Cor Baerveldt

With a vocational background in psychology and, more specifically, cultural psychology, I find myself, nowadays, at the cross-section of the humanities, the social sciences and the natural sciences. A central concern in my current work flows from my belief that in its obsession with scientific exactitude, psychology has failed as a human science and has lost touch with the ‘depth’ structure of everyday life. This central concern takes shape through two different lines of inquiry. The first line of inquiry is theoretical and concerns what I call the normative structure of everyday life. My earlier work on the conception of an enactive cultural psychology was inspired primarily by the work of Gregory Bateson, Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela. Rather than focusing on culture as a system of already established ‘ready-made’ meanings, I tried to conceptualize and study culture as a dynamic and consensually enacted practice. However, while maintaining strong roots in the life-sciences, I increasingly felt the need to integrate these ideas with that of ‘life’ in the human historical sense. To this end, I tried to connect my earlier work on enactive cultural psychology to the ideas of a genetic method and lived expression, particularly as envisioned historically by Johann Gottfried von Herder and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. I explore the notion of 'development' in relation to the concept of 'life' in its multiple facets and aspects. My historical sources in this regard include the work of James Mark Baldwin, Henri Bergson, Heinz Werner, Lev Vygotsky, Kurt Goldstein, Mikhail Bakhtin, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Gilles Deleuze, and Michel Foucault, among others. The second line of inquiry is decidedly non-theoretical and non-epistemic and draws from a long tradition of literary realism, especially as conceived through the work of the German philologist and comparative scholar Eric Auerbach. A sustained series of conversations with my friend and colleague Floyd Dunphy, partly in the context of annual meetings of the Western Canadian Theoretical Psychology group (WCTP), started with the realization that something has been missing in our discipline’s engagement with everyday practice. By tentatively calling this ‘something’ depth, we embarked on a journey that took us from the figural depth of literary tradition to the depth that opens up “in the blink of an eye”, but only for those who are adequately disposed. We came to believe that  the pursuit of depth in culture and everyday life is not an epistemic project guided by methodology, but an erotics that requires us to slow down just enough to “be with” or “dwell in” the material sites that are brought into the regions of our genuine concern. The pursuit of depth requires the sustained attention and fidelity that allows something or someone to show up in its living, generative capacity, but it also requires the risk that comes with leaving rules, general structures and authority behind, the “leap into the abyss”, or “the killing of the father,” so that we may attend to life in its concrete particularity rather than in its schematic forms. It requires that we flag our own complicity and contamination, rather than subjecting our material site to the sanitized, controlled look of objectifying science, and it requires that we remain radically hospitable to others and otherness. Using our conversations and our writing as a way to cultivate those dispositions, we are working to articulate the implications of such a depth approach for community, ethics, therapeutics, politics and our own vocational identities.