguity (And Creating More of It) �� 64
xi
xii Contents
Sensuality as a Hypothesis, Sexuality as a Dogma�� 67

Normativity in the Not-Yet-Known: The Differentiated AS-IF Zone�� 68
Conclusions: Dialogical Negotiation of the Unfolding Affective
Atmospheres�� 69
6 Hierarchical Integration of Human Psychological Needs�� 71
Sensuality in the Hierarchical Field of Human Needs�� 72
Societal Guidance of Need Transformation�� 74
Love as the Escape from Moral Norms �� 75
Sensuality in Musical Performing�� 77
Conclusion: Semiotic Regulation of the Hierarchy of Human Needs �� 79
Part IV General Conclusion

7 Sensual Living in Affectivated Worlds �� 83
ommentary: Sinking Back and Beyond to Understand Sensuous

C
and Affective Processes: What Will an Artist Think of All That? �� 87
Lia Da Rocha Lordelo
References �� 95
Index�� 101
Part I
Living by Affective Hyper-Generalization
Chapter 1
Theory of the Dynamic Sublime
I claim that human beings are constantly in the process of affective transcending of
their mundane lives and—simultaneously—finding such self-constructed acts of
invention affectively overwhelming, the key feature of sensuality. We construct,
live, and overcome the sublime in our lives (Valsiner 2019a, chapter 1).
The basis for such feeling of being immersed in the affective relation with the
world is at the lowest level of the operation of the human psyche—that of elemen-
tary sensations. These sensations—minimal units of detecting differences in our
experience (“just noticeable differences” as these were labeled in early experimen-
tal psychology of 1880s)—are affective in their nature. We owe to Wilhelm Wundt
the demonstration of the lingering affective outcome of a sensation—the feeling
tone (Gefühlston). Over a century later, the way how this tone lingers on in irrevers-
ible time can be explained by the mechanisms of semiotic mediation (Fig. 1.1).
In Fig. 1.1 the crucial feature of the affective processes is the generalized encod-
ing of the immediate feeling for some future—by necessity unspecifiable—time.
This encoding is possible by signs—field-like signs (Valsiner 2003, 2014)—that
organize whole domains within the psyche. A person is not only dealing with the
momentary penetration of the skin when a technician is trying to put the needle into
the vein to draw blood for analysis but assembles a generalized feeling of apprehen-
sion towards such skin penetrations in the future. The whole domain of “something
might cut into my skin” becomes flavored through such anticipatory generalization
from a single encounter with an aversive penetration act. Or, the pleasure of sleep-
ing in tactile contact with one’s mother as an adolescent boy—experiencing erec-
tion and feeling ashamed of it—can lead to generalization of the ambivalence to all
heterosexual social encounters and brings him to therapy a decade later (Kakar
1989, p. 134—see Valsiner 2019b, p. 27 in ms). In this we find the unbearable sim-
plicity of human living—some specific unique affective encounters lead to general-
ized apprehensions for the future, while most others become neutralized after the
particular encounter ends. Already in the middle of the eighteenth century, Johann
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 3

J. Valsiner, Sensuality in Human Living, SpringerBriefs in Psychology,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41743-7_1
4 1 Theory of the Dynamic Sublime
GENERALIZED
ENCODING FOR FUTURE
SENSATION
TRIGGER: Gefühlston framing
IMMEDIATE FUTURE
IMMEDIATE Gefühl-
AFFECTVATING
SENSATION
IRREVERSIBLE TIME: PRESENT future

Past → MOMENT 1.......2
Fig. 1.1 Feeling forward to the future: Generalized Gefühlston. (Figure by author)
Gottfried Herder gave an introspective description of the progress of feeling as it

proceeds through the body:
Affect, which at the outset silently, encapsulated within, benumbed the entire body and
surged as a dark feeling, gradually pervades all slight stirrings, until it finds expression in
recognizable signs. It moves through the facial expressions and unarticulated sounds to the
level of reason, where at last it seizes upon language, and here, too, through most subtle
differentiation it loses at last in a clarity that gives it identity… In affect one perceives the
most comprehensive sensuous unity without being able to bring it into correspondence with
the intellect (Herder 1764/2010, p. 96, added emphasis)
This hyper-generalized role of affect leads later to neutralization. Neutralization

of ordinary encounters with the world is highly adaptive—not allowing each and
every event disturb our life course over the whole life span. A counter-force to such
neutralization—needed intentionally for preserving some of such here-and-now
event memories for the future—comes in the practices of genetic dramatization
(Werner and Kaplan 1963), goals-oriented affective dramatization of some mun-
dane event. Something ordinary becomes made extraordinary—hence memora-
ble—by a constructed dramatic moment or regular life course ritual. For that, the
feeling of the sublime—which at times crosses over to the aesthetic—is the arena
for affective generalization.
The Sublime: Dramatizing the Mundane
What is sublime? Edmund Burke introduced the central core of the focus on the
sublime in the eighteenth century:
Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever
is in any sort terrible, or is conversant of terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous
Erhabene (the Sublime) as an Affective Drama 5
to terror, is the source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which
the mind is capable of feeling. When in danger or pain press too nearly, they are incapable
of giving any delight, and are simply terrible: but at certain distances, and with certain
modifications, they may be, and they are delightful, as we every day experience. (Burke
1757, pp. 13–14, added underlining)
This kind of understanding of the making of the sublime by the human psyche
gives us a basic background for understanding why sensuality is central in our lives.
We live sensually towards beauty—not necessarily reaching it. Burke’s further
comparison of the sublime with the beautiful reflection of his belief of “eternal dis-
tinction” between them gives us further material for thought:
…sublime objects are vast in their dimensions, beautiful ones comparatively small; beauty
should be smooth, and polished; the great- rugged and negligent; beauty should shun the
right line, yet deviate from it insensibly: the great in many cases loves the right line, and
when it deviates, it often makes a strong deviation; beauty should never be obscure; the
great should be dark and gloomy; beauty should be light and delicate; the great should be
solid and even massive (Burke 1757, p. 115)
The contrast obviously here applies to sizes of objects. The same person whose
image is turned into a monumental sculpture becomes emphasized as “great” and
operates as a sublime object, while its miniature counterpart can be beautiful.
Erhabene (the Sublime) as an Affective Drama
Kant was interested in the questions of the sublime (Erhabene) and beautiful
(Schöne) over 35 years of his life. Mostly our contemporary philosophy of aesthet-
ics has emphasized the role of the latter, while from the outset Kant was fascinated
by the sublime.
Kant was in his early 40s when he took on the issue of beauty—after thinking
through planetary systems and becoming librarian in Königsberg. He had interest-
ing interlocutors before him—Alexander Baumgarten and his student Georg Maier,
as well as William Hogarth, Edmund Burke, Christian Wolff, and others. He was in
a position of overcoming the limits of all of his predecessors, given his genre of
developing critiques of the others. Yet there were everyday realities. The 1760s were
filled with heavy lecturing to earn his income—which set the stage for typically
Kantian “critique” genre of lecturing, leading to his substantive monographs. Kant
would lecture on the basis on another scholar’s book, providing incisive and thor-
ough critique of the target author’s ideas. As a seasoned private tutor (Hauslehrer)
prior to becoming a librarian, Kant was meticulous in his coverage of the topics that
emerged as themes for his lectures.
The first source where the issues of the sublime and beautiful were treated—
Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen (1766)—is a good
indication of the polemic style of the librarian-lecturer. It is in the first 7 pages
where Kant introduces the notions of Erhabene and Schöne, spending the rest of the
text (pp. 8–62—Kant 1766/1873) in describing differences between human c haracter
and of the prototypical features of national character, in terms of the sublime and the
beautiful. So, for example, the reader finds out that Italians are characterized by the
feelings of beauty more than the Spaniards but are more sublime than the French
(Kant 1766/1873, p. 49). Kant’s text reads almost like a result of our contemporary
cross-cultural psychology account of the differences between “cultures” (national
characters). Even more curious is Kant’s comparison of persons as wholes (Gestalt
der Person). In his comment, persons with brown skin color and dark eyes are sub-
lime, while white and blue-eyed persons are beautiful (Kant 1766/1873, p. 10).
Setting the stigmatization barrier between the beautiful and the sublime brings the
aesthetics to bear upon classificatory oppositions between races—a common prac-
tice in Europe of the eighteenth century.
Translation Paradoxes: Forgetting the Time
To understand the full function of the sublime in the human psyche, we need to
overcome imprecision that has occurred in the move from the German concept
(Erhabene) to that in English (sublime):
We may describe the Sublime thus: it is an object (of nature) the representation of which
determines the mind to think the unattainability of nature regarded as a presentation of
ideas (Kant 1790/1914, p. 134)
Wir kann das Erhabene so beschreiben: es ist ein Gegenstand (der Natur), dessen Vorstellung
das Gemüt bestimmt, sich bei Unerreichbarkeit der Natur als Darstellung von Ideen zu
Denken (Kant 1790/1922, p. 114)
The English translation reverses the prefixes of vor1- and dar2- in front of
the -stellung. Kant’s German original is clear: some object presents itself to us (here
and now), but our mind cannot reach it because of some existing idea (representa-
tion). The result is a tension between the presentation (Vorstellung) and mind-
mediating representation (Darstellung). Here the time sequence is accepted—object
presents, the mind is in tension because of its unattainability. The English transla-
tion eliminates the sequence (pre-post), and with it the process nature of the sublime
(tension between the given and the new) is eliminated.
1
vor- (Old German fora) indicating “before” (Kluge 1891, p. 379). If looking backwards in time
one can refer to the “before” in the past (e.g., Vorgeschichte) but the time focus (this X, pre-X was
before X).
2
dar- (Old German dara) indicating “there” (Kluge 1891, p. 51). No time represented here.
Erhabene in Everyday Experiences 7
Erhabene in Everyday Experiences
Everyday experiences are built on the sublime. Referencing a traveler to Egypt,3

Kant outlined the distance factor in the relating with the object of
observation—pyramids:
…we must keep from going very near the Pyramids just as we keep from too far from them,
in order to get the full emotional effect from their size. For if we are too far away, the parts
to be apprehended (the stones lying one over the other) are only obscurely presented [vorg-
estellt], and the presentation [Vorstellung] of them produces no effect upon the aesthetical
judgment of the subject. But if we are very near, the eye requires some time to complete the
apprehension of the tiers from the bottom up to the apex; and the first tiers are always partly
forgotten before the Imagination has taken in the last… (Kant 1790/1914, p. 112; 1922,
p. 96)
The focus on the perspective taking on behalf of the experiencing person is cru-
cial here—the sublime feeling emerges only under some conditions, which can be
as simple as those of viewing distance.
Kant was known never to have travelled far from his native Königsberg. Yet,
using others’ travel accounts, he could sensitively feel into the experiences of oth-
ers. He claimed that while entering St. Peter’s in Rome for the first time, there is:
…a feeling of the inadequacy of his imagination for presenting the ideas of the whole,
wherein the imagination reaches its maximum, and, in striving to surpass it, sinks back into
itself [in sich selbst zurücksinkt], by which, however, a kind of emotional satisfaction is
produced. (ibid.)
The feeling of “sinking back into itself” is an indicator of the sublime nature of
the experience. Architecture presents many forms that support the triggering of the
sublime.
In contrast, the notion of beautiful is freed from the tension of the object being in
some direct relation to the self’s needs. As a concept, it structures the immediate
experience—in Kant’s scheme of transcendental deduction, it guides the thinker to
appreciate the object in terms of its own qualities. The object is perceived as beauti-
ful in itself—not in relation to the perceiver who has a need for it, kept in the tension
of unattainability.
In comparison with the sublime,
The Beautiful prepares us to love disinterestedly something, even nature itself; the Sublime
prepares us to esteem something highly even in opposition to our own (sensible) interest.4
(Kant 1790/1914, p. 134)
Overcoming one’s interest is thus the dividing line of the sublime and the beauti-
ful. In Kant’s time and within the ontologically oriented philosophical realms, it
3
The example of the pyramids was used by Kant in 1766 (p. 6) referencing the travels by the
Swedish explorer Fredrik Hasselqvist to Egypt in the 1750s, made available in German translation
in 1762.
4
In German original: “Das Schöne bereitet uns vor, etwas, die Natur ohne Interesse zu lieben; das
Erhabene, es selbst wieder unser (sinnliches) Interesse hochzuschatzen” (Kant 1790/1922, p. 114)
was the distinction between the two that was crucial. It was important for Kant also
for the general purposes of linking the a priori with the experienced through the
processes of apperception. Yet the developmental question was not raised—how
would one turn into the other? How can the beautiful emerge from the sublime and
disappear again—through the sublime—into the mundane world?
Borders in the Imagination Process
The mundane, the sublime, and the aesthetic are different stages in the affective
generalization processes. First there is the body—that of the observer and that of the
observed. The body of the observed—when transposed to canvas—is no longer the
body but a sign of that body, an iconic depiction in terms of Charles Sanders Peirce.
The iconic presentation of the body has the greatest potential to trigger the tension
between the mundane and the sublime. This happens in two ways in parallel—the
signified object (real body) is similar to the presentation (photo, or painting) and
leads to the direction of tension of mundanization (specification—making the sign
to organize mundane reality). At the same time, the parallel oppositely directed
process—aesthetization—is moving the image of the mundane towards that of an
aesthetic object. The tension between these two oppositely oriented processes meet
in the sublime domain where we are deeply desirous to related with the mediated
object (photo, painting) as psychologically distanced from the mundane—while
observing the mundane in the image (Fig. 1.2).
Courbet’s depiction of the woman with white stockings is both real—of a woman
with white stockings—and non-real (feeling of the quasi-nude in full focus on the
background of landscape. The latter directs us towards affective relating to the
painting in terms of aesthetic feelings about the beauty—of the scene, of the woman,
of her almost nude (but not really nude) body. But from here follows that in its own
(mundane) turn may lead us to erotic relating with the picture (mundanization)
while still actively feeling the aesthetic appeal of the painting as beautiful as itself.
The beauty of erotic temptation that fills much of art and literature is precisely built
on the non-reducibility of the affective experience neither to lower psychological
functions (sexuality) nor fully to the highest affective processes of interested disin-
terest (aesthetic domain). The appreciation of art is often generated by the tension
between the aesthetic and mundane in the liminal zone of the sublime (Kamboureli
1984). Figure 1.3 provides a general model of these transformation processes.
Figure 1.3 describes the processes of the move by the psyche between the mun-
dane, the sublime, and the aesthetic. The right column maps the hierarchy of affec-
tive semiosis upon that of the emergence of the distanced encoding of the experience.
Ongoing experience of the person is at first non-differentiated followed by the emer-
gence of semiotic encoding by use of new signs (Level 1). The first emerging signs
(Level 2) allow the person to categorize the experience into binary categories (this
is A and not non-A: “I am feeling angry, not neutral” to B: “I am angry”—“I am not
happy”). Here the traditions of classical logic prevail—if A then not B, and if B then
Fig. 1.2 Teasing ourselves on the border of the mundane and the aesthetic (Gustave Courbet-
Woman with white stockings, 1861). (Public domain: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/
File:Courbet_Gustave_-_Woman_with_White_Stockings_-_c._1861.jpg)
not A. In the affective encoding sign hierarchy, this corresponds to Level 2 (catego-
rized feeling signified by point-like signs: “happy,” “sad,” etc.). This is the regular
verbal discourse level of thinking and interaction of the “how are you?—fine”
variety.
Generalization of the meaning beyond Level 2 takes the form of emergence of
field-like signs for affective meanings coverage in coordination with point-like signs
(A and B). The previous exclusive opposites become united in a systemic whole
where their opposition becomes inclusive through coordination of the schematic and
pleromatic (Fig. 1.4) channels. With the move of the meaning construction to the
zone of the sublime (where generalized and hyper-generalized sign fields are used)
leads to tension. The tension between the inclusive opposites within a whole—in
the zone of the sublime—is the basis for the dynamics of the affective phenom-
ena, as those were initially detected and labeled by Burke and Kant in the eighteenth
century. The sublime phenomena are characterized by the ambivalence of feeling
between the two directions—towards further generalization and towards return to the
mundane level of experiencing (which amounts to the rational logic of Level 2
encoding by the common sense)—the Generalization <> Specialization.
The process of hyper-generalization to the zone of aesthetic relating requires a
transformation of the ambivalent unity of opposites within the whole (A relating
with B) into a new form of distancing—that of interested disinterest. The person
relating to aesthetic object are simultaneously affectively non-interested in it and—
Fig. 1.3 The process of coordinating generalizing and specifying processes in aesthetic discourse.
(Figure by the author)
at the same time—deeply fascinated by that object. The tension of the subliminal
domain is replaced by the structural co-existence of appreciation of the object and
that of personal embodied non-interest. In everyday terms, it is not expected that
lovers of art encountering the muscular David of Michelangelo in Florence would
look at his body with sexual desire to have him as their partner in bed. David remains
highly appreciated artwork from which personal interest is completely removed but
the aesthetic appreciation of the beauty of the human body is at its maximum.
What happens if the ambivalence between aesthetic and sublime feelings is not
overcome in favor of the emergence of the former? The sublime can be main-
tained—with the tension of the included opposites keeping up the feeling of some-
thing awesome—yet possibly threatening. The sublime can then slowly dissipate
and become mundane.5 Alternatively, the sublime can “crash” downwardly—into
the mundane—with the use of moral escalation. The hyper-generalized signs of the
MORAL<>non-MORAL kinds would lead the person to turn away from these
images—in actions and internal feelings—at an instant. Such moralistic collapse
5
Examples of legalization of pornography in the public domain in different countries demon-
strates. While before such legalization the encounter with a nude picture would trigger fascinated
feeling of awe, then after legalization and public visibility of pornographic literature in public
domain this becomes replaced by feeling of boredom or other forms of neutrality.
Fig. 1.4 Alexandre Cabanel’s Birth of Venus (1863) the miniaturized postcard-sized versions of
which were targets of the attack on “vice” in New York in 1887. (Public domain: https://commons.
wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Alexandre_Cabanel_-_The_Birth_of_Venus_-_Google_Art_Project_2.
jpg)
into the mundane can be observed in everyday practices on a regular basis (e.g.,
“This is so gross!” or “I am not that kind of a woman”—Nedergaard et al. 2015).
The personal processes regulating the dynamics of mundane-sublime-(aesthetic)
transitions are framed by the changing of public presentability norms within a given
society. These norms fluctuate over historical time—while eighteenth-century
France was accepting the presentation of nude figures, then in the nineteenth cen-
tury, their public presentation in art was again undergoing a negotiation with “moral
decency”.6 Similarly the Victorian era in Britain made nudity in public unaccept-
able. In the late nineteenth century, we can observe curious historical events in the
history of art museums in Britain and the United States—where, at times, coverage
of genitals of classic nude sculptures has been documented and the borders of
“decency” in the public exposure of nudes, male or female—in artists’ paintings
have been episodically censored.
These examples constitute the proof of the cultural-psychological processes in
the border zone between the sublime and the aesthetic (in Fig. 1.3.) These processes
are embedded in the wider societal context as the “Comstock Affair” in the 1880s in
the United States demonstrates. The social movements for “fight for decency” have
regularly emerged in various disguises in the British and North American societies.
6
In the 1860s the Paris Salon—major exhibition arena for artists—started again to accept pictured
nudity if it was camouflaged in the legendary meaning frameworks of classical goddesses or gods.
The realistic counter-move to that (see Fig. 1.2 above and all the work of Gustave Courbet in the
1860s) challenged that camouflage.
By the final decades of the nineteenth century, these gave form for a conflict that
centered on the public proliferation of reproductions of classic artworks. In 1887 a
leading New York gallery owner was arrested because of selling postcard images of
classic European art (e.g., Fig. 1.4) that were publicly exposed in the art gallery (i.e.,
the arena for “high art” for middle- or upper-class viewers7) to any person ready to
buy the miniaturized pictures of the classic art. The access by lower social classes
to the images was considered to be “vice” in the streets—while the original
(European-“certified”) art paintings in the gallery would be considered “art.” The
institutional act of exposition in the art gallery and the European “art pedigree”
guaranteed that the museum goes would treat it as “art,” while the lay public in the
street would get hold of the images in the sublime-to-mundane transition of objects
of “vice” (Beisel 1993).
The leader of the “anti-vice” campaign, Anthony Comstock himself commented
that a painted nude has different meaning for different social classes. He claimed
that when:
exhibited to cultured minds in an art gallery, where it legitimately belongs, is a very differ-
ent thing than it appears to be to the common mind on the public street in the shape of a
photograph. (Comstock 1887, p. 9)
The same image in a different location (and of different size) accessible to differ-
ent audiences was perceived as a moral risk. Comstock’s efforts to eradicate “vice”
was his lifetime effort (Werbel 2014) that brought him various honors and notoriety
among the opponents. In a newspaper article in 1887, Comstock pointed to the dif-
ferent atmosphere of the art museum:
A grand oil painting, with its massive coloring, its artistic surroundings, its grand shadings
and streaks of light, all of which create a work of art, ceases to be such when represented in
a photograph, which gives mere outlines of form, and that is all. (quoted via Beisel 1993,
p. 150)
The “real art” is framed, in a gallery, expensive—and accessible to well-to-do

