The Making of a Dialogical Theory: Social Representations and Communication 1009294997, 9781009294997
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THE MAKING OF A DIALOGICAL THEORY
Creating a stimulating social theory with long-lasting influence for generations of scholars is driven by multiple interacting factors. The fortune of a theory is determined not only by the author’s creative mind but also by the ways in which principal concepts are understood and interpreted. The proper understanding of a social theory requires a good grasp of major historical, political, and cultural challenges that contribute to its making. Considering these issues, Marková explores Serge Moscovici’s theory of social representations and communication as a case study in the making of a dialogical social theory. She analyses both the undeveloped features and the forward-moving, inspirational highlights of the theory and presents them as a resource for linking issues and problems from diverse domains and disciplines. This dialogical approach has the potential to advance the dyad Self–Other as an irreducible intellectual, ethical, and aesthetic unit in epistemologies of the human and social sciences. ˊ was born in Czechoslovakia and is now Professor Emeritus in Psychology at the University of Stirling, UK. Her previous books include The Making of Modern Social Psychology (with Serge Moscovici; Polity Press, ), Dialogicality and Social Representations (Cambridge University Press, ), and The Dialogical Mind: Common Sense and Ethics (Cambridge University Press, ). She is a fellow of the British Academy, the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and the British Psychological Society.
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THE MAKING OF A DIALOGICAL THEORY Social Representations and Communication
IVANA MARKOVÁ University of Stirling
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Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge , United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, th Floor, New York, , USA Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, , Australia –, rd Floor, Plot , Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – , India Penang Road, #–/, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore Cambridge University Press is part of Cambridge University Press & Assessment, a department of the University of Cambridge. We share the University’s mission to contribute to society through the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/ : ./ © Ivana Marková This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press & Assessment. First published A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data : Marková, Ivana, author. : The making of a dialogical theory : social representations and communication / Ivana Marková, University of Stirling. : Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, . | Includes bibliographical references and index. : (print) | (ebook) | (hardback) | (paperback) | (epub) : : Dialogical theory. | Social representations. | Social knowledge. : . (print) | (ebook) | /.–dc/eng/ LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/ LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/ ---- Hardback Cambridge University Press & Assessment has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
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Contents
List of Figures Acknowledgements
page viii ix
Introduction Socio-political Sources of the Theory of Social Representations . . . . . . . . .
The Second World War and Social Psychology Migration and Cultural Experience Racism as a Subject of Study Theory and Practice of Social Psychology after the War Moscow or Paris? Debates about Marxism Why Did He Leave the Paradise? Psychoanalysis Conclusion
A Political Refugee in Paris . . . . . . . .
Empirical Exploration of Psychoanalysis as a Social Representation The ‘Age of Intellectual Innocence’ in Writing Psychoanalysis () Reviews of Psychoanalysis in
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Social Psychology and Science The Choice of Psychoanalysis to Study Social Representations Serge Moscovici’s Two Fathers: Daniel Lagache and Alexandre Koyré New Ideas about Communication in Cybernetics From Attitudes to Social Representations Phenomenology Values and Ethical Choices Conclusion
The ‘Age of Intellectual Innocence’ in Psychoanalysis () . . .
Contents
vi
. Emile Durkheim in the First Edition of Psychoanalysis . Serge Moscovici and Ernst Cassirer . Epistemological Presuppositions and the Main Concepts in Psychoanalysis . Two Hypotheses . Conclusion
The Durkheimian in Psychoanalysis () . . . .
After Psychoanalysis () The Second Edition of Psychoanalysis in Concepts at the Heart of the Theory of Social Representations Conclusion
The ‘Great Smoky Dragon’
. The ‘Great Smoky Dragon’: The Aftermath (Post Second Edition of Psychoanalysis) . The Structural Approaches to the Study of Social Representations . Organising Principles in the Study of Social Representations . Socio-cultural/Anthropological Approaches to the Study of Social Representations . Sociogenetic Approach . Communication Approach . Conclusion
Pseudo-dialogues and Building Bridges . . . . .
The Theory Travels Abroad Problems of Terminology and of Meanings Pseudo-dialogues about Social Representations Linking Social Representations with Other Social Theories Conclusion
Social Representations and Common Sense . . . . . .
What Is Common Sense? The Unconscious Common Sense as Irresistible Beliefs Themata Common Sense and Other Forms of Socially Shared Knowledge Conclusion
Meanings and Knowledge as Semiotic Processes . Social Representations as Symbolic Processes . Figurative Schema and Figurative Equation
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Contents . . .
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The Infinite Meaning-Making Processes Symbolic Relations in Meaning-Making Processes Conclusion
They ‘Made Flowers Grow Where It Seemed Impossible’
. . . . .
Moscovici’s Triadic Model the Self–Other–Object The Ego–Alter–Object through Dialogical Rationality The Ego–Alter–Object in Real-Life Situations Dialogicality of the Self and Other in Extreme Situations Conclusion
Social Representations as Unique Phenomena: Dynamics and Complexity . . . . .
Dialogical Single Cases Dynamics and Complexity Time and Temporality Complexity Conclusion
The Making of Dialogical Theories . . . .
Social Theories as Dialogues What Has the Theory of Social Representations Achieved? Theorising in the Stream of Worldviews Conclusion
Afterword
References Index
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Figures
. Peirce’s and Moscovici’s triadic models page . Knowledge and beliefs are jointly and asymmetrically constructed by the knower and Others (in Marková, )
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Acknowledgements
Over many years, I have discussed the central issues concerning the making of a dialogical social theory, and of the theory of social representations and communication, with colleagues and friends. I view this book as a continuation of my previous volumes on dialogicality published with Cambridge University Press. I wish, specifically, to acknowledge discussions held with members of the study group in Cambridge on dialogical single case studies from to (Martina Cabra, Flora Cornish, Clare Coultas, Pernille Hviid, Cathy Nicholson, Sophie Zadeh, Tania Zittoun) coordinated by Sophie Zadeh. Three persons (Alex Gillespie, Ivana S. Marková, and Sophie Zadeh) very patiently read the whole manuscript of this book and provided helpful corrections and comments. Other colleagues and friends read various chapters and made valuable comments: Martina Cabra, Flora Cornish, Jorge Correia Jesuino, Adelina Novaes, Jacqueline Priego-Hernández, and Tania Zittoun. During the last few years, I have given lectures and seminars on some of the issues raised in this book in the Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science at the London School of Economics, in the Institute of Psychology and Education at the University of Neuchâtel, in the Carlos Chagas Foundation, Sao Paulo, Brazil, and in the research team of Work Psychology and Clinic of Activity at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers in Paris, and benefited from discussions and comments from colleagues. In , I had intensive seminars on dialogicality and social representations with Timo Häkli and Jenni Savonen from the University of Helsinki, who read and commented on several chapters and drew attention to some inconsistencies in my text. I am grateful to Flora Cornish for allowing me to use the quotation from her article as the title for Chapter . I also acknowledge the guidance and help of the commissioning editor Janka Romero, Rowan Groat, Anne Raymond from Cambridge University Press, and Pete Gentry for excellent and professional copy-editing.
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Introduction
The making of an inspirational social theory with long-lasting influence for generations of scholars is driven by multiple interacting factors. Attempts at unravelling these require the involvement of surrounding disciplines, exploration of their histories, and understanding the role of the Spirit of the Time (zeitgeist) and its major challenges. These interacting factors indicate that not only the author’s creative mind but also the ways in which his/her principal concepts are understood and interpreted determine the fortune of his/her theory. Some ideas get miscomprehended or ignored; some never see their climax; others are treated uncritically as unquestionable facts. The proper understanding of a social theory, therefore, requires not only the awareness of the contribution made by its creator but also a good grasp of the historical, cultural, and political environment in which the theory develops and is appreciated by others. Some historical periods appear to flow relatively slowly, without obvious changes and, seemingly, with few new ideas or breakthrough inventions. Other periods appear to exude revolutionary advancements in which the abundance of new discoveries can overwhelm citizens who may be barely able to grasp their significance and implications. The philosopher Georg W. F. Hegel expressed his views on contrasts in the quality and kinds of human activities between, on the one hand, situations in which the lives of humans are threatened and, on the other, those circumstances in which humans live in relative peace. He commented that prolonged or ‘perpetual’ calm leads to stagnation, indifference to stabilised institutions, and to passivity. In contrast, wars or revolutions threaten the very existence of humanity, and the struggle for survival strengthens individuals and nations and their ethical health (Hegel, /, /, pp. –). However, one might make a totally opposite observation in finding that revolutions, wars, and their aftermath provoke moral devastations and general decay. Hegel’s comment is not a support of wars and crises in order to advance science. Rather, his observation suggests that the threat to
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Introduction
life and the struggle for survival may galvanise and focus the human mind in a specific direction and lead to engaged actions. For example, the Covid pandemic has led to unparalleled scientific and professional activity as well as to the public’s ethical engagement and to taking responsibility for the Self and Others. Such unique events that focus the human mind in a specific direction have fundamental effects on the creation of social theories. Moreover, they suggest that the making of a social theory, too, is a unique event that must be explored on its own merits. Not only are the creators of great theories remarkable individuals but they conceive their projects in irreplaceable conditions and are surrounded by irreplaceable Others. Exploring such theories can reveal pointers towards new ideas, advanced concepts, and lead to practical implications that extend beyond a theory’s boundaries. In other words, attention to a unique theory can serve as a case example to help one understand the myriad of elements that are involved in the creation and development of other social theories. I have chosen to write about Serge Moscovici’s theory of social representations and communication because of my own long dialogue with the theory. It formed part of my intellectual history and, through my struggles with it, it has been important in transforming my own thinking. Having originally rejected the theory as ill-defined, inconsistent, and yet provocative, I was quickly won over. In , Serge Moscovici invited me to the European Laboratory of Social Psychology in the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme in Paris. One morning, we were discussing social psychology in the Café Française in front of la Bastille and he spoke with great knowledge about the Prague School of Linguistics and the relevance of language and communication for the study of social representations. Moscovici was always puzzled as to how it was possible for social psychology to develop as a social science discipline without paying any attention to language or showing much interest in communication. In his book Psychosociology of Language, Moscovici (b) observed that linguists were not interested in social psychology and social psychologists were not interested in linguistics. Social psychologists have not been interested in language probably because they thought it was not their domain. There were exceptions, of course. Ragnar Rommetveit was a notable example at that time, and his ideas had a most profound influence on my thinking. Following my stay in Paris, in , I carried out dialogues with Serge Moscovici (Moscovici and Marková, , ) and sought answers to questions that my colleagues and students also wanted to know. These included, for example, the studies of attitudes, communication, common
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Introduction
sense, social representations, social influence, language, social change, as well as politics and Marxism. Marxism, specifically, influenced both Moscovici’s and my own thinking, though in totally opposite ways. He started his career as a Marxist; I was an anti-Marxist from the very beginning. Later, Moscovici invited me to write a book with him on The Making of Modern Social Psychology (Moscovici and Marková, ). In the process of working with him on that book, I learned a great deal about his epistemological presuppositions and his thinking. The entire work of Serge Moscovici was a response to momentous political and social events that shook the world, including his personal experiences of those upheavals. Having survived the horrors of Nazism, including the pogroms on Jews where he barely escaped death (Moscovici, a, ), immediately after the Second World War, Moscovici travelled from Romania to Germany to confirm with his own eyes that Nazism was demolished. Destroyed Germany made deep impressions on him as a very young person. He posed questions to himself, such as how was it possible that Nazi ideology could attract the rational thought of so many people? How was it possible that so many people joined Nazism, believed the Fu¨hrer, supported atrocities against Jews, other minorities, and indeed against anybody who did not endorse Hitler’s orders? As I understood his ideas, throughout his life, Moscovici kept asking the question about Otherness in two ways. First, who is the Other, that is, how does the individual create the sense of other people? And, second, who is the individual and what is society? Concerning the first question, we may interpret Moscovici as saying that the Other is like me and yet different and strange. The Other is someone who may facilitate close intersubjective relations and aim to resolve conflicts but, equally, they may present danger and the possibility of brutal conflicts that destroy unwanted humans. Although Moscovici had experienced these issues personally and deeply in his youth, he made them part of his explicit writing only later in his life when he spoke directly about the problems of Otherness and of stigma. He explained at the beginning of his essay on two forms of thought in modernity (Moscovici, ) why he had not written about discrimination, racism, identity, and other related concepts. It was not because he did not know anything about them but because he knew too much about these phenomena: he had lived through them but was afraid to write about them. The second question percolated explicitly throughout all of Moscovici’s work. We find it in his studies of the dynamics of groups, social influence,
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Introduction
ecology problems, and, above all, in his theory of social representations and communication. During the last years of his life, in our discussions, he talked extensively about the beginnings of his theorising on social representations and communication after he had come to France, and about the political and intellectual resources of the theory. These discussions were intended for publication as a dialogue but, unfortunately, due to Moscovici’s illness, this project remained unfinished. Parts of our discussions are incorporated in Chapters and of this book. It was only in the years after Moscovici’s death that I returned to the beginnings of his theory of social representations and communication and read, for the first time, the first edition of Psychoanalysis (), published only in French. The first edition was Moscovici’s PhD thesis; it was difficult to find in libraries and bookshops and I acquired it in a secondhand shop in Paris with uncut pages. Only then did I realise the big difference between the first and second editions: the first was nonDurkheimian; in the second, Moscovici presented himself as a disciple of Durkheim. This discovery led me to redefine, for myself, the theory of social representations and communication and I researched on how to resolve the conflicts and inconsistencies concerning this theory that I had experienced much earlier. The theory of social representations and communication brings to light novel ideas, to fight for and against, rather than ones to be accepted as whole truths or total errors. There are contradictions in these ideas but they should not be ignored or rejected as non-essential. Their value is in their being resources for thinking. Moscovici’s creativity and capacity to connect issues and problems from diverse domains and disciplines was vast, and it opened up the theory’s rich potential for development and for fulfilling its role as an anthropology of modern culture, to which Moscovici aspired.
Content of the Book There are different ways of writing a social theory, and there are different ways of writing about the theory of social representations and communication. There have been many full-scale treatments of the theory in handbooks, textbooks, books, chapters, articles, and newspaper reports. Each interpretation presents an effort to do justice to the theory’s achievements and future potentialities, as well as to its problems and inconsistencies.
