Trans-modal Methodology
摘要
This primacy of semiotic mediation of the human psyche leads to an understanding of the unity of all modalities of human functioning. We hear some sounds—detect them as music—and visualize scenes that are not directly perceivable in the sounds. The visualized scene is further the basis for a verbal description of the particular feeling, and may grow into the creation of a short story or even a novel. The writers of fiction are masters of such trans-modal creative acts. The focus in the creating of methods is on how meaningful forms of communicative messages emerge. These are most likely to be triggered at the border transitions from one modality to another. At each transition between modalities, the person—meaning constructor—necessarily expands the realm of the communicative message (in terms of Karl Bühler’s Organon Model), and thus reveals new pleromatic nuances for the message. This value is of course present only if the pleromatic (affective) side of the human psyche is considered to be primary over its schematizing (cognitive) counterpart. Human beings are passionate inhabitants of their own lives. What they create—their homes, gardens, poetry, clothing, music, and moral control over all of those—is in the form of dynamic sign complexes. These may be different between societies, and change in history—but it remains universal that these acts are generating meaningful gestalts. Cultural Psychology studies the constructive processes of creating such complexes.