clientele. Taking the forms out of their frames was viewed as stimulating the infiltra-
tion of sublime ideas into mundane practices—the way of “vice.”
It is interesting to note the similarity of anti-sensuous art censorship with icono-
clasm—total denial of appropriateness to depict symbolic images of anthropomor-
phic kind. The ideological waves of social feelings that different objects or
personages of religious worship are improper to present in their iconic images have
passed through all human history, East and West. The hyper-generalized feelings
about these objects are so profoundly intense that depicting these in any figurative
form would be considered as an act of their desacralization. In contrast, similarly
hyper-generalized anti-iconoclasm ideologies have emphasized the role of these
7
Cabanel’s painting (Fig. 1.4) was institutionally appreciated in the Paris Salon when it was first
exhibited in the year of its completion (1863) and was immediately purchased by Napoleon III for
his personal collection. His critics were clear in their ideological opposition (“This goddess,
drowned in a sea of milk, looks like a delicious dance-hall girl, but not of flesh and blood—that
would be indecent—but made of a sort of pink and white marzipan” wrote Emile Zola—https://
www.napoleon.org/en/history-of-the-two-empires/paintings/the-birth-of-venus/).
images as tools towards further proliferation of the faith into their religious and
psychological roles in the lives of human beings. The “Comstockian” fight against
presentation of classic art on photographs beyond the walls of art galleries or muse-
ums has the flavor of similar desacralization.
What if an art object is planfully situated beyond the walls of a museum, and
without miniaturization? It is through public controversy about the location of par-
ticular art objects in the public sphere where the social guidance of the move
between the sublime and (back to) mundane (or to the aesthetic) is usually negoti-
ated. The fate of the 1894 sculpture by Frederick MacMonnies’ The Laughing
Bacchante (Fig. 1.5)—also under the influence of French sculptures in the 1860s—
became a target of public indignation if set up in front of Boston Public Library. The
result was its removal to the interior of the Metropolitan Museum of Art—again out
of the way of “lay public” and available to the special category of “art lovers.”
Fig. 1.5 The Laughing

Bacchante (1894)—meant
for public space in Boston.
(Public domain: https://
commons.wikimedia.org/
wiki/File:BPLcourt3.JPG)
The controversy around the Bacchante in the late-nineteenth-century United

States seems to be built upon similar aspects as was the case with ballet (Hanna
2010). It is the dynamic whole that seems to irritate the “vice guardians”:
First there is a subject—a woman dedicated to Dionysius, god of wine and luxuriant fertil-
ity, and associated in the nineteenth-century mind with orgiastic pagan rites. Even more
important is the formal aspect: none of those conventions of pose, proportion, or surface
treatment are present that would allow the body to assume some elevated connotation.
Instead of a static pose with downcast eyes… MacMonnies’ Bacchante prances forward,
her energy asserting an existence in present flesh, not a higher realm of spirit or intellect.
And the flesh itself, albeit bronze, absolutely invites the touch—it looks as though a layer
of whipped cream or foam rubber had been injected under the skin. Small but striking
details emphasize the fact of this woman’s corporeal contemporaneity: a modern hairdo, the
faint impression of garters under the knees, the smiling belle laide face that bespeaks
resemblance to a specific model. All of these elements combined to make The Laughing
Bacchante one of the most openly erotic works ever seen in the United States (Brezeale
1986, p. 151)
The visible general eroticism was the problem for the “vice hunters” of the late-
nineteenth-century United States. The public space was viewed as morally inappro-
priate for the hyper-generalized meaning field—atmosphere—where it would relate
to the lay audience. While hidden in an art museum, it was—for the “vice hunt-
ers”—neutralized by it framing as “high art” that draws upon viewers who have
successfully overcome the barrier to the aesthetic world view and would appreciate
the image for the sake of her beauty, rather than for her impact onto the mundane.
By bringing the sculpture from the museum to the open public domain, the “down-
ward” specification (Fig. 1.3) of the affective processes towards the mundane
becomes feared. Hence the censorship of possible “vices” that it could trigger.
In sum, we encounter constant transition—move between sublime and mundane
with occasional encountering of aesthetic and back to sublime and mundane—that
characterizes human ways of living. The process of such up-and-down move in
generality are mediated by signs of various forms at different levels of
generalization.
Schematization and Pleromatization
The specific meaning construction processes that are the basis for making the sub-
lime and the aesthetic are two mutually linked generalization processes. The pro-
cess of schematization (left part of Fig. 1.6) is well recognized in cognitive science
as that of categorization—moving from undifferentiated flow of experience step by
step towards their categorical ascription and through that—to meaning of the given
situation. Thus, I may feel something disturbing and at the same moment fascinat-
ing in the moment of entering a large cathedral (e.g., St. Peter’s in Rome; see above
on Kant’s example of the sublime)—but I cannot describe it at that moment. Trying
to find a label for my feeling, I end up categorizing the feeling as that of respect—a
rational solution to the situational flow of experience. My understanding of the
Fig. 1.6 Two pathways in generalization: schematization and pleromatization. (Figure by the
author)
s ituation becomes clear to myself as I have given it a label that links the present
experience with many others in my personal past, like resect for my father, teachers,
friends, nature, etc. The category ascription here is the cognitive end point of my
meaning-making along the schematization pathway.
The second pathway of generalization—pleromatization (Valsiner 2006,
2018a)—proceeds in parallel to schematization. It involves affective expansion of
the feeling of the original situation through field-like signs that generalize the
feeling-into the present setting into an intuitive understanding of its general atmo-
sphere and eventually leads to the hyper-generalized feeling that incorporates the
categorical label as a marker of the affective field. Thus my respect for the given
entrance to a cathedral is no longer an act of category ascription (“this event, like all
the others in the past, are of category X”) but sets up an apperceptive focus for the
future. While moving into the cathedral, I feel I can act in some—rather than other—
ways, as I feel the hyper-generalized affective meaning field that carries the categor-
ical label respect but is not confined to the effect of having located its class where it
belongs. The hyper-generalized feeling sets up my personal relating with the set-
ting. It is the context of my action in the setting—I walk around in the interior of the
cathedral speaking in low voice or remaining silent, and I walk in slow soft steps
rather than march and shout. The latter would be—in my self-evaluation—inappro-
priate for the given setting (myself-in-the-cathedral). Personal ethical standards are
encoded in terms of hyper-generalized sign fields (Nedergaard et al. 2015). So are
efforts of moralistic invasions into the lives of the others—the example of “vice
police” described above as an example. The holy warriors against “the vice” are
fully convinced they are preventing society from moral decay.
I imported the idea of pleromatization to psychology from art history (Valsiner
2006 published as Valsiner 2017c) where it was built on the interesting observation
that depiction of many scenes in Renaissance paintings was more complex in details
(and in the whole) than the scene—real life or Biblical—it was describing. The
direction for affective generalization was given by creating full-fledged artistic pan-
oramas8 that would trigger the vague generalized feeling of awe when a person
encounters it.
Pleromatic generalization is free from verbal mediation which is part of the sche-
matization pathway. That is the reason why many complex visual scenes can be
encountered in totality—and lose their affective texture when turned into a narra-
tive—even a deeply intelligent one. Visitors to art museums are facing the choice
between schematized understanding of the paintings (by dutifully following the
electronic guide device that provides rich information but leaves no space for affec-
tive feeling-in) and wandering around the exhibit on one’s own. The latter choice
prioritizes the pleromatic starting point of relating to the paintings while obviously
remaining poor in narrative details.
The author—the painter—may create the initial focus on the schematic or plero-
matic pathway. A painting may be set up in such a way as it cannot be understood
by narrating about “what is this scene about” but needs to be felt-in in total. For
example, the paintings by the French painter Antoine Watteau (1684–1721) were
from the outset meant to be dreamed about (Wile 2014, p. 319) rather than talked
about (see as example Fig. 1.7). Here Watteau depicts the mood of the scene, rather
than the event itself.9 The mood is depicted in ways that complicate the understand-
ing, creating a tension for the zone of the sublime:
…by repudiating color’s illusionism and the tout ensemble’s magnetic harmonies, by refus-
ing to fix the eye at the center of the composition, Watteau blocks its emergence. The result
is an absence installed at the heart of the representation: the eye wanders in search of the
object of its desire only to find it just out of reach, the ecstatic hallucination of flesh and
presence refused. Watteau presents a different encounter with the painted world, one
founded on the eye’s freedom to wander and range and roam. (Wile 2014, p. 328)
The object here is the feeling carried by the whole—to be felt into as a result of
the pilgrimage of the viewer’s eyes on the promised canvas of the painting. The
implied sensuality of the here-and-now world—rather than that of a promised
island—made this painting later into an object of social controversy as part of the
8
Panoramas of nature scenes are the frames that put the experiencer into the situation of impossi-
bility to escape from it (Valsiner 2017b). Using the same Ganzheit-generating role of experience
in mediated paintings operates on the generalizing practices of pleromatic kind that evolved in the
evolution of the species.
9
Cythera is an Ionian island where—by Greek legends—Aphrodite’s (Venus’) cult of love was
located according to Greek legends.
Fig. 1.7 Jean-Antoine Watteau L’embarquement pour Cythere (1718). Charlottenburg Palace,
Berlin. (Public domain: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Antoine_Watteau_034.jpg)
“old life” to be eradicated, during the French revolution.10 Pleromatic hyper-

generalization can lead to both positive and negative escalation of feelings.
Varieties of the Affective Construction in the Sublime Zone
The sublime zone (Fig. 1.3) is the location for establishment of various forms of
meanings that operate in contrast with the mundane—across their border general-
ization. Both the notion of the grotesque and of the humorous find their birthplace
in the contrast of the sublime and the mundane (Fig. 1.8.)
The grotesque and the humorous are complex moments of insight about some
state of affairs in the here-and-now setting where the constructed feeling operates
upon the contrast of what currently is and what is currently felt to be. There is a
necessary discrepancy between these two simultaneous feelings into the object.
They are in tension between themselves, and the state of that tension leads to the
moment of humor and of the grotesque—depending on the direction of the affective
generalization.
The painting became part of the Louvre collection in 1795, yet with ambivalent status. In the
10
early nineteenth century, the curator at the Louvre was forced to place it in storage until 1816 in
order to protect the painting from angry protesters. It was not until the 1830s that Watteau and the
Rococo returned into fashion.
Fig. 1.8 Emerging within the sublime—GROTESQUE and HUMOROUS feelings. (Figure by
the author)
The Emergence of the Grotesque
Grotesque is the name given (since 1560) to events and scenes that are strange or
mysterious—yet with negative affective evaluation. Its origins go back to the dis-
covery of Roman ornaments in a grotto—ruins of Nero’s unfinished palace of first
century A.D.—that were of such mysterious kind. From the sixteenth to the twenti-
eth century, the notion of grotesque became widely but loosely used in literature and
art. It is the Russian literary scholar Mikhail Bakhtin who—analyzing the work of
the French writer Francois Rabelais—elaborates the notion of grotesque theoreti-
cally. The phenomena to be viewed in the class of grotesque are characterized by the
unity of opposites in a state of ambivalence captured in the process of its transfor-
mation into a new state. Both the old and the new are simultaneously present—“..
the old and the new, the vanishing (umirajuscheye) and the coming to be (rozdajuch-
eesja), the beginning and the end of the metamorphosis” (Bakhtin 1990, p. 31). The
grotesque moment happens in time—yet it for the moment unifies past and future
within the ambivalent state of the present. The result is an affective rupture that goes
beyond the mundane here-and-now setting. In the domain of everyday actions, the
grotesque moment leads to the emergence of carnivalesque settings in social life
where old social roles in a society become temporarily inversed—the pauper takes
on the role of the king and vice versa. The grotesque includes the recognition of the
ambivalent tension that leads to extraordinary actions in which the opposites affirm
each other. Thus, in the Medieval forms of the grotesque, which often involved reli-
gious themes,
Medieval man’s imagination erased the boundary between possible and impossible,
between beautiful and ugly, between serious and comic. Or, more precisely, these boundar-
ies are continually erased only to be reconstituted, again, to be finally rejected or chal-
lenged. It is in this perpetual movement going from opposition to fusion and from fusion to
opposition that we find the core of “grotesque thought” (Gourevich 1975, p. 74)
The processes that give us the grotesque feeling are thus processes on the border
of mutually inclusive opposites, for the given moment concentrated in one bundle
that feels like “fusion” but is actually the location of the move by affective processes
beyond the here-and-now oppositions to bring into these the possible impossible
imaginary scenarios. For the Middle Ages, the latter involved the acts of the Devil
and various demonological invented agents who were considered to exist in reality.
They were functional contrasts for the sacred domain of religion—the grotesque
could lead to joy (grotesque humor) but would not eradicate fear. It was not under-
mining the sacred in society—rather the opposite—it supported it (“it profanes and
affirms the sacred at the same time”—Gourevich 1975, p. 75). This dialogical sup-
port in terms of Fig. 1.8. is explainable by the constraints of the upper limit of the
zone of the sublime (that does not let the grotesque transform into either the destruc-
tive orientation or—with some exceptions11—into the aesthetic art forms) together
with the border of the return to the mundane living (the lower limit of the sublime
zone). Being caught in between the affective rupture of the concentrated opposites
gives a new result of “it is disgusting yet appealing.” How is that kind of synthesis
possible?
As our scheme (Fig. 1.8) suggests, the grotesque is the tension within the zone of
the sublime between ordinary aspect of the scene in simultaneous relation with its
evaluation as disgusting (Level 2 category in terms of Fig. 1.3). The direction
towards disgust differentiates grotesque from humorous—laughable (Billig 2005)—
encounters with the object. Yet the grotesque—while being emotionally disturb-
ing—functions at the relative distance from the mundane (in the zone of the
sublime). Grotesque does not lead to direct action to eliminate the disgusting object
(which could happen in the immediate mundane world) but to internal or external
expression of a commentary on the grotesque object.
Often it is extraordinary modification of a relevant part of the object that triggers
the grotesque feeling (Fig. 1.9). Otto Dix’s paintings are filled with capturing the
11
The surrealist art forms include grotesque (Valsiner 2018b).
Fig. 1.9 Otto Dix (1921) The Match Seller. (Public domain: https://www.wikiart.org/en/otto-dix/
match-seller-1920/)
grotesque—here it comes from juxtaposing the results of the war (depicted is a

World War I veteran with no legs) involved in trivial object selling in the streets,
having all the affluent, well-shoed, passers-by to ignore his personal life drama of
living with heroically mutilated body and no economic support in post WWI
Germany. The negative absurdity of the war—which even the dog would not pass by
unmarked—is encoded into the image of a street seller. This hyper-generalized feel-
ing of the reality of many veterans who were lured into the “Great War” only to
arrive at personal life miseries after shell shock and no jobs frames the ordinariness
of the street selling act from the higher levels of value construction. The viewer of
the painting is directed away from the distanced disinterested patriotic view
(MILITARISTIC AND LEGALISTIC in Fig. 1.8) and is confronted in the sublime
zone with the disgusting-but-real phenomena in the ordinary life scenes in the
streets.
The synthesis of the grotesque in the tension between the ordinary (street seller)
and the disgusting (seller’s war-mutilated body) leads to the temporary affective
commentary about the world—but not to any action to change it. The grotesque is a
vehicle for compensation for the vicissitudes of ordinary living.
The Humorous Hyper-Generalized Sign
Humor operates similarly to the grotesque, only on the other side of the zone of the
sublime. It entails the synthesis of distant surprise about something ordinary—with
a comment in the form of a joke or a burst of laughter.
A joke is a synthetic event at the border of the mundane and the sublime. This is
best analyzed through jokes that are attempted by the joker—but that fail to reach
such synthesis as being funny (the sublime component) while pertaining to the mun-
dane world. Seeing somebody fall in a “candid camera” show need not trigger any
funny meaning generalization in some viewers while making others laugh without
bounds. Likewise, Billig’s example (2005, pp. 177–179) of Silvio Berlusconi’s
attempted ironic joke about Martin Schultz backfired as it became interpreted at the
mundane level (and turned into a grotesque insult).
The synthesis of humor in the psyche—between the confines of the upper and
lower borders of the sublime zone (Fig. 1.8)—leads to the tension of action, smile
in opposition of non-smile or laughter in linked opposition of non-laughter (unlaugh-
ter in Billig’s terms):
‘Unlaughter’ can be used to describe a display of not laughing when laughter might other-
wise be expected, hoped for or demanded. … A complete absence of laughter or smiling
can be disconcerting to the joke-teller. Every professional comedian has tales of ‘dying to
death’, when an audience greets the jokes with silence, refusing to occupy the slots which
the comic has left for the audience reaction. (Billig 2005, pp. 192–193)
This rhetoric humor-making activity of professional jokers indicates that the

audience needs to be led into the zone of the sublime and provided a surprising end
form to the story that would bring it back to the mundane with the evocation of
humorous sign-field in-between.
Consider a cartoon—a door opens and an unfamiliar man enters and a smiling
man enters saying “Hello, I am Gary, You do not remember me, I liked you five
years ago on Facebook.” Juxtaposing “liked you” and “five years ago in Facebook”
builds on the linking of the notions of FRIEND and FACEBOOK FRIEND, with the
latter requiring some basic understanding of the new technology of friendships. By
bringing the two realms together in an imaginary real meeting scene creates the
moment of laughter at the intersection of the suggestion that the virtual domain
(Facebook friendship) could arrive at one’s doorstep in the form of a real person
(who tries to present oneself as a real friend). Again the sublime zone of hyper-
generalized feelings (friendship) becomes directed towards an ordinary scenario
(visit) with the distant realization of the absurdity of the scenario. Yet it is flavored
by surprise—rather than by disgust (as in the grotesque).
There are many kinds of comic and humorous constructions by human beings
(Lipps 1898, 1903). They can be combined with others (e.g., “grotesque humor”),
they are of temporary moment of sudden excitement, but of no longer term conse-
quences. Telling the same joke twice in a row would eliminate its pleromatic fresh-
ness and lead it to be classified by the schematizing side (“I have heard it… no
longer funny”) to keep it classified in our mundane world of existence.
onclusions: Conceptualizing the Emerging Complexity

