The second volume of Annals of Cultural Psychology is dedicated to the
affective nature of human social relationships with the environment. The
chapters here included explore the historical, theoretical and practical
dimensions of the concept of affectivating originally introduced by one
of us (Valsiner, 1999), as a potential tool of inquiry into the
affective-sensitive dimension of psychological life within a
cultural-psychological framework. The concept of affectivating involves
two psychological dimensions often undervalued or even obliterated from
contemporary cultural psychology, namely the affective involvement and
the agentivity of people in their social encounters.
Through several examples --'feeling-at-home', silence spaces and
rituals, memorials, music and poetry, among others-- we show
individual's concrete actions in mundane everyday life aim to give an
affective personal sense to the world around. This focuses on the
primary affective nature of human meaning construction that guides the
person in one's continuing feeling-into-the-world.
At a theoretical level the notion of affectivation challenges
contemporary Cultural Psychology to rescue subjectivity, not only
symbolism. Affectivation propounds a return to the long, but partially
forgotten, organismic tradition, represented in the history by thinkers
like Wilhelm Dilthey, Jakob von Uexküll and Kurt Goldstein. Cultural
psychology has to bring semiosis back to the vital background of human
experience.