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Introduction
As I show in this book, there are different ways in which the theory of social representations has been comprehended and clarified. I am presenting here one way in which this theory can be interpreted: I view it in a dialogical perspective. It is derived from my own knowledge and understanding of the philosophical epistemology of dialogicality and from my dialogues with Moscovici. Therefore, I make extensive references to dialogical scholars, for example, Vico, Hegel, Cassirer, Bakhtin, Tarkovsky, Morin, among others. Consequently, I emphasise the concepts of language, forms of thinking and knowledge, the triadic model Ego–Alter– Object, ethics, aesthetics, temporality, and dialogue in the theory of social representations and communication. No doubt, others would view the theory and its potentials differently. This book is composed of two parts. In Part I, I trace the development and diversification of the theory, its critiques, interpretations, and ideas as proposed by Moscovici and his followers. In Part II, I focus on issues that, in my view, were not clarified in Moscovici’s original approach or are promising for further development. The choice and understandings of these issues are underlain by my dialogical perspective, and it is likely that Moscovici would disagree with some of my interpretations and developments of the theory. Chapter outlines the political resources of the theory of social representations and communication, while Chapter is concerned with its intellectual resources. These two chapters are partly based on my dialogues with Moscovici and with his preoccupation with the beginnings of the theory after his arrival in Paris in . He viewed these beginnings as arising from his experiences during the War, the post-War political and social situation, and from his scholarly inspirations in his early experience in Paris during his ‘age of intellectual innocence’. Only with hindsight did I realise that Emile Durkheim played a minimal, if not zero, role in our discussions about these beginnings of the theory. Chapter depicts the first edition of Psychoanalysis. I claim that it was inspired by the philosophy of Hegel, Marx, and Cassirer, as well as by ideas from social anthropology and sociology with which Moscovici was familiar at that time. Moscovici was strongly influenced by Piaget, with whom he regularly held discussions when Piaget had the Chair in Paris in –. Moscovici was also influenced by the Marxist developmental psychologist Henri Wallon and by the Communist scholar, another Romanian Jew, Lucien Goldmann, who lived in Paris at that time. As Moscovici () later admitted, he did not know much of the work
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Introduction
of Emile Durkheim, who figured very little in the first edition of Psychoanalysis. Chapter portrays the second edition of Psychoanalysis in . By that time, Moscovici was a well-respected international scholar and presented himself as a follower of Durkheim. His aim was to modernise Durkheim. The second edition of Psychoanalysis became known outside France and the subject of appreciation and critique. Chapter discusses the diverse approaches to social representations that developed from Moscovici’s original theory: structural, organising principles, socio-cultural-anthropological, sociogenetic, and communication. Chapter is concerned with the ways the theory was received when it diffused outside France. First, I discuss critiques and pseudo-dialogues between Moscovici and his opponents. Second, I outline numerous attempts to construct bridges between social representations and other theories that both his followers and adversaries advocated. While some of these attempts seriously question the underlying commonalities between diverse theories, others refer to seeming resemblances or superficial similarities; still others use the term ‘representation’ as a substitute for attitudes, opinions, or narratives. Part I concludes with the claims of Moscovici’s followers and opponents that, while the theory of social representations and communication is provocative and provides an alternative vision of social psychology, it is unfinished and requires further development. Part II includes five chapters which address some issues that, in my view, necessitate clarification and further explanation. I develop the dialogical perspective of these issues. Chapter poses a fundamental question about social representations and common-sense knowledge. Are these the same or different phenomena? The theory of social representations and communication involves different forms of socially shared knowledge but not everything is common-sense knowledge. Multiple forms of knowledge, for example, conscious, unconscious, routinised, and reflexive, are usually in tension in the process of formation and change of social representations. Chapter argues that ‘meaning’ and ‘knowledge’ are crucial semiotic concepts in the theory of social representations and communication. They present in various forms and relations and, very often, are not well distinguished and are used indiscriminately. Chapter is concerned with the triadic model the Ego–Alter–Object. Moscovici conceived it as fundamental for the construction of social knowledge and social reality. However, the model is presented only as an
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Introduction
abstract schema, while its values, ethical concerns, engagement, and responsibility have not been problematised and conceptualised. It is vital that the potentialities of this model are discovered, recognised, and further developed. Chapter emphasises that social representations and communication explore dynamic and complex dialogical phenomena, thus implying their uniqueness and the necessity of exploring them as single cases. I view Edgar Morin’s dialogical thinking as crucial for the future development of social representations and communication. Chapter returns to the question posed at the beginning of this book as to why the theory of social representations and communication is a good exemplar of a social theory and of historical, political, and cultural contexts. This chapter involves comments on simultaneous multiple interactions and dialogues between the creator of a theory and various ‘Others’. These include socio-political and cultural-historical environments and their institutions, peers, other researchers, and lay observers, as well as the internal dialogues of the creator of a theory in encountering his/her uncertainties, hopes, or fears. I revisit here Moscovici’s life-long questions of who is the individual and what is society? Do answers to these questions justify the followers of the theory of social representations referring to it as a revolutionary paradigm in the Kuhnian sense? Among various considerations, I particularly emphasise the choices that the creator of a social theory has between pursuing either scholarship and the search for knowledge or the strategies of political success and empire building. The Afterword suggests that the theory of social representations and communication has conceptual capacities to explore the multitude of uncertain and ambiguous complex phenomena that characterise contemporary society.
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The Development and Diversification of the Theory of Social Representations and Communication
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Socio-political Sources of the Theory of Social Representations
. The Second World War and Social Psychology The Second World War had a dramatic impact on the development of natural sciences as well as of social sciences. Inventions in physics during the War, such as the creation and the use of the atomic bomb, showed that human genius and human evil were very closely interconnected. The War also showed close links between the natural and social sciences. Kurt Lewin () argued that it was the realisation of the closeness between scientific advances and the possibilities of the destruction of the world that, after the War, led to an unparalleled expansion of human and social sciences. Moreover, rapid innovations in technology, in cybernetics, computation, and in the new means of communication, had a major effect on the development of social sciences. It was the War and the consequent advancements in physical sciences, Lewin observed, that totally changed perspectives on the importance of social sciences as viewed by the natural sciences as well as by the public. It became apparent that social phenomena, for example, communication, collective intentions, group relations, and social activities, are not about abstract theorising. Instead, they manifest themselves concretely in daily action: they mobilise the masses and, together with technological advancements, co-determine societal transformations and the directions in which humanity evolves. Some social sciences, for example, anthropology, sociology, or economics, had been already well established before the War. Other disciplines, such as social psychology and cross-cultural psychology, became recognised as institutional disciplines during and after the War. It was during the War that social psychology proved its usefulness by providing social knowledge that was applied to wartime purposes and activities. For instance, social psychological research focused on building citizens’ integrity and solidarity, encouraging resilience, and combatting demoralisation (Moscovici and Marková, ). Social psychologists contributed a great
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Development and Diversification
deal to the study of practical societal problems. Atrocities, which the War had brought to the surface, had major impacts on the development of social psychology as a new discipline. For example, after the National Defense Advisory Commission in the USA had set up the nutrition defense program for civilians, Kurt Lewin () got involved in the investigation of the eating habits of diverse groups of people. He used methods of cultural anthropology and psychology to study how to change the eating habits of civilians during the period of food shortages. Social psychologists also contributed to the study of military problems, such as those of the American soldier (Stouffer et al., ), and to explorations of domestic and international attitudes towards the War. They developed new concepts and research tools (Cartwright, ) as well as examined group relations and group dynamics (Lewin, /).
. Migration and Cultural Experience The generation of social scientists who lived through the rise of Nazism, the horrors of the Second World War, and the subsequent rise of Communism and antisemitism in Europe were deeply aware of the interdependence between socio-political circumstances and psychosocial processes transforming the human mind (Marková and Jahoda, , ). Many European social scientists left their threatened countries and migrated elsewhere, particularly to the USA, where they had a tremendous influence on the post-War development of social psychology. Dorwin Cartwright drew attention to the significance of migration to the USA in pointing out that it would be difficult to ‘imagine what the field would be like today if such people as Lewin, Heider, Koehler, Wertheimer, Katona, Lazarsfeld and the Brunswiks had not come to the United States as they did’ (Cartwright, , p. ). Equally, the development of social psychology in Europe was profoundly influenced by migrating individuals such as Marie Jahoda, Henri Tajfel, Serge Moscovici, Gustav Jahoda, Hilde Himmelweit, and Rudolf Schaffer, among others (Moscovici and Marková, ; Marková and Jahoda, ). The engagement of social psychologists with political and practical problems of their time was a primary role they took on after the War. As migrants, they not only encountered political alternatives in their newly adopted countries but also experienced cultural differences changing their life perspectives. Marie Jahoda, imprisoned in Austria before the War for her political involvement with the Democratic Party, and released only on the
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Socio-political Sources
condition that she would immediately leave the country, described her experience: The transition from Austria to England and then the transition to America with, again, a different culture, then the transition back here, these changes in my life, which were really determined largely by world history, were a very good education for social psychology: the direct experience, the direct involvement and feeling within one’s own skin how different cultures can be, even when they speak the same languages as here and in America (in Fryer, , p. ).
The transition from one culture to another enabled the migrating social psychologists, in Jahoda’s words, to make invisible things visible. The strangeness of a new situation, in which one cannot follow one’s own established habits, forces the individual to search, often by trial and error, for what it is that guides local citizens to do this or that. The search for underlying mechanisms or reasons for their specific activities is, indeed, ‘a very good education for social psychology’ as well as the main task for research in social theories. As Jahoda admitted, it was her personal involvement and living experience in concrete situations that gave rise to the topics of her study: ‘I am very much convinced that, whether we admit it or not, extra-scientific factors influence virtually everybody’s thinking, particularly in the social sciences . . .. I think personal life history must have an influence on the way thinking develops’ (in Fryer, , pp. –). She emphasised that her political activity was, above all, concerned with the relations between individuals, their impact on the environment, and the differences among people resulting from these mutual relations. Psychology was the best preparation for the political and community activities that Jahoda wished to carry out.
. Racism as a Subject of Study The War exposed the most terrible atrocities which humans inflicted on other human beings. The shameless purpose of these was to purify
Alex Gillespie reminded me that the effect of life history was also the main point in Mead’s () study of the movements of thought in the nineteenth century, where he explained the different trajectories of scholarship in Europe and America due to different socio-historical conditions. This point can be expanded to daily thinking. For example, Mead (, p. ) referred to the fact that in the nineteenth century, in contrast to Europe, social conditions of American workers did not lead to the development of social and class consciousness, and to organised movements of workers. Mead suggested that this was because wages of American workers were protected by tariffs providing for better working conditions than were the case in Europe.
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Development and Diversification
mankind of ‘inferior races’ who were subjected to persecution, butchery, and annihilation in the name of science and progress. The post-War research on the nature of racism, and on the psychological and political phenomena in relation to persecution of ‘inferior races’ all over the world, contributed to the emergence of cross-cultural psychology as a discipline in which social psychologists played a crucial role. It led, in , to the establishment of the International Association for Cross-cultural Psychology, of which Gustav Jahoda served as its first full-term president. Gustav Jahoda, himself a persecuted refugee, published studies on political issues, on racist attitudes soon after the War (Jahoda, , ), and, subsequently, on children’s ideas about nationality (Jahoda, ). Another refugee, Henri Tajfel, who crossed several countries after the War, published on stereotypes, on the nature and the development of nationalism, on the perception of similarities and differences among people, and on children’s awareness of foreigners (e.g., Tajfel, , , ). In contrast, for others who experienced persecution and racism, like Serge Moscovici, it proved impossible to explicitly write about these issues at the time (see Introduction). As he explained later (Moscovici, ), he could not write about such phenomena so soon after the War because they were still too painful to be expressed.
. Theory and Practice of Social Psychology after the War The post-War generation of social psychologists faced demoralised humans and their broken families and saw devastated cities and wrecked educational institutions. The study of daily problems appeared to be crucial in the reconstruction of the ruined world and in rehumanising the shattered relations among people. All these contributed to the development of close links between theoretical and practical problems. Social psychologists involved themselves in management, training, administration, and business and in any fields that they believed would lead to the reconstruction of the world. Both the world distorted by the War and the outdated and inefficient ways of management came under scrutiny. For example, Serge
Although Marie Jahoda and Gustav Jahoda were both Austrians, there was no family relation between them. The family of Marie Jahoda came to Austria from Bohemia much earlier than the family of Gustav Jahoda, who arrived in Austria in the nineteenth century. The name ‘Jahoda’ means ‘strawberry’ in the Czech language. Alex Gillespie pointed out to me that, despite crises in many domains of life, we must not forget optimism, and even utopianism, after the Second World War when most of the welfare state systems were created. For example, when the National Health Service was founded in in the UK, modernist architecture and the building of new towns were planned and social problems became the focus of attention.
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Socio-political Sources
Moscovici (e.g., Moscovici and Columelli, ; Moscovici and Toublanc, ; Moscovici, , , b) studied, from , the reconversion of ineffective old factories in the Upper Aude Valley in south-eastern France. This isolated region had been the site of the manufacturing of felt hats since the nineteenth century but, in , the hat-making industry was in chronic crisis leading to widespread unemployment, which, in turn, had brought about societal changes. During the s, these factories underwent various kinds of reconversion: one factory totally abandoned the production of felt hats; another converted some of its workshops; still others closed completely. Using ethnographic methods, Moscovici (b) studied the workers’ social representations of their labour in these different conditions and explored what kinds of social changes contributed to their representations. Marie Jahoda, throughout her long life, remained critical of psychology removed from the study of practical problems and fiercely resisted pressures imposed upon her by the UK psychological establishment. When she designed her courses at Brunel University in the UK (–), in each year of a four-year programme, students spent six months in college and six months in practical placements, for example, in prisons, hospitals, industrial departments, and others. She described troubles with the British Psychological Society in ‘getting the course accredited because of the sandwich principle, the absence of animal work and what was regarded as insufficient laboratory work’ (in Fryer and Jahoda, , p. ). Very soon after the War, the field of the newly established social psychology in the USA and in Europe became split between experimental social psychology aiming to study even complex social phenomena in the laboratory, and social psychology attached to social anthropology and sociology (De Bie et al., ; Moscovici and Marková, ). The younger generation of social psychologists, not surprisingly, became more attracted to the American experimental social psychology, which professed to make scientific advancements, while the problems with which the older generation were concerned had less appeal. Having experienced the War, the older generation, preoccupied with humans and with their existential problems in a holistic manner, could not understand the effort of young scholars and researchers studying small elements of interactions and of behaviour. For those who survived the War, studying such minute interactions was no more than a trivial enterprise.
Rupert Brown’s (, p. ) biography of Henri Tajfel describes the following case: Professor Wolfgang Stroebe, at that time a postdoctoral fellow whom Tajfel invited to Bristol for one year, was giving a seminar on interpersonal attraction in dating and marriage, which was based on a paper he
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Development and Diversification
.
Moscow or Paris?
Serge Moscovici (–) was born in Brăila, Romania. He lived with his father who was a grain merchant, moving to different places. When Moscovici was thirteen years old, he was expelled from high school because he was a Jew. He (Moscovici, a) described his childhood and youth in Romania in his autobiography Chronique des années égarées. In , at the age of sixteen, he joined the Communist Party, believing that the political engagement would enable him to mentally survive in a world full of misery, prejudice, and antisemitism. During the War, it was forbidden to be a member of the Communist Party and, therefore, it was dangerous not only for the individual who took the risk but also for his/her relatives. Moscovici and his colleagues met secretly in their little cells, in fear of being discovered by the Nazis, and, at the same time, as he later described, experienced the romanticism of such adventures. After the War, Romania was led by the Communist Party and dominated by Marxist ideology. With his experience of the War, antisemitism, an inability to pursue his studies, and in admiration of the Soviet Union and Stalin, Moscovici wished to make dramatic changes in his life: ‘J’étais bien résolu à changer d’existence pour devenir un homme d’étude’ (I was determined to change my life and become a man of study) (Moscovici, a, p. ). His dream was to leave for Moscow and pursue his studies at the university. The problem was to obtain a visa for the Soviet Union, which proved to be very difficult, and he could see no ways of acquiring it. In the event, it happened that the famous Soviet writer Ilya Ehrenburg visited Bucharest and Moscovici went there hoping to meet him. He pretended that he was a journalist who wanted to interview Ehrenburg. He succeeded in meeting Ehrenburg and asked him for help in obtaining a had just published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Listening for ten minutes, Tajfel became restless; he phoned Paris, speaking in French; then, continuing phoning, he left the room and returned only towards the end of Stroebe’s seminar when he asked him: ‘Wolfgang, I really have only one question: for an intelligent guy, why do you study such trivial issues?’ Another example comes from my dialogue with Moscovici (Moscovici and Marková, ). Politics was for Moscovici one of the central themes of social psychology and ‘the analysis of literary texts based on dissidents is one way of progressing with the study of minorities. Laboratory experiments could sometimes become no more than a series of little studies, one leading to another, one a refinement of the previous one and so on, all together a kind of a closed intellectual world’ (Moscovici and Marková, , p. ). Although Moscovici appreciated that his research on active minorities attracted a great deal of attention, he regretted that rather than studying active minorities in political engagements, for example, of political dissidents, experimental studies of minorities did no more than manipulate dependent and independent variables to obtain statistical data.