C
of the Psyche
The focus on the sublime and its dynamics is crucial for understanding of the func-
tioning of the hierarchical integration of the human psyche. In this chapter I concen-
trated on the ways in which emerging tensions can be mapped on the dynamic
moves of the meaning-making process between the mundane, the sublime, and the
post-sublime. The aesthetic domain of relating with selective aspects of our worlds
with deeply interested disinterests was the starting point of this theoretical effort.
The surprising addition to it was the new understanding that there is the opposite—
destructive—part of the psyche that operates at the same (highest) level of human
meaning construction (past the upper limit of the sublime—Fig. 1.8). The killing
and looting at times of military conflicts are built upon similar—psychologically
distanced—basis of such thoroughly interested disinterest as is our constructive
appreciation with aesthetics objects. This similarity seems a counterintuitive find-
ing, yet it is proven by the analysis of hunters’ feelings about their prey (Willerslev
2007). This similarity may help us to understand how many people may welcome
an upcoming war with fascination—as it was the case of designating World War I at
first as the “Great War”—only to end up as a massive carnage of naively patriotic
young men at Verdun and other places of combat theatres. Last but not least, the use
of “self-disciplining” in religious practices of hurting one’s own body (the mundane
action) with the deep destructive goal of exorcising the demons from the soul (the
ideological fervent) support the analogy of the constructive aesthetic and destruc-
tive militaristic (and legalistic) post-sublime hyper-generalized bases for human
mundane actions.
The dynamic moves between the mundane and the sublime do not necessarily
cross the border to the post-sublime domain. They remain episodic encounters with
the awesome—turned into one or another form of hyper-generalization (grotesque,
humor) for their returns to the mundane domain. The zone of the sublime is where
most solutions for problems in the everyday life are being contemplated. Religious
institutions of all varieties have skillfully set up specific places for support for these
moves—in the forms of sacred rivers and forests, temples, synagogues, churches,
and other shrines. Our secularized societies add to these art museums, concert halls,
movie theatres, tourist spots, restaurants, schools, psychotherapists’ offices, and
saunas. Persons are expected to navigate out of their everyday life contexts of home
to encounter places that support their entrance into the zone of sublime—for subse-
quent return to the ordinary life. In that process the pleromatic generalization path-
way leads the schematization processes, with hyper-generalized affective meaning
fields providing solutions for the mundane issues. Not only are affective processes
primary in the human mind, but their hierarchical integration leads us to understand
the seemingly paradoxical unity of love and violence in any of our societies, and
within the minds.
Chapter 2
Embodiment in Action: The Making
of the Body
What is real body? This question is central for any discussion of ephemeral topics
such as “embodiment”—and for the issue of sensuality in the present book. At first
glance this seems obvious—my body is the strange mass of fat, muscles, and inte-
rior organs that make my living possible. Thus it is a biological question—our real
body is the biological system of being that is fully bordered by our skin.
However, the story does not end with such “biological sack” notion. Rather, it
just begins there. Our skin becomes the arena for human meaning construction
(Semiotic Skin Theory—Nedergaard 2016). Personal meaning is executed on the
skin—by creams and tattoos applied to it—as well as through layers of clothing by
which the human skin becomes covered (Valsiner 2019c). Such personal meaning-
fulness of the body also enters the body itself—by meaningful understanding of the
functioning of the internal organ, and by projecting higher psychological functions
into one or another places within the body. So my feelings may be projected into my
heart—rather than to my kidney—or vice versa. Literally each and every part of the
human body has been made to be a communicative device to maintain one’s own
psyche and to regulate relationships with others.
Looking at the Body: All Around
Human beings make their bodies culturally organized. The cultural organization of
the skin takes over, and the “real body” becomes a “cultivated body”—ranging from
the use of skin color modification creams to suntanning and finally to messages for
others who might ardently look at others from the back.
The human back is the place which may be out of the direct view to oneself—but
it is a clear surface for communication with others. First of all—evolutionarily—it

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41743-7_2
24 2 Embodiment in Action: The Making of the Body
is the non-aggressive part of the body1 that is not able to defend itself if attacked. It
is also the arena where affective haptic exploration of the other happens—ranging
from various forms of soothing back massages to tender embraces of dancers and
lovemakers.
The front and back of the human body carry different significance in human
beings’ relating with the surrounding environment. The front perspective entails
reciprocities with others, while the back carries a potential for unidirectional mes-
sage generation (Fig. 2.1. right picture). The contrast between the front and back
view of the body (Fig. 2.2)—even that of a sculptural imagination of a Greek god-
dess—illustrates that perspective difference well.
All human body becomes cultivated by the specialization of various technologies
(and specialists) that turn it from its natural to cultivated form. The care of the body
is of constant interest in human everyday living. Starting from the need to give form
to those parts of the body that continue growing on the otherwise accomplished full
form of the body frame—such as body hair and nails of fingers and feet—the array
of specializations of various kinds is finding its ways to modify any aspect of the
body (Fig. 2.3.) all over its surface.
Literally from top to bottom the human body is an activity field divided by vari-
ous specialists—mundane (Fig. 2.3, left column) and medical (right column). The
Fig. 2.1 The body—the back as the biological real and a cultural construction. (Image copyright
the author)
1
In contrast with the frontal view of the body that is ready to attack and defend if needed. The
confrontation by visual gaze between conspecifics in many animal species is the arena for aggres-
sion and submission.
Looking at the Body: All Around 25
Fig. 2.2 The body from back and front. (Bertel Thorvaldsen’s Hebe (Goddess of youth in Greek
mythology), 1815, Photo by the author)
scalp hair is not only to be cut once it grows too long2 but cut and formed (dressed)
in special ways. The profession of hairdressers has been established over the past
3000 years to make this artistic act possible. For those representatives of the Homo
sapiens who are biologically capable of growing beards and mustaches, it is the
specialty of barbers who are always ready to give these naturally growing parts of
the body a socially and personally acceptable form.
2
The notion “too long” is in itself an example of cultural organization of the human body. In many
societies cutting of scalp hair is not expected—so the important task for the hairdressers is to give
the ever-growing hair a manageable and socially acceptable form. Cultural norms apply to the
preservation or removal of hair in other parts of the body—armpits, legs, genital areas. Socially
enforced haircutting can be a ritualistic act of subordination or punishment of the receiver of the
unwanted haircut.
HAIRCUTTERS
and STYLISTS
OPTHALMOLOGISTS
PLASTIC
BARBERS and SURGEONS
COSMETICIANS DENTISTS
PERSONAL
TRAINERS
BODY
DIETOLOGISTS
DECORATORS
and other FOOD
(tattooists ec)
MISSIONARIES
SEXUAL DERMATOLOGISTS
SATISFACTION and SEXOLOGISTS
SPECIALISTS
NAIL-MAKERS
SHOE-MAKERS
ORTHOPEDISTS
Fig. 2.3 Divide and conquer: different specialists operating on the human skin for its transforma-
tion into new meaningful forms or recovery. (Photo by the author)
The whole face of the human beings is the arena for various kinds of self-
presentations by masks—ranging from minimal makeup to elaborate reorganizing
of the color and texture of the facial skin. This can—on the medical side—entail
purposeful modification of the facial form as such, made possible by the work of
cosmetic surgeons. The latter can work to change many other parts of the form of
the human body as well.
It is notable that the arenas of likely reconstruction of the body for social presen-
tations occur at the ends of the body contour—head, hands, breasts, buttocks, and
feet. Such reconstructed versions of the body are the end symbols (Theodor Lipps-
Endigungsymbol) of the bodily form (Fig. 2.4).
These end symbols are places for outward extensions of the symbolic forms of
the body (Fig. 2.5.). Besides the hair being given some desired form and color, it is
the extensions of the hair—hats—that constitute the symbolic continuity of the
body upwards (Fig. 2.5a). Likewise the sculpting of the fingernails (Fig. 2.5b)—at
Looking at the Body: All Around 27
Fig. 2.4 The locations of the arenas of major body modifications. (Drawing by author)
times to an extent of functional inconvenience—illustrates the role of the body as a

symbolic medium for the life of the body-owner and her or his social ambience. On
the bottom side of the body, it is the remarkable concern about the feet, starting from
creating malformations for their growth3 and ending with shoes—with high heels or
without—that keeps human beings busy presenting the ends of the body to them-
selves, and to others. The specific features of shoes produce different bodily feelings:
Heels and stilts afford a quite distinct feeling of double contact; we feel their tread on the
ground as well as their pressure on the foot, and at the same time can correctly enough
estimate the distance between the two places of contact. Thus, as can be understood, arises
a lively feeling, not only of being exalted above the ground, but of filling this whole space
upwards with our own increased stature, for we do not lose our sense of the ground beneath
us. (Lotze 1885, p. 593, added emphasis)
Lotze’s comment upon “feeling upward” wearing high-heeled shoes is interest-

ing in a number of ways. First, it is located in a position in the main text where it
was a side story. Secondly it comes from a male academic who—while wearing
elevated-from-ground heeled male shoes—could not directly access the feelings of
a wearer of hyper-elevated shoes that at our time are standard in many public profes-
sions (Fig. 2.6).
In addition to the ends of the body, it is the trunk of the body that undergoes
specific procedures of care, starting from different versions of changing temporary
Ancient Chinese practices of forcing the feet of young upper class women become non-usable in
3
mundane terms.
Fig. 2.5 The end symbol

of the feet—hyper-elevated
heels. (Photo by the
author)
color modification—tanning and uses of lightening creams—to efforts to perma-

nently change the form of the body (by various kinds of diets or beauty surgeries—
such as implants into breasts, or reduction of size in bariatric surgery). Various
personal trainers help to build muscles and massagists to relax those. The figure in
the central parts of the body has been temporarily reformed by various versions of
corsets and underwear that either diminish or exaggerate selected aspects of
the body.
The notion of beauty has been crucial in organizing social practices over centu-
ries. Different fashion norms have changed dramatically over time, but the reliance
on the effort to present oneself socially in the aesthetically pleasing ways has been
part of human universal efforts.
How is beauty psychologically possible? Its basis is in the affective relation of
the beauty-maker to the object—body of oneself, of another, or an object (garden,
pot of flowers, a building). The pathway to beauty becomes negotiated across the
pleromatization channel in the human meaning-making where sensuality plays the
central role.
Sensuality is based upon the feeling-in (Einfühlung) of the experiences into the
medium with which the person is relating. Any form of clothing on the body creates
a barrier that imagination gets ready to overcome. In the case of transparent gar-
ments (see Chap. 5) this dialogue of covering and non-covering leads to the sublime
fascination with tempered invitation for vicarious participation in the experience.
But Botticelli was not painting women in their everyday dancing occasion. The
Three Graces are—by traditional Greek mythology—sisters who accompany Venus
in her movements. Appropriately in the traditional mythology the three—Pleasure,
Chastity, and Beauty—were usually depicted nude. Botticelli dressed them in trans-
parent garments, so they are nude and non-nude at the same time. They represent a
number of dialogical oppositions:
Cultural Body in Action: The Role of Dance 29
Fig. 2.6 Extensions of the ends of the body (head and hands). (a) Princess Isabella of Austria,
1599. (b) Sculpted nails. (Photo by author)
…they are clothed in transparent gowns (not nude), that they are dancing (not standing
still), that their hands are locked in an unbroken ring (not gesturing to the sides). (Dempsey
1971, p. 328)
These dialogical oppositions create a wholistic cycle of dynamic dialogue. The

dialogue begins from the semiotic skin—clothed body that can be observed through
clothing. The view seems blocked—but is not—as it is limited by a border which in
itself is transparent. It can be viewed as an equivalent of a window—allowing to
look through yet demarcating clear meaning border (Maslov 2019). The tension
triggered by transparency creates the sublime feeling that transcends the perceived
scene. The selective use of transparent fabrics in the clothing since the fifteenth
century indicates the psychological productivity of the limited-but-observable
access. Furthermore, the dialogue of dancing with stationary position and unity of
the three—in contrast to individual presentation—are simultaneously in place.
Cultural Body in Action: The Role of Dance
The Three Graces above (Fig. 2.7) are guiding our Einfühlung not only by the trans-
parency of the semiotic skin but by their depicted movement—which is that of
dance. Not every movement of the body is dance, but dance—when it becomes so
designated—may make use of almost any specific movement of the body. Dance is
a Ganzheit of body movement directed towards creation of meaning.
Dance is one of the basic forms of human cultural existence—extension of regu-
lar movement of bodies in mundane living to special ritualistic and presentational
forms. Regular movement of human beings—walking, running, sitting, etc.—can
become dramatized when such movement is turned into special frame we designate
as dance. In dance, the movement of human bodies takes on a different meaning—
both for the participants and for the audience. Dancing—together with music—is
Fig. 2.7 Sensuality triggered through transparently clothed bodies (A fragment of the Three
Graces from Sandro Botticelli’s Primavera, 1490). (Public domain: https://commons.wikimedia.
org/wiki/File:Botticelli-primavera.jpg)
probably the oldest cultural form of human bodily dramatization of human liv-
ing. Dance:
…is a purposeful, intentionally rhythmical, culturally patterned, nonverbal body movement
communication in time and space, with effort, and each genre having its own criteria for
excellence. Dance conveys meaning through the use of space, touch, proximity to another
dancer or to an observer, nudity, stillness, and specific body postures and movements.
(Hanna 2010, p. 213)
Dance takes many forms. The dancers can be naked, clothed, or wearing masks
of full or transparent coverage of the body. They can dance to music or without it. A
dance can be ritualistically planned or created on the spot. Alternatively dance can
be highly ritualized to be performed in specific instances—at adolescent initiation,
funerals, and for bringing rain to the community when that is direly needed for the
crops. In short, explosions of human activity into various forms of dance are every-
where in human history in various cultural and religious conditions.
Human beings are in constant movement, and dance is a specially guided direc-
tion of creation of the movement to present different feelings and meanings. The
activity of dancing is historically an activity that human beings have invented for
concrete communal purposes. Traditional societies are characterized by involving
persons in community through ritual dances. By giving a specific form to the guided
body movement, the person is guided towards new experience that is of meaningful
kind in the given society.
Historically dance links human basic bodily sensuality with the meaning cre-
ation exercises in public domains. Its origins are in the domain of the supernatural
forces in mundane human lives. Using dance to communicate with the worlds of
ancestors’ spirits or deities depends upon the basic orientation of the given cosmo-
logical system towards the role of the human body in such relations. For example,
opposition to dance has been historically prevalent in Christianity- and Islam-
dominated parts of the World, while Hinduism:
…merges the sacred and the erotic in a felicitous union. Rather than considering carnal love
a phenomenon to be “overcome” as in some Christian denominations, this form of Hinduism
embraces sexual congress as symbolic of the desired absolute union with divinity. Many
Hindu dances convey this microcosm of a divine creation that reveals the hidden truth of the
universe through telling stories about the anthropomorphic gods. (Hanna 1988, p. 283)
In the European context, the special form of dance—ballet—emerged in the

fifteenth-century Italian Renaissance from where it spread to France, through the
role of Catherine de Medici (1519–1589) in its promotion. Ballet started as an enter-
tainment game for the royal court—where the leading aristocrats, dressed up in
lavishly ornamented clothes, would make relatively clumsy movement being sur-
rounded by admiring courtiers. It is only in the beginning of the seventeenth century
when the performer and the audience became distanced from one another. The
entertainment functions of the court of Louis XIV in France in the late seventeenth
century led to further link of ballet to royal court functions—in which seduction and
sexuality were intertwined with refined manners of the higher classes. The special
role for female entertainers in ballet—the ballerinas—became established from
1681 onwards, after establishment of the training system through Royal Academy
of Dance (1661) and inclusion of ballet in the Paris Opera system. From the end of
the seventeenth century to the first half of the nineteenth century, the ballet served
as the training ground of sensuality in the aristocratic social strata.
Dance in the case of emerging ballet was emerged in the general context of poetic
experiencing. Writing in 1886 in an essay about dance, Stephane Mallarme suc-
cinctly summarized the role of ballet in the realm of sensual experiencing:
Ballet gives but little: it is the imaginative genre. When for our eyes a sign of scattered
general beauty isolates itself, flower, wave, cloud, and jewel, etc. if, for us, the sole means
of knowing it consists in juxtaposing its appearance to our spiritual nudity so that our mind
may feel (the sign) analogous and adapt it to itself in some exquisite confusion of (our spiri-
tual nudity) with the vanished form—by virtue alone of the rite, there, expression of the
Idea, doesn’t the dancer seem half the element in question, and half humanity apt to become
confused in the flotation of reverie? (This is) the operation which is poetry, par excellence,
and theatre (Shaw 1988, p. 4)
On the side of the Sender,4 the ballet dancer encodes the given script into moving
forms of the body that become meaningful for the Receiver through the sensual
relating with the dancer’s bodily message of hyper-generalized feeling forms. The
body—in all of its everyday mundaneness—becomes the medium for creating most
complex ephemeral, as the body moves on, hyper-generalized sign fields. Both the
dancer and the viewer are protected by the layers of their semiotic skin—yet the act
of dancing brings the spiritual saturation of the dancer’s quasi-naked body in move-
ment with the “spiritual nudity” of the physically fully clothed viewer. The psyche
gets into contact via the movements of the bodies—a deeply erotic and at times
orgasmatic experience for the hidden layers of the psyche of the viewer. Observing
ballet is a sensual experience of affective meaning-making in its fullness. It is an
arena of affective meanings where liminality of the action (Siegel 1991) leads the
transformation of the whole subjective worlds of all participants.
The parallel with orgasm here is not coincidental. Usually we assume under that
label a lower-level act of purely physiological kind in the lives of lovemakers. Yet
that basic physical union gives rise to instant higher-level meanings that are deeply
personal but rarely put into words. Ignacio Matte Blanco—a Chilean psychoanalyst
who practiced in Italy—has collected and published a number of personal accounts
of the emerging meanings of orgasm. Thus, a male perspective shows high com-
plexity of affective phenomena at the moment of orgasm:
Before orgasm there is a tendency to the manifestation of contradictory impulses, as for
instance to destroy, and at the same time to embrace; to separate, and at the same time to
fuse.
These impulses never determine definite images, and so I have great difficulty in giving
them names afterwards. I could say that there are very many different ones, with the pre-
dominant characteristic that to each given impulse there is a contradictory one.
Mathematically it would be represented with a minus and a plus sign. (Matte Blanco 1998,
p. 441, added emphasis)
Unification of opposite feelings is evident in this self-report. The recognition of

the unity of construction (of closeness) and destruction is here empirically substan-
4
In Karl Bühler’s organon model—Sender encodes a message for Receiver that the latter reorga-
nizes in one’s own ways. The message sent and the message received are not the same as a result,
there is always some interpretive surplus on both sides.
tiated. The polyphony of images—reported but not labeled—indicates the relevance

of intermediate Gestalts in the explosive experience.
The male informant continues:
At the moment of orgasm I felt something like an identification with space. When studying
this primitive explanation more carefully I now see it very clearly; for instance the follow-
ing image occurs very frequently: it is astronomical space with its constellations of stars,
each one of which is my own self, but not as identical beings and in an abstract manner, but
as desperate effort to give a biological value to an abstraction.
These impulses always follow one another chronologically and in the same manner; that
is to say, the contradictory impulses never appear at the end, but always in the beginning.
(Matte Blanco 1998, p. 442, added emphases)
Here the reported sign explosion is followed by consolidated sign complex that
is perceived to be located outside of the here-and-now setting, with the effort to
recontextualize the abstracted hyper-generalized sign field in some aspects of the
concrete. The total experience as reported here indicates the rapid emergence of the
sublime and its resolution.
A woman describing her experiences gives a similar feeling of leaving the here-
and-now—an account:
In intercourse the transcending of physical limits means that I am conveyed to a strange
world where feelings of time, as I know them here, do not exist, where feelings of space, as
I am bound in by space here, become meaningless. Time itself is stretched out, not in the
sense where extension implies a conception either of beginning or end, but in the sense that
I may drift along forever in a sort of time-river; drift, yet remain in the same place. (Matte
Blanco 1998, p. 442, added emphasis)
The unity of opposites emerging in the moment of orgasm creates a feeling of

timelessness. This can be interpreted as the moment of synthesis of new affective
state. As she continues:
As far as space feelings are concerned, intercourse presents a paradox: a feeling of expan-
sion into infinity, a blending into the universe about one, a melting and fusing—yet also a
feeling of infinite contraction, of an intense focusing to a minute part of space and even into
a small part of one’s physical self as it ordinarily is. There is another paradox in the identi-
fication’s loss with one’s partner, and yet a realization that I am myself, unalterable. (ibid.,
p. 442)
The abstracted feeling of timelessness becomes elaborated in the unity of being

alone (myself) and being non-alone (with partner). Yet in this account the reported
experiences are referencing the situation of orgasm in general—already in abstracted
retrospection. What about the reporting of the feeling close to the moment of
orgasm, in immediate retrospect? Another woman informant of Matte Blanco’s
reported (after having had intercourse shortly before the self-report):
It is very difficult to describe, because no matter how many times you have had intercourse,
each time it seems something new, and when it is over, the memory of it seems to escape; it
isn’t that you forget, it escapes you and you’ll never know until you have intercourse the
next time.
I think that is one of the reasons why you always want to repeat intercourse; you are trying
to grasp something elusive. I was aware where I was the whole time. But when it approached
the climax, although I was still aware of the surroundings, I also had the sensation of being
high among rolling dark blue clouds, or something similar; I would describe them as clouds
exactly, but it was an impression of something like that. (Matte Blanco 1998, p. 442)
She was then asked to explain the feeling of oblivion:

…When I had all these sensations high up, I seemed to be alone. This is rather funny. I
seemed to be completely alone, which is very strange because all the time I was completely
aware that I was with him, and giving way to a strong impulse to dig my nails into his back.
I felt very close to him. And I was alone. It is funny, I was alone and yet I was with him.
When I say alone I mean the only person on earth. (p. 443, added emphasis)
The fused unity of being alone and being together leads to a new feeling of
hyper-generalized kind. The presence of catharsis can happen at any level of affec-
tive hierarchy. In terms of the cultural psychology of semiotic dynamics, the phe-
nomenon of catharsis is an example of a rapid momentary emergence of a
hyper-generalized sign field (Valsiner 2019c). Its empirical example is well docu-
mented by Lev Vygotsky in his analysis of the last sentence of Ivan Bunin’s short
story The Gentle Breath (Vygotsky 1970) where the author’s particular decision for
the last pointe to the story makes a mundane description of events deeply philo-
sophical (Valsiner 2015).
The hyper-generalized affective field we conventionally call love defies simple
verbal description:
Love always starts out from the private side of life, is set alight by small details and yet
seems to transcend mundanity. Seen from above, or outside, love always remains tied to the
trivialities of daily life, habits that have become man and wife, with pictures of me and you
and the general attitudes they conceal. Love is bound to an inherited role personified in the
beloved, and beyond him/her the forces of history and politics which reappear anew in
every one of us. (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 1995, p. 166)
Love’s trivialities are described in Chap. 6 (the Austin-von Pückler-Muskau rela-

tion). In contrast, the non-trivialities are exemplified by the strategic presentation of
the body in terms of affective human relations—including both deeply intimate
(orgasm experiences) and peripheral (body decoration) sides. The latter are an
important part in creating romantic feelings—and relations with the ambience.
Part II
Feeling into the World
Chapter 3
The Romantic Encounters
Talking about anything labelled romantic seems to bring us to the realm of love
poetry and serenades sung under the balconies of various beauties confined to their
family fortresses. Yet behind these images are psychological functions of the human
mind to relate with their environment in imaginative, affectively overwhelming
ways—in my terminology—using the pleromatic pathway of generalization (Chap.
1) in its dominance over the schematizing pathway.
The romantic orientation to the world goes beyond stories of love to include all
feeling-into the environment (Einfühlung in terms of Theodor Lipps). At the begin-
ning of the nineteenth century, this became a wide cultural orientation in German
language area in Europe to relate with the whole life-world in its affective totality—
including everything from landscapes to novels and music. The German literary
philosopher Novalis1 (1777–1801) exclaimed:
The world must be romanticized, thus the original meaning will be rediscovered. This pro-
cess is as yet completely unknown. In so far as I give to the commonplace the lofty meaning,
to the ordinary an occult aspect, to the well known the dignity of the unknown, I am roman-
ticizing them” (von Simson 1942, p. 342,2 added emphasis)
What Novalis and other romanticizing scholars of the early nineteenth century
had in mind was the focus on pleromatic generalization (as described in Chap. 1). It
is the constructive affective attribution of higher meaning—“lofty” as it is raising
above the concrete here and now setting—that guides human relating with the world.
In case of my analysis of the literary and art genre of Romanticism, I view it as a
case where pleromatization dominates over schematization in dealing with the
world. It is therefore not surprising that the medieval focus on occult phenomena
1
Georg Philipp Friedrich von Hardenberg (2 May 1772–25 March 1801).
2
“Die Welt muss romantisiert werden, so findet man der ursprünglichen Sinn wieder… Diese
Operation is noch ganz unbekannt. Indem ich dem Gemeinen einer hohen Sinn, dem Gewöhnlichen
ein geheimnisvolles Ansehen, dem Bekannten die Würde des Unbekannten gebe, so romantisiere
ich es” (Novalis 1929/1798, p. 335).

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41743-7_3
38 3 The Romantic Encounters
becomes used as one of the roots of romantic encounters—with the assumption that
there is the “original meaning” that needs to be “rediscovered.” This focus on the
past (origins) is borrowed from the general theological universe that was character-
istic of the era and history. Yet the focus on the act of giving meaning goes beyond
that—to the creative framing by field-like signs (which are “lofty” by being neces-
sarily vague as generalized meanings of Level 3 kind—Fig. 1.3). The seemingly
“original meaning” is not that of the past—but an original construction facing the
future. Romantic sentiment is the pleromatic process that builds on the focus of
uniting the concrete figures with the sublime backgrounds (Fig. 3.1). Romanticism
leads to the potential for emerging sensuality in the views of the experiencer.
Fig. 3.1 Philipp Otto Runge, The Morning (1808)

Basis for Romanticism: Intense Expression of Feelings 39
The emergence of the Romantic traditions in German literature (The Jena

Romanticism 1798–1804, followed by the Heidelberg Romanticism, the Berlin
Romanticism in the first four decades of the nineteenth century) was linked with
feelings about nature as these had proceeded in European societies over the eigh-
teenth century. Reflections upon nature as nature in it itself in European societies
have slowly emerged since late-fifteenth-century emergence of pure landscape
paintings to the seventeenth-century Dutch “genre paintings” and to the eighteenth-
century Rococo stylistic imagination. The realistic and the imaginary have always
gone hand-in-hand in these pictorial depictions—from the imagination of the nature
in the Garden of Eden to that of creating gardens out of landscape in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries. Arrival in the romanticist feeling-into the nature was
framed by viewing the beauty and other physiognomic features of the nature as
concealed results of the “maker”—a deity, or of a process (e.g., evolution) viewed
in that role. There was to be a higher organizational principle behind the here-and-
now feelings into the Ganzheit of the present encounter—be it with nature, opera or
ballet performance, or a novel.
Basis for Romanticism: Intense Expression of Feelings
The Romantic movement in art and literature becomes possible if the personal cul-
tures of individuals allow for rapid affective dynamics. Such feelings themselves
can be provoked by specific experiences—including those of nature, music, theatre,
science, and art. The German starting event—the journal Athenaeum (1798–1804)
edited by the Schlegel brothers—gives us an overview of this early interdisciplinary
effort through which the Romantic movement redirected the energies of the societal
turmoils of post-1789 into the realm of artistic creativity. The roots of the romantic
movements in Europe at the turn of the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries were in
the social turmoils that the French Revolution of 1789 and its subsequent Napoleonic
wars triggered.
Two forms of art—opera and ballet—had a special place in the Romantic capture
of the subjective worlds of the Europeans in the nineteenth century. Opera was a
social event where music presented various social agendas. For instance, the singing
of a patriotic aria in Auber’s La muette de Portici led to social turmoils in the streets
of Brussels in 1830, as apart of Belgian independence movement. The grand
operas—supported by new grand opera performance places—were places for dis-
play of exaggerated affect on the stage, followed by acceptance of such exaggera-
tions in ordinary lives of their audiences.
The affective expressivity of the ballet emphasized the role of female dancers
who—as depicting immortal nymphs and other spirits capturing the hearts of pow-
erful male characters. The 1827 ballet La Sylphide is considered to be the first of the
Romantic ballets—a deeply French invention. The 1831 grand opera by Giacomo
Meyerbeer—Robert le Diable—included a special part of the sensuous dance by
dead nuns raising up from their graves to seduce a lonely man.
The German counterpart of the Romantic movement also utilized music as a

medium (Ludwig van Beethoven) but mostly found its expression in visual art.
Aside from Runge’s Morning (Fig. 3.1), it was Caspar David Friedrich’s Cross on
the Mountaintop (Fig. 3.2) that signified the starting point of German Romantic
painting.
What is shared by the different versions of the Romantic movement in literature,
music and art is the focus on uninhibited outbursting of the affective domain in its
relation with the environment. This bursting out of feelings can be immediate—a
person encountering a sunset is so overwhelmed by its beauty that she cannot but
watch it in full amazement. It can also be deferred—observing a setting that prom-
ises a mystique in the middle of current seemingly ordinary setting. The readers
fascinated with Harry Potter (Carriere 2019) are feeling faced with something mys-
terious that takes long time coming. It is the basis of the sublime settings that makes
the move into Romantic hyper-generalization of feelings possible.
In the Romantic act, the human affective system erupts in total—like a “personal
volcano”—in experiencing a nature scene, or the sufferings of the young man
Fig. 3.2 Caspar David Friedrich—Cross on the mountain top (1808)

Basis for Romanticism: Intense Expression of Feelings 41
Werther deeply in love, or facing the promises of mystique in looking at paintings

(Figs. 3.1 and 3.2). The totality of the feelings—their whole nature (Ganzheit)—is
not reducible to its parts but needs to be accepted in toto. Here it is the pleromatic
channel of meaning-making that is set up to lead the understanding of the world,
leaving little or no room to schematization.
The Romantic outburst is a sophisticated act of affectivating (Cornejo et al.
2018). The fullness of relating with the World becomes rapidly affectively colored.
This process generates the sublime feeling in its wholeness, to which specific sym-
bols (e.g., the cross on the mountain top—Fig. 3.2) provides further triggers of
meaningful aboutness. The viewer feels into the image not as a depiction of the
manifest content (a cross on top of a mountain) but as an overwhelming feeling of
the totality for which both the cross (schematized object) and the landscape (plero-
matized object) jointly stand. That feeling is not possible to express in descriptive
words. If it is to be attempted to be translated into a verbal form, this could happen
in terms of poetry. The romantic orientation to being was an aesthetic revolution
built on the unleashing of the many forms of creating sublime experiences. In the
German case, it was a revolt to the eighteenth-century rationalism with focus on
German national unity based on the German language.3 Hence poetry and the senti-
ments collected in folk songs led the way of human psychological innovation in the
first decade of the nineteenth century. The totality (Ganzheit) of multifaceted feel-
ings became a personal focus in a search for unity with others:
the romanticist, feeling himself hemmed in by the society which he found around or rather
beneath himself, did not accept the titanic loneliness of the Storm and Stress. He was drawn
longingly towards a community of like-minded individuals who would live a full life
according to their innermost emotions. The complexity and anguish of this search for a
community were heightened by the underlying all-demanding subjectivism; the unique
individual longed for a total self-assertion of all his conflicting desires and yet felt the tragic
need for fulfillment in the miracle of a true harmonious union in which all the conflicting
opposites of life would be reconciled, of a new golden age which seemed accessible to the
magic power of the artist. Art became to the romanticists the new religion. (Kohn 1950,
p. 444)
The emergence of the societal credo of German exceptionalism can be traced to

the Romantic movement in poetry, art, theatre, and literature in the German lan-
guage room into the beginning of the nineteenth century. According to Novalis,
everybody should become a poet and artist—a goal that could be pursued by the
economically fortunate social strata.4 The poets, in their search for their historical
roots, became fascinated with the mysteries of the Middle Ages and with the Indian
roots of the Occident. And, indeed—there is much to learn from India when it comes
to sophistication of the wholeness of the human psyche.
3
This unification desire of the (then separated) German lands finds its twentieth to twenty-first
century counterpart in the Romantic origins of the European Union (Ossewaarde 2007).
4
For the less fortunate the romantic destiny was to become a soldier ready to be killed for patriotic
causes in a war. The glorification of war that became used politically in the twentieth century wars
found its roots in the Romantic poets calling for “patriotic duty” in the war with Napoleonic con-
quest of Europe (Hagemann 2006).
Romantic Devotion in Indian History: The Bhakti Movement
The core of the devotional tradition of Bhakti in the Indian context is the unity of
devotion to deities that makes the person free in one’s affective live. The Bhakti
movement was historically started at the lower castes anti-hierarchical societal
effort in the fourteenth to eighteenth centuries—promising spiritual liberation from
the social restraints through full devotion of the mind and body to the deities. The
anti-caste ideological stance has rendered this movement socially apprehensive by
the upper castes—as the result Bhakti activities are often hidden from public view
and not openly discussable. Yet it is the flow of Bhakti poetry that stays publicly
visible over centuries. If the Western Christian world endlessly repeats the story of
Christ’s suffering, physical abuse, execution, and—finally—resurrection, the Indian
Bhakti story scheme is much more human as it deals with the devotion to Krishna
in conjunction with sensual, sexual pleasures as well as of torturing feelings of
jealousy.
The intricate ways in which sexuality and sensuality became linked in Bhakti
poetry can be observed in the following text by the fourteenth century court poet
Vidyapati.5 In this example the act of lovemaking is embedded in the lyrical affecti-
vated context that links sexuality with divine participation in nature:
Her cloud of hair eclipses the luster of her face,
like Rahu greedy for the moon;
the garland glitters to her unbound hair, a wave of
the Ganges in the waters of the Yamuna.
How beautiful the deliberate, sensuous union of the
two; the girl playing this time the active
role,
riding her lover’s outstretched body in delight;
her smiling lips shine with drops of sweat; the god
of love offering pearls to the moon.
She of beautiful face hotly kisses the mouth of her
beloved, the moon, with face bent down,
drinks the lotus.
The garlands hanging on her heavy breast seem like
a stream of milk from golden jars.
The tinkling bells which decorate her hips sound the
triumphal music of the god of love
(Schelling 2011, p. 178, added emphases)
In this example we can observe how description of a mundane act of sexuality

becomes elevated into a sublime state making it possible to enter into the border
5
Vidyapati (born 1352) was a Bihari poet who was in service of the Maithil king Kirti Simha
(1380–90) and his son Deva Simha. At the time of the latter’s rule Vidyapati switched his writing
from Sanskrit to Maithili, and in his more than 500 love poems reflect the unification of sexuality
and sensuality. In his poems the lovers are never alone, but the moon, the rivers, the birds, bees,
lotuses, trees, vines, and rushes are animated by the same passion and rapture as humans
(Schelling 2011, p. 181).
From the Sublime to the Sensual: The Tantric Love Ritual 43
zone of sensuality. The road from sexuality to love is through affective hyper-
generalization supported by the metaphoric contextualization.
From the Sublime to the Sensual: The Tantric Love Ritual
Despite the general references to “tantric sexuality” as a social practice elaborate

descriptions of what such practice involves are rare. Like Bhakti traditions, the tan-
tric rituals were (and are) carefully hidden from the public view. Once we get a
glimpse into these we can observe that these were not “sexual orgy” type rituals,6
but carefully scripted religious services in which sensuality was the central feature
and episodic (final) move into the sexual act a bodily confirmation of the whole
spirituality-focused ritual.
The preparatory phase (purvardha) entails concrete steps—preparation, transfor-
mation, Shakti worship, body worship, yoni (vulva) worship, lingam (penis) worship,
and mental union. Already from this general sequence it becomes obvious that the
focus in this preparatory phase is to direct the participants to meaning-construction
beyond the biological body and its direct needs, towards unity between the actors and
with the deity. The preparation includes bathing of both bodies and massaging with
various oils. The transformation entails the ritual making human bodies divine, ending
with the male partner symbolically “drinking” from the divined woman’s breasts.
The human bodies have thus been given meanings beyond human (linking with
deities). In the next phases the worship of thus transformed—by now symbolic—
bodies takes place with the goal of arriving in the abstracted feeling of unity between
the symbolic genders. Both partners recite “I am ham” (she and he) repeatedly. The
male partner haptically explores the whole body of the woman—from right toe to
head—while reciting a mantra appropriate for each body part. This is followed by a
special worship of the yoni (vulva) and lingam—with the goal of reaching mental
union between the partners. The lingam worship:
…consists of the recitation of a special mantra ten times, followed by mental sexual inter-
course, the latter consisting of two parts. First the sadhaka (male partner) recites the mantra
HRIM 108 times while touching her yoni… After these recitations, the Shakti assumes her
first clearly active role of the sequence by standing up, placing her hands on sadakha’s head,
and reciting three times “Get up. Wake up. Be strong” (Gatwood 1985, pp. 165–166)
The sequence is interesting as it demonstrates how by specific bodily rituals

which could be viewed as ”sexual” (male partner touching the woman’s vulva) are
actually framed in ways that enhance the subliminal nature of the situation by way
of mantras (repetition—3, 10, 108 times). The bodies involved are actors in a spiri-
tual drama where the sensual experience has acquired meaning beyond the bodily
needs. In fact, the experiencing the Other in this context is purposefully slowed
down (e.g., by requiring numerous recitations) to allow the new hyper-generalized
As outsiders—non-sympathetic critics and denouncers—are more than happy to label those.
6
meanings (needed for the final phases of the ritual) to emerge. The acts of genital
touching by the partners are not sexual, but sensual—carrying meanings far beyond
the primary needs.
The central ritual sequence is expected to begin precisely at midnight and con-
tinue to precisely 3:54 am in the morning, involving consumption of wine, meat,
fish—usually forbidden in everyday life practices. At least in the Hindu version of
the ritual the woman is in the dominant role. The sexual part of the ritual com-
mences precisely 3:54 am and must last precisely 1 hour and 36 minutes (due to the
auspiciousness rules). During that—again slowed-down phase—both the male and
female orgasms are to be coordinated (ideally happening together7).
In sum—the tantric “sexual ritual” is actually sensuality-promoting cultural
occasion where the bodies and their sexual needs are incorporated into religious-
spiritual setting where the goal is worship of deities. In a move opposite to most of
the Occidental religious systems, the Buddhist and Hindu tantric ideologies empha-
size the feeling into the body—of one’s own and of the other—as a tool for psycho-
logical growth and resistance to societal segregation.
Conclusion: Sensuality in Society
The romantic movements in nineteenth century Europe and the Bhakti traditions in
India provide a good example of the use of sensuality in the macro-social realms.
The feelings into one’s own body are guided towards anticipating the sublime,
which in its turn leads to pleromatic signification of centrally relevant meanings
(auspiciousness, patriotism, love) for human existence.
However, there is the area of distance between the macro-social (ontogenetic)
and micro-social (microgenetic—Aktualgenese) levels. This—mesogenetic—level
includes the ways in which the sublime feeling direction is triggered by conditions
set up for experiencing—the promotion of our affectivating processes in the direc-
tion of negotiating the aesthetic aspects in our ordinary lives. In Chap. 4 we will try
to look through the various ways in which our making of the beautiful and the mun-
dane are socially guided.
In the Hindu version, in the Buddhist version it is not expected.

7
Chapter 4
Sensuality in Seeing Through
Our world is filled with objects that we can see—among which there are some that
purposefully invite us to see through the transparent primary surfaces that we can
see as-these-are. The dialogue—seeing X in relation to seeing through of X—is the
location where the real and the imaginary become unified in the complex of poten-
tial reality. The latter—seeing through of X—gives a new, distance-focused mean-
ing to the X. That distance is fluctuating—as we see through a transparent layer we
see far(ther), yet as we see that we are seeing through, we see closer. Transparent
layers of coverage are seductive—they create a possibility for the sublime.
The act of seeing through is an act of meaning construction that is made possible
by the materials that let the viewer see through these materials to encounter the
object. On the one end of the continuum visible <> invisible are the fully transparent
modifying lenses. For best viewing of the object, fully transparent lenses of a micro-
scope mediate the relation between the viewer and the object by magnifying the
latter. Similarly lenses in a telescope allow us access to what is far and not visible.
The nature of the object is supposed not to change by the act of magnification.1
The situation is different in case of purposefully modified lenses—layers that
allow to see through these to reach the nature of the object in ways that are mediated
by the modifications into the lens. Such modifications can make it difficult to see the
object, and can purposefully alter the nature of the expected view. The figure(s)
inserted into the lens create a counter-view about the object. In Fig. 4.1 we can see
that in the naturally occurring “see-through” veil—the waters of a sea covering the
sand on the beach. We look at the sand but see the texture of the waves that obstruct
our direct view of the sand.
Botticelli’s painting Primavera is saturated with clothing that allows—and
invites—the viewer to see through the body coverages to get a glimpse of the naked
body—yet the presented bodies are not naked (Fig. 4.2). They are nudes that are
1
Of course that depends on the meaning system of the viewer who can attribute to the magnified
views all kinds of characteristics.

