Affective Semiosis: Philosophical Links to Cultural Psychology

Abstract

The matrices and forms of meaning-making are the shared focal concerns of a philosophical semiotics and of a cultural psychology informed by broad-based semiotic categories. C. S. Peirce’s analysis of sign processes is a fine point of entry into a reflection on their main points of intersection. However, the centrality of the notion of quality or firstness in Peirce’s model of semiosis leads to a reflection on the universality of feeling and of being affected by objective forms that emerge at the thresholds of sense. Phenomenology’s engagement with the primacy of form over explicit meaning, foregrounded by Merleau-Ponty, points toward new ways of foregrounding affectivity as a universal mode of sense-making and is complemented and extended by Susanne Langer’s development of a revised notion of feeling and by John Dewey’s extension of Peirce’s theory of quality into a core principle of a reformed pragmatist account of the multi-dimensional organism-environment relation, a prime concern of cultural psychology.