Cultural Psy

Critical Social Studies •  No. 1  •  2008 67

Jaan Valsiner

Ornamented Worlds and Textures  of Feeling: 

The Power of Abundance

Summary Human development takes place in an ornamented –  redundantly patterned and highly repetitive – world.  The emergence of knowledge takes the form of epi- sodic unpredictable synthetic events at the intersection  of the fields of internal and external cultural meaning  systems – through the mutually linked processes of con- structive internalization and externalization. Patterns of  decorations – ornaments – are relevant as redundant “in- puts” into the internalization/externalization processes.  Ornaments can be viewed not merely as “aesthetic ac- cessories” to human activity contexts but as holistic  devices of cultural guidance of human conduct that  acts through the subjectivity of personal feelings. This  guidance is peripheral in its nature – surrounding the  ordinary life activities with affectively oriented textures  of cultural meanings.

How do we make sense of our environments?  In this paper I suggest a holistic view of human  development on the basis of coordination of  patterns – of the person’s environments, and  of  one’s  interior  spaces  of  affective  think- ing. The theoretical goal here is to take my  theory of internalization/externalization (Law- rence & Valsiner, 1993, 2003; Valsiner, 1997,  2007b) and the hyper-generalization theory  of affect (Valsiner, 2005, 2007a) to the field  of our everyday life contexts. These contexts  are saturated with highly repetitive patterns of  visual and auditory kinds. They are patterns we 

encounter in our activities. All encounters of  organisms with environments can be viewed  as processes of coordinating patterns – cam- ouflage of body patterns relating to patterns  of biological environments, mating based on  body display patterns, textures of surfaces for  walking,  sucking,  swimming,  or  crawling.  Life is patterned – rather than dependent on  singular “stimulus”-“response” relationships.  Of course that is understood in psychology  since 1890s (Ehrenfels, 1890/1988), but its  implications for our general knowledge have  not been elaborated.   In the case of human development, such  double patterning of life – environmental and  intra-mental – acquires a future-oriented flavor.  Patterns are constructed for a purpose – guiding  the person encountering those towards some  goal orientation. Most of these constructed  cultural patterns are peripheral in their relat- ing with our personal worlds – we live among  them rarely noticing them in the background.  We even consider them “mere decorations” –  or ornaments. Our lives are ornamented lives –  and that nature of our activity contexts sets up  new demands for psychology’s methodology  (Diriwächter and Valsiner, 2008). Instead of  continuing the practice of breaking complex 

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Ornamented Worlds and Textures of Feeling •  Jaan Valsiner 68

wholes into analytic elementary constituents,  our methodology leads us to field-theoretic  method construction.

What are ornaments –  and what do they do? We  surround  ourselves  with  a  myriad  of  seemingly useless things. Human beings cre- ate decorations – patterns – largely following  patterning examples from nature that for us  look beautiful – while they for the species who  use these patterns are of utilitarian value. The  colorful feather patterns of birds look beauti- ful to the human eye, while their functional  value for the birds themselves may be in mat- ing regulation or in merging with the envi- ronment to confuse predators. Birdsongs can  be models for human music – but music is a  pattern created by humans with communica- tive functions.   Cultural constructions differ from nature’s  patterns. While human-made ornaments may  mimic nature, they abstract from natural pat- terns and guide human meaning-making. The  whole enterprise of cultural organization of  human lives entails the construction of ways  of distancing oneself from the here-and-now  settings while remaining within the settings  (Valsiner & Rosa, 2007). Ornaments lead such  abstracting generalization efforts – they are re- petitive patterns of some abstracted aspects of  reality – rather than close to original “copies”  of the reality. They trigger further psychologi- cal generalization:

…consists in the subsequent naturalization of a  pure ornament, i.e., an abstract form, and not in  the subsequent stylization of the natural object.  The crucial factor is contained in this antithesis.  For it reveals that the primary element is not the  natural model, but the law abstracted from it. It was  therefore the artistic projection of the regularity  of organic structure which, in consequence of the  intimate organic connection of all living things,  afforded the basis for the aesthetic experience of 

the spectator, and not concordance with the natural  model. (Wörringer, 1963, p. 60)