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41743-7_4
46 4 Sensuality in Seeing Through
Fig. 4.1 Nature’s see-through cover. (Photo by the author)
Fig. 4.2 Botticelli’s Primavera (around 1480). (Public domain: https://commons.wikimedia.org/

wiki/File:Botticelli-primavera.jpg)
4 Sensuality in Seeing Through 47
dressed in ways that emphasize their nudity which has specific cultural meanings
for the creation of aesthetic synthesis (Fig. 1.3). The revelation of the nude bodies
through transparent clothing leads the viewer to “jump” beyond the boundary of
aesthetics and appreciate the scene without the preliminary sublime phase.
In the eighteenth century, the use of the seeing-through techniques was mastered
in the architecture of rococo. From there it was carried over to the human body—in
the form of introducing transparent clothing. This introduction is an example of
adding an ambiguous layer to the semiotic skin (Nedergaard 2016).
It is not surprising that it is the clothing styles of affluent women in the eighteenth-
century France that were the arena from such hide-and-seek games that the dress
wearers introduced to the viewers and partners. New materials to create clothes
allowed for transparency, and women’s fashion makers utilized it strategically.
Figure 4.3 is one of the best known examples of such introduction—Marie Antoinette
wearing white muslin dress that would be similar to underwear (chemise) and
allows the viewer strategic possibilities for further imagination of the sensuous
Fig. 4.3 Marie Antoinette in a muslin dress (Louise Le Brun, 1783). (Public domain: https://www.
wikiart.org/en/louise-elisabeth-vigee-le-brun/marie-antoinette-in-a-muslin-dress-1783)
kind. It is here where the seeing-through functions were set to enhance the processes
of the sublime. No surprise that women wearing such garments evoked social scan-
dals around “immodesty” of the women who wore them.
The border of the sublime and the mundane was being tested—the transparent
garment created a possibility to see more of the body that was instantly not possible
because the body was covered—yet by see-through barrier. The transparent body
coverages are an example of Gegenstand in the ordinary practice of erotic seduc-
tion. Erotic seduction plays an important role in human relationships and is at times
produced by partial un-coverage of some part of the body—or in a similar way—by
dramatic coverage of the very same body part. Thus, partial uncovering of women’s
breasts in dress—the “V-neck” exposure—has been an object of moral controversy
in Europe since the fifteenth century (Fig. 4.4).
In Fig. 4.4 the ambivalence of the bodily exposure in the V-neck is further accen-
tuated by the see-through V-neck (border outlined in green) that covers the large
V-neck exposure (red contour) that in its term is compensated by a dark kirtle (red
triangle) and a second skin-colored kirtle (blue contour). The medallion (on chain)
form the third V-shape contour that ends up hidden under the kirtle. In this depiction
of a woman’s neckline clothing, we can observe the double use of Gegenstand—
first the guidance of the viewer downwards by all three V-shapes, the solid one end-
ing in the black kirtle end symbol, keeping the second (skin-colored) kirtle ending
Fig. 4.4 Roger van der

Weyden Portrait of a Lady
(1460). (Public domain:
https://commons.
wikimedia.org/wiki/
File:Rogier_van_der_
Weyden_-_Portrait_of_a_
Lady_-_Google_Art_
Project.jpg)
the see-through V-shape. The hidden medallion adds to this “look but do not expect
to see” teasing game.
A reverse controversy—the “immorality” of covering the bare breasts—was a
social concern in nineteenth-century Malabar in India (Devika 2005). It was not
expected from Nair caste women to tease men (of Nambudiri Brahmin caste, their
superiors) by trying to cover their breasts, while courtesans did that for their own
socio-sensual power assertions. Thus, Indian advices for creating erotic appeal
included the covering of the breasts—albeit with a muslin scarf that would leave the
contours of the breasts publicly visible while covering the upper part of the body
(Devika 2005, pp. 473–474). The cover became a transparent mask that was ambig-
uous by design.
Women’s breasts in public—covered, semi-covered, or not covered at all—con-
stitute an example of political power relations entering into the domain of normative
moral claims. All these have been played out on the bodies of the most important
(and at the same time—most socially regulated) half of the humankind—the women.
What is “decent” or “moral” body coverage—from body painting to attached deco-
rations to clothing—has been constantly under careful scrutiny of moral censorship,
both external (social) and internalized (personal). The nineteenth-century Nadar
“breast cloth” controversy was about more than mere normative morality play
(Cohn 1996; Hardgrave 1969). It was part of the social power relationships negotia-
tions between the Christian missionaries (London Missionary Society, trying to
convert South Indian lower casts to Christianity), the British colonial empire (claim-
ing to operate by “indirect rule” through local rulers), and the local rulers (who were
interested in maintaining social stability in the society where castes were symboli-
cally separated yet functioned in mutual interdependency). The arena for this politi-
cal power struggle happened to be the bare breasts of lower-caste women. For the
British missionaries, these were deeply unwanted and morally dangerous displays,
while for the women going bare-breasted in public was not only natural but socially
demanded.
The missionaries conversion efforts that had started in South India already in the
eighteenth century increased in the first half of the nineteenth century. Aside from
religious teachings it entailed the fight against what was “immoral” for the European
missionary gaze—the bare-breasted public participations of lower-caste women.
The two moralities—European and South Indian—were in direct conflict here. For
the former it would be a sign or “respect” and “decency” if a woman covered her
breasts. For the latter—the efforts to cover the bare breasts were direct indicator of
the “indecency” of breaking the borders of the intercaste relations. Thus, Nadar
(lowest caste) women were supposed not to cover their breasts in public in front of
any higher castes. If they did so, or tried to, they were reprimanded for doing so. The
next caste in hierarchy above the Nadar—Nair—could cover their breasts in front of
others but would keep them bare if encountering higher caste members (Nambudiri
Brahmins). So—the bare breast of women was as sign of respect towards the casts
higher than theirs, and any violation of that rule would be an example of “cross-
class” dressing.2
The missionaries’ insistence of Nadar converted women dressing in the “Christian
ways” led to direct conflict with the Nair caste privilege defense. The Nadar
Christian women tried to start wearing the breast cloth of the Nair, only to be vio-
lently “bared down” in public. From 1820s to 1858, the controversy reached a state
of violent intercaste conflict which was finally negotiated by allowing Nadar women
to wear breast-covering jackets but not the kind of “breast cloth” that defined the
identity of the Nair caste.
The borders of underwear are often set up in see-through textiles creating a zone
of covered non-cover that may be ornamented in the see-through fabric (Fig. 4.5).
As high-fashion inventions lead the proliferation of technical clothing possibilities
to widespread social uses, the see-through effects in women’s clothing have prolif-
erated over the last two centuries. The technique of covering an object of underwear
worn by the person with see-through overwear (Fig. 4.6) creates an effect of a win-
dow (Maslov 2019) into the private world of the wearer.
The “window” to the underwear and body texture of the wearer is further inter-
esting as it makes possible to insert decorative figures—ornaments—onto the trans-
parent basis of the visual access to the undercovers of the body. The “starry pattern”
in Fig. 4.6a is the add-on ornamentation to the lacings of the bra that creates the
complex sign field of a “well-dressed non-dressed back.” The social presentation of
the back is of crucial self-presentational importance (Valsiner 2019d), and the use
of transparency of textiles creates further opportunities for its sculpting. The use of
transparent coverage can be used also in the presentation of other end symbols of
the body.
What would the coverage of the particular part of the body by transparent textiles
produce in our psychological realms? Presentation of the feet (and of shoes—see
Chap. 6) has both the function of marking the end symbol of the body as well as
extends to the symbolic realm of normative self-presentation.
Fig. 4.5 The utilization of

the see-through function
on the border of covered
and uncovered parts of the
body. (Photo by author)
2
Which was well known in European cases—the efforts of lower-class women to dress in upper
class clothing has been widespread in history. It is through clothing that social class differences are
both maintained (strict clothing rules) or overcome (new dressing styles in revolutions).
Fig. 4.6 The open closedness of see-through garments: A decorated window. (a) Value addition to
back view. (b) Hand-knitted see-through garment. (Photo by author)
The veiling of any part of the body by transparent textiles creates a dialogical
relationship of the Self and the Other in the context of distancing. The transparent
cover creates increased psychological distance without changing the principal per-
ceptual access. I see the original body form through the transparent cover—the
dialogue of the NO DISTANCE with the MEDIATED DISTANCE is attained. The
“tease” of the transparency maintains the dialogue. In contrast, if the transparent
cover is replaced by a nontransparent one, the immediate dialogue either ends or is
moved to the realm of imagination (e.g., “I wonder what is hidden behind this bar-
rier of clothing”).
The promotion of the tension between the visible and the imaginary is similarly
accentuated on the borders of buildings. The specific domain is that of covered win-
dows (Maslov 2019)—the Self looking through such window onto the Other is
involved in an asymmetric dialogue. The building that includes windows is in a
dominant position over the exterior that can be observed through the windows, and
the Self that looks out is dominant over the object of observation.3
In this dialogue mediated by the distancing devices—windows—it is the inser-
tion of various forms into the cover that provides for further distancing and un-
distancing dialogues of the human participants. The history of decorated windows
goes hand in hand with developing glass making technologies for the windows. The
use of stained glass windows in many churches (Fig. 4.7) creates opportunities for
insiders’ dialogical tensions with outside powers—the sunlight that becomes sym-
bolically (in the inside of the church) transformed into a “divine light.” The dire
3
This asymmetry is reversed in the case of outsiders trying to “peep in” through the windows into
inside. Most often such reversal is normatively disallowed—it is not “polite” to “peep into” win-
dows of the private houses while walking in streets. The countermeasure to such reversals—use of
window coverages that eliminate the dialogue with the unwanted outsiders using their possibility
to “peep in”—indicates the relevance of the need for such regulation.
Fig. 4.7 When the world outside “sees through” into the inside. (Photo by the author)
sunlight outside of a church that may entice bathers on beaches to grill their bodies
to brownish perfection becomes honorable message from supernatural power once
the very same sunbathers come into the church for religious services.
The use of color on (or in) the glass used in external windows is obviously
directly linked to the technologies of glass making. The antecedent to this—use of
transparent stone (alabaster)—would be present in many places of worship since
ancient times, but the making of glass windows for religious architectures all over
the world started actively in sixth to eighth centuries A.D. By sixteenth century
A.D., the technologies had improved to make highly sophisticated colorful scenes
to be set up into the stained glass windows.
The “seeing through” from outside in is utilized by architects by creating images
on the glass that are illuminated and project into the inside space. The visibility of
these images is granted only by the light entering from well-lighted outside to be
perceived by the viewers in the poorly or moderately lighted inside. Like in Fig. 4.6
(view of the pattern in border from outside in), that stained glass windows in Fig. 4.7
entail asymmetric visibility—in this case from inside out. In both cases the attention
is guided by the scene behind the transparent message—the young woman’s body
or the divine sunlight.
Stained glass windows have often being targets of violence. The first objects in
iconoclastic attacks on churches are such windows—the Protestant Reformation led
to the devastation of many Catholic church windows over the sixteenth century.
Wars and their accompanying looting practices were no better. Importantly, the
decoration of ritualistically relevant buildings by such windows grew back into
practice once the vandalism was over (Fig. 4.8).
Fig. 4.8 A stained glass window from Antwerpen Cathedral. (Window from 1877, photo by
author)
Fig. 4.9 Pulling the boat (a sub-part of Fig. 4.8). (Photo by author)
The division of the window into segments is a technical feature which actually
guides the experiencer of the scene towards a wholistic look at the scene depicted
across the various panels which create the image of window frames (Fig. 4.9). The
viewer of the scene looking from inside outwards observes the scene on the window
as if it were out there beyond the window.
A person who looks at an image on a window is looking from one’s own position
(here) to an outward located position (there). The latter can be located on the win-
dow (stained glass images) or beyond the window. Yet the understanding of what is
“out there” happens by the viewer (here). But what would happen that the image on
the window is that of the person oneself—the window becomes a mirror?
Figure 4.10 illustrates the role of mirrors in human lives—depicted by Rubens in
the case of goddess Venus. Goddess images in the language of art in the seventeenth
century had the privilege to be painted nude, which Rubens used to the maximum.
The depiction of the back side of the body in addition to the mirror image of the face
makes the appeal of her beauty open to the public. The allegory of love introduced
by Cupid holding the mirror adds to the message.
In reality, Rubens has painted a see-through scene in Fig. 4.11. The mirror is the
partial access tool for the frontal plane. It is only through the placement of the mir-
ror that we get a glimpse of the front—while the whole back of the body is revealed
in meticulous detail of depicting the body shape much beyond the idealizable body
of a goddess (including the transparent veil in the bottom).
Rubens’ painting illustrates best what a person looking at oneself in the mirror
can not observe—the back side. It is the presentation of the back that most directly
communicates the sensual aspect of the person.
Fig. 4.10 Venus in the mirror (Peter Paul Rubens, 1613–14). (Public domain: https://commons.
wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Rubens_Venus_at_a_Mirror_c1615.jpg)
Conclusions: Sensuality Is a Border Process
Sensual experience emerges under conditions of seeing through. The latter triggers
imagination which is crucial for the Einfühlung process. The dialogical nature of the
transparent border guides the viewer towards the sublime. The precise course of the
dialogue takes this general form:
( 1) I look and see X
(2) but I recognize I should not look at X
(3) since X is covered but yet I see through the cover
(4) since I see X through the cover I feel Y towards X but
Fig. 4.11 The dialogue of the contrast of the seen and not-to-be-seen. (Drawing by the author)
(5) since (2) and (3) I am apprehensive about feeling Y

The result is the emergence of the hyper-generalized feeling of “apprehensive
aboutness” which is a version of the sublime. Sublime is a result of border crossing-
here of the normative border that is given by the ambiguous “see me but do not
look” teasing. The ambivalence of such aboutness leads to further affective meaning
construction at the border zone of the sublime and the aesthetic. Sensuality belongs
to that zone—it creates the BEAUTIFUL and the FASCINATING. In the latter case,
the viewer has deep interest in the fascinating object which is still not distanced to
that of “disinterested interest” but also is not a mundane object for direct action.
Figure 4.11 links the see-through phenomena with the wider class of masks used
on various occasions in the human culturally organized lives—ranging from tradi-
tional societies’ various rituals using masks to the mask-wearing in aristocratic ball-
rooms in the eighteenth century and beyond. The mask—nontransparent—creates a
similar dialogue between the seen and the non-seen. The implications of the non-
seen are in the activation of the processes of imagination that create the “dialogical
partner” for the seen. What is absent in the nontransparent mask is the teasing sug-
gestion of the object’s identity that is being masked-but-not-unseen.
To finish this chapter we can precisely locate the place where feelings of sensual-
ity are generated. In an elaboration of the scheme in Chap. 1 (Fig. 1.3), the place
where sensuality emerges is the upper border zone between the subliminal and the
aesthetic (Fig. 4.12).
Sensuality in this formulation is the state of affairs in the human affective mean-
ing construction where the sublime (characterized by the personal interest in the
Fig. 4.12 The sensuality zone. (Modification of Fig. 1.3, drawn by the author)
appealing “aboutness of something”) is in dialogue with the potential aesthetic

(characterized by the personal “disinterested interest”). It is a tensional state of
dynamic kind—it can move into aesthetic (upward synthesis), or return to mundane
(downward semiotic regulation of the ordinary life). The “divine beauty” of the
stained glass windows in churches leads us to appreciate them even if we have no
personal linkages with the religious scenes depicted in them. The idea of breaking
these windows would let ourselves shiver with horror—how could any human being
even think of such attack on beauty! In contrast—if we convert to the ideology of
some iconoclastic ideology—we not only accept the task of breaking these win-
dows as our duty, but do it with full personal satisfaction of fighting the “wrong”
ideas exemplified by these color images. The mundane action of destruction
becomes substantiated by high ideologies that have been internalized as “my fight.”4
The distance from appreciation of beauty to its ideologized destruction is
4
The allusion here at first may seem to be to Adolf Hitler’s treatise of this title, but I use it as a veil
to partially cover the contemporary personal versions of similar kinds—those of ever-increasing
examples of suicide bombers.
interestingly very short and fully dependent on the processes on the borders of the
semiotic mediation system (see also back to Fig. 1.8).
A re-look at Fig. 1.8 (Chap. 1) can put the claim here to critical test. There are
two stylistic trajectories in the subliminal zone—the humorous and the grotesque—
that are depicted not to let the dialectical synthesis to the aesthetic happen. Thus—
my argument in Fig. 4.12 would stand if (and only if) no feelings of sensuality were
to be possible in conjunction with the humorous and the grotesque. No scene that is
viewed as grotesque can be simultaneously praised for its sensuality, and any
humorous elaboration of a sensual scene would eliminate that sensuality at an
instant.
Part III
Theoretical Proliferations
Chapter 5
Sensuality In-Between: Dialogical
Negotiation of Feeling Fields
Sensuality—feeling into the Umwelt in subjectively appreciative ways (as was

pointed out in Fig. 4.13)—is present in human lives of many ordinary situations. A
woman is knitting some garment in a warm home setting when a hunter comes and
gives her a present (Fig. 5.1). The act of giving a present may be just that—a pres-
ent—which could be viewed sensually (“what nice poulet you bring us as a gift! We
will enjoy our dinner!”) or as a part of sensual beginning of a sexual solicitation
(“you bring me a bird but I know what you really want”) which could be accepted,
neutralized, or actively rebuked. A painting carries a double message—unity of
what is depicted and what is being implied (AS-IF). The viewer of the painting—or
a person relating with another person in everyday life—is constantly navigating the
dynamic movement between the AS-IS and AS-IF domains within the general field
of sensuality. That movement—happening in irreversible time—is inherently
ambiguous.
The Amsterdam Rijksmuseum’s description of the painting in Fig. 5.1 makes a
clear statement about as-if sexually explicit nature of this scene:
A hunter offers a dead bird to a young woman virtuously occupied with her sewing. Is he
trying to seduce her? During the seventeenth-century “vogelen” (literally “to bird”) was
slang for sexual intercourse. The statuette of Cupid, the god of love, on the cupboard also
alludes to this. These kind of “hunter’s scenes”—especially due to their possible double
meaning—were a popular subject in painting.
https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/collection/SK-C-177
The interpretation is based on the allusion linking two symbolic objects—Cupid

and the bird—overlooking the generalized aboutness of the whole scene. The
straightforward statement “see sex here!” for this painting of a scene taking place in
home conditions gets rid of the titillating sublime nature of the depicted scene. Yet
it is precisely the unspoken mystery encoded into the painting that makes us ponder
about it. In the case of Metsu’s painting, this is created by the counter-allusion to
basic domesticity of the scene—the sewing woman reaches towards the Bible by her
hand with her shoes in the front plane.