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visa for the USSR. However, Moscovici was then stunned by what Ehrenburg told him. The Soviet Union was a very different country from what Moscovici had imagined it to be. Moscow was not Paris, and his dream about studying in Moscow was totally unrealistic. Ehrenburg explained that the Soviet Union was a vast country in which individuals were often not treated according to the ethical and idealistic expectations that Moscovici had. He warned him not to go to the Soviet Union and certainly did not offer to help with the visa. In remembering this event later, Moscovici doubted whether during the discussion Ehrenburg even mentioned the name of Stalin, that is, ‘the symbol of revolution’. Moscovici was extremely perturbed by this experience with Ehrenburg, which totally contradicted his vision of the Soviet Union. This episode determined his future. He gradually realised the complexity of political events, of ideology, and conflicts between different actors in the Soviet Union and elsewhere. After the War, the situation in Romania was becoming more and more difficult with the rise of a new wave of antisemitism and Moscovici, together with four of his Jewish friends, decided to leave Romania and emigrate to Paris. He secretly left Romania in (Moscovici, a, ), travelling across several European countries, living in camps for displaced persons, and arriving finally in Paris in January at the age of twenty-two. Despite wanting to be a ‘man of study’, when Serge Moscovici turned up in Paris as a political refugee (Moscovici, ), he had no idea about
Moscovici (a) described this episode in considerable detail in the first volume of his autobiography Chronique des années egarées and narrated it again with more details in the second volume (Moscovici, ). He also kept returning to it in numerous discussions with me. Ehrenburg was, Moscovici thought, a mysterious person. He was a protégé of Stalin and one of the very few Jews to be allowed to travel to Western countries, and yet, he helped many intellectuals and artists to survive the Soviet regime. He was a man with ‘tangled loyalties’ (Rubenstein, ). He survived five decades of Communism, and his life symbolises the catastrophic dilemmas of intellectuals living under Soviet dominance. Moscovici pointed out to me that Ehrenburg was one of two individuals he knew, both Jews, who could have written about Stalin’s atrocities during the s because they were both in the USSR during that time, but neither of them did. Ilya Ehrenburg knew very well what Stalin had done but never said anything about the artificially invented trials in the s and never wrote about them. And yet, he advised Moscovici not to go to the Soviet Union, and protected many other Soviet intellectuals (see also Rubenstein, ). The other person who, in Moscovici’s view, knew very well the extent of Stalin’s atrocities but never openly wrote about them was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher, György Lukács, who supported the Stalinist regime and lived in the Soviet Union during the terror of the Great Purge in . He returned to Hungary towards the end of the War. While living in the USSR, he worked in the Marx-Engels Institute and in the Philosophical Institute of the Academy writing and editing (e.g., Lichtheim, ). He publicly defended Stalinism in aesthetics and politics, although in the s and s, he was critical of Stalin’s ideas. However, he never openly criticised the purges in .
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Development and Diversification
his professional future. He was interested in social and political matters and wished to understand what binds together – as well as what separates – individuals and society. At that time, he did not see these issues as questions to be answered in his future academic career. They were the questions of a political refugee who was preoccupied with crimes against humans and with problems of post-War Europe. He arrived in Paris laden with his heavy personal experience, without knowing anybody, without any money, and with nowhere to turn (Moscovici, ).
.
Debates about Marxism
During the early years after the War, Moscovici () observed that most intellectual debates in France involved some references to Marxism, because Marxism was focused on the study of social phenomena, their historicity, conflicts, group relations, on the environment, and the dynamic transformations in society. In building on philosophical and political presuppositions of Marxism, Moscovici simultaneously selected, both intuitively and intentionally, his intellectual, political, and cultural resources in his attempt to understand the problems of his time (Moscovici, a). He contributed to the debate about Marxism and its critique (Moscovici and Marková, ) with respect to the dialectics of nature and of social psychology and, specifically, with respect to dialectic oppositions or antinomies existing both in nature and in human society. As we shall see in Chapter , dialectic oppositions were directly conceptualised in the theory of social representations as objectification. ..
Dialectics of Nature
Moscovici had been preoccupied with the conflicts between humans and nature since his youth. In (Moscovici, , p. ), he saw these
The question of the understanding of Moscovici’s theory of social representations and communication, as well as of his whole work, requires political, psychological, and philosophical responses. Maaris Raudsepp () answered them perfectly in her paper titled ‘Why is it so difficult to understand the theory of social representations?’ As she explained, Moscovici’s conception of the social is underlain by dialectics which has roots in Hegel’s thought of cultural-historical social consciousness and its dynamics. Hegel’s dialectics was taken over by Marxism and, therefore, Moscovici’s theory is easily understood by those who were educated in the past Soviet regime and who took compulsory courses on dialectical and historical materialism. This explanation was not intended to disparage Moscovici’s theory. As a philosophy, Marxism was embedded in European scholarship, adopting Aristotelian principles of self-motion, and was strongly influenced by dialectics and by dialogical philosophies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Raudsepp’s comment clarifies that dialectic epistemology is totally different from the mechanistic and empiricist epistemology that still dominates much of Western psychology.
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Socio-political Sources
conflicts both as a political and as a scientific problem. He appreciated Marx’s scientific vision, according to which he applied biological science to the study of humans in his belief that the science of man will be in future based on the natural sciences; there will be no longer a conflict between nature and humans but they will constitute one science (Marx, / ). Just like young Marx (/), who in his early writings adopted Hegel’s holistic vision of nature and humanity, so Moscovici insisted that humans are part of nature. The artificial separation that is often interpreted as a conflict between humans and nature must be viewed as a struggle within one nature. Both humans and nature belong together and it would be unnatural to separate them (Moscovici, /, , /, a; Moscovici and Dibie, ). The Marxist dialectics of nature was an important political resource for examining relations between humans and nature, which remained Moscovici’s life-long concern. It was equally a socio-historical problem exposing the contrasting and conflicting questions of either ‘returning to nature’ or ‘defeating nature’ (Moscovici, , p. ). Moscovici’s dialectics of nature in the s, and the oppositions and conflicts involved, to which he devoted so much attention and to which he kept returning, anticipated the life-threatening problems that humans experience today. He envisaged the contemporary politics concerned with ecological problems and, over years, he devoted much energy to these issues (Chapter ). .. Marxism and Social Psychology In the s and s, little of what could be called social psychology in France was concerned with the study of attitudes and relations in small groups. Such studies were empirically based and not concerned with the political problems of post-War Europe. For Moscovici, social psychology was a discipline that should make significant contributions to the rebuilding of society. He viewed social psychology as a political science both in terms of its theories and practice and as a discipline in movement that should play a significant role in society. He saw Marxism as a political and societal power. Together with Claude Faucheux, Moscovici posed a question about the relations between Marxism and social psychology, exploring the contradictory features and similarities between these two domains. Marxism was deterministic and scientifically orientated. Dialectics advanced evolution in and through self-movement, reaching towards higher stages both in nature and in human society.
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Development and Diversification
Faucheux and Moscovici () also saw complementarities between Marxism and social psychology: Marxism was concerned with macrosocial phenomena, while social psychology focused on microsocial phenomena. Marxism was concerned with historical phenomena, while social psychology explored social phenomena in daily life. Marxism was concerned with structures and relations of masses, leaving out interpersonal relations, the study of which belonged to the domain of social psychology. As a political science, social psychology was concerned with practical problems; it was a hybrid discipline in movement. Movement takes place in and through tension and conflict of oppositions realised in and through action and communication. Moscovici thought that the most important interdependent oppositions were those between an individual and a group, personality and culture, psychology and sociology (Moscovici, , p. ). The study of these tensions constituted the challenge for, and specificity of, social psychology. Moscovici’s approach was based on open and multifaceted forms of thinking. We shall see that in the theory of social representations, oppositions and antinomies appeared as features of objectification (Chapter ) as well as of themata (Chapter ). Moscovici’s concept of dialectic oppositions or antinomies was not deterministic as in Marxism, but he adopted dialectics in its movement, such as the conflict between oppositional perspectives and their dynamics in thinking, knowledge, action, and communication. He never accepted the deterministic evolutionary position of dialectical and historical materialism of Marx and Engels. He never made a distinction between antagonistic and non-antagonistic relations that were among the basic principles of Marxism. These differences between the determinism of dialectics and Moscovici’s openness of developmental changes form the crucial distinction between dialectic social science and dialogical social science. Although later in his social scientific career Moscovici clearly distanced himself from Marxism, he preserved his admiration for Marx (alongside Nietzsche and Freud) throughout his life. Nevertheless, he kept saying that Marx was the greatest mythmaker (personal communication) due to his ‘scientific’ claims concerning historical materialism.
. Why Did He Leave the Paradise? In order to add to the complexities surrounding Moscovici’s relations with Marxism after his arrival in Paris, let us remind ourselves that Serge Moscovici was a migrant from post-War Romania, which, being part of the Soviet bloc, was rapidly rising towards the Communist hegemony.
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Socio-political Sources
He arrived in capitalist France where the Communist Party struggled to impose itself as a political force. Serge Moscovici commented to me on several occasions about the difficulties and uncertainties that he and his Romanian friends, the poet Paul Celan and the anthropologist Isac Chiva, had experienced after their arrival in Paris. Most young French intellectuals in the late s and early s were Communists and played a significant role in the struggle of the Party to impose itself as a political force. They could not understand why Moscovici and his friends left such a paradise as Communist Romania. The French Communist intellectuals at that time still had in mind ‘the trial of the century’ with the Soviet defector Victor Kravcenko, who had applied for asylum in the USA in . The French Communist Party accused Kravcenko of being a traitor and Kravcenko initiated legal proceedings against the French Les Lettres Françaises. The trial took place in Paris in , at which Soviet KGB representatives were present, but Kravcenko’s lawyers were able to defend him and he won the process. Nevertheless, the Communists in France believed that Kravcenko was a traitor and that his process was manipulated by the Americans.
. Psychoanalysis It might be surprising for some readers that Moscovici, despite his political concerns, decided to advance his aim of becoming ‘a man of study’ by exploring a relatively ‘non-political’ subject matter (but see later), such as social representations of psychoanalysis. Although his decision to study psychoanalysis was intellectual, he did not feel completely free in his choice. He was a political refugee from Eastern Europe and the study of explicitly political issues was too risky. Nevertheless, there were two kinds of mutually interconnected socio-political circumstances that played a vital role in his decision to focus on psychoanalysis. .. Psychoanalysis and Politics After the War, psychoanalysis penetrated French society, was widely talked about, and was highly controversial. This alone would have seemed a good subject matter for exploring the formation of social knowledge by individuals and groups. Psychoanalysis was not only debated by the public but discussed in the press, as well as by two powerful political and ideological institutions in France at that time, the Communist Party and the Catholic Church. Both the Communists and the Catholic Church attempted to
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Development and Diversification
influence people’s thinking about psychoanalysis; they were both concerned with evaluating psychoanalysis but took diverse approaches. Moscovici (/, p. ) commented that Communists expected the Party to give citizens a direction of what and how to think about psychoanalysis. In contrast, Catholics thought that psychoanalysis, because it was concerned with sex, would not be approved by the Church. They thought that they would be sanctioned if they agreed with psychoanalytic principles because these were supposedly against those of the Church. For Serge Moscovici, these two powerful institutions, that is, the Communist Party and the Catholic Church, as well as the public and the press, provided a socio-political, and partly an intellectual, resource for his study of social representations of psychoanalysis. The Communist Party in the Soviet Union and, by implication, Communist Parties elsewhere considered science a political matter. During the s, two terms, ‘bourgeois’ and ‘proletarian’, were applied to various sciences across different disciplines ranging from cybernetics to genetics, biology, physics, mathematics, and chemistry. For example, in developing ‘proletarian’ science, the Soviet geneticist Trofim Lysenko rejected the ‘bourgeois’ Mendelian genetics and substituted it with the idea that features acquired during lives of plants or animals could be transmitted to future generations. This meant that humans, and
The twentieth-century totalitarian systems, both the Soviet regime and Nazism, created ‘scientific’ visions of the individual and society. Concerning individuals, both regimes constructed the image of ‘the new man’. This image originated in the European Enlightenment and in the French Revolution. Later, it became part of the nineteenth century in modernisation programmes. It was adopted by Marx when he rejected the exploitation of workers and their alienation from the products of their work. The Soviet regime adopted the idea of ‘the new man’ who would be created in modern Soviet factories. ‘The new man’ would be endowed with ethical principles of the future Communist society. The image of ‘the new man’ was equally important in Nazi Germany. However, in contrast to the Soviet regime, for Nazism, this idea was based on the ‘scientific’ vision of a ‘pure race’ of a united German nation and on national consciousness. Nazism attributed a ‘scientific’ status to the faith in the superiority of one race over another and it manufactured, quite arbitrarily, superior characteristics that were granted to the ‘Nordic race’ (Marková, b, ). Concerning society, in realising ‘the new man’, Stalin coined a new expression, that of ‘the engineer of human souls’. This defined a new role for the intelligentsia and for writers: while engineers constructed machines, the writers’ duty was the construction of the mind of ‘the new man’ (Zhdanov, /, p. ). The Soviet writer Maxim Gorky (/, p. ) confirmed that the state must educate craftsmen of culture and engineers of the soul. The image of ‘the new man’ connected the efforts to control nature and to restructure it scientifically according to the demands of humans. It was believed that the future of humans would be constructed by technology and new machines in which humans would control nature (Marková, ). Let us recall that Moscovici’s aim to view nature and humans in a holistic manner, as belonging together, contradicted the Soviet efforts of ‘defeating nature’.
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particularly ‘working people’, could decide which features of plants and animals should be transmitted to future generations. This would enable humans to control nature, increase crops, and beat the laws of genetics. Moscow placed pressure on sciences abroad, particularly in countries where there was a strong Communist Party, such as France after the War. In that context, psychoanalysis, too, was labelled as a ‘bourgeois science’ and as a symptom of the American cultural invasion (Lecourt, , p. ). The difference between the ‘proletarian’ and ‘bourgeois’ sciences was never clear, but it was considered by their proponents as part of the ‘class struggle’. Psychoanalysis was an important subject of public and political debates in France in the s. The diversification between the ‘bourgeois’ and ‘proletarian’ sciences became such a controversial issue that some scientists left the Communist Party. These included, among others, the biologists Jacques Monod and Marcel Prenant (Moscovici, /, pp. –) because ‘proletarian science’ offended their conviction that politics should not interfere with making decisions about what science was. Others, however, wrote personal critiques and confessions rejecting their previous adherence to psychoanalysis, which they subsequently relabelled as reactionary ideology (Marková, ). ..
Psychoanalysis and Daily Thinking
The distinction between ‘bourgeois’ and ‘proletarian’ sciences was a Party matter: it was believed that only an enlightened proletariat could objectively evaluate science and develop a ‘proletarian’ version. The proletariat would reorganise existing working relations, develop the plan and direction of labour, and rationalise arrangements in factories. However, the other side of the argument stated the opposite. Already in , in his book What Is to Be Done (/), Lenin had argued that, while the initiative and spontaneity of the masses in the class struggle were extremely important, spontaneity must not overwhelm class consciousness. Ordinary people did not think rationally and needed the guidance of the revolutionary intelligentsia (Lenin, /, /). Working-class people had the potential to develop proletarian science, and it was the task of revolutionary intellectuals to teach people materialism and rationality to substitute unscientific thinking with scientific reasoning. In the late s and early s, it became an obligatory task for Communist intellectuals to provide such guidance and ‘to conduct this struggle to the total victory
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Development and Diversification
of the proletarian point of view in all branches of learning and culture’ (Lecourt, , p. ). Although after coming to Paris in Moscovici sympathised with Marxism, he objected to the belief that in order to become the revolutionary vanguard, ordinary people needed the Party to guide their spontaneous and often erroneous thinking. He rejected both sides of the Marxist argument, that is, ‘proletarian science’ on the one hand and the point of view that ‘le peuple ne pense pas’ (people do not think) on the other. Moscovici aimed to rehabilitate daily thinking, and this facilitated his ideas regarding the study of social representations of psychoanalysis. He argued that all people have the capacity of rational thought and that their common sense guides them through conflicts, and interactions with others, and that their thinking does not have to follow any predetermined road. He was very much opposed to the view which assumed that daily thinking and knowledge was inferior to rational scientific thought (Moscovici and Marková, , p. ; Marková, , ). It appeared to Moscovici that psychoanalysis was highly suitable subject matter to explore the transformation of the ‘superior’ professional/ scientific knowledge into the ‘inferior’ daily or common-sense knowledge because lay people formed their own views about it. Freud was successful in attracting the public because he used common sense and lay notions such as ‘dreams’ and ‘myths’; his theory was part of folk psychology and of daily thinking (Moscovici, ). Moscovici (a), therefore, wished to explore the ways that ideas of psychoanalysis as a professional treatment of mental problems diffused into everyday conversations and understanding of lay people. Religious and political ideologies, as well as the mass media, too, were instrumental in influencing the understanding and knowledge of lay people. Moscovici did not specify what he meant by ‘common sense’. His interest was to challenge the idea of Marxists that ordinary people do not think rationally and to explore the transformation of psychoanalysis as a system of professional ideas into everyday thinking.
There was a most obvious paradox in the propaganda concerning the bourgeois and proletarian sciences. Without going into details of this complex contradiction, let us recall that up to per cent of the Russian pre-revolution population were peasants, whom the Marxist philosopher Plekhanov characterised as ‘stupid, lazy, conservative’ (Stepun, , p. ). At the beginning of the twentieth century, Marxists and Lenin believed that the proletarian revolution could not take place in Russia because the country was lacking a working class with consciousness, that is, workers were not trained to respond to the capitalist oppression and abuse. As Lenin (/, p. ) stated: ‘The consciousness of working masses cannot be genuine class-consciousness, unless the workers learn, from concrete, and above all from topical, political facts and events to observe every other social class in all the manifestations of its intellectual, ethical, and political life.’ The working masses must learn class consciousness from the revolutionary intelligentsia in order to become a revolutionary vanguard.
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Socio-political Sources
. Conclusion The making of a social scientific theory, which is grounded in dramatic political events, brings to the surface the question of its meaning, purpose, and historical role. Scientific theories, as well as common-sense insights that develop during wars, revolutions, or pandemics, tend to focus the human mind on fundamental problems of human existence, survival, and the extension of life. When Serge Moscovici arrived in Paris in early as a political refugee, he did not know how to achieve his goal to become a ‘man of study’. His experience of the Second World War, of crimes against humans, and of problems of post-War Europe guided his thought towards questions such as what binds individuals and society together and what separates them? These were political, as well as intellectual and socio-cultural, questions. Moscovici’s generation of migrant social psychologists struggled with concrete questions of understanding political and cultural problems in their adopted countries, of the racism that the War inflicted with full force, and of reconstructing the world that was left in ruins. Moscovici thought that social psychology could find solutions to these issues because it was a discipline in movement, which occupied a unique and strategic position between sociology and social anthropology. He viewed it as a political science both in terms of its theories and its practice. In his attempt to answer his queries of the relations between individuals, society, and nature, Moscovici applied dialectical thinking but did not accept dialectic determinism. He explored Marxism and the dialectics of nature, and Marxism and social psychology. The study of tensions and oppositions in dialectics would prove a vital resource for the theory of social representations. In order to explore the diffusion of professional thinking into daily thinking, Moscovici chose psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis was widely discussed and controversial; it was of interest to the public and a subject of political debates in France in the s; it was conceived as a ‘bourgeois’ science and, therefore, it was a Communist Party matter. The Party believed that the proletariat needed the guidance of the Party because ordinary people could not think logically. Paradoxically, however, ‘proletarian science’ was to guide the future of humankind. Having considered the relevant socio-political resources surrounding the development of Moscovici’s thoughts about the theory of social representations, let us focus, in the next chapter, on its intellectual resources.
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A Political Refugee in Paris
During the last seven years of his life, Serge Moscovici kept reflecting on his early years in France and on the intellectual resources that motivated his thinking when he was developing the theory of social representations. These resources were embedded in political, historical, and cultural events of the time as well as in his intellectual and intimate experiences with friends and colleagues. It does not mean that he was fully aware of everything that shaped his thinking. Rather, one can suggest that his observations, intuitions, and talent orientated his ideas and led him to recognise vital intellectual and practical questions of the post-War time that were relevant for social sciences. One needs some retrospection to reflect on and evaluate the driving forces that were influential in the creation of his new theory. Some of the resources of the theory of social representations that I shall discuss had been explicitly present in Moscovici’s thought even before he arrived in France, while others appeared later or even remained implicit. In this chapter, I shall draw on my recollections of discussions with Moscovici in order to recreate my understanding of his thinking and of the epoch in which he lived. The intellectual resources to which I shall refer were fundamental not only for the theory of social representations but, more generally, they shaped his epistemology over his long career. He often repeated: ‘the origin of the theory of social representations is a fruit of my age of innocence’ (Moscovici and Marková, , p. ). By that he meant that, during the s, he had no contact with American or other psychologists abroad and had no idea what social psychology was; he only had some intuitions about what it could be. French psychology in the
Although he engaged in deep discussions with me about these issues for several years, he did not allow me to tape-record or even write them down as he thought that they were too premature and should be developed much further before publication, but this did not happen because of his illness.
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A Political Refugee in Paris
s was experiencing its ‘blind spot’ (Bianco and Fruteau de Laclos, ). It did not take advantage of the theoretical advancements in philosophy and psychology that took place in the s during the inter-war period. In the s, it was mainly limited to psychophysiological experiments and to clinical psychology (Fruteau de Laclos, ). To earn a living as a student, in the early s, Serge Moscovici worked as an assistant for the distinguished French psychologist Paul Fraisse in his laboratory of Experimental Psychology and Physiological Sensations. In post-War psychology, experimentation was viewed as an essential source of knowledge and Fraisse created experimental psychology as a scientific discipline in France. Among the important topics of the laboratory was the study of reaction time, perception, and physiological thresholds. Moscovici remembered that Fraisse carried out ‘thousands of experiments’ and that he himself, as an assistant, was involved in many experiments using frogs, cutting their heads while their bodies were still jumping around. Moscovici also translated for Fraisse abstracts and papers from German psychology. In the psychoanalyst Daniel Lagache was already addressing the problem of the narrow scope of psychology in France in his call for unifying psychology on intellectual and societal grounds. His efforts were partly influenced by phenomenology and partly by American social psychology, in which he particularly valued the work of Kurt Lewin. In addition to attending Lagache’s courses in psychology, Moscovici’s intellectual resources of his ‘age of innocence’ differed from those that informed other social psychological approaches in the s and s. These sources included his knowledge of continental philosophers and social scientists ranging from Blaise Pascal to Nietzsche, Marx, Husserl, Cassirer, Mauss, Merleau-Ponty, among others. These scholars also inspired Moscovici’s thoughts about common sense and science, and about holistic and dynamic approaches to human thinking. Unless one understands the nature of the resources that inspired presuppositions of Moscovici’s thought during that period, one cannot answer questions that social psychologists often ask about the similarities and differences between the theory of social representations and other social psychological approaches, for example, ‘social cognition’, ‘attitudes’, or ‘discourse analysis’ (Chapter ). Because the theory of social representations explores interdisciplinary issues of high complexity, its ‘translation’ into other social psychological approaches must be based on the understanding of that complexity to avoid trivialisation of the theory.
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Development and Diversification
. Social Psychology and Science When Moscovici arrived in Paris in January as a political refugee, he did not waste any time and almost immediately enrolled as a student of psychology at the Sorbonne University to become ‘a man of study’. As he explains in the second volume of his autobiography (Moscovici, ), there were three reasons that led him to choose psychology as the subject of his study. First, at that time, psychology was novel subject matter. Before , it was not considered in France as a subject worthy of serious study and had no scientific appeal. Thus, Moscovici wanted to find out for himself what psychology was and what its potentials were. Secondly, he was interested in the psychology of masses and, specifically, in the mysteries of the collective hysteria of crowds that had been attracted to Nazism. However, he was also aware that an individual or a group can resist even the most degrading ideologies. Why do some individuals resist the collective hysteria of crowds? Moscovici explored these ideas later in the theory of social representations and in minority influence. The germs of his thoughts were already apparent in his early publications (Moscovici, a, ; Faucheux and Moscovici, ; Jahoda and Moscovici, ). Both this and the previous reason reflected Moscovici’s supreme questions: who is the individual and what is society? Finally, Moscovici had practical reasons for choosing psychology. He was uncertain what to study due to his status as a refugee and his lack of confidence. He thought that psychology, since it was not an established university subject, would attract fewer students, that the criteria for being accepted on a course would be less strict, and that it would appeal to older and atypical students. That would suit him. However, there was another area where psychology could prove beneficial. Among the major questions that were debated by Moscovici’s generation in the late s and the s, as well as in the up-andcoming social sciences, were those related to the Second World War and its aftermath, and to the role of science in society. Young people were attracted by Marxism. They aimed at societal changes and were preoccupied with possible impacts of science on historical changes (Moscovici and Marková, , p. ). These concerns were not just the mission of the French youth but became questions of central international interest. Around the same time, Karl Popper in the UK was presenting his views on science and pseudo-science. In his lecture in at Peterhouse College in Cambridge, he asked questions about scientific theories and
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the criteria for their truthfulness and acceptability (Popper, ). Specifically, Popper viewed science as an activity emerging from myths. He distinguished between proper sciences, for example, Einstein’s theory of relativity, on the one hand and pseudo-sciences, such as Marx’s theory of history, Freud’s psychoanalysis, and Adler’s individual psychology, on the other. The latter three theories, Popper argued, were pseudo-sciences because they were able to confirm practically everything within their region and so could verify whatever they wished. Questions about sciences, technologies, and their truthfulness, as well as those about the public communication of science and the education of citizens, were widely discussed and debated. Later, they led to the report of The Royal Society of London () on the public understanding of science, which provided guidance for the education of the public. Such inquiries into the problem of science and its public understanding were far remote from the major interests of international social psychology after the War. Social psychology in the USA was using abstract ideas to analyse social relations as transactions based on an individual’s rational calculations to demonstrate the existence of social entities (Moscovici, /). In other words, it used a ‘scientific approach’ to deal with phenomena that one could not understand without considering emotions, passions, beliefs, myths, and religion. It excluded common sense, intuition, and forms of daily thinking. Social psychological programmes were concerned with the study of behavioural elements and purified methods, for example, studies of attitudes or of small groups and their modelling, and with describing causes of behaviour in individuals and groups. Serge Moscovici did not aim to contribute to these social scientific programmes. Social psychology needed a different start that would not use a simplistic logical and rational model of people. Moscovici’s interest in the impact of science and technology on historical changes in society led him to postulate some major questions: • How does scientific knowledge transform into knowledge based on daily thinking and on common sense? • More generally, how does one kind of thinking and knowing transform into another? As he said later (Moscovici and Marková, ), these were questions of his generation and they totally absorbed his mind. Moscovici thought these were the fundamental enquiries of modernity. These two questions concerning the transformation of knowledge became the central points that he raised in developing the theory of social representations.
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. The Choice of Psychoanalysis to Study Social Representations It was, therefore, important to find a scientific or professional problem that would be of interest to lay people’s daily thinking in the street. Such a subject matter became psychoanalysis. There were several coincidences that facilitated Moscovici’s decision. First, in his study of psychology at Sorbonne University, Moscovici was inspired by the previously mentioned psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Daniel Lagache. As Moscovici () pointed out later, the fact that Lagache agreed to supervise his thesis on this subject matter gave a firm direction for his future. Second, one of Moscovici’s students was Anne Parsons who studied the diffusion of psychoanalysis in the USA and in France (Parsons, ) and was concerned with the question of whether the Oedipus complex was a universal phenomenon (Parsons, /). More generally, she was interested in what, in an anthropological sense, could be called a ‘culture of psychotherapy’ (Parsons, , p. ff.). For example, she explored the problems of incomprehension between a patient and a therapist. Incomprehension arose because the patient’s expression of his/her mental state was meaningful in his/her own culture but not for Parsons as a therapist in undertaking psychoanalysis in her own culture. In other words, incomprehension was related to the meanings of utterances produced in a specific culture and to barriers preventing understanding of these utterances in a different culture. It is likely that Anne Parsons’s ideas on myth and belief, as well as those of Talcott Parsons (Moscovici, a, pp. , , , ), had a considerable impact on Moscovici’s thought when he was developing his ideas. In addition, Cassirer’s (Moscovici, a, p. ), Malinowski’s (Moscovici, a, p. ), and Maus’s (Moscovici, a, pp. , ) concerns about language and anthropology, to which Moscovici referred in the first edition of Psychoanalysis, contributed to the formulating of his
Moscovici told me that, originally, he had intended to study lay ideas about the transformation of physics or mathematics into daily discourse, and he even carried out some preliminary research using these disciplines, but it came to nothing. Neither physics nor mathematics were of much interest to the public and, therefore, the problems encountered in these disciplines were not debated outside of their scientific and professional contexts. However, it appears from existing documents lent to me by Martin Bauer that these attempts to study social representations of sciences came much later than Moscovici had remembered (Moscovici et al., ). These documents show his interest in public education and the diffusion of sciences such as physics, chemistry, and mathematics. On Moscovici’s interest to explore social representations of Marxism, see Chapters , , , and . Published posthumously in Parsons ().
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own project on social representations of psychoanalysis. While he clearly acknowledged the significance of these intellectual resources in the first edition of Psychoanalysis in , he referred to these authors to a lesser degree in the second edition in (Chapters and ). Third, psychoanalysis was an ideal subject because it would enable Moscovici to study the phenomenon of common-sense thinking. Psychoanalysis was controversial, was evaluated as a political ideology (Chapter ), and its diffusion into daily thinking promised a rich pattern of ideas expressed by lay people and the mass media. Moscovici thought that lay people were interested in this topic because they perceived similarities between Freud’s psychoanalysis and various kinds of daily experiences. For example, they perceived similarities between a religious confession and a psychoanalytic interview, or between their attempts to forget unpleasant experiences and the therapist’s insight into their problems (Moscovici, a, /). More generally, these reasons made psychoanalysis an eminently suitable topic for the study of daily thinking. As Moscovici (, p. ) noted, just as with other social phenomena, for example, a family or a market, psychoanalysis was independent of science. It diffused spontaneously into collective thinking in and through everyday conversations. Neither language nor social knowledge could be arbitrarily modified by single individuals. An individual has no power over these social phenomena. In addition, Moscovici’s ‘age of intellectual innocence’ was inspired by several other intellectual resources that, at that time, were not of interest to social psychologists and, therefore, had no influence on the discipline.
Ideas about the links between common sense and Freud’s psychoanalysis were explored later independently of Moscovici by other researchers. For instance, Edelson () provided numerous examples showing that psychoanalysis extends common-sense accounts of action; thus, Freud’s concept of repression is based on common-sense knowing that people tend to forget or distort troubling events and avoid thinking about them. Brook (), too, explored the relation between psychoanalysis and common sense. He argued that psychoanalysis not only depends on common sense but that it extends common sense, particularly with respect to vocabulary, unconscious beliefs, and explanations of actions. By common sense, Brook meant unconscious beliefs, doctrines, skills, and rules enabling the interpretation of actions and interactions among people. Brook showed that Freudian unconscious mental processes such as desires, purposes, memories, and so on are derived from common sense and that, in their extended versions, they fit well into Freud’s theory. Billig (, p. ) presents an argument according to which Moscovici’s assumption that common-sense thinking in social representations comes from ‘the Freudian theory – as opposed to other versions’ is not quite correct. Billig suggests that Adler’s, Horney’s, and other versions of psychoanalysis were closer to social representations than Freud’s version. However, while Billig’s comment may well be correct, the fact is it was Freud’s psychoanalysis that circulated among the French public, and it was representations of this that Moscovici explored.
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However, before coming to those, let us turn our attention to two scholars who had a profound influence on Moscovici’s intellectual life, whom he called ‘les deux pères’ (the two fathers) (Moscovici, ).
. Serge Moscovici’s Two Fathers: Daniel Lagache and Alexandre Koyré Daniel Lagache was a psychiatrist, philosopher, and psychoanalyst and was appointed to the Chair in Psychology at Sorbonne in . He established the Licence in Psychology and a laboratory of social psychology attached to his Chair (Herzlich, ) into which he brought diverse scholars, including Serge Moscovici. Lagache taught courses on the psychology of ‘social life’, on Kurt Lewin, and on psychological features of group behaviour, all of which stirred Moscovici’s interest. At that time, Moscovici’s ideas were still dominated by Marxism and Lagache’s approach exposed him to a more flexible, open, and subjective perspective with respect to individuals, groups, and social life in general (personal communication; also, Moscovici, ). Moreover, Moscovici found Lagache intellectually stimulating and approachable, and after much hesitation, he asked him to supervise his doctoral thesis on psychoanalysis. Lagache agreed and suggested that Moscovici applied for a grant from the National Centre for Scientific Research. Today, it is difficult to imagine what this suggestion meant for a young refugee from Romania. Moscovici (, p. , my translation) described this event as an incredible and moving occasion that gave his life a new direction: ‘I was even shaken by a slight nervous laugh. For the first time, someone gave me their trust. I think the only flaw that I have never had is ingratitude: it was so rare, since childhood, that something was done for me.’ Understanding that Moscovici wanted to study attitudes towards psychoanalysis, Lagache suggested that a topic on the cultural adaptation of emigrants (Moscovici, ) would be more acceptable to the French authorities in providing financial support for his Doctorate d’Etat. Moscovici’s second ‘father’, Alexandre Koyré, was a philosopher of science, a Russian émigré who, later in his life, lived in Paris. Moscovici met Koyré in the early s during the Lévi-Strauss interdisciplinary seminar on ‘The use of mathematics in human and social sciences’ (see later). He then attended Koyré’s seminars on the history and philosophy of science of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes. Moscovici was captivated by Koyré’s intellect, philosophical breadth, and pedagogical capacities. Koyré suggested that Moscovici explore the work of the seventeenth-century Italian scientist
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Giovanni-Battista Baliani and his correspondence with Galileo. Moscovici agreed and in obtained a diploma on this study under Koyré’s supervision. Subsequently, Koyré invited him to the Institute of Advanced Studies in Princeton, where he was a permanent member. Moscovici stayed there from to . Baliani was an engineer and navigator who was interested in technology. He modernised the principle of inertia (the resistance of physical mass to change its speed if external forces do not act upon it). He was an amateur who based his ideas on empirical observations and experience and was critical of Galileo’s conjectural approach. The two researchers based their ideas on different epistemologies and their correspondence about these matters was the subject of Moscovici’s interest and publications (Moscovici, , , ). As Capecchi () commented, Moscovici was the first scholar who analysed in depth the work of this important and underrated researcher. Jodelet (, p. .) notes that, in Baliani, Moscovici personified the ‘amateur scientist’, an idea he developed much later in his study of common sense (Moscovici and Hewstone, ). In his book on Baliani, Moscovici () reflected on the production of common-sense knowledge and its relations to scientific knowledge (Jodelet, , p. .). Although Moscovici claimed that Koyré influenced his thinking about minority innovation but not on social representations, Koyré’s ideas on common-sense thinking, technology, and science were important for Moscovici’s thought. Koyré argued that, just like in ancient Greece, in the seventeenth century, technological and scientific thinking were originally independent modes of thought. However, while in ancient Greece they remained independent, in the seventeenth century, science and technology absorbed each other’s elements (Koyré, , p. ). Science gripped common-sense elements, developed them, and adapted them to form new knowledge and for practical needs, enriching one another (for more details, Marková, ). In conclusion, in the early years of Moscovici’s career in Paris, Lagache and Koyré were the most concrete intellectual pillars to whom he always referred with gratitude: ‘In my case, two men played a decisive role: the psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Daniel Lagache and the historian of sciences Alexandre Koyré . . . I owe them everything’ (Moscovici, , p. ).
. New Ideas about Communication in Cybernetics In the post-War years, a new interdisciplinary field entered the scene. Norbert Wiener () defined this new field as cybernetics, or the
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scientific study of control, information, and communication in animals and machines. Cybernetics refocused the interest of science on investigations of systems and their structures. Above all, Wiener’s work brought to attention the concepts of information and communication. The study of structures and organised patterns – or gestalts – was possible in and through the transmission of information from one part of a system to another. For example, in human bodies, such transmissions of information take place, say, in phasic contractions in epilepsy or in fibrillation of the heart (Wiener, , p. ). Wiener considered that information and communication were essential organising mechanisms in domains that went far beyond the study of a single individual. They penetrated the life of the community and domains such as anthropology and sociology. Wiener argued that one could not understand communities without a thorough exploration of the means of communication in social systems (Wiener, , p. ). Wiener was a Marxist. He was familiar with the work of Russian scientists whose work he appreciated. He acknowledged that some of his ideas on cybernetics had been already articulated by Kolmogoroff (Wiener, , p. ) although, at that time, cybernetics was rejected in the Soviet Union as a reactionary pseudo-science that had originated in the USA (Czismas, ; see also Chapter ). In the last chapter of his book Cybernetics, Wiener dealt with the logical relation between the individual and social groups and applied his mathematical model to social phenomena. He showed that individuals do not create a group or community to achieve homeostasis but that, in contrast, a society is created in and through heterogeneous disturbances and various kinds of interactions among members and their modes of communication. All these new ideas were inspirational for Serge Moscovici and corroborated his own ideas about conflict creation as a dynamic and innovative activity (see Chapter ). The conception of cybernetics became an important resource for Moscovici’s views of social life and its practices. Wiener spoke about the acceleration of technological advancement, its impact on society, and, specifically, about its impact on communication. Moscovici adopted Wiener’s view that public discourse is based on the flow of systems of ideas, that this creates redundancies in transmission of information and establishes rules and order in communication (Moscovici, ). Cybernetics appealed to Moscovici for several reasons. Around the time he entered the field of social psychology, theoretical approaches focused on the study of behavioural and mental elements. In contrast, cybernetics orientated attention to the holistic idea of gestalt, to systems, structures,
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and communication. Wiener’s vision of society and interaction turned him away from Hovland’s () linear formula of communication which was expressed in terms of ‘who’ says ‘what’ to ‘whom’ and with ‘what effect’. Instead, Wiener was concerned with patterns and configurations in systems and communication. The concepts of ‘structuredness’ and ‘formness’ in cybernetics thus fundamentally contrasted with the concepts of ‘elements’ or ‘stimuli’ and with their aggregates that prevailed in positivistic and behaviouristic approaches in communication at the time. Wiener’s vision had a general epistemological relevance for Moscovici. It seemed to form connections between natural and human phenomena, which was another of Moscovici’s major interests (Chapters and ), and between the mathematical theory of information and the socio-physical theory of communication. All this corresponded to Moscovici’s views about social psychology (Moscovici and Marková, , pp. –) and brought him ‘closer to the idea of representation’ (Moscovici and Marková, , p. ). Communication and language were essential to this enterprise. Representations are formed, maintained, and changed in and through language and communication and, equally, the use of words and attributes attached to meanings transforms social representations. Moscovici was convinced that social psychology and the study of language belonged together (e.g., Moscovici, b).
. From Attitudes to Social Representations In the early s, the only professor of social psychology in France was Jean Stoetzel in Bordeaux. Stoetzel was a specialist in the study of public opinion and opinion polls, which he introduced in France after learning about Gallup methods in the USA. As Lagache mistakenly thought that Moscovici wanted to study attitudes and public opinions towards psychoanalysis, he suggested that Moscovici contact Jean Stoetzel who was a specialist in such matters. Moscovici had managed to avoid explaining to Lagache that he wanted to study the transformation of professional ideas of psychoanalysis into common sense. He thought that as Lagache himself was a psychoanalyst, he would consider Moscovici as lacking in seriousness (Moscovici, ; also , p. ). Moscovici contacted Stoetzel and, subsequently, started using scales to examine the opinions and attitudes of his participants towards psychoanalysis. It was a dilemma for Moscovici because attitudes did not interest him and, therefore, the results of this study could not find for him the answers he sought. In using those scales
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and opinion surveys, he could not learn what was ‘individual’ and what was ‘social’. How could he answer these questions by using scales? Marx made clear what was ‘social’. ‘Social’ involved social classes and it was clear what he meant. However, Moscovici thought that Marx did not pay much attention to what was ‘individual’ (personal communication). Moscovici (, ) explained in his first published papers that the results from scales provide yes–no answers; they reveal a degree of homogeneous responses to an issue in question. They are concerned only with measurement, and one does not learn anything about the contents of people’s thoughts. In contrast, Moscovici’s idea was to explore the transformation of professional or scientific knowledge of psychoanalysis into daily thinking and knowing. In his first article, where he presented his primary results about attitudes and opinions based on scales, he had already expressed his strong dissatisfaction with this kind of investigation (Moscovici, ). In reading the book The American Soldier: Combat and Its Aftermath (Stouffer et al., ), Moscovici discovered Guttman’s scales, which, to his mind, offered a totally different approach to the study of social phenomena to what other opinion and attitude scales did. He saw the originality of Guttman’s scales in sampling ideas rather than respondents and in Guttman’s attempt to discover the structures of items binding respondents together. Patterns, in which items are closer together, represent meaningful and socially shared gestalts. They measure the degree of structuredness of social phenomena (Moscovici and Marková, , p. ). The degree of structuredness was a concept already present in Wiener’s information theory and now Moscovici also found it in Guttman’s scale. In contrast to statistics, which present bits and pieces of information, Moscovici found Guttman’s approach holistic, systematic, and aesthetic. While originally neither Guttman nor his associates emphasised the structuredness of their scales, it is interesting to note that Moscovici saw immediately that the Guttman scale had potential for the study of the contents of ideas and their structures. It was only later that Guttman () considered a major shift in the way of looking at factor analysis and searched for the possibility of developing multidimensional models.
The notion of aesthetics is here of some interest. The Nobel Prize physicist Paul Dirac, in various contexts, made repeated references to the importance of the beauty of mathematical equations and counselled researchers ‘to let the theory’s beauty lead them by the hand, not to worry about the lack of experimental support and not to be deterred if a few observations appear to refute it’ (Farmelo, , p. ). Equally, Einstein, to whom Moscovici continuously referred throughout his career, appreciated theories that were aesthetic.
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This finally led to his concepts of facet and facet analysis (Guttman, , ). Guttman’s scales do not present correlations but structures, and they are based on hierarchies. Moreover, Moscovici appreciated that Guttman’s scales did not commence with the study of single entities but with networks and interactions. Moscovici understood that Guttman’s scales offered a new approach to the study of complex social phenomena. He (Moscovici, ) noted that, gradually, he was able to explain to his supervisor Lagache that he was not interested in the study of opinions or attitudes towards psychoanalysis. For him, it was not important whether participants believed that psychoanalysis was good or bad; he wished to learn about the transformation of scientific and professional knowledge into everyday thinking and into socially shared knowledge. Transformation of knowledge involves making judgements, evaluating knowledge, imagining the implications of new discoveries, and moralising about these issues. Moscovici was not concerned with the transformation of neutral information but with valueladen knowledge that groups and societies accumulated in and through culture over generations and expressed in and through communication. After developing the concept of what he wanted to study, Moscovici () did not have a name for it, one that would adequately account for his ideas about the transformation of social knowledge. How could he explain to others what it was he wanted to study when he did not have a name for it? It was when he carried out his research on the history and philosophy of sciences at the National Library in Paris that he came across a book by the French clerical philosopher Reverend Father Robert Lenoble () titled Essai sur la notion d’expérience. Lenoble’s book reflected on the philosophy of history and Moscovici (, p. ) remembered that it summed up his project on psychoanalysis and gave him the name ‘representations’. According to Lenoble, there is no unique common sense and different civilisations have different kinds. For example, European common sense popularises mechanistic philosophy, science, and Christian morality; it differs from the common sense of the Orient or of black Africa; equally, French common sense of the twentieth century profoundly differs from that of the eighteenth century. Common sense, formed by language together with ‘collective representations’, expresses a norm: ‘it awakens
Moscovici met Guttman some years later at the Brussels International Congress of Psychology in , discussed with him his scale and facet analysis, and visited him in Israel when he was in Beersheba in the s.
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thinking of one who does not think: it overwhelms the one who thinks’ (Lenoble, , p. ). Lenoble was using the term ‘collective representations’ without referring to Durkheim, whose work, apparently, he did not appreciate (Moscovici, personal communication). In fact, throughout the whole of his book, Lenoble referred to Durkheim’s predecessor, the French philosopher Renouvier, who borrowed the term ‘representation’ from Kant (Pickering, a; Marková, ). It was in the reading of this passage that Serge Moscovici was inspired to name his project ‘collective’ or ‘social’ representations. He said to me that if he had not found the word ‘representation’, he would have probably remained stuck with the term ‘belief’ as the closest notion to what he had in mind. This also indicates that, at that stage, he did not know Durkheim’s work on collective representations. Moscovici () used this newly discovered name of ‘collective representations’, or ‘social representations’, in his first article concerned with the primary results of a survey about psychoanalysis. At the beginning of his first paper, he acknowledged that he carried out the survey under the direction of Lagache and that the object of his study was not concerned with the validity of psychoanalysis. Rather, his study was concerned with the psychosocial phenomena of collective representations. He made it clear that if the methods of studying opinions aimed to achieve scientific status, they would have to grasp and analyse the production of images and the conditions of interaction in groups and among individuals. He was aware that the methods he used did not capture interactions between individuals and groups and did not study representations. Instead, in his first paper (Moscovici, ), in presenting his primary results, he attempted to differentiate between opinions and attitudes. He viewed opinions as possibilities of behaviour of an individual which took as a frame of reference his/her preferred group. By an attitude, he meant a component of that behaviour that took frames of reference from both the individual’s preferred group and his/her personal motives, reasons, and so on. The situation in this latter case could lead to intrapersonal conflict that might be solved by changing an attitude into an opinion. Moscovici concluded that opinion refers to a possibility of behaviour in interindividual interaction, while attitude is a component of intra-individual behaviour. None of these behaviours, however, were concerned with contents and processes of social phenomena that Moscovici intended to study. It is interesting to reflect on the problems of a young researcher who was struggling with conventional methods with which he disagreed. He was a
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poor, hungry, cold migrant from a Communist paradise (Chapter ) facing uncertainties about his future. Moscovici’s first articles on questioning and rejecting attitudes and opinions as unsuitable concepts for his own study showed his own dilemma. He was developing new thoughts which clashed with established knowledge and existing research practices. These articles, in which he reported his first findings using attitude scales and opinion surveys, indicated his struggle with his own ideas and his awareness of confronting the established ‘truths’. When he carried out an opinion survey on psychoanalysis, he used the term ‘collective representations’ for his findings (Moscovici, , p. ). He maintained that his study did not intend to validate psychoanalysis and that, in fact, the scales he used could not capture collective representations. He timidly introduced in his papers the concept of the Guttman scale and referred to Professor Jean Stoetzel. Stoetzel did not favour the Guttman scale as he was committed to Gallup polls. Moscovici’s comprehensive article on Guttman’s () scales, in which he explained their theoretical advantages over other attitude scales, is titled a ‘hierarchical analysis’, as suggested by Stoetzel. Moscovici (, , ) did not elaborate on this suggestion; it seems to have been his attempt to conciliate Stoetzel. We need to bear in mind that it was only a short time earlier that Moscovici had come to Paris as a political refugee in . When he published his first articles, he did not have French citizenship. It is not surprising that he felt he had an uncertain position in France, and he found it difficult to present his unauthorised views. The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss became interested in Guttman’s questionnaire after Claude Faucheux and Serge Moscovici had introduced it into research of ‘social objects’ in Corsica that Faucheux carried out for Lévi-Strauss. Lévi-Strauss saw the value of Guttman’s approach for structuralism. He thought that the design of Guttman’s questionnaire was a revolutionary discovery because it reversed the relation between mathematics and social science (Lévi-Strauss, , p. ). In using Guttman’s scales, one could mathematically show the patterns of structures in social phenomena. The relation between mathematics and social sciences was Lévi-Strauss’s major concern. In and , he co-ordinated an
Moscovici (, p. ) explains in a note: ‘The term “hierarchical analysis” is due to J. Stoetzel (), instead of “scale analysis” used by L. Guttman. We adopted Stoetzel’s term because it seems to us better suited to the main approaches of this method of building attitude scales.’ The researcher on Corsica, Florence Pizzorni (), refers to this work that was never published. Therefore, it is not clear what kinds of ‘social objects’ their research involved.
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interdisciplinary seminar titled ‘The use of mathematics in human and social sciences’, under the auspices of UNESCO. It was due to the research in Corsica and his interest in Guttman’s scaling that Lévi-Strauss invited Serge Moscovici, together with Claude Faucheux, to take part in the seminar (Pétard, ). Lévi-Strauss appreciated the Corsica study because it contributed to his structuralist perspective. Among other participants of the Lévi-Strauss seminar were specialists in human and social sciences like the linguist Benveniste, the psychoanalyst Lacan, the philosopher Koyré (see earlier), and sociologist Maucorps, plus mathematicians like Guilbaud, Mandelbrot, Riguet, and Schu¨tzenberger (Le Roux, ). Moscovici commented to me that the mathematicians Mandelbrot and Schu¨tzenberger were the main stars in the seminar. Lévi-Strauss, however, never accepted the theory of social representations which Moscovici published in . It was based on daily thinking rather than on ‘science’. Moscovici remarked that Lévi-Strauss tried to ‘scientify’ everything. For example, he tried to use the laws of thermodynamics to study kinship, family, religion, and cultures (personal communication). Using the thermodynamic notion of entropy, which refers to the measure of disorder in systems, Lévi-Strauss stated that anthropology should be renamed as ‘entropology’, that is, as a discipline that studies the process of disintegration in its most evolved forms. He insisted that ‘civilization can be described as a prodigiously complicated mechanism’ (Lévi-Strauss, , p. ). In conclusion, I have gone to some length to clarify the relation between social representations and attitudes because this issue has always puzzled students of social representations and for many contemporary social scientists, it is still not clarified. When I carried out dialogues with Serge Moscovici (Moscovici and Marková, , ), I posed questions to him about attitudes and social representations because I too was intrigued by this problem. The intellectual history of this issue shows that the question ‘what is the difference between attitudes and social representations?’ cannot be answered by listing their similar and diverse characteristics. From the very beginning, Moscovici was interested in the study of dynamic contents of social phenomena, and this kind of inquiry is underlain by an epistemology that is incompatible with the study of attitudes as they were explored in social psychology in the USA. However, these issues have been ignored by many students of social representations. Even today, many studies that use the term ‘social representations’ are no more than studies of attitudes and owe very little, if anything, to Moscovici’s theory (Chapter ).
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.
Phenomenology
After the War, phenomenology became a flourishing philosophical movement in France. Paul Ricoeur () maintained that Husserl was read, translated, and commented on in France more than anywhere else. Phenomenology appealed to Moscovici for several reasons. It is holistic and does not fragment the world into elements. Human consciousness is intentional and directed towards objects and other humans. It is concerned with the contents of experience, which include imagination, judgements, emotions, Self- and Other-awareness, and interactions. When Serge Moscovici was developing the theory of social representations, one of the main representatives of phenomenology in France was Maurice Merleau-Ponty. As Moscovici () notes, very soon after his arrival in Paris, he attended Merleau-Ponty’s brilliant lectures. I suggest that there were at least three main sources of ideas in Merleau-Ponty’s work that were important for the theory of social representations. First, following Husserl’s concept of ‘Lebenswelt’, Merleau-Ponty emphasised life experience as a dynamic and open system. He (e.g., Merleau-Ponty, ) fundamentally disapproved of the Piagetian conception of a child’s intellectual development from illogicality towards logicality, which accounted for this development in terms of a gradual approach to mature thinking of an adult. If we take just one example of Merleau-Ponty’s criticism, that of his phenomenological approach to the human body, we can understand why Moscovici’s own interest in social representations of the human body was inspired by Merleau-Ponty’s thought. In contrast to Piaget, Merleau-Ponty emphasised the child’s representation of the body as a ‘lived experience’ and as a relation between activities such as speaking, thinking, listening, knowing, and imagining, among others. He did not view a child’s representations as inadequate or irrational, which gradually, through the passage of cognitive stages, finally reach mature and logical adult thinking. Instead, he thought that a child’s representation at a given time is adequately adapted to his/her lived experience. The second source of ideas for social representations was the phenomenology of language and this, in fact, is an expansion of the first point concerning the body. For Merleau-Ponty, the living body embraced the totality of an individual’s sense-making and self-creating of the world, whether by gazing at an object, painting a picture, or, perhaps most importantly, by speaking. The analysis of speech and expression shows the importance of the living body more effectively than any other kinds of
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activity (Merleau-Ponty, /, pp. –). As Merleau-Ponty states: ‘[t]he problem of the world, and, to begin with that of one’s own body, consists in the fact that “it is all there”’ (Merleau-Ponty, /, p. ). Ricoeur’s () essay on the phenomenology of language refers to Merleau-Ponty’s suggestion that the study of language should turn away from the modern linguistics and semiology of de Saussure (see also Chapters and ) and, instead, revert to the speaking subject (MerleauPonty, /). Linguistics and semiology established a linguistic model but ignored language as an expression of a speaking subject and as an actuality. Merleau-Ponty pushed the spoken language into a central position of human experience. This made a contrast to the conception of language as a ‘fait accompli’, that is, of language conceived as an already accomplished system of signs. Merleau-Ponty (/, p. ) objected to such a linguistic account of ‘language in the past’. He thought that the linguistic focus on ‘language in the past’ totally ignored ‘the fecundity of expression’. In contrast, the phenomenological perspective focuses on the speaking subject in a living community and is orientated towards the future. Third, Moscovici remembered that it was Merleau-Ponty’s (/) Phenomenology of Perception that helped him to develop the concept of representation. However, it is also in relation to this point that we find a fundamental difference between phenomenology and the theory of social representations. Phenomenologists, including Merleau-Ponty, emphasised the primacy of perception from the point of view of an individual. In contrast, Moscovici’s approach is based on the interdependence of consciousnesses: it is social. Different to Merleau-Ponty, who emphasised the primacy of perception, Moscovici highlighted the primacy of social representation. As he stated: ‘this is what fixed this notion in my mind, how it was associated with certain ideas on the relationship between communication and knowledge, and the transformation of the content of knowledge’ (Moscovici and Marková, , p. ). Although Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology placed emphasis on the intentionality of perceptual imagination, imagination obtained new meaning in the theory of social representations. Once children start imagining, they can form social representations and so can transform one kind of image, knowledge, emotional experience, and so on into another. A social representation is organised around a figure (Chapter ; Moscovici, a, /) that underlies images that a group or society has generated over time.
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A Political Refugee in Paris
. Values and Ethical Choices Serge Moscovici described in his autobiography Chronique des années égarées (Moscovici, a) that the Second World War, Nazism, and Stalinism deeply influenced his focus on human drives, values, and moral forces that, throughout the long history of mankind, tore apart communities as well as brought them together. On the personal side, the experience of antisemitism, persecution, and humiliation during and after the War became the formative foundation of his ideas. Moscovici expressed his views on these issues in his first publication in the journal Dada, co-edited with his friends in Bucharest during the War, which was immediately stopped by the authorities. Later, during his social scientific research in France, inspirations from Pascal, which he described in Chronique des années egarées (Moscovici, a), and particularly those relating to science, religion, ethics, and morality, became the centre of his attention. When he started his research in Paris, he conceived prejudices, stereotypes, and influences as interactions historically rooted in groups in their religions, morals, and ideologies. This was why he strongly objected to studies of opinions and attitudes using scales and questionnaires that aimed to examine facts and information about rational thinking without attention to historical and cultural heritages. Humans are not rational machines that express thoughts without any engagement with respect to socially valorised phenomena and their interactions. We shall find (Chapter ) that, in Psychoanalysis, Moscovici considered values and ethical judgements in relation to all the main agents involved in the study, such as the lay participants, the press, the psychoanalysts, the Church, and the Communist Party. Making evaluations is what makes our species human. In contrast to social psychological studies at the time, which conceived human events, actions, and communication as neutral and disengaged, Moscovici argued that making evaluations and judgements of events and of others is indispensable to all interactions in daily living. The tendency to rationalise and mechanise interpersonal relations and to draw reified rules into ethics serves as a permanent reminder of susceptibility to disregarding values (e.g., Moscovici, ).
. Conclusion With the benefit of hindsight, Serge Moscovici tried to reflect on what had motivated him to develop the theory of social representations.
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Socio-political and intellectual resources that underlay his thinking were complex. They were determined by events during the War and its aftermath, as well as by his personal and interpersonal experiences. In contrast to social psychological studies in the s which were preoccupied with the study of attitudes and small groups, Moscovici was interested in urgent global issues such as the impact of science and technology on historical changes in society, the role of masses, conflicts, and the construction of social knowledge. He believed that social psychology would be able to respond to these challenges. The two masters, who had a tremendous impact on Moscovici’s career during the first years of his research in Paris, were the psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Daniel Lagache and the philosopher of science Alexandre Koyré. They re-orientated Serge Moscovici’s life and he called them his two fathers. Moscovici’s choice to study social representations of psychoanalysis was inspired by several intellectual reasons and coincidences. Above all, he thought that psychoanalysis would be a suitable subject matter to explore the transformation of ‘scientific’ or professional knowledge into daily knowledge and, therefore, it would enable him to confront the Marxist conviction that ordinary people should be taught how to think rationally and logically. Psychoanalysis was widely discussed, was controversial, and brought to light the tension between scientific and professional thought on the one hand and the daily thinking of ordinary people on the other. Moscovici discovered the name ‘representation’ in Robert Lenoble’s book. There, he also found ideas about common sense as being shaped by history, language, culture, and social habits. However, he found it difficult to explain to his tutors that he did not want to study attitudes or opinions but aimed to discover the content and processes of what people were thinking about psychoanalysis in daily life. Intellectual resources that inspired him, such as Wiener’s cybernetics with its emphasis on social communication, Guttman’s scales, phenomenology, values, and ethics, all adopted holistic and dynamic perspectives in the study of social phenomena. Among these resources, he did not mention the influence of Emile Durkheim’s collective representations.
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The ‘Age of Intellectual Innocence’ in Psychoanalysis ()
In effect, as the philosopher Cassirer put it, in human knowledge nothing is simply presented: everything is represented. Our perception and our thought are the products of minds which already have a shared organisation and the content which, to a large extent, delimit what our immediate world of experience will be
(Moscovici, a, p. ).
The political and intellectual resources available to Moscovici when working on the first edition of Psychoanalysis: Its Image and Its Public (Moscovici, a), together with his intuitions and creative thinking, largely determined how he explored the dissemination of psychoanalysis as a ‘science’ and profession into daily thinking. He decided to study this real-life process empirically and theoretically through multiple ways of collecting data in a holistic fashion.
. Empirical Exploration of Psychoanalysis as a Social Representation The book Psychoanalysis consists of two parts, each applying different empirical methods to explore social representations. In Part I Moscovici describes collecting data through interviews and a notebook questionnaire. He interviewed individuals from different strata in society, including Communists, Catholics, students, members of the public, and professionals. Open-ended interviews were designed to explore the understanding, description, and meanings of psychoanalysis, the role of the psychoanalyst, and knowledge and comprehension of terms connected with psychoanalysis by lay people, among other aspects. Moscovici thought that members of different social groups would understand and evaluate psychoanalysis in diverse ways depending on their social, political, and cultural backgrounds. He thought that participants would share their representations only partially because meanings are never interpreted
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completely and further questions will remain. He conceived language and dialogue as fundamentally open, unfinished, and always having potential for further development. The notebook questionnaire combined an interview with a questionnaire, enabling the use of an alternative approach to data-collecting while using the same questions. Moscovici constructed a different questionnaire for each explored group, with fourteen questions common to all questionnaires. The use of two methods made it possible to compare opinions about psychoanalysis across different social strata using free interviews and closed questions. In Part II, Moscovici analysed the presentations of psychoanalysis in newspapers and magazines published in France during the period of January to March . Altogether, he collected , articles. The press expressed contradictory ideas not only about psychoanalysis but also its associations with ideologies, religious and political beliefs that were presented by powerful institutions at that time, namely, the Catholic Church and the Communist Party. These institutions conceived psychoanalysis in specific ways: the Communist Party was opposed to it strictly as a pseudo-scientific and political issue; the Catholic Church expressed some misgivings and treated psychoanalysis with some sympathy and as a moral issue. Finally, Moscovici was a keen observer of concrete social and political events. His observations entered directly and indirectly into his writing, for example, the clashes between defendants of the concepts of ‘proletarian’ and ‘bourgeois’ science, scientists’ resignations from the Communist Party due to the Party’s propaganda, among others. Using these different methods of collecting data provided Moscovici with a spectrum of possibilities for empirical analysis which, together with his philosophical, anthropological, and social scientific resources, enabled him to construct a novel approach to the study of socially shared knowledge and communication.
. The ‘Age of Intellectual Innocence’ in Writing Psychoanalysis () I suggest that Moscovici’s intellectual ‘age of innocence’ expressed itself in the first edition of Psychoanalysis in several ways. One of them was the structure of his book which, in fact, was his doctoral thesis. The book starts with presenting data from interviews rather than a theoretical background leading to hypotheses or models. Some books of Jean Piaget, though not
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Psychoanalysis ()
all, were also structured in this way. Equally, the studies of the developmental psychologist Henri Wallon (), whose work Moscovici appreciated, on children’s intelligence commenced with examples of interviews with children, showing their thinking, before addressing theoretical questions. Since these two psychologists figured strongly in Moscovici’s first edition, perhaps it is not surprising that he followed their examples in structuring his book. Moscovici first depicted participants’ responses to the question ‘what is psychoanalysis?’ Participants, who came from diverse social backgrounds, expressed not only their knowledge of psychoanalysis, their commitments, beliefs, and images, but also their views on social, political, and moral issues. The participants’ meanings played an important role in Moscovici’s development of his theoretical ideas. It was a major contribution of his work that both the data from participants, that is, their lay definitions of psychoanalysis, and the socio-political and moral contexts in which these were formed were equally important in Moscovici’s theoretical constructions. Another expression of Moscovici’s ‘age of intellectual innocence’ was the use of the theoretical background from which he approached his work. Casual inspection of the bibliography of his first edition of Psychoanalysis shows that, although he referred to contemporary psychologists such as Piaget, Wallon, and several American social psychologists, his main references came from anthropology, Marxism, philosophy, and the sociology of knowledge. It was the latter kind of literature that provided Moscovici with an unusually broad and rich range of ideas. This literature facilitated his focus on different forms of daily thinking, myth, images, forms of symbolic communication, the relation between language and thinking, and the socio-political environment. Among these resources, Piaget played a vital role. Moscovici (, p. .) commented on Piaget’s (/) book The Child’s Conception of the World: Piaget was also one of my favourite authors. And through the originality of its method, its treatment of the interviews with children and its theoretical energy, this book enabled me to grasp more intuitively what is behind ‘common sense’ and, thereby, a social representation. It is this vision of the abstract into the concrete, of the ideal into the real which compelled me to study Lévy-Bruhl and Piaget, before immersing myself in Durkheim for whom these representations appeared like an ‘idealised’ real.
Here, we have evidence of Moscovici’s concern with philosophical questions around the multitude forms of thinking, such as abstract versus
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concrete and ideal versus real, which was prior to his focus on Durkheim’s representations as an ‘idealised’ real.
. Reviews of Psychoanalysis in When Psychoanalysis was published in , it attracted a great deal of attention and immediately, both highly appreciative reviews as well as critiques of Moscovici’s book appeared. Claude Faucheux (, p. ) characterised Moscovici’s book as ‘an anthropological study of our own society, akin to Marxist analyses of ideology’. On several occasions in his detailed essay, Faucheux referred to the theory as a ‘theory of social representations and communication’. Above all, it was a study of the relations between the individual and society; it explored how a theory circulates in society, how society absorbs and uses it for its own purposes. Faucheux emphasised that Moscovici explored the process of social representation and communication in their unity: he analysed their structure, the ways in which elements of the process were linked to each other and followed their internal laws; he studied them in their genesis and their wholeness. Faucheux raised the question of Moscovici’s choice of psychoanalysis as a subject of study and wondered whether it qualified as a ‘scientific theory’. Nevertheless, it was surely suitable as a subject that diffused in society and was of interest to the public. Faucheux suggested that a field of research that he would like to see as a followup would be a study of Marxism as a social representation. One could learn just as much about the transformation of knowledge as about the political practices. The philosopher and psychoanalyst J.-B. Pontalis () also raised the question of whether psychoanalysis was an example of a scientific theory; he appreciated Moscovici’s analysis of the press but found contradictions
I suggest that these philosophical questions about the nature of thinking reflected both Moscovici’s primary interest in the study of daily thinking as well as Koyré’s philosophical conviction that the whole history of philosophy must be understood as the tradition of Plato versus that of Aristotle (e.g., Koyré, ). Plato’s theory of forms or of abstract ideas represented true natures of things. For Aristotle, thinking was concrete as it related to senses (common sense); daily experience determined whether thinking was correct or involved contradictions (e.g., the theory of syllogisms). (Some implications of these issues in psychology were discussed in Marková, , , .) Moscovici often repeated that Koyré was a Platonist (personal communication). Durkheim’s ‘idealised’ real in the previous quotation is likely to refer to his static (Platonist, Cartesian, and Kantian) perspective. Koyré admired Durkheim (Chapter ). Moscovici, indeed, attempted to study social representations of Marxism in the s (Chapter ).
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Psychoanalysis ()
between Moscovici’s theory and methods of exploring social representations of psychoanalysis. In a highly favourable review, the sociologist and anthropologist Roger Bastide () emphasised Moscovici’s contribution to the sociology of knowledge, although, as he pointed out, Moscovici was more concerned with the study of groups than with global society. Another reviewer, the sociologist F.-A. Isambert (), emphasised that Moscovici’s study formed an intersection between social psychology and the sociology of knowledge. He doubted whether Moscovici had built a bridge between the two disciplines in Part II of Psychoanalysis. He commented that Moscovici had raised many questions which, in Isambert’s view, were not answered. Nevertheless, Isambert maintained that shortcomings of the book should not dominate the evaluation of this very important study that raised so many significant questions. He concluded that the first part of the book offered such valuable insights that one was obliged to name the author a pioneer in such a difficult field of research. I have gone into some detail of the reviews of Psychoanalysis in to draw attention to the following issues: • Moscovici’s book immediately attracted a great deal of attention, and many reviews were published in . • The reviews were written by philosophers and social scientists across social psychology, sociology, and anthropology. • None of the reviewers mentioned the name of Emile Durkheim and of his collective representations, showing that, in their minds, Moscovici’s social representations were not associated with Durkheim. Roger Bastide, in his review, regretted that Moscovici did not refer to the sociologist of knowledge Georges Gurvitch. Let us remind ourselves in this context that the word ‘representation’ was in use in philosophy (e.g., by Kant, Renouvier, Lenoble) and in the social sciences (Weber, Simmel, Lévy-Bruhl) and, therefore, this may explain why the reviewers of Psychoanalysis did not associate Moscovici’s book with Durkheim’s collective representations.
. Emile Durkheim in the First Edition of Psychoanalysis In contrast with the contemporary association between Moscovici’s and Durkheim’s social or collective representations, Durkheim figured very little in the first edition of Psychoanalysis. This corresponded to Moscovici’s
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() own claim that he had adopted the notion of ‘representations’ from Father Lenoble (Chapter ), who not only used the term ‘representation’ but also referred to common sense and its expressions in and through language (Chapter ). Although mental representations had already been studied by Descartes and Locke (Marková, ), it was Immanuel Kant who influenced the Durkheimian version of representations. According to Kant, the human mind did not have direct access to the real world, that is, to things in themselves, but only to its representations (appearances) formed through perception and understanding. The mind assembled sensory data into representations of objects and so constructed appearances of the world. In the first edition of Psychoanalysis, Moscovici was critical of Durkheim (e.g., Moscovici, a, pp. –; also, a) for adopting the static Kantian perspective of representations. This meant that representations were a priori forms of knowledge; Kant did not raise the question of their possible change during an individual’s life. Neither Kant nor Durkheim meant that a priori knowledge was innate. For Kant, a priori knowledge was grounded in the constitution of the mind and was independent of individuals’ experience. For Durkheim, apriorism meant that collective representations were the logical presuppositions of thought. He equated collective representations with reality and conceived them as given (Stedman Jones, ). Instead, Moscovici viewed representations as dynamic constructions of social reality. Neither did Moscovici accept Durkheim’s anti-common-sense approach to representations. Moscovici’s conception of language and communication as a dynamic feature of social representations had nothing to do with the language as a static social fact view adopted by Durkheim. However, Moscovici appreciated that, in contrast to Kant, Durkheim conceived representations as ‘social’ or ‘collective’ (Moscovici, a, p. ). In addition, Moscovici valued that, for Durkheim, collective representations did not double reality by presupposing the existence of things in themselves and their representations. Instead, as stated above, collective representations were the reality (see Chapter for details).
In formulating collective representations, Durkheim was also inspired by other scholars, particularly his teacher, the philosopher Charles Renouvier (Pickering, a; Stedman Jones, ) but also William James (I am grateful to Alex Gillespie for reminding me of this link). Importantly, Durkheim claimed that James contributed more than anyone else in drawing attention to the continuity of representations so that one can never say where one representation begins and the other ends because they mutually penetrate each other (Durkheim, /, p. )
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Psychoanalysis ()
Durkheim adopted both these points from his teacher Charles Renouvier, whose work Moscovici probably did not know at that stage. Moscovici, however, did not approve of Durkheim’s (/) neglect of psychological features of individuals and groups as agents in the formation of collective representations and of his static Kantian approach. Moscovici commented: ‘If Durkheim simply wanted to say that social life is a condition of all of our thinking, this would be fine’; however, since he did not address the plurality of modalities of individuals’ thinking before giving the representation its social qualification, the notion of representation lost its clarity. One must first identify psychological aspects of a representation: ‘Social representation is indeed a psychological organisation, a modality of particular knowledge’ (Moscovici, a, p. , my translation). The word ‘indeed’, or ‘as a matter of fact’, can be read as an argument against Durkheim’s position according to which ‘psychological’ is only individual and not social. Moscovici emphasised that if one adopts the perspective that all representations are social then one must involve individuals’ psychological features. Durkheim did not appreciate this point. The observation about the marginal role of Durkheim in the first edition of Psychoanalysis brings me to highlight Moscovici’s implicit and explicit adherence to philosophical perspectives that were vastly different from those of Durkheim.
. Serge Moscovici and Ernst Cassirer Moscovici was knowledgeable about the rich philosophical and cultural history of approaches to social knowledge that formed an alternative to Cartesian and Kantian representations. This alternative philosophical perspective can be traced from the late seventeenth century (e.g., Giambattista Vico), through the eighteenth century (e.g., Hamann, Herder, Humboldt), to the nineteenth-century dialectics (e.g., Hegel, Marx, Engels, Plekhanov), and, finally, to the twentieth-century philosophers and language scholars (e.g., Cassirer, Bakhtin, Rommetveit, Merleau-Ponty). This perspective conceives humans as symbolic and dynamic agents striving to construct their social realities in and through language, thinking, and (inter)acting. All that was totally remote from Durkheim’s collective representations. Among scholars belonging to this alternative philosophical perspective, I suggest that Ernst Cassirer had a particularly strong effect on the development of Moscovici’s ideas on social representations in the first edition of Psychoanalysis. Cassirer started his career as a neo-Kantian
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philosopher and, in his later work, he became known as a philosopher of culture. He completed his doctoral studies with Herman Cohen of the Marburg neo-Kantian School. Cohen also had an inspiring influence on dialogical scholars such as Bakhtin, Lévinas, Rosenzweig, among others (Marková, , ). Moscovici referred to Cassirer at various points in his career in his discussions of language, myth, imagination, the symbolic nature of humanity, folk knowledge, naming, diversities of cultures, objectification, but, in my view, Cassirer’s influence was even stronger than Moscovici explicitly admitted. Whatever the case, the coincidences between Cassirer’s and Moscovici’s concepts are striking. In the first edition of Psychoanalysis, Moscovici referred directly in the text to Cassirer’s An Essay on Man () and to an essay on ‘Language and the construction of world objects’ (Cassirer, /) (see later), and he also made reference to The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (Cassirer, ) as background reading in his bibliography. Since the conceptual coincidences between the two scholars percolate throughout the whole first edition of Psychoanalysis, rather than summarising them, I shall refer to them as appropriate throughout the remainder of this chapter.
. Epistemological Presuppositions and the Main Concepts in Psychoanalysis ..
Myth, Language, and Representation
In the ‘Preliminary Remarks’ in the first edition of Psychoanalysis, Moscovici spoke about the theory of social representations as a crossroad among human and social sciences. Having insisted on the intersection between social psychology and the sociology of knowledge, he suggested that questions asked by anthropologists about the nature of myths, about different cultures and their structures, were equally important in the theory of social representations. He explained that the study of social representations implied the analysis of cultural forms of group expressions, the organisation and transformation of such expressions, and the interdependencies between humans and their milieu. One can observe analogies
I understand that it was a common practice in Moscovici’s time to make two kinds of references: to those that were explicitly quoted or mentioned in the text of a thesis and to those that were used as background reading but were not referred to directly in the text. Correspondingly, in the first edition of Psychoanalysis, Moscovici referred to Cassirer both in the text, where he mentioned specific works, and in his final bibliography as background reading.
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Psychoanalysis ()
between past and contemporary societies with respect to myth, social practices, regulation of activities, and communication. It was Cassirer, Moscovici (a, p. ) reminds us, who drew attention to analogies between myths and representations. Referring to Cassirer, Margaret Mead, and Malinowski, Moscovici elaborated on the role of myth in society. Thus, he was aware of Cassirer’s studies of symbolic forms such as myths, religion, arts, rational thinking, and science. Symbolic forms are historical and cultural achievements of human intelligence and reasoning: they are organs creating social reality. Humans create myths and representations in and through language. Symbolic forms are inseparably linked. Myth and language arise together and there is no question of one being derived from the other. Among those whose views Cassirer specifically endorsed was German philosopher Ludwig Noiré, who emphasised that language is a sensorium commune (Cassirer, , p. ff.); it is in and through communal activity that humans choose objects and their names. In and through language, objects ‘enter into the scope of human vision, i.e., they become things only in so far as they undergo human activity, and it is then that they obtain their designation, their names’ (quoted by Cassirer, , p. ). This activity depends on the emotional, volitional, cognitive, or otherwise relevance of objects. Therefore, human life attains reality and visibility in the cultural symbols expressed through words and images. Humans are symbolic beings and the symbolic forms they create must be understood in a holistic manner. All these achievements are organically connected and it would be a gross error to treat them as separate or arbitrary. Moscovici (a, p. ) considered that among ‘primitive people’, myth constituted a global vision of nature, society, and kinship. The function of myth was to provide ‘primitive people’ with guidance in real life. For them, myth was a total philosophy, science, and symbolic perspective in life. Moscovici insisted that despite analogies between myths and social representations, the two phenomena must not be confused. Modern society is highly diversified and social representations form only one of the different ways that humans apprehend the world. Myths do not disappear in the modern world but both in science and daily life, they often complement one another (Chapter ). Both science and myth are
Cassirer refers to Giambattista Vico as the true discoverer of myth in The Problem of Knowledge (Cassirer, , p. ). Moscovici is much more explicit about the distinction between myth and social representations in his second edition of Psychoanalysis, pp. –.
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cultural forms through which humans attempt to comprehend the world. They must be understood as cultural forms on their own terms and as having their own logic. Although he did not refer to Lévy-Bruhl at this point, Moscovici referred to Cassirer’s () The Essay on Man, and Cassirer, indeed, had recalled that Lévy-Bruhl’s collective representations complemented Durkheim’s ideas. Throughout all his work, Cassirer also extensively used Kant’s concepts of representation (Vorstellung) and presentation (Darstellung). Moscovici’s discussion in the ‘Preliminary Remarks’ shows the importance that he attached to the interdependence between language and social representations, and to the interdependence between culture and the symbolic expressions of humans. Although various authors writing on social representations state that the concept of ‘social representations’ replaces ‘myths’ in traditional societies, the rich links between language, culture, and symbolic forms are rarely mentioned. Moscovici’s concern with language and communication totally infused his thinking. Later in his life, in his autobiography, he described his arrival as a refugee to Italy (Moscovici, a, p. ). On his promenade in Italy, he observed long conversations of local people, the rhythm of their speech, gestures, nuances of the tone of their voice, exaggerated movements which accompanied their speech. Their whole bodies mimicked with passion their ideas. He commented that his observations did not stop there: I was introduced to the life of language with the liveliest interest. This was my Berlitz school for Italian. By the way, it inspired me with the hypothesis – which I was the first to formulate and verify through research – that bodily gestures are part of the process of producing speech and affecting thinking. And it would not surprise me if the importance of conversation in my theory of representations came from there. Added to it are other charms that make it one of the attractions of the social life and customs in Italy. A truly human element and respectful of others (my translation, Moscovici, a, p. ).
Moscovici was convinced that one cannot communicate unless one shares, at least to some degree, a social representation of an object or event that is discussed – these two phenomena condition one another. ‘For me, communication is part of the study of representations because representations
Kant’s representation (Vorstellung) refers to imagining or placing something in front of the mind’s eye without that something being present. Presentation (Darstellung) refers to awareness of something concrete, for example, an object, in a specific situation. Kant refers to this capacity as ‘being given’ (Kant /, B ).
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Psychoanalysis ()
are generated in the process of communication and then, of course, expressed through language’ (Moscovici and Marková, , p. ). In conclusion, in expressing ourselves in language, we also express our social and cultural nature. It means building a common world in which people live together and express emotions and affects, and these sentiments lead to a metamorphosis in meaning. Language and communication are fundamental features of social representations because they articulate differences in individuals’ views and enable an expression of diverse conceptions or ideas. Some voices facilitate communication because they work out diversities and create intersubjective understanding. Others convey rigid oppositions and create barriers to communication. Indeed, for Moscovici, it was an incomprehensible and disappointing fact that social representations were not understood as a language and communication-based theory (Doise, Clémence, and Lorenzi-Cioldi, /; Moscovici and Marková, , p. ). As he said: ‘If we are interested in social thinking, we cannot imagine people as chewing information or chewing knowledge as if they were speechless or body-less’ (Moscovici and Marková, , p. ). .. The Implicit Ego–Alter–Object From the very beginning, Moscovici conceived the theory of social representations as one of social knowledge based on ‘natural thinking’ and ‘communication’. These concepts manifested themselves in and through the epistemological triad the ‘Ego–Alter–Object’. Although in Psychoanalysis () Moscovici did not yet use the concept of ‘Ego– Alter–Object’ explicitly (he used it openly for the first time in Moscovici, ), it was already implicitly present. Let me explain. For Moscovici, knowledge of psychoanalysis, as it was conceived in daily usage, was a form of social knowledge. The Self (the Ego) acquired knowledge of psychoanalysis in and through communication, for example, in conversation, reading papers, listening to professionals, and so on. In other words, the individual Selves (the Ego) were confronted with Others (the Alter, e.g., other people, the Church, the Communist Party, journalists, politicians). The two such parties discussed, rejected, negotiated, and argued about psychoanalysis (the Object). In transforming scientific and professional ideas into daily thinking and social representations, humans constructed their social reality of psychoanalysis. Two features of this construction should be noted. First, Moscovici did not think that scientific or professional knowledge of psychoanalysis would retain its original form in the process of
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Development and Diversification
communication. Rather, he anticipated that participants would interpret it according to their preferences, their practical and social interests, and would enrich it in multiple ways, introducing new features and placing values on their meanings of psychoanalysis. Their interpretations would also imply an understanding of social practices concerning psychoanalysis according to their experiences and attachment to institutional ideologies. For example, Moscovici found that the Oedipus complex reminded ordinary people of love–hate relations between parents and children; psychoanalysis, conceived as an ‘American pseudo-science’, was part of Marxist ideology; psychoanalysis, as a process of revealing to a therapist a patient’s unconscious fears, was a reminder of confession as a practice of the Catholic Church. Throughout communication, humans generated and changed images and created new patterns of knowledge (Moscovici, a, pp. –). Interdependencies between language and images take specific forms in different groups and sub-groups, which develop their distinctive terminologies according to their adopted beliefs and ideologies about psychoanalysis. External context directly interacts with participants’ thinking, actions, and communications; participants actively select those features that are of interest to them and to which they relate in one way or another. Second, Moscovici’s concept of Self–Other is a dialogical process of interactions that is underlain by tension and the strife of opposing and complementary features of participants’ beliefs, experiences, and motives. The Self and the Other belong together by being mutually opposed. Consequently, social knowledge is acquired in the public sphere through a real struggle of cultures and other systems of values (Kulturkampf). It does not mean that the ways in which his participants expressed their views in speech and images would directly correspond to their social representations. Very often, their representations may be ‘buried under the layers of words and images floating in people’s minds’ (Moscovici, , p. ). In Cassirer’s terms, the use of language does not imply referring or pointing to already existing entities but to constructing new entities and thoughts. In other words, language is constitutive of thought and thought is constitutive of language: humans construct reality by means of these two capacities. The translators of Cassirer’s essays, S. G. Lofts and A. Calgagno (, p. xvii), expressed this point as follows:
See previously, pp. –: ‘For me, communication is part of the study of representations because representations are generated in the process of communication and then, of course, expressed through language’ (Moscovici and Marková, , p. ).
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Psychoanalysis ()
It is through the system of symbolic forms that thought and being are set apart in the strife of their belonging together in opposition. At the core of this symbolic strife of thought and being . . . is found the relationship of the self to the other. Here, too, the word and the image do not mediate two autonomous subjects; rather it is only in and through them that the I and the you are first distinguished as separate and formed in their belonging together in opposition. In and through the Auseinandersetzung there occurs a genuine and mutual cor-respondence [sic] between being and thought, between the I and the you.
By using the notion of strife (a translation of the German word of Auseinandersetzung), Cassirer was expressing the idea that the I and the You belong together in a symbolic confrontation, mutually opposing one another. Importantly, the I and the You are not two independent subjects; they co-exist together and co-develop in and through the symbolic strife expressed in words and images. ‘Word and image’, both for Cassirer and for Moscovici, constituted the interdependent relations between the Self and the Other that, by their expressive powers, created their social reality. ..
Natural Thinking and Rationality
Moscovici’s main aim in Psychoanalysis was to explore the social determinants of natural thinking, including their emotional, ethical, interactional, religious, ideological, and political aspects. These issues were part of daily discussions about psychoanalysis. They were of interest to the public; people had conversations about them and argued and negotiated their positions. Equally importantly, the mass media reported political and ideological perspectives and these were apparent in participants’ responses in interviews. In the s, the dominant model of thinking in psychology was derived from formal logical systems such as syllogisms and propositional calculus. This model supposedly represented the idea of correct and standard thinking and of rationality. Accordingly, rational thinking is supposed to be the search for ‘objective’ truth and is not affected by emotions, ethical concerns, religion, or cultural habits. The studies of thinking that adopted the model of rational thinking explored ‘errors’,
Cassirer used the German expression Auseinandersetzung to convey the idea of a symbolic strife between the Self and Others (see particularly The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, ).
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Development and Diversification
‘biases’, and ‘irrationalities’ in daily thought which interfered with correct thinking (Marková, ). In contrast to this dominant model of thinking in psychology, Moscovici introduced the concept of ‘natural thinking’, which was one of the most novel concepts in Psychoanalysis. He presented a perspective of thinking that is pluralistic and diversified in various ways. For example, philosophical thinking uses a different conceptual framework to religious thinking, daily thinking, professional thinking, and so on. ‘Natural thinking’ is social thinking which in daily life takes diverse forms that clash, contradict, and complement one another. Since thinking is a social phenomenon and expresses itself in language, language and thinking are both involved in social representation. Intellectually and psychologically, Moscovici presupposed that the transformation of professional knowledge of psychoanalysis into the knowledge of daily thinking had its own logic, and that it was a rational process of thinking enriched by people’s experience. It was not an inferior process that degraded specialist knowledge. ..
Objectification and Anchoring
After presenting his empirical results on social representations of psychoanalysis based on interviews, Moscovici posed a question as to how these representations were formed. He pointed out that the answer to this question could be neither complete nor generally valid. Rather, he thought that he had shown how empirical and theoretical analyses were linked together and how they related to the same phenomena. In attempting to
In contrast to psychology, the sociology of knowledge was concerned with social forms of knowledge, and Moscovici was aware of the work of Mannheim, Scheler, Gurvitch, and Sorokin, whose work he noted in the ‘Preliminary Remarks’ in the first edition of Psychoanalysis. As mentioned previously, one of the critics of Moscovici’s book, Bastide, regretted that Moscovici did not pay attention to Gurvitch. The concept of natural thought as a dynamic and evolving process recalls Mannheim’s ‘styles of thought’ which is at the heart of his sociology of knowledge: ‘The history of thought from this point of view is no mere history of ideas, but an analysis of different styles of thought as they grow and develop, fuse and disappear; and the key to the understanding of changes in ideas is to be found in the changing social background, mainly in the fate of the social groups or classes which are the “carriers” of these styles of thought’ (Mannheim, , p. ). We can recall here the work of Piaget’s collaborator, the logician and mathematician Jean-Blaise Grize of the University of Neuchâtel, who, during the s and s, developed the concept of ‘natural logic’ (e.g., Grize, ). This was, of course, much later than Moscovici’s work on ‘natural thinking’. Natural logic, in contrast to formal logic, is concerned with the relation between the form and content of thinking and, to that extent, it could be relevant in social representations and communication. Yet, despite the availability of Grize’s model of natural logic, as Jodelet () remarked, researchers paid little attention to investigating this matter.
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Psychoanalysis ()
answer his question of how representations were formed, Moscovici postulated objectification and anchoring as two major language-based processes that he viewed as the cornerstones of his empirical research. Since both objectification and anchoring have had a long history in European scholarship (Moscovici, a, p. ), it was necessary to explain their meanings in his own project. .. What Is Objectification? The term ‘objectification’, on the one hand, is commonly associated with scientific and rationalistic thinking and, on the other, it is also conceived as a language-based process that takes place in daily activities and communication. It is this latter meaning of ‘objectification’ that Moscovici developed. Moscovici was very careful to explain what he meant by objectification in his study. He described it as a process that proceeds through three components: ‘information’, figurative schema, and naturalisation. ... ‘Information’ Humans have a fundamental capacity to select ‘information’ that circulates around them. I put ‘information’ into inverted commas because it is not ‘information’ in some general or unspecific sense. Instead, humans select from the external world what they find meaningful, what fits with their interests, motives, beliefs, and values. Let us insist, however, that although such selection of significant elements is an individual activity, it is cogenerated by images, judgements, beliefs, and values of social groups to which an individual belongs. The process in which an individual assembles the selected elements into a meaningful pattern that expresses his/her comprehension of an object in the outside world forms the first part of ‘objectification’. Some of the elements are consciously selected while others
Charles Taylor (, p. ) comments that this kind of objectification presupposes disengagement and neutrality towards the issue in question. ‘Objectification of human nature’ (Taylor, , p. ) means that the human mind is decomposed into individual faculties, to a mechanistic separation of cognition from emotions and will, and so it devises a new concept of objectivity that is linked to a new notion of subjectivity (for details, see Marková, a). This implies that a human being takes a disengaged stance even to his/her own self, including emotions, will, and compulsions. Taking a disengaged stance, the Self takes distance from subjectivity to act rationally in ‘an objectified and impersonal mode’ and assumes control over the world by standing back from it (Taylor, , p. ). The world is viewed as a big mechanism that the individual can objectively reconstruct and draw conclusions from. As Taylor (, p. ) explains, this perspective implies connections between disengagement, objectification, and power or control, which define rationality and the acquisition of knowledge. In other words, objectification is derived from individual rationality based on indubitable knowledge.
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Development and Diversification
could be adopted unconsciously. The selected elements form a dynamic structure, what Moscovici called a ‘figurative schema’, in which they are linked with one another and may be in conflict. ... Figurative Schema The ‘figurative schema’ transforms as an individual selects new elements and de-selects and re-selects others. Let me repeat that although the figurative schema is the product of an individual’s activity, it is underlain by images, judgements, and values of social groups or communities that have been established over generations. In the case of psychoanalysis, Moscovici’s interviewees selected, for example, features of psychoanalysis such as ‘a form of therapy’, ‘a method for investigating personality’, ‘a medicine without medication’, among others. The figurative schema tied together unconscious, repressed, and conscious processes into a psychoanalytic ‘complex’. The ways the schema was developed remind us of the concept of thema and themata that Moscovici developed years later (see Chapter ). The figurative schema is based on the oppositional nature of human thinking – the capacity that has been recognised and studied in different cultures all over the world since ancient scholarship (Marková, ). With respect to psychoanalysis, Moscovici (/, p. ) states: The unconscious and the conscious mind are often seen as a transposition of the pair of categories we have outlined: hidden/apparent, involuntary/ voluntary, inner/outer. As a result of this mutation, they acquire a conceptual dignity. The concepts of the conscious mind, the unconscious and repression are themselves steeped in concrete imagery and have the same dynamism as any contradictory concept.
Moscovici (a, p. ) comments that this schema has been well documented in the data from his interviewees. unconscious
repression
complex
consciousness
The concept of schema as an active organisation of individual experiences was widely used by Bartlett (/).
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Psychoanalysis ()
As Moscovici developed this figurative schema in the study of social representations of psychoanalysis, the unconscious and repression components featured most strongly. One would assume that, in the study of social representations of other phenomena, the schema would take a different form. For example, while the unconscious and the conscious would play a vital role in the study of social representations of HIV/ AIDS or of Covid-, it is likely that the unconscious would be linked to danger or fear rather than to repression. The construction of the figurative schema would have specific features in objectification in different cases of social representation. ... Naturalisation Moscovici (a, p. ) adopted the term naturalisation from Daniel Lagache. Moscovici shows the ways in which ‘objectification’ takes place through language: it is through language that an idea is changed into social reality. For example, Freud’s ‘Oedipus complex’, originally an abstract term used in psychoanalysis, obtained a new meaning in common-sense language. In daily language it designated the way in which relations between parents and children were organised; it helped to interpret certain tensions in such relations and the arising pathological symptoms. Let me emphasise that the three processes of objectification must not be construed as sequential. For analytical purposes, I have described and explained them sequentially; however, we must not forget that the selection of ‘information’, schematisation, and naturalisation proceed simultaneously, one process transforming itself into the other, back again, and continually moving forward. They are language-based dialogical processes. ... From Image to Social Reality In addition to characterising the process of objectification in terms of the selection of ‘information’, figurative schema, and naturalisation, Moscovici also described it as a process broken into two phases through which the theory was transformed into social reality. One movement of that process ran from Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis to its image, and the other proceeded towards the construction of social reality (Moscovici, a, p. ). These two movements emphasised two features of objectification: first, humans use their capacity to select ‘information’ from the object of knowledge based on their values and other representations. Their selection of the pertinent features of Freud’s psychoanalysis led to a divergence between Freud’s theory and its image (i.e., representation). Second, this image (rather than the original Freud theory) became the social reality of
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Development and Diversification
psychoanalysis. These dialogical and activity-based ideas mark the ways in which objectification through language and image changes an idea into social reality. ... Objectification as a Language-Based Process and Practical Activity Let us return at this point to Cassirer, who described objectification in terms of language and practical activity. Cassirer derived his ideas on language from Herder, Humboldt, Lotze, and Noiré, among others, who all viewed language as a social activity designating objects and their properties, therefore stabilising the world and fixing social reality. Social reality is fixed by giving an object a name, and so naming is the means of creating objects in the world. Cassirer (/, pp. –) particularly insists on the importance of naming in a child’s representations of objects. A child needs names for fixing the representation of an object – or by making it an object for the Self, that is, by objectifying it. The object becomes the child’s possession through naming: name and thing not only grow together but conjoin with one another (Cassirer, /, p. ). Cassirer was deeply involved in children’s efforts to grasp objects in the outside world by knowing their names. Referring to numerous child psychologists who observed this phenomenon, Cassirer (, pp. –) claimed that the hunger for names is ‘a hunger for forms, an urge for essential apprehension’. Well-established studies in developmental psychology built on the holistic concept of a child’s agency and on the growth of symbolic consciousness. They showed that the meaning of a name and the knowledge of the identity of an object developed together in a holistic manner. Only gradually does a child make a distinction between an object and its name in his/her effort to comprehend reality. Equally important, alongside the world of external objects and a child’s own Self, language opens for a child the social world, the vision of Others, and their names (Cassirer, /).
A similar approach to objectification was taken in the special issue on objectification of knowledge in science classrooms by the anthropologists Massoud and Kuipers () who, too, characterise objectification as a language-based process and as an activity manifesting itself in everyday interaction. More specifically, the authors view objectification as an inter-relational semiotic practice that has significant social and epistemological consequences. Objectification means ‘participation and practice within culturally defined activity systems’ (Massoud and Kuipers, , p. ). Without referring to Moscovici, these authors, too, focus on linguistic objectification through the analysis of names and sentences. Names ‘thingify’ or ‘objectify’ but nominalisation is not solely a grammatical process; the meanings of the words affect, and are affected by, the very process in which nominalisation takes place.
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Psychoanalysis ()
It was here that Moscovici explicitly recognised that his observations were very close to those of Cassirer in his ‘very lucid article’. He quoted Cassirer’s views in both editions of Psychoanalysis: ‘Objective’ representing, as I will attempt to formulate, is not the beginning that the process of the formation of language assumes but the goal to which this process leads; it is not its terminus a quo but its terminus ad quem. Language does not enter into a world of finished objective intuition only in order to add to the given and clearly distinguished and delimited individual objects their ‘names’ as pure external and arbitrary signs; rather it is itself the means of the formation of objects. Indeed, in a certain sense, it is the means, the most important and the most perfect instrument for the production and the construction of a pure ‘world of objects.’ [Cassirer, /, p. ] . . . Alongside the world of ‘external’ objects and the world of one’s own I, however, is the social world, which is first actually opened up by language and progressively conquered by it [Cassirer, /, p. ].
While Moscovici clearly recognised the closeness of his and Cassirer’s position, he did not refer to the second part of Cassirer’s quotation, which is concerned with the social world. In developing his ideas, Cassirer insisted that the road to objectivity does not lead to concern with things; instead, the first step emerges in the vision of the ‘you’: ‘The direction of the “you” is primary and original, proving itself to be so strong and overpowering that for a long time all consciousness of mere “things” [Sachen] must be dressed in the form of the “you” in order to achieve appearance or withdrawal as such’ (Cassirer, /, p. ). Most important, this life-with-one-another [Mit-einander-Lebens] is, above all, made available and created by language. It was here that Cassirer explained what he meant by the ‘social world’. It is the ontology of humanity; the I and You form the social world and only when this ontology is established does one proceed to the epistemology of the I–You–Object. Moscovici did not develop, at this stage, these ideas expressed in Cassirer’s ‘very lucid article’ and, thus, this epistemology remained implicit in Psychoanalysis. Moscovici explicitly adopted this epistemological triad a few years later (Moscovici, , c). He, however, insisted that he derived the triad Ego–Alter–Object from C. S. Peirce (see Chapters and ).
Cassirer published this paper in German in . It was translated into French in and Moscovici quotes from that French translation. The English translation of the second edition of Psychoanalysis in uses that of D. Macey. Rather than using the translation from German to French and then to English, I am using the translation of S. G. Lofts