Our contemporary – mostly empirically ori- ented – anthropology and psychology that em- phasizes human immersion in “situated activ- ity contexts” has overlooked the centrality of  the agency – of the person who, while being  involved within a context, moves far beyond  it in one’s psychological construction of one’s  “inner infinity” (to use William Stern’s term  here). The affective synthesis – generalization  emphasized by Wörringer – is the center of  human aesthetic experience (Vygotsky, 1971).  Yet we need to know how such aesthetic ex- perience is afforded, and how it functions in  situated activity settings.   Where do ornaments begin? Elementary  graphic forms – points or their extensions –  lines – by themselves do not amount to being 

Figure 1. The birth of the minimal ornament

A  B  C

Figure 2. Creating the field – ornament emerging from combination of features (Jones, 1856, p.190)

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Critical Social Studies •  No. 1  •  2008 69

an ornament (Figure 1). It takes some form of  repetition of the pattern to create an ornament.  Such repetition of patterns can be woven to- gether with that of other patterns and located  in selected locations of human ordinary life  (and death) environments. Thus, in his descrip- tion of the basics of Moorish ornament, Jones  (1856/2001, p. 190) explained the principle of  combination (Figure 2)

In surface decorations, any arrangement of forms,  as at A, consisting only of straight lines, is monoto- nous, and affords but imperfect pleasure; but intro- duce lines which tend to carry the eye towards the  angles, as at B, and you have at once an increased  pleasure. Then add lines giving a circular tendency,  as at C, and you have now complete harmony. In  this case the square is the leading form or tonic; the  angular and the curved are subordinate.

Ornaments are patterns with order – a gram- mar of forms (Salingaros, 1996).   Yet the meaning of ornament – decoration –  is often linked with the notion of a non-func- tional or excessive kind of decoration. They  are there – yet we may confess that their only  function is aesthetic. But why are we so sure of 

that? Ornaments have been systematically cre- ated by human beings long before the mean- ing of beauty for its own – aesthetic – sake.  There must exist some social reasons for creat- ing decorated patterns for the ceilings of the  homes of the dead (Figure 3) as well as those  of the living (Figure 4)

Ceilings  as  places  for  ornamentation  are  interesting.  It  is  obvious  that  most  human   everyday activity takes place within the verti- cal plane – hence ornamentation located on  our vertical surfaces is of primary function for  our psychological environments. Thus, walls,  screens, windows, etc. are often decorated by  ornaments. Yet the history of recorded orna- ments from Ancient Egypt to our days includes  ceiling ornaments – leaving us with the func- tional question of why would the horizontal  structures – floors, ceilings – be ornamented.  Such horizontal decoration can be parallel to  the build-up of relevant buildings – churches,  temples, or political monuments – upwards.  When the mundane everyday activities en- counter vertically layered environmental set- tings, their transcendental counterparts are or- ganized into horizontally located layers facing  either upwards (ceilings, church towers, etc)  or downwards (floors, catacombs).   The habits of sleeping and waking bring  the patterning of the ceilings to the field of at-

Figure 3. Ceiling ornament in an Ancient Egyptian tomb (A) and in a 20th century public building (B)

A B

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tention of architects and designers. Worries of  parents who decorate the child’s sleeping envi- ronments with different patterns are function- ally examples of ceiling decorations – the need  to consider what kind of visual patterns appear  in front of the child’s eyes when s/he wakes  up, is itself a tacit recognition of the function  of ornaments in human development.

Ornaments as cultural arenas  of meaning construction Ornaments  are  omnipresent.  We  can  find  ornaments below us (on the surfaces on which  we move), on all sides (in between which we  move) and above our heads – in the form of  the  natural  clouds  and  cultural  decorations  of  ceilings.  Such  holistic  patterning  of  our  perceptual environment is obvious in every- thing that surrounds us – architecture, textiles,  wallpaper,  monuments,  etc.  They  are  also  right on our bodies – in the form of tattoos  and body painting, near our bodies in private  (underwear) and public (costumes), and they  envelope our immediate activity contexts of  sleeping  (lace  decorations  on  pillows  and  bedspreads), eating (patterned tablecloths and  napkins). Furniture is often filled with orna- ments – at home and in public settings. Walls  are covered by wallpaper – ornamented – or  made of ceramic tiles.