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41743-7_5
62 5 Sensuality In-Between: Dialogical Negotiation of Feeling Fields
Fig. 5.1 The obvious and the implied (Gabriel Metsu, The Hunter’s Present, 1658–1660). (Public
domain: All Metsu paintings are in public domain)
The display of the shoes by the artist is crucial for the understanding of the whole
complex message in the painting. Wayne Franits provides an alternative interpreta-
tion if the painting in Fig. 5.1 that is centered on the symbolic meaning attributed to
the shoes:
In my opinion, the woman has already made her choice, if only for the fact that she is reach-
ing for a prayer book or Bible. Regardless of the book’s precise content, the woman’s ges-
ture does not demonstrate her indecisiveness but rather her resistance to the man’s
proposition. Her resistance is probably emphasized by her sewing. The equation of the
motif of sewing in seventeenth-century art and literature with diligence, domesticity and
virtue was so widespread that such associations should only be discarded in favour of its
interpretation as an erotic metaphor in rare cases… Her virtuous refusal is further con-
firmed by the shoes which Metsu so carefully depicted in front of her. (Franits 2017, p. 228)
Importantly, the shoes are depicted in a state of disarray—adding further ambiguity

to the situation. Their placement can underscore the erotic interpretation of the
scene—but they can also stand in for the virtue of domesticity. People—particularly
5 Sensuality In-Between: Dialogical Negotiation of Feeling Fields 63
women at home—were not expected to wear shoes. The shoes play a similar role in
another scene depicted by Metsu around the same time—The Intruder (Fig. 5.2).
Here the male actor is trying to reach the woman who slightly raises her skirt to
expose her leg while another woman is blocking his advance. Again we see the unity
of approach, uncertainty of acceptance and resistance—both displayed together,
within the same visual symbolic field. There is no subtlety in the actions of the
intruding man—yet the ambiguity of the domesticity of the female life worlds—
including desires and their self-limitations—become encoded into the complex of
an ordinary scene of women’s togetherness in an indoor space. Again we can
observe the female shoes in the central spot arranged in a state of disarray.
Fig. 5.2 The Intruder (Gabriel Metsu, painted around 1660, focus added by author). (Public
domain: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabri%C3%ABl_Metsu#/media/File:The_
Intruder_%28c1661%29_Gabriel_Metsu.jpg)
Both paintings used here illustrate the encoding of life scenes into the hypercom-
plex of signs in paintings.1 The sign complexes in Figs. 5.1 and 5.2 involve the
complex SEXUAL ALLUSION <> DENIAL OF THE ALLUSION (by way of
manifest food delivery theme) <> with DOMESTICITY ALLUSION (which in
itself includes sexuality as a regular normal part) and <> RESISTANCE. This com-
bination is set to be inherently ambiguous—interpretable in different ways. It can be
viewed in the way the Rijksmuseum catalogue description suggests (as an erotic
scene) or—as an alternative—a scene of virtuous resistance to temptations beyond
the gift. This enigma itself—as created by the artist—is the core of human living:
ambiguity created on the border of what can be seen and what is not observable—
yet hinted.
Living Under Ambiguity (And Creating More of It)
What is the value of inherent ambiguity in human lives? Such state of affairs is the
basis for the move between the mundane and the sublime—a process that is central
for human living (Valsiner 2019a, and Chap. 1 of this book). The liminal zone where
such move takes place is marked with many kinds of uncertainties in human life—
from weather changes to paintings that seem to depict something ordinary while
leading the viewer to suspect something extraordinary behind the ordinary. Such
hypercomplexes of signs involve dialogues of the different allusions encoded into
the pictures—those of vice and virtue—forming meta-complexes of affect-triggering
meanings. The paintings as complex signs use pictorial sensuality to provide the
viewer with the awe of aboutness—something is happening here, but it is not cer-
tain what it is. The general sensuality of the paintings—similarly to that of everyday
life settings—includes sexuality (directly or by allusion) together with many other
aspects of human functioning. It is a Ganzheit-complex, the function of which is to
maintain the suspense generated by the most ordinary elements united into an
extraordinary whole. That unification happens within the functional “membrane” of
the Self in the form of cultural body (elaborated in the Semiotic Skin Theory—
Nedergaard 2016) and involves the basic processes of Einfühlung (in the sense of
Theodor Lipps—Valsiner 2018b). Sensuality is the process of double Einfühlung
that arrives the a synthesis of a new hyper-generalized affective field that is being
felt subjectively through one’s body. Figure 5.3 is a schematic illustration of such
double process.
Figure 5.3 gives the dynamic elaboration for Fig. 4.12 (which charted out the
structural location of the sensuality as a feeling-making process. The border of
looking outwards to the Umwelt (Einfühlung 1) leads me to feeling the sublime
1
The seventeenth-century Dutch paintings (“genre paintings”) were encoded with representations
linking two levels. The manifest surface image would give a scene from everyday life (“reality”),
while beneath it lies another meaning, having little or nothing to do with the first (De Jongh 1968,
p. 72). Similar allegorical functions were carried by poetry.
Living Under Ambiguity (And Creating More of It) 65
MY BODY as I
feel it
(Einfühlung 2)
SELF
THE UMWELT
at the
Einfühlung 1 (outwards) given time
The WORLD-OUT-THERE
as I feel it NOW
TIME
IMMEDIATE FEEDFORWARD
into AFFECTIVE ESCALATION of the
experience (HYPER-GENERALIZED FIELD)
SENSUAL SYNTHESIS
Fig. 5.3 Sensuality as a result of double Einfühlung. (Drawn by the author)
within me (Einfühlung 2), which operate as oppositions in either synthesizing the

new complex feeling (sensuous moment) or equilibrate into either making sense of
the outside (the observed Other) or of the Self inside—both in schematized terms.
That process is normatively regulated—by the basic rules of organizing the field of
imaginary depiction of the implied. In the history of the human sciences, this entails
an extension of Hans Vaihinger’s (1952–1933) important introduction of the AS-IF
notion of various forms of useful fictions.
Hans Vaihinger (Fig. 5.4) was a leading German neo-Kantian scholar whose
main—and largely forgotten—contribution is the ALS-IS <> ALS-OB contrast. The
AS-IF (Als-Ob) domain includes a wide variety of fictions—ideas the truth value
maybe missing or be doubtable. Fictions are not problems for our thinking but tools
for it—many of them are necessary and indispensable in our ways of transcending
the here-and-now settings. Aside from basic notions in the physical sciences that are
fictions (e.g., protons, electrons, etc.), all our psychological concepts are useful and
sometimes enjoyable fictions. Notions like “personality,” “mind,” “self,” “identity,”
and others are used in psychology all the time, but they have no material locus. This
is not a problem for science (unless it—like some efforts in neuroscience—naively
tries to locate these in the brain by some MRI scan). Most abstract notions of any
science are useful fictions without which the science cannot proceed precisely
because they cannot be materially localized.
Vaihinger’s elaborate analysis of the various forms of fictions of the AS-IF
domain dates back to the 1870s–1880s—even if his magnum opus Die Philosophie
des Als Ob was published only in 1911 (Vaihinger 1911, 1922—in English transla-
tion first in Vaihinger 1924). Aside from clear connections in this treatise with
Vaihinger’s analysis of Immanuel Kant’s thoughts, it provides a careful demonstra-
tion of the value of fictions in different sciences (e.g., the notion of infinity in
Fig. 5.4 Hans Vaihinger

(1852–1933) (from
Vaihinger 1921, p. 174)
athematics). For almost a century after its publication, Vaihinger’s work remained
m
little used in psychology or philosophies of science. It is only in the twenty-first
century that—due to the increased interest in the topics of imagination and creativ-
ity (Glaveanu 2016; Smythe 2005)—the stigma of the notion of fiction becomes
slowly eliminated and Vaihinger’s positive program for the sciences appreciated.
Fictions are signs we construct in order to make sense of reality—AS-IF leads the
discovery and understanding of AS-IS.
Vaihinger was not a developmental scientist—yet his focus on the relation
between AS-IS and AS-IF domains required a dynamic look at their intersection.
Vaihinger provided that in his Theory of Ideational Shift (Gestez der
Ideenverschiehung—Vaihinger 1911, Part 1, Chapter 27). It entails the transition
between DOGMA (fixed undoubted knowledge—AS-IS), HYPOTHESIS (doubt-
able ideas in-between of knowledge and fiction), and FICTION (ideas in the AS-IF
domain—not real but useful for thinking). Thus, in Vaihinger’s terms:
On the one side we have groups of ideas which are without hesitation regarded as the
expression of reality, on the other, ideas as to whose objective validity there is doubt. The
former are dogmas, the latter hypotheses. (Vaihinger 1911, p. 220, 1924, p. 125)
Note that Vaihinger’s notion of dogma differs from our common language notion at
least in part. I know without doubt that the computer on which I write this book
exists as a material object—this is the notion of dogma for Vaihinger, while in com-
mon sense any strong and undoubtable belief (“I know that God does not exist”)
would be a dogma, with or without the material existence test.
Sensuality as a Hypothesis, Sexuality as a Dogma 67
Dogma is free of tension, while hypothesis is based on tension. According to

Vaihinger:
The mind has a tendency to bring all ideational contents into equilibrium and to establish an
unbroken connection between them. An hypothesis is inimical to this tendency in so far as
it involves the idea that it is not to be placed on an equality with the other objective ideas. It
has been only provisionally accepted by the psyche and thus interferes with the general
tendency to adjustment. (ibid.)
The psyche tends towards equilibration—hence towards turning hypotheses into

dogmas (AS-IF into AS-IS). But where do the hypotheses originate? Vaihinger’s
answer was—in fictions. The sequence FICTION → HYPOTHESIS → DOGMA is
the main way in which human knowledge is generated.
Vaihinger also covers the reverse transformation—from dogmas to new hypoth-
eses (and from there—to new fictions). The history of the Darwin-Wallace theory of
evolution started from releasing the dogma (without doubt God created everything)
to hypothesis (maybe it was not so but we don’t know how it was) to new fiction (the
evolutionary theory) that gave rise to many new hypotheses of the development of
the species as well as to the new dogma—unfaltering belief in the evolutionary
theory being “right.”
Sensuality as a Hypothesis, Sexuality as a Dogma
Looking back at Vaihinger’s contributions through the lens of cultural psychologies

of the beginning of the twenty-first century, it becomes clear that he was about a
century and a half ahead of his time. While his Kantian focus did not encourage him
to accept the axiomatic notion of irreversible time—which is crucial for an analysis
of creativity as a process—he nevertheless outlined the various ways of creating
useful fictions. Especially valuable was his theory of Ideational Shift—how idea,
hypothesis, and dogma move into one another under conditions of psychological
tension.
Here we elaborate Vaihinger’s AS-IF domain by first positing its locus (in the
future, in the structure of irreversible time that operates in PAST-PRESENT-
FUTURE basis), and then creating a normative complement to further structure this
domain. The latter leads to an interesting recognition—because of human living
within irreversible time all normative regulations of our feelings and conduct are
projected into the not-yet-known future. Thus the place where societal norms meet
the actions that are targets of regulation is in the immediate future, and all dis-
courses about normative nature of one or another action are hypothetical (in
Vaihinger’s terms). The norms themselves, however, may be represented as dogmas.
The application of dogmas upon hypotheses is the realm of moral action—self-
regulating dialogues before the actions are carried out, or abandoned (Nedergaard,
Valsiner and Marsico 2015). These dialogues are reflections upon the structure of
the Gegenstand as it organizes the field for fulfilling personal needs (see Chap. 6).
Normativity in the Not-Yet-Known: The Differentiated

AS-IF Zone
The world we live in is constantly challenging our intentionality in the move towards
future. As the future is in principle not pre-known—but only guessed—it belongs to
the constructive imagination processes of a person to create its idealized image.
That process of construction of such image is preemptively guided by the social
norms that are contextualized in the AS-IF domain (Fig. 5.5).
The three sub-domains of AS-IF set the stage for such goal-oriented internal
dialogues. The AS-COULD-BE domain (in contrast to the opposite—
AS-CANNOT-BE context) sets the stage for further differentiation of
AS-SHOULD-BE (positive normative future ideation) in contrast to AS-MUST-
NOT-BE (negative ruling out of some states of affairs). Moral norms human beings
have developed for their living are precisely on the border of the latter. Bodily self-
presentations through clothing (see Chap. 4 above) are carefully negotiated settle-
ments for the given time and social class hierarchies2 in a society which are
constantly contested by changing new fashions. The personal dialogues on that bor-
der happen every time a person makes decisions about how to dress—risking the
moral condemnation of peers and unwanted interest from other onlookers, or even
risking becoming stigmatized on ideological or religious grounds.3
Sensuality as a border process is precisely in the center of such personal negotia-
tions. A particular garment worn in a particular way could lead to the interpersonal
Fig. 5.5 The AS-IF → AS-IS move in irreversible time
2
See the Nadar “breast cloth” controversy described in Chap. 4.
3
The French Muslim schoolgirls’ “headscarf controversy” (Bowen 2007) and the experiences of
Swedish women going into public in Muslim headdress (McGinty 2006) give dramatic evidence
of the possible outcomes of such personal negotiations.
Conclusions: Dialogical Negotiation of the Unfolding Affective Atmospheres 69
construction of generalized sensuality that gains its value from the aesthetic side of
the border (“it is BEAUTIFUL, so I WANT TO WEAR IT!”) while in the social
practices of living would enhance the sensual experience (and appreciation by oth-
ers) in these terms. But if the fascination with the beauty of the garment is mis-
placed once it is brought onto the body of the presenter, the insistence of wearing it
may lead to the nonappearance of the sensual impression or to outright denigration
of grotesque. Even the most aesthetically pleasing garment that is displayed in fash-
ion shows and promoted in clothing shops can lose its sensual productivity if mis-
fitting with the eager potential wearer’s body. No surprise that shopping for
appropriate selection of clothing for any person is a long-lasting exercise that may
entail multiple returns of the once already purchased items. The dialogue of
AS-I-AM and AS-I-WANT-TO-BE takes complex forms in everyday life.
onclusions: Dialogical Negotiation of the Unfolding Affective

C
Atmospheres
Sensuality is a field of affective semiosis—a state of affairs in the AS-IS <> AS-IF
relationship that makes the AS-IF function as the guiding force for the AS-IS. It is
filled with tensions, can (in Vaihinger’s terms) return to the equilibrium of everyday
life, or—in a dialectical leap—move to the realm of absolute beauty of Ancient gods
and goddesses, thus overcoming the tension. Such tensions are constantly in the
making—a glance of smiling eyes, a glimpse of a male muscular body under a see-
through shirt, the almost unperceivable smell of a perfumed body, unexpected view
of a shoe, and many more daily occasions of social encounters trigger the plero-
matic process of abstracting a sensuality field within the given moment of experi-
encing. The role of sensuality as triggered in the course of living-forward is to create
the affective atmosphere for the person and the others in the social encounter. But
why are such atmospheres needed?
Chapter 6
Hierarchical Integration of Human
Psychological Needs
The notion of needs has been maintained in the Occidental psychology through the
humanistic perspective of Abraham H. Maslow (1908–1970). This perspective was
an outgrowth of various social tensions in North American psychological scene in
the 1950s–1960s which is a domineering example of indigenous psychologies of
the world. The topic of needs is of course universal—but psychological perspectives
that create theories of needs are inevitably built on the social representations that
dominate in the given society at the given time. In the case of the United States of
mid-twentieth century, it was the tension between the mechanistic behavioral sci-
ence and the focus on individualistic moralizing within the society. One of the
results was the individual-centered humanistic psychology movement that benefit-
ted from Maslow’s contributions. Maslow’s theory of needs was a deeply individu-
alistic perspective without any explicit social or cultural extensions.
The main value of Maslow’s account is in its hierarchical order of organizing
various needs where higher-order needs (self-actualization) are built on lower-level
security and basic survival needs. Maslow talked about the hierarchy but never actu-
ally draw it. Figure 6.1 is our illustration of the hierarchical order of needs that can
be found through his various writings.
Needs in Maslow’s conceptualization are given as entities of psychological kind
in terms of common language. Thus, security, friendship, confidence, self-esteem,
and morality are presented as existing objects—ontological entities. A person can
claim to “have” these characteristics—“I have confidence” or “I have self-esteem.”
This ontological projection that is present in most of psychology is one of the
“snares” of the discipline that William James pointed out in 1890 (James 1890;
Valsiner 2017a)—we give a label to some complex psychological phenomenon, by
the label the phenomenon takes on the form of ontological entity, and that entity is
further projected into the intra-psychological domain as a causal entity that is sup-
posed to produce the particular conduct. So—it is ordinary in common language
and in psychology to make claims such as “my self-esteem causes my security in
family” or “my need for security causes me to search for better employment.”

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41743-7_6
72 6 Hierarchical Integration of Human Psychological Needs
SELF-ACTUALIZATION:
higher accomplishments
of self-driven by self-set goals
EVALUATION:
confidence, self-esteem,
achievement, respect for self and others
AFFILIATION:
friendships and kinship ties,
intimacy in various forms
BASIC SAFETY:
security of the body and heath,
availability of income, family as safety net,
PHYSIOLOGICAL:
alimentation (and excretion), sexuality, sleep/wakefulness
Fig. 6.1 Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. (Figure by author drawn on the basis of Maslow’s
publications)
The notion of deficit—not having “enough” of satisfaction of the needs—is built

into Maslow’s scheme. All levels under that the SELF-ACTUALIZATION can be
characterized by estimation of lack of satisfaction. It is only at the highest level
where such “lack” is moved from an ontological (“I do not have ENOUGH of X”
where X is sleep, food, love, self-esteem, etc.) to a developmental (“I WANT TO
accomplish X”) domain. Such developmental move to self-initiated efforts to
change one’s relations with the given environment is the starting ground for the
SUBLIME → SENSUAL → (possibly) AESTHETIC transformation of the activi-
ties that take place in our mundane worlds. A person’s desire for self-actualization
through furnishing one’s home in aesthetically pleasing ways takes place within the
most mundane world of shopping for door knobs, kitchen units, toilet seats, and
many other elements of home furnishings. Yet its core in in the personal desire to
actualize one’s Self through the synthesis of the affective object “my home”—a
hyper-generalized affective field that is fully comprehensible only for its creator.
Sensuality in the Hierarchical Field of Human Needs
Sensuality is the general condition under which persons satisfy their needs that
emerge in their living. These needs are multiple—co-present at any time. They
emerge as a need profile over the life course and change their profile structure over
time. The model of semiotic mediation of need hierarchy was first developed in col-
laboration with the late Dieter Ferring in 2011 but was never published in its origi-
nal version (meant for a grant application that, as usual, ended in rejection). The
Sensuality in the Hierarchical Field of Human Needs 73
version here (Fig. 6.2) is the result of fitting the sexuality <> sensuality phenomena
into a general scheme that covers all possible human needs in their constant move-
ment between levels of the needs. The very same act—that of eating or drinking
(Maslow’s lowest level)—can become elevated into specially meaningful ritual (a
family dinner, an official banquet) with eloquent action rules involved. A person
encountering a sequence of eating utensils in a restaurant with multi-course mean is
unprepared as to the social norms in which order and to which of the sequence of
served dishes the particular fork and knife is to be applied. The act of eating has thus
become transformed into an act of affiliation and evaluation. The meanings of the
edible foods become transferred—albeit in body-linked ways:
Transforming wine into blood is typical of ritual, transformations of wine into whisky
would not do. I view such transformative potential as the central fact of ritual symbolism,
and shall argue here that the symbolic power of trees comes from the fact that they are good
substitutes for humans. (Bloch 2001, p. 40)
From the cultural perspective of semiotic mediation human needs are constantly
being re-constructed within their hierarchy. Some are moved upwards—the invitees
to a formal banquet are there not merely to eat but to partake in a social ritual that
involves specially prepared foods. The latter may be the arena for self-actualization
for the master cook who may spend much energy to create the aesthetic qualities of
the foods—which will then vanish into the mundane act of eating immediately as
HIGHEST NEEDS
Sign mediation at HIGHEST LEVEL—“feeling myself accomplished in
(aesthetic, unity with the world”. RELIGIOUS, MORAL, SOCIAL DEVOTION
life philosophical, WITHOUT The OTHER needed for fulfillment, results of yoga or
etc) and time- meditation practices
deferrable fulfillment
Sign mediation of extra-normative need fulfillment—the

NEEDS beyond establishment of imaginary relations with the world
MORAL NORMS (e.g. unaccomplished extramarital relations in the mind)
NEEDS MOVE UP
AND DOWN THE
HIERARCHY, NEEDS based NORMATIVE GENERALIZED relations with the world (e.g. “she
MEDIATED BY on MORAL is my wife” or “she is my husband”)
SIGNS AND NORMS
CONDITIONS OF
FULFILLMENT
NEEDS that
Sign mediation of episodic encounter with the Other
are
EXPRESSED with attributed affective meaning (“I like it” versus “I
in hate it-- this is abuse!”)
CATEGORIES
LOWEST LEVEL OF sign

mediation: “this is food” (versus non-food), “this is
LOWEST sexual lure”. Shared with non-human animal
BASIC NEEDS: alimentation (food intake,
NEEDS excretion, sexual drive) species. Follows the LOGIC OF AFFORDANCES
and (James Gibson)
immediate
fulfillment
Fig. 6.2 Dynamic hierarchy of needs in constant exchange relation with the social world
the ritual takes place. Each of these upward <> downward moves is mediated by
particular meaningful relations with the Umwelt—at all levels of the need hierarchy.
Further elaboration of Fig. 6.2 can be seen in the example of transformation of
sexual needs (lowest level). When confronted with an unwelcome potential partner,
these needs can be denied by the person while they are in place. Sexual advances by
an unwelcomed partner are refused (“I am not that kind of a woman”—Nedergaard
et al. 2015) or end up in the accusations of abuse (category level). In contrast, if the
same basic needs may become satisfied within the context of accepted social role
relations (“she is my wife”—“he is my husband”). Then at the moral norms level it
becomes a mundane act in the context of “marital relations” that is expected,
accepted, and not necessarily affectivated. The latter may happen in case the sexual
need becomes transferred to the level beyond moral norms—leading to the desire
(Sarah Austin’s example below) or accomplishment of the adventures of “adultery.”
As viewed from the perspective of the “adulterer,” the sexual act is not relevant for
immediate satisfaction, nor for child-bearing, but constitutes a personal affective
adventure in the zone of the sublime and focusing on the sensuous.
Finally, the basic sexual needs can be elevated to the level of self-actualization
where they stop being sexual and become spiritual—hence aesthetic. The desire for
tantric experiences of sensuality is an example of such highest level of functioning
of sexuality. The mundane physical act of copulation is no longer that but becomes
a sensual religious act (Valsiner 1996) in which it is not the personal pleasure but the
highest feelings of union with deities or muses in art and science that are being
sought after.
Societal Guidance of Need Transformation
The hierarchy of needs is constantly under social guidance—not only are the means
for satisfying needs at different levels normatively regulated, but also the upward
and downward transposition of different needs themselves is socially regulated.
At the lowest level of the bodily needs, it is the practice of masturbation that
could be considered a necessary regular satisfaction of sexual needs—if appropriate
partners are nowhere to be found. Not so in the cultural history of the Occidental
societies where—since eighteenth century—the practitioners of that activity have
been threatened with personal futures of physical and mental pathology (Garlick
2014) and scrutinized in the process of their confessions (Tortorici 2007).
Physiological needs of sexual kind have been normatively upwardly transposed
upwards—to interpersonal relations, particularly those within the normatively set
context (of marriage, rather than outside it). The function of sexuality becomes
further circumscribed to the function of procreation within a marriage—rather than
enhancement of mutual pleasures:
A basic tenet of Christian morality is an overwhelming disapproval of the pleasures of the
flesh, because it trammels up the soul in the body, preventing it from aspiring towards God.
We must eat to live, but we must be careful not to enjoy the pleasures of the table too much.
Love as the Escape from Moral Norms 75
We are obliged to embrace the opposite sex in order to produce children, but we should not
get too fond of the pleasures of sex. Sexuality was given for the purpose of reproduction.
(Flandrin 1985, p. 114)
The moral use of sexuality in the service of religious ideology was brought into
Christianity early in its emergence as a moral system. St. Jerome already in the
fourth century A.D. suggested that a married man must not be passionately in love
with his wife (and even less so with the neighbor’s). Men should come before their
wives not as lovers, but as husbands (Flandrin 1985, p. 122) was the normative
wisdom propagated in the Occident since the fourth century A.D. The use of sensu-
ality in the service of the moral order is clear—if passionate longing for the other
may have been accepted for the purposes of entering the marital state, the passion
became outlawed within the marriage itself. A husband who passionately is in love
with his own wife is similar to an adulterer—so it is the passion, not the marital ties,
that was the main goal of moral socialization of Christian need hierarchy. Together
with the suppression of passion, we encounter the development of ambivalence
about sensuality over the centuries.
Love as the Escape from Moral Norms
Despite all societal regulations, human affective domains can escape the moral
rules. Affective bonds as the arena of self-actualization can develop at any moment
in human life course. As such, these bonds transcend the normative structure of
human societies and make their carriers free—at least within their own selves. The
love story of English upper-class woman Sarah Austin (1793–1867) and German
aristocrat Hermann von Pückler-Muskau (1785–1871) in the 1830s. Aside from the
flamboyant character of von Pückler-Muskau who was a German pioneer of land-
scape art, their relationship is interesting because it was an adulterous relation on
both sides based on completely imaginary closeness at distance. The two met only
after the love affair had calmed down, a decade later (late 1840s)—while it was
intense via letters in the 1830s.
The beginnings of the clandestine love affair were located in Sarah’s role as the
translator of his book into English.1 The correspondence led into mutual exchange
of household2 and personal objects, furnished with specific affective messages. In a
letter to Hermann in his Muskau estate, Sarah wrote:
A thousand thanks for the lock of hair and for having it enclosed in such a manner that my
lips can touch it. I am however afraid to wear the medallion. My child and I have had no
separate existence—she has been always with me and sees all I do and all I wear. I would
neither conceal it from her nor lie to her (you don’t like the word—I hate glosses and palter-
ings with what one means.) I must have the hair put into some concealed place where I may
1
Tour in England, Ireland, and France by a German Prince, (London, 1832), in German direct
form Letters from a Dead Man.
2
Sarah sent over to Germany various furnishings for the Bad Muskau estate (Fig. 6.3).
wear it invisible to all eyes but mine. (Late May 1832—Hamburger and Hamburger 1991,
p. 242, added underlining)
The caution by the loving woman here is psychologically important in terms of the
role of the hiding of the personally sacred treasure with the desire of not hiding it.
This ambivalence is the border condition for all close affective relations—secrecy
adds to the personal sensuality of the feeling.
When considering love relations—legal or clandestine—we can think about the
material products that emerge from intersensuality. The park that von Pückler-
Muskau built on his estate (Fig. 6.3) encoded into culturally organized natural forms
(of bushes, flower beds, etc.) some feelings of a woman far away in England whose
love reaches the German prince only through postal messages and deliveries of
household objects. A better known example of such material effects of intersensual-
ity is the Taj Mahal in India. Human beings go into substantial efforts to set up
Umwelts for, and in accordance with, the sensual expectations of their real or imagi-
nary Others. Places become expressions of affect—encoded in buildings, sacred
forests, and personal fetish objects.
Fig. 6.3 The house of the beloved: Bad Muskau estate. (In 2012, photo by author)
Sensuality in Musical Performing 77
Sensuality in Musical Performing
The field of sensuality is particularly powerfully demonstrated in the total bodily

feelings in the process of creating music. As the following self-confession of a
musician shows, the “Tantric experience” (see Chap. 3) is a usual part of the self-
actualization need of a musician:
I have a thrill of emotion when playing for an audience. I love the way the music sings out
and connects with the audience. I feel one with the music when I perform. I feel almost in a
trance. I am focused only on the note, and I feel connected to the music. (Freedman 2012,
p. 23, added emphasis)
The feeling of being connected in the context of performing extrapolates to that

with other players:
I get emotionally involved while playing—also feel a oneness with other players…. I feel
more connected with the music when I am actually playing it, and this is a special experi-
ence. (Freedman 2012, p. 23, added emphasis)
Here the bodily sensuality involved in the act of playing music undergoes a plero-
matic rupture3—the feeling of unity with the act (music) the co-creators (other
musicians and audience). The self-actualization of the musician—similarly to that
of a lover or a partner in a tantric ritual—involves an act of aesthetic synthesis.
Human lives involve constant setting of future goals, efforts to reach those, and
either replacing them or reaching those. The basic structure of all human actions is
that of Gegenstand (Fig. 6.4). This minimal Gestalt4 entails the striving agent who
encounters a barrier (“membrane”) towards which the goal-oriented actions are
directed, and through which innovation proceeds. The sublime and the sensual are
concrete results of the efforts to make the borders, work to cross them, and finally
succeed or fail. The act of moving towards (and against) the border is inevitably
leading to sublime experiences as the border resists the move towards it. Resistance
is a basic principle in nature and in society (Chaudhary et al. 2017)—it implies the
unity of action and counteraction.
The structure of the triple Gegenstand (Fig. 6.4) illustrates the human case of
semiotically mediated relating with the world. The move towards the border is char-
acterized by dialogical encounters with normative suggestions. In my teaching in
various universities in Europe since 2013, I encounter a curious question from stu-
dents who have just arrived at some new idea—“but are we allowed to think this
3
The centrality of basic qualitative changes—ruptures—in human life course has been analyzed by
Tania Zittoun (Zittoun 2006).
4
The focus on the need to use units that are minimal Gestalts of the whole was emphasized by Lev
Vygotsky (van der Veer and Valsiner 1991) in 1927 in his critique of the methodology of psychol-
ogy that reduced the whole to elements, rather than functional units that preserve the structure in a
whole. Such minimal units—the usual example being that of water molecule (in contrast to its
constituents—hydrogen and oxygen) that loses its qualities if reduced to its elementary compo-
nents. The minimal Gestalt of water molecule is present in its basic form in an ocean and in a
spring—the quantitative accumulation does not change is quality.
Fig. 6.4 The structure of triple Gegenstand
way?” A question like this indicates the end of creativity at its very start, while
exemplifying the dialogue with social normativity in Fig. 6.4. The person—through
one’s imagination of the obstacles (barriers) set by social norms creates the “mem-
brane” through which the ongoing effort needs to proceed. The “membrane” has
selective open pathways (A. B in Fig. 6.4). At the same time, the person reflects
upon one’s move to the encounter with the border—taking into account the results
of dialogue with social normativity while using one’s own will to act towards the
border. In a generic form, the structure of self-reflections can be illustrated by
this way:
MOVE: “I want X and will get it!”
DIALOGUE WITH NORMATIVITY: “I know I am not expected to want X”
REFLECTION ON THE MOVE: “But I want to get X anyway!”
REFLECTION ON THE BORDER: “I do not know how to proceed” (need to find A
and B)
It is obvious that tension on the border is expected—the preknowledge of transit

zones in the “membrane” (A and B) need not exist. The structure leads to the act of
trying-and-trying-again (James Mark Baldwin’s 1890s solution for persistent imita-
tion—in contrast to “trial and error” focus). What human beings do in their life
courses is to enter into new encounters with the world—based on imagination—and
then work beyond any “error messages” to make that new world into a reality.
Conclusion: Semiotic Regulation of the Hierarchy of Human Needs 79
onclusion: Semiotic Regulation of the Hierarchy of Human

C
Needs
In this chapter, I have reformulated Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs

in terms of the cultural psychology of dynamic semiosis. While accepting Maslow’s
hierarchy of levels of needs—from basic to the highest (self-actualization), the par-
ticular needs (as sign constructs) can be moved upwards (from hungry eating any-
thing by hands to being picky about a wedding cake) or downwards in the hierarchy.
Furthermore, at different levels of the hierarchy the societal norm systems are set up
to constrain the upward or downward move. Sensuality enters into the hierarchy in
it upper part—replacing the lower bodily needs by affectively felt-through relating
with the environment. Covering the body with clothes for granting sufficient warmth
in cold climates to stay alive becomes turned into conscious following of changing
clothing fashions. This happens at the intermediate level of the hierarchy. Compare
this with the complete oblivion about one’s clothing by self-actualizing hermit “des-
ert fathers” of early Christianity or bohemian artists in nineteenth- or twentieth-
century European artist colonies. Needs are signs that organize human lives in a
dynamically changing fashion.
Part IV
General Conclusion
Chapter 7
Sensual Living in Affectivated Worlds
Sensuality emerges from the human need for the sublime. Human beings live for-
ward—constantly anticipating the immediate future that is—and cannot be—pre-
known before it happens. Hence the future always looks ahead of us—creating the
necessary conditions for the sublime. As active constructors of our own lives—
through signs—we create the sublime moments by attributing meanings to the full
scene we are facing as the future looms over us to become the present. We dramatize
our ordinary lives by creating sublime experiences.
Sensuality becomes possible as a way of being—founded on the sublime. It is a
phenomenon of the border zone—between the sublime and the aesthetic. It can
move beyond the border—to the fully aesthetic domain. The serene beauty of the
head of the Nefertiti (from 1300 years BC) fascinates us without any mundane car-
nal desires. The transition to the aesthetic has enshrined the feminine in its pure
beauty. In contrast, a similar display of head-and-shoulders by a young woman in a
disco may lead from my fascination with her sensuality into the mundane desire for
a sexual encounter with her. The tension in the zone of sensuality becomes trans-
formed into a sexual tension. The sensual becomes reduced to the mundane—and
becomes sexual in is function. A young woman in love looks at her partner’s David-
like muscular body with deep sexual desire to be held by that powerful man. The
same woman can appreciate a similar display of male muscles as an aesthetic expe-
rience in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence (Fig. 7.1)—without any sexual desire.
In sum, sensuality is in the center of human living. We need it for our mundane
living, as well as for our aesthetic ways of seeing. We create it through semiotic
mediation—using signs to transcend the sensual in either direction (Fig. 7.2)
Sensuality is erotic—in the general sense of reliance on desire. Our human ways
of living are positively erotic in two ways. First of all people create their own
aesthetic eroticism through the sublime-to-sensuous (and beyond) affective relating
with the Umwelt. This kind eroticism is free of sexuality—its function is to make
human lives guided by feelings of beauty—both in art museums and in everyday
aesthetics. A beautiful bouquet of flowers in a vase or a carefully designed castle

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41743-7_7
84 7 Sensual Living in Affectivated Worlds
Fig. 7.1 Beyond the

sensual to the aesthetic
(Michelangelo’s David,
Galleria Uffizi)
with its garden (Fig. 6.3) are examples of such aesthetic eroticism. In terms of my
system of levels of affective meanings (Fig. 1.3), such eroticism belongs fully to
Level 4, with possible interludes of verbal presentations at Level 3. The move
between Levels 4 and 3 entails all the personal and philosophical romantic reflec-
tion upon the beauty of the person, the experience of a sunny day and of listening to
classical music, or many other genuinely human higher-order psychological
activities.
Secondly, human living entails episodic reliance on sexual eroticism—the hyper-
generalized feeling that leads to physiological sexual arousal and to possible sexual
activities. This kind of eroticism entails Level 4 → Level 1 → Level 0 (Fig. 1.3)
guidance of the body by higher-level psychological functions. Sexual desire gener-
ated from the domain of higher-order feelings—leading to bodily readiness for
asexual encounter—differs from the “pure” sexual arousal (Level 0 → Level 1 activ-
ity). The latter is of completely physiological kind1 and can lead to recognition of
1
Usually characterized by the general categories of satyriasis and nymphomania—exaggerated
forms of sexual desires that enter into conflict with societal moral norms.
7 Sensual Living in Affectivated Worlds 85
Fig. 7.2 Making the aesthetic and making the mundane: the “membrane” of the sensuous.
(Drawing by the author)
the bodily needs at Level 2. Such purely biologically organized sexuality is similar
across different species. It is sufficient for the biological reproduction of the
species—and completely devoid of any higher feelings. All three forms of sexuality
are in the service of our human sensual living.
Our story of sensuality has traversed a complex path in this book. It has crossed
the borders of continents and times. Its focus is one—loving in the middle of living,
and beyond (Fig. 7.3).
It is this capacity for loving—the World, the Other, and Oneself—that makes us
human. It is an intricate relation of the biological, social, and personal aspects of the
psyche. It makes our feelings to be the core of our rationality—in the middle of a
world where we strive for living our lives in personally meaningful ways.
86 7 Sensual Living in Affectivated Worlds
Fig. 7.3 The sensual on the border of the living and the dead. (La Recoleta cemetery, Buenos
Aires, photo by the author)
ommentary: Sinking Back and Beyond
C
to Understand Sensuous and Affective
Processes: What Will an Artist Think of All
That?
Lia Da Rocha Lordelo
Intro: Request for an Artist to Comment
I strongly suspect that I take part of this book as a commentator more due to my
artistic background than to my experience as a cultural psychologist—if this suspi-
cion is correct, I couldn’t be happier. I have been practiced and thought about art
long before I entered the university and chose my major. But I also think that being
experienced in both fields at the same time (Art and Psychology) is what qualifies
me to comment such an exciting book. Although Valsiner centers his discussion in
the more general notion of sensuality, all the examples and illustrations in this book
come from sculptures, paintings, poems, aesthetic movements, and, even more
interestingly, more challenging phenomena, in terms of definition (tantric practices,
Bhakti movement, and so on). If you claim to theorize on psychological matters
parting from these examples, it is wise to have a part-psychologist, part-artist appre-
ciate them. And I immense do.
What I intend to do here is to take some of the issues addressed by Valsiner when
concerning sensuality and affective meaning-making processes, using other artistic
illustrations and references to activate a fruitful debate. Valsiner initially claims to
have a non-poetic view on the topics he explores, and I honestly don’t think that is
accurate. But more importantly, in a dramatic scientific turn, the author inverts the
relationship between reason and affect and also between fiction and fact. It takes a
bold scientist to do that.
Art Looking at Complexes
This book curiously focuses on the sublime and aesthetic phenomena that have been
traditionally studied by philosophers and artists. Art has historically been underes-
timated as a legitimate field of knowledge—or yet, as an inferior field, especially

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41743-7
88 Commentary: Sinking Back and Beyond to Understand…
when we compare it to science—the main reason of that distrust is the methodological

fragmentation of its practices, which supposedly prevents it from having homoge-
neous, consensual criteria for appreciating and judging it. But do we psychologists
have the right to make such criticism? Since the first decades of the twentieth cen-
tury, researchers have diagnosed a crisis in Psychology (Vigotski 1999; Bühler
1927; Politzer 2004) concerning dissent on objects of study, acceptable methods,
and even ontological assumptions on our living world—that is, on basically every-
thing. Knorr Cetina (1997) reminds us that although the notion of methodological
unity is a requirement which is typical of the natural sciences, not even they can
bear such costs in their everyday practices. This difficulty makes doubly question-
able the belief that human sciences must be guided by the same methodological
standards than natural sciences: first, because human sciences have specific features
and needs and, second, because natural sciences also have what Knorr Cetina calls
different “epistemic cultures” (Knorr Cetina 1997, p. 260).
One of Valsiner’s efforts when laying foundations for Cultural Psychology
(Valsiner 2007, 2014, 2017a) has been precisely to question traditional methods of
research and, particularly when it comes to developmental phenomena, which are
viewed as open, intransitive systems (Valsiner 2008), to focus on their transforma-
tions. In this book, that concern is expressed when author claims that “the mundane,
the sublime, and the aesthetic are different stages in the affective generalization
processes” (Valsiner, this book, p. 12). The fundamental developmental question
would be, “how would one turn into the other? How can the beautiful emerge from
the sublime and disappear again—through the sublime—into the mundane world?”
(Valsiner, this book, p. 12).
These questions are not only important to generate methods which can handle
the complexity of developmental phenomena in Psychology; the very idea of the
sublime, the mundane, and the aesthetic as being different stages in the affective
processes injects new content into a very old debate: what is art and what is not? Art
scholars, practitioners, and admirers have engaged in such discussions, usually
attributing an aesthetic dimension to what they consider true works of art. But to
state what is art and what is not might be a fruitless endeavor. First, because art itself
changes through different times and places, the paradigmatic shift in representa-
tional art, with the invention of photography (Benjamin 2013), is a relatively recent
example in the West. Second, and more importantly, if we take into account that
developmental, psychological dimension proposed by Valsiner, then any words,
paintings, sounds or gestures can actually be “artistic” somehow—it all depends on
which stage a person if affectively relating to it. A work of art is a stage or our affec-
tive relationship to the world around us.
Commentary: Sinking Back and Beyond to Understand… 89
The Sublime Is a Meaning-Making Process on the Move
At this point some things start to make more sense to me as for the reasons why I
am writing this commentary. I remember now it has not been long since I have com-
mented on Valsiner’s thoughts on affective processes and the notions of sublime,
mundane, and aesthetic (Lordelo 2018).
My purpose was to use a theoretical approach in aesthetics to discuss meaning-
making processes in human trajectories: in other words, to link Aesthetics to a
developmental approach in Cultural Psychology. But I realize now that this is what
this book is actually doing. It has been a systematic effort from the author to view
Cultural Psychology as a multidisciplinary field on the borders of psychology, semi-
otics, and cultural studies focusing on how individuals make their experiences
meaningful (Cabell and Valsiner 2014). Well, that perspective fits Art almost per-
fectly. Reading a poem—or listening to a song and feeling that those words seem to
have been written for you and nobody else—is a meaningful experience that many
of us can immediately recollect and recognize.
As an artist myself, I have for a while now understood that meaningfulness. Not
only through the impact that a poem, a play or a song might have on me but through
the centrality of the plays and songs I make—and also the plays and songs I imagine
myself making. Appreciating a work of art can be as meaningful as doing one—and
why is that? Because similar semiotic affective processes are at stake in both
situations.
From a developmental point of view, two basic processes are at work there:
meaning-making and imagination (Zittoun et al. 2013b). So, being an artist, in a
broad sense, is more than a profession: artists like Allan Kaprow (1993) have writ-
ten on the subject, saying that art cannot be seen as something people do—sepa-
rately from their lives and how they understand themselves. Within that logic, art
becomes a diffuse activity, completely linked to life. In one of his essays, he defends
the idea of a lifelike art, as opposed to artlike art. Art ceases to be seen as something
we do, for it constitutes who we are. Aesthetics is part of human life.
Moreover, Valsiner specifically claims that the sublime is an arena for semiosis
(Valsiner 2018a). What kind of arena is that?
The Grotesque, the Humorous, and the Burlesque
Tensioning the borders of art leads me to another exciting passage of this book. The
author states that the sublime would be somewhat of a tensional state that could
move up to the aesthetic or down to the mundane—this is why we can talk of stages.
I would like to bring a curious example of a tensional state—you can choose if it is
humorous, sublime, or grotesque: the burlesque.
According to artist Julie Atlas Muz, in the documentary Burla (2017), burlesque
can be considered a theatrical style, as much as a lifestyle in itself. In Portuguese,
burlesque comes from the word burla, which means cheating. Burlesque, then, is the
adjective that qualifies everything or everyone that cheats or jokes. Its history remits
to popular theatre plays in European Renaissance fairs, in which women, nomads
and immigrants, physically disabled, homosexuals, and any other persons whose
bodies were not socially admired or accepted would perform (Conceição 2018).
Nowadays, particularly in Brazil, it is a flourishing movement that congregates con-
temporary burlesque artists who usually perform over the duration of a popular song
in theatres and nightclubs, similar to drag queens and kings—another contemporary
version of burlesque practices.
Brazilian artist Miss G. (Photo by Ida Vickers)

But why talk about burlesque here? Or yet, what is burlesque cheating on?
Burlesque artist and researcher Giorgia Conceição (2018) claims that what is being
cheated, or mocked, is the artist’s body in its social, historical, and psychological
meanings. To cheat on one’s own body is to break off normative logics and prac-
tices, creating possibilities to reinvent oneself. “Where there are wounds, burla
makes room for the creation of dissonant spaces of acting – singular politics, perfor-
mative genders etc.” (Conceição 2018). This is the reason why many burlesque acts
involve stripping. Conceição claims that contemporary stripping is the subversion
of a typical practice that historically put women as objects of desire—by men, of

course. A burlesque body in exhibition inverts, nowadays, the power relation
between genders.
Brazilian artist Marquesa Amapola. (Photo by Ibsen Vasconcellos)

If a burlesque performance is cheating on historically constructed meanings, it
might also be challenging another opposition—that between sensuous and humor-
ous or between sensuous and grotesque. The overweight body of a woman happily
exposing herself in front of an audience, in this context, is a challenge to our affec-
tive processes. Beauty, as Valsiner himself states, is psychologically possible
because its basis is “in the affective relation of the beauty-maker to the object—
body of oneself, of another, or an object” (Valsiner, this book, p. 34).
Southern Beauties
Critical thinkers of what we call decolonial studies have a compelling argument

when it comes to the notion of beauty. They claim that the birth of Aesthetics as a
theory and the concept of Art as practice, in Europe, in the seventeenth century, have
performed what they call a “cognitive operation of colonization of aesthesis by
Aesthetics” (Mignolo 2010; Brandão and Sanchez 2014). By that, they mean that
the notion of aesthesis, a word of Ancient Greek origin that translates into “sensa-
tion,” “process of perception,” “visual,” “gustatory,” or “hearing sensation,” has
been restrained in its meaning and turned out to eventually mean, from the seven-
teenth century on, “sensation of beauty.” The word “beauty,” then, comes to the
center of a debate that has historically been concerned with phenomena such as
feeling, affection, sensuality, and so on—the main topics of this book. Some of
these authors (Brandão and Sanchez 2014) claim that this transformation of general
sensations into an appreciation of beauty and the sublime has established a system
of privilege of the sight over other senses—hearing, touch, smell, and taste.
That system of privilege is the colonial operation they are talking about, for it
comes along with an asymmetrical power relation. “Beautiful” is what the European
eyes look at with admiration.
That thinking makes perfect sense for us, Latin Americans. Many of us struggle
our whole lives for an opportunity to cross the ocean and finally appreciate, with our
own eyes (with what else could we appreciate paintings?), the most famous master-
pieces at Louvre Museum. And I must confess it is somewhat disappointing to
finally stand in front of Leonardo Da Vinci’s La Gioconda and understand that that
picture has become famous for a reason which you never completely understood.
You have been told, since school, in a city in the Northeast of Brazil, that La
Gioconda is one of the most important works of art in the world. But why, exactly?
Of course the beauty of the painting itself is not at stake here; what is questionable,
precisely, is the expression “beauty in itself.” The museum was conceived, mainly
in the eighteenth century, exactly as this institution where people go if they want to
understand what is worth being looked at, admired, and appreciated (Bourdieu and
Darbel 2015). This is why authors like Mignolo (2010) stand up for the construction
of non-colonial aesthesis and subjectivities.
Valsiner’s considerations on beauty explicitly or intuitively go in the direction of
these decolonial debates. But being an enthusiast of good theory, his contribution
aims a broader, more generic scope of explanation, as have been his recent efforts in
the theorizing of Cultural Psychology (Valsiner 2014, 2017a). The Bhakti move-
ment in India, as well as other non-Western, nonhegemonic examples, is used to
show the psychological construction of beauty and sensuality, defined as “the gen-
eral and constant relating with the world through affective creation of meaningful-
ness in one’s life” (Valsiner, this book, p. 5). The only possible knower of that
process, he claims, is yourself. There you have a psychological explanation as to
why you and you alone are capable of looking at La Gioconda—and that does not
exactly mean to appreciate it but to affectively relate to it.
Science and Fiction or Science Fiction?
We don’t just want to eat. We need fiction. It looks like Western society has built a
“pyramid of knowledge needs,” and in this pyramid, natural sciences are on the
ground. On the basis. Human sciences would stand a little higher, because Political
Sciences are not as fundamental as, let’s say, Biology; and then you could maybe
place Religion, right above; but on the top, we would definitely see Art. This book
already disorganizes Maslow’s pyramid, but it is also in the way of dismantling this
other hierarchical structure I have just described. Valsiner states that virtually all
“our psychological concepts are useful and sometimes enjoyable fictions. Notions
like “personality”, “mind”, “self”, “identity” and others are used in psychology all
the time but they have no material locus” (Valsiner, this book, p. 68).
Fig. A.1 Pyramid of

knowledge needs
I have previously argued that doing research is, in many ways, like doing litera-
ture (Lordelo 2015); when we interpret data through the light of a theory and con-
struct a narrative to tell others what we have found, we are a special kind of a
storyteller. Semiotician and literary theorist Roland Barthes (1978) tells us that sci-
ence can be coarse, and life, subtle; and literature would exist to shorten this gap.
His striking vision of literature and its forces is helpful at this point: for him, one of
the forces of literature would be to take on many types of knowledge; in a way, lit-
erature itself could compose a whole pyramid of knowledge. Through literature, we
can know things; we can learn about the world—he refers to this force by using the
Greek term mathesis.1 But in spite of being a source for our grasping of reality, lit-
erature never grants us with a completed, total expertise of the world, but instead, it
gives this knowledge an indirect place. The kind of knowing literature yields us is
always partial—and so is the knowledge produced in sciences (protons, electrons;
or mind, personality, and so on), we might add. Barthes actually states an interesting
relationship between science and literature: he argues that they have similar second-
ary features: they do have similar content; they are systematic; and most impor-
tantly, they are both discourses—only they assume in different ways the language
which constitutes them. Whereas science traditionally uses language as an instru-
ment, literature is within language. Language is the being of literature (Barthes
1989, pp. 4, 5). Nonetheless, resorting to scientific discourse as an objective instru-
ment of thought is postulating a neutral state of language, a referential code which
would be the basis of all normality; and by that, says Barthes, science is arrogating
to itself an authority which must be precisely contested by the act of writing.
Barthes’ vision of literature is in consonance with Vaihinger’s (1924) ideas on fic-
tions, which are considered tools for our thinking and can be translated into
Valsiner’s proposition that sensuality works like a hypothesis, since it is a field of
affective semiosis.
For all these claims, Valsiner’s considerations on sensuality and affective life are,
in a way, highly poetic. His theoretical propositions are comprehensive, but at the
1
<?Note Type=”footnote”?>The word translates from the Greek as the knowledge, science, and
the act of learning.
same time, they leave room for questions and further elaborations—I have just
made room for Brazilian rock music, burlesque art, and a Latin American’s appre-
ciation of La Gioconda. These dialogues show us that, as Barthes, Vaihinger, and
Valsiner have demonstrated, science is an extremely useful fiction that can never
arrogate to itself a universal authority. We, artists, proudly standing on top of the
pyramid of knowledge needs, always suspected that.
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Index
A symbolic forms, 26
Aesthetic eroticism, 83 trunk, 27
Aesthetics, 5, 22, 91
Affective processes, 3
Ancient Greek origin, 91 C
Anti-sensuous art censorship, 12 Comstockian, 13
Apprehensive aboutness, 56 Contemporary stripping, 90
Asymmetrical power relation, 92 Cultural psychology, 88, 89, 92
B D
Barthes, 93 Dancer’s quasi-naked body, 32
Bhakti movement, 87, 92 Darwin-Wallace theory of evolution, 67
Body Dialogical negotiation
back and front, 25 ambiguity
cultural existence, 29 “awe of aboutness”, 64
dance, 31 Einfühlung, 64, 65
dialogical oppositions, 29 Ganzheit-complex, 64
divide and conquer, 26 inherent, 64
face, 26 notions, 65
fashion norms, 28 AS-IS and AS-IF domains, 61
feelings, 27 double message, 61
frame, 24 fictions, 65
functional inconvenience, 27 generalized aboutness, 61
human back, 23 Intruder, 63
human beings, 23 paintings, 64
human body, 24 sexual solicitation, 61
human meaning-making, 28 sexuality as hypothesis, dogma, 67
hyper-elevated heels, 28 Umwelt, 61
male informant, 33 unfolding affective atmosphere, 69
non-trivialities, 34 Vaihinger
orgasm, 32, 33 AS-IF domain, 67–69
psychological productivity, 29 dogma, 66
reconstruction, 26 fictions, 65
sign explosion, 33 reverse transformation, 67
skin, 23 Theory of Ideational Shift, 66
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41743-7
102 Index
E M
Einfühlung, 37, 55, 64 Maslow’s pyramid, 92
English translation, 6 mathesis, 93
Epistemic cultures, 88 Meaning-making processes, 89
European Renaissance fairs, 90 Mirrors, 54, 55
Everyday experiences, 7 Mundane, 4–5
sublime, 22
Mundane-sublime-(aesthetic)
F transitions, 11
Feeling forward, 4
N
G Natural sciences, 88
Gegenstand, 48, 77 Non-colonial aesthesis, 92
Generalization, 15, 17, 88 Notion of methodological unity, 88
Genre paintings, 39
German concept, 6
Greek mythology, 28 O
Grotesque, 17–20 Occidental psychology, 71
Orgasm, 32
H
Hierarchical integration, human P
psychological needs Paradigmatic shift, 88
AESTHETIC transformation, 72 Pleromatic generalization, 16
dynamic semiosis, 79 Pleromatization, 15, 16
intersensuality, 76 Political Sciences, 92
Maslow’s conceptualization, 71, 72 Psyche, 3, 8, 22
musical performing, 77, 78 Psychological concepts, 92
occidental psychology, 71
self-actualization, 72–76
semiotic mediation, 72, 73 R
semiotic regulation, 79 Rhetoric humor-making activity, 21
sexual advances, 74 Romantic encounters
transformation, 74, 75 Berlin Romanticism, 39
Hinduism, 31 einfühlung, 37
Human character, 5 genre paintings, 39
Human sciences, 92 intense expression, feeling
Humor, 21 ballets, 39
Hyper-generalization, 9 forms of art, 39
Hyper-generalized feeling forms, 32 human affective system, 40
Hyper-generalized role, 4 paintings, 41
romantic movement, 39, 40
societal credo, 41
I sophisticated act, affectivating, 41
Imagination process, 8–14, 89 mesogenetic—level, 44
Intersensuality, 76 pleromatic generalization, 37
Italian Renaissance, 31 psychological functions, 37
romantic devotion, Bhakti movement, 42
romantic orientation, 37
L sentiment, 38
La Gioconda, 92, 94 tantric sexuality, 43, 44
Index 103
S V-neck, 48, 49
Schematization, 14 wider class of masks, 56
Semiotic mediation, 58, 72 women’s clothing, 50
Semiotic Skin Theory, 23 Sexual eroticism, 84
Sensuality, 28 Stained glass windows, 53
aesthetic, 83 Sublime, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10
aesthetic eroticism, 83 zone, 17
affective levels, 84 Sublime objects, 5
borders, 85
human living, 83
sexual eroticism, 84 T
sublime, 83 Tantric sexuality, 43
Sensuality Tensional state, 89
aesthetic synthesis, 47 Theory of Ideational Shift, 66
architects, 52 Traditional societies, 31
barrier, 48 Translation paradoxes, 6
Botticelli’s painting Primavera, 45 Transparency
covered and uncovered parts, 50 clothing, 47
fabric, 50 garment, 48
open closedness, 51 Gegenstand, 48
overwear, 50 immorality, 49
stained glass windows, 51–53, 57 layers, 45
starry pattern, 50 primary surfaces, 45
transparent primary surface, 45 textiles, 50, 51

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SPRINGER BRIEFS IN PSYCHOLOGY

THEORETICAL ADVANCES IN PSYCHOLOGY

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Sensuality in Human Living

Carl-Gustav Carus Winterlandschaft mit verfallenem Tor. 1816-1819

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020

Aalborg, Denmark Jaan Valsiner

Sensuality in Focus: The Human Psyche Beyond the Lures

Sexuality is a topic of never-ending fascination—in ordinary life and in psychology.

by our senses—from pleasure to non-pleasure—involved.1 So, let me offer a general

This definition is admittedly recognizing subjectivity (as it is centered on the

Listening to Gregorian chants is a deeply sensual experience with no transformation

In addition to no direct access to sexuality in practice, there is a lack of concep-

Part I Living by Affective Hyper-Generalization

Part II Feeling into the World

Part III Theoretical Proliferations

Sensuality as a Hypothesis, Sexuality as a Dogma�������������������������������������� 67

Part IV General Conclusion

 ommentary: Sinking Back and Beyond to Understand Sensuous

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 3

IRREVERSIBLE TIME: PRESENT future

Gottfried Herder gave an introspective description of the progress of feeling as it

This hyper-generalized role of affect leads later to neutralization. Neutralization

The Sublime: Dramatizing the Mundane

Erhabene (the Sublime) as an Affective Drama

Translation Paradoxes: Forgetting the Time

Erhabene in Everyday Experiences

Everyday experiences are built on the sublime. Referencing a traveler to Egypt,3

Borders in the Imagination Process

The “real art” is framed, in a gallery, expensive—and accessible to well-to-do

Fig. 1.5 The Laughing

The controversy around the Bacchante in the late-nineteenth-century United

“old life” to be eradicated, during the French revolution.10 Pleromatic hyper-­

Varieties of the Affective Construction in the Sublime Zone

The Emergence of the Grotesque

grotesque—here it comes from juxtaposing the results of the war (depicted is a

The Humorous Hyper-Generalized Sign

This rhetoric humor-making activity of professional jokers indicates that the

 onclusions: Conceptualizing the Emerging Complexity

Looking at the Body: All Around

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 23

times to an extent of functional inconvenience—illustrates the role of the body as a

Lotze’s comment upon “feeling upward” wearing high-heeled shoes is interest-

Fig. 2.5 The end symbol

color modification—tanning and uses of lightening creams—to efforts to perma-

These dialogical oppositions create a wholistic cycle of dynamic dialogue. The

Cultural Body in Action: The Role of Dance

In the European context, the special form of dance—ballet—emerged in the

Unification of opposite feelings is evident in this self-report. The recognition of

tiated. The polyphony of images—reported but not labeled—indicates the relevance

The unity of opposites emerging in the moment of orgasm creates a feeling of

The abstracted feeling of timelessness becomes elaborated in the unity of being

She was then asked to explain the feeling of oblivion:

Love’s trivialities are described in Chap. 6 (the Austin-von Pückler-Muskau rela-

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 37

Fig. 3.1 Philipp Otto Runge, The Morning (1808)

The emergence of the Romantic traditions in German literature (The Jena

Basis for Romanticism: Intense Expression of Feelings

The German counterpart of the Romantic movement also utilized music as a

Aalborg, Denmark Jaan Valsiner

Sensuality in Focus: The Human Psyche Beyond the Lures

Part I Living by Affective Hyper-Generalization

Part II Feeling into the World

Part III Theoretical Proliferations

Sensuality as a Hypothesis, Sexuality as a Dogma�� 67

Part IV General Conclusion

ommentary: Sinking Back and Beyond to Understand Sensuous

The Sublime: Dramatizing the Mundane

Erhabene (the Sublime) as an Affective Drama

Translation Paradoxes: Forgetting the Time

Erhabene in Everyday Experiences

Borders in the Imagination Process

“old life” to be eradicated, during the French revolution.10 Pleromatic hyper-

Varieties of the Affective Construction in the Sublime Zone

The Emergence of the Grotesque

The Humorous Hyper-Generalized Sign

onclusions: Conceptualizing the Emerging Complexity

Looking at the Body: All Around

Cultural Body in Action: The Role of Dance

Basis for Romanticism: Intense Expression of Feelings

Romantic Devotion in Indian History: The Bhakti Movement

From the Sublime to the Sensual: The Tantric Love Ritual

Conclusion: Sensuality in Society

Conclusions: Sensuality Is a Border Process

Living Under Ambiguity (And Creating More of It)

Sensuality as a Hypothesis, Sexuality as a Dogma

Normativity in the Not-Yet-Known: The Differentiated

onclusions: Dialogical Negotiation of the Unfolding Affective

Sensuality in the Hierarchical Field of Human Needs

Societal Guidance of Need Transformation

Love as the Escape from Moral Norms

Sensuality in Musical Performing

onclusion: Semiotic Regulation of the Hierarchy of Human

Intro: Request for an Artist to Comment

Art Looking at Complexes

when we compare it to science—the main reason of that distrust is the methodological

The Sublime Is a Meaning-Making Process on the Move

The Grotesque, the Humorous, and the Burlesque

Science and Fiction or Science Fiction?