Tension within the exaggerated opposition PLAIN <> FANCY The history of ornaments is usually elaborated  in terms of a history of art and architecture  (Hamlin, 1923). When cultural objects were  constructed, the surfaces may remain as those  functionally were (plain) – or become covered  with add-ons the function of which is decora- tive. The contrast to the decorated (A) state is  its non-decorated (“PLAIN”) opposite (non- A) – in line with the A-non-A perspective on  meaning (Josephs, Valsiner, & Surgan, 1999).  Here the dynamics of A-non-A acquires a new 

focus – a growth from A (decorated) to Hyper- A (hyper-decorated – “FANCY” – Figure 4) The latter can take the form of exaggera- tion of selected parts of the figure, or through  proliferation of the redundancy – by repetition  of the pattern of its ground that is ornamented.  By manifold replicating, a simple element of  an ornament covers the sensory field of the  person in full, thus “keeping the person within  the field.”   Differences in the trajectories of resolv- ing the tension between PLAIN (non-A) <>  FANCY (hyper-A) in the construction of the  exteriors  of  the  building  between  different  European societies – Spain, Italy, the Nether- lands – demonstrate the prevailing need to  strategically  regulate  the  activity  fields  of  every day  public  worlds.  The  “war  against  decorations” in churches around the Protestant  Reformation in Europe is an example of how  the meaning of excess in decorations was made  into an ideological and political issue that led  to destructive consequences like vandalism in  churches. The “exaggerations” of these deco- rations became viewed as breaches of visual  piety – the {non-A}<>{hyper-A} opposition  moved in the direction of a positive valuation  of the non-A pole. The need to destroy Catho- lic symbolic figures first – before turning to  the human beings who revered these figures –  was the first step. Likewise, pulling down the  monument of a deposed dictator after the first  entrance into a city – the full conquering of  which may take years – indicates the rhetoric  power of hyper-exaggerated symbols.   The tension can lead also to an opposite 

Figure 4. The growth of a sign and escalation of affective tension

ANon-A

Hyper-A Escalated

tension

growing of A

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build-up of symbols – on the hyper-exagger- ated  side.  From  the  history  of  architecture  we know of the emergence of the architec- tural style of churriguresco in 18th century  Spain (Hamlin, 1923, p. 291-293) that signi- fies hyper-decoration of selected parts of the  architectural space – described as frantically Baroque (see Figure 5). Church architecture in  the Spanish colonial domains in the Americas  is filled with such abundance of decoration.  From the very emergence, these hyper-deco- rated objects were noticed as such – yet their  function of exaggeration remained in place  and regulated the social lives of people who  may have found such ornaments worth talking  about.   Exaggeration guarantees redundancy – and  redundancy is the only way to guide the direc- tion of open systems – which (by definition)  are unpredictable. As Edmund Leach pointed  out – “the jumble is the message” (Leach,  2000, p. 126) – yet which message, for whom, 

and how does it work? Ornamentation in its  abundance – or its purposeful absence in the  puritan worlds (i.e. “abundance of nothing”) –  is an example of how human living takes place  in a field of exaggerations that the person can- not leave (Valsiner, 2006, 2007a).   The imposing appearance of cathedrals to  pilgrims arriving on their long walk would turn  the excessive details of the architectural orna- ments into images that link the mundane with  the supernatural. The overwhelming impres- sion of the grandiose pattern of abundantly  decorated  building  feeds  into  the  meaning  making facing the scene. Yet ornaments on  buildings can be found anywhere (Figure 6).  By proliferation of their pattern in space and  time ornaments create an inescapable field  structure. Anybody  who  is  passing  by  the  house depicted in Figure 6 – without any goal  of carefully examining the pattern – necessar- ily is exposed to the pattern through at least  peripheral vision.   In the acoustic domain, the music playing  in the background of an activity setting – shop- ping, wedding, etc. – constitutes an all-encom- passing auditory ornament for the activity. In  child development that is exemplified by the  Suzuki method in music education that begins  from enveloping the child completely in the  musical environment. Furthermore – the di-

Figure 5. A “frantic” cathedral – Santiago de Compostela

Figure 6. Side ornament of a house – Santiago de Chile

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rect link of the auditory and visual-kinesthetic  ornamentation of situated activity context is  the tradition of singing while performing an  activity (see Goodale, 1995). In the context of  singing-while-doing, the actor establishes the  unity of the internal affective sphere with the  external socially canalized activity frames. For  example, the song to be sung while collecting  honey among hunters-gatherers of the Nilgiri  Hills (Demmer, 1997) catalyzes the personal  meaningfulness of the activity. Not surpris- ingly, many social rituals – religious, politi- cal, or life cycle transition linked – involve  scripted mandatory singing. The move from  background (external) ornaments to ornaments  that catalyze the internalization of the mean- ing system through fusing the action and its  ornament (e.g., acting while singing) unites  the ornamented and theatrical action worlds.   Most of human living is theatrical – persons  assume social roles and transform these (Turn- er, 1974). In that context human role-assum- ing involves selective and purposeful exagger- ations – dramatizations – that create affective  meaning tensions which lead to ruptures (Zit- toun, 2006) and syntheses of new meanings. 

Through the unity of analogy and opposition  (Foster, 1979) – by way of escalated opposi- tions – we can see the emergence of novelty.  It is as if the developing human being – in the  act of experimenting with the meanings sys- tem and driving the existing opposition to the  breaking threshold – guides one’s own devel- opment. Such rupture is a goals-oriented mo- ment of chaos – often seen as affective tur- moil – that becomes reconstituted into a new  oppositional (B <> non-B) state that grows out  of the (A<> non-A) contrast.

Temporal structure of ornamented activity settings The  use  of  ornaments  in  situated  activity  contexts gives us a picture of ground/figure  relations in the motion of the given activity.  Most human activities entail a movement of  the actor through some environmental struc- tures – entrances from open to closed spaces  (living  room  to  bedroom,  street  to  house;  square to church or temple, etc.). The routes  of such entries are often strategically deco- rated by ornaments – as the entrances to most  churches exemplify. External ornaments in our 

barrier A barrier B

BACKGROUND OF THE GOAL OBJECT

GOAL OBJECT

PERSONAL MOVING

TOWARDS THE GOAL

OBJECT

Figure 7. Strategic locations of ornaments in a situated activity setting (a generic example)

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life contexts are strategically situated to guide  us towards the goal objects set up for us by  goal-directed social institutions (Figure 7).   Human  activities  are  organized  through  movement – the goals-oriented agent moves  through some environmental settings to reach  the goal. In that movement, all the patterning  of the setting is exposed as peripheral input to  the sensory system of the actor. The access to  the goal region (Figure 7) may be guided by  various barriers that limit the actor’s move- ment towards the goal (A and B in Figure 7). It  is precisely the ornamentation of these barriers  that functions as a peripheral cultural canaliza- tion device targeting the acting person who is  moving towards the goal.

Human activities are bounded by constraint  structures (Valsiner, 1997) – and entail en- trances (as well as exits) from these situated  contexts. The tendencies to use ornaments for  entrances – framing the surroundings of doors,  or doors themselves – are present in architec- tural spaces in human history. The ornamenta- tion of the entrance can be contrasted with its  absence further away from the boundary of the  everyday activity that it marks (Figure 8).

Last – but not least – the goal object itself may  be surrounded by an ornamented ground that 

frames it. The example of such ornamented  guidance of affect is the mediaeval focus on  Schaufrömmigkeit (piety of seeing – Morgan,  1998, p. 59) – presentation of scenic images of  the deity in contexts that, while giving primary  focus to the image, surround the viewer with  an affective tone that guides him or her to- wards feeling into the event depicted. Through  the processes of empathy and sympathy the  meanings of the main visual (or acoustic) nar- rative become internalized/externalized. They  lead the formation of an internal value sys- tem – of the subjective ornament of meanings.  Values are internal subjective meaning fields  that totally capture and guide the person who  has constructed them. They can be labeled –  but the labels never capture the holistic nature  of their function.

Internalizing ornaments My main point here is the parallel to external  ornaments within the developing mind – in the  form of the establishment of hyper-generalized  affective fields (Valsiner, 2005 – and Figure 9  below). These fields are semiotic – presenting  the affective meaning for the meaning-maker.   The actions of persons and social institu- tions converge on the set-up and maintenance  of such holistic promoter signs. Creating orna- ments guarantees that the experience of these  decorations  is  surrounded  by  such  signs  –  hence keeping the person within the field –  surrounded by general direction for ways of feeling within the given environment. The  affective domains of human existence are the  primary domains for guiding human think- ing – affective input is the basis for effective  rationality.

A hierarchy of affective semiotic fields The hierarchy of levels of semiotic mediation  of affective processes is depicted in Figure 9.  Level 0 is the universal – for all of the animal  kingdom – physiological anticipation about 

Figure 8. An entrance to a building in Dresden

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the immediate next future event in life. Based  on  that  level,  the  organisms  can  develop  a  generalized, non-mediated “feeling tone” (or  anticipatory affective state, a kind of undif- ferentiated awareness of something – positive,  negative, or ambivalent – that is about to hap- pen). These Level 1 phenomena do not require  semiotic mediation – they are generalizations  based on imagery and activity. It is at this level  where biological regulatory patterns – those  of body patterning and coloring (Badyayev  & Langdeen, 2007) that behavioral interactive  events such as mating are organized. Semioti- cally mediated (i.e., cultural) organization of  the affective field has its roots at the move from  Level 0 to Level 1. The examples of meanings  that exist in the animal worlds – described by  Jakob von Uexküll in his Bedeutungslehre  (1940/1982) – are of Level 1. The person’s  primary affective field is already oriented by  the person’s previous experience.   The quasi-differentiated affective complex  of the affect-within-activity conglomerate be- comes articulated at Level 2 – where a specific  naming of emotions present “in” the experi- encing person, by the person oneself, is taking  place. The undifferentiated field of a particular  directional quality (e.g., positive, negative, or  ambivalent) becomes reflected upon through  assigning the present state of the field a speci- fying name for the emotion felt. So, the person  can say “I am sad”, “I am disgusted”, “I am  happy” or talk about emotions like HAPPI- NESS, SADNESS, ANGER, SURPRISE, etc.  The process of feeling-in-activity has been  changed into a static depiction of “states of  feeling” – de facto entities (“happiness”) based  on states (“I am feeling something positive”)  which on their side were based on the feeling- while-acting.

Generalization of the entified signs (“happi- ness”, “sadness”) proceeds in the direction of  gradual loss of the categorical nature of the  emotion terms and their immersion in the gen-

eralized field (Level 3). The person can refer- ence one’s feeling in general direction terms  (“I am feeling GOOD”) – yet it is a general- ized vague category (“good”, “bad”) rather  than the emerging first generalization (move  Level 1à Level 2) of “I am feeling SOME- THING positive”.   The  sign-mediated  field  of  feelings  can  reach the highest level of hyper-generaliza- tion at Level 4. This entails the emergence  of  feeling  fields  that  overtake  the  person’s  psyche in its totality. The person “just feels”   something – but cannot put that feeling into  words. Examples of aesthetic feelings – cathar- sis experienced during a theatre performance,  reading deeply moving poems or prose, or in  an interpersonal situation of extreme beauty,  indicate that the human affective field can be- come undifferentiated as a result of extensive  abstraction of the emotions involved, and their  overgeneralization to the person’s general feel- ings about oneself or about the world. Theo- retically, that process entails internalization  and abbreviation.   Values are basic human affective guidance  means that are ontogenetically internalized,  but their externalization can be observed in  any  aspect  of  human  conduct. Yet  as  they  have reached such a hyper-generalized way  of being, they are no longer easily accessible  through verbally mediated processes. We can  decisively act as directed by our values – but  are ill at ease telling others what these values  are. If we succeed, we have performed the  Level 4→3 translation of a hyper-generalized  semiotic field into general verbal statements  (e.g., “I feel totally dedicated to science”) that  may refer to the direction of the values but  cannot capture them in their entirety. Values  are not entities – but dynamic semiotic fields.  In human life, affective fields of higher kind –  as depicted in Figure 9 – regulate experience in  its totality. Affective fields can be hyper-gen- eralized meanings that have left their original  context of emergence and flavour new experi-

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Critical Social Studies •  No. 1  •  2008 75

ences. Thus, a person may develop the notion  “life is unfair” from a series of life events of  being mistreated.

How development happens – or: On the importance of wallpaper Ontogeny involves weaving together the pat- terned flow of encounters with the textured 

world, and the internal subjective affective  fields that are constantly under construction  through hyper-generalization. As is usual, we  can begin to understand the extraordinary na- ture of very ordinary life events when there  are ruptures in the ordinary.   In around 1861 in a small country home of  a former officer of the Russian army, far from 

Figure 9. Levels of affective fields (from Valsiner, 2007, p. 312)

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Ornamented Worlds and Textures of Feeling •  Jaan Valsiner 76

St. Peterburg, repairs were being made to re- furbish the house. It turned out there was not  enough wallpaper brought from the capital –  and the decision was made to use left-over  paper to cover the children’s bedroom walls.  By  coincidence,  lithographic  lecture  notes  of the father on mathematics – found on the  attic – were used. The retrospective account  by a 11-year old girl captures the flavor of the  new life this makeshift wallpaper created:

As I looked at the nursery walls one day, I noticed  that certain things were shown on them which I had  already heard mentioned by Uncle. Since I was in  any case quite electrified by the things he told me,  I began scrutinizing the walls very attentively. It  amused me to examine these sheets, yellowed by  time, all speckled over with some kind of hiero- glyphs whose meaning escaped me completely but which, I felt, must signify something very wise and interesting. And I would stand by the wall for hours on end, reading and rereading what was written there. (Kovalevskaya, 1978, p. 215,  added emphasis)

That this kind of encounter with the patterns  on  such  makeshift  wallpaper  entails  social  guidance – the mentioned Uncle, who had  been regularly chatting with the girl:

Uncle used to tell me fairytales and teach me how  to play chess. Then, unexpectedly carried away by his own thoughts, he would initiate me into the secrets of the various economic and social projects through which he dreamed of benefitting humanity. But more than anything else, he loved to  communicate the things he had succeeded in read- ing and learning in the course of his long life.   It was during these conversations that I first  had occasion to hear about certain mathematical  concepts which made a very powerful impression  upon me. Uncle spoke of “squaring the circle,”  about the asymptote – that straight line which the  curve constantly approaches without ever reach- ing it – and about many other things which were quite unintelligible to me and yet seemed mysteri- ous and at the same time deeply attractive. (ibid,  p. 214, added emphasis)

The girl – Sofia Kovalevskaya – became one  of the most celebrated and original mathemati- cians of the 19th century when there was no ed- ucational discussion of few women in the hard  sciences, or the “math phobia” in schools, etc.  Women were simply not in academia – being  forbidden to attend university courses – yet the  highly dedicated and motivated ones prevailed  and excelled. No social institution was offering  to “help” them to “overcome” their supposed  “inferiority” – rather, the unconditionally re- pressive social system triggered various trajec- tories of resilience. Some of these proved to  result in excellence in the sciences.   What emerges as an important point from  this example is the role of episodic synthe- sis (see Vygotsky, 1971) of the interpersonal  (listening to the talkative uncle) and individ- ual experiences (reading the wallpaper). The  way in which development works is not that  of active teaching-and-learning in the here- and-now special setting (a school lesson), but  rather a bricolage of moments of haphazard  social suggestions and occasional links with  environment through concentrated attention.  Life is not an institutionalized training ground  where the more experienced “social others” –  teachers, parents, peers – do their utmost in  the lesson framework to bring the “novices”  to the ever-expanding horizons of new know- ledge. Instead, knowledge is acquired in an  ambivalent social maze of limitations, bogus  value attributions, pretense of “help” to mask  acts of appropriation, and so on. Developing  ignorance – under the cover of “choice”, “op- portunity”, and “right to know” is an important  social goal orientation for any profit-oriented  social institution in a globalizing consumer  society.  Filling  our  lives  with  ornaments  –  through the television commercials of our day,  similar to church decorations in the pre-literate  eras – is a vehicle amply used in implicit social  guidance of human development.

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General Conclusions Ornaments are bases for holistic experienc- ing – and holistic abstraction. Hence the power  of abundance – including here its null case  (absence of ornament) for the human psyche.  An ornamented world keeps the experiencing  person “within the field” – not letting him/her  escape, while at the same time not particu- larly demanding attention or goals-oriented  actions in relation to the patterns. It is there- fore not surprising that the function of orna- ments has been viewed usually in terms of  aesthetics, rather than those for psychological  development.   Both biological and cultural worlds create  human life conditions in the form of multiple  potentially infinite fields that are abundant.  We  can  consider  human  development  as  a  coordination – with qualitative ruptures – of  two holistic fields of external and internal in- finities of pattern transformation. Within these  coordinated fields, the principle of redundancy  guarantees multi-faceted canalization of the  developing  organism  in  socially  desirable  directions.

Acknowledgment The pleasures of Chinese food in Copenha- gen – and discussions with Marianne Hede- gaard, Pernille Hviid, Jytte Bang, and Char- lotte Mathiassen – set the foundation for this  synthesis of architecture and human devel- opment. I am grateful to Max Berkowitz for  our recurrent discussions of the nature of sci- ence, and for his provision of the lead for the  Kovalevskaya example. Suggestions by two  unknown editorial reviewers were helpful for  bringing this article to its completion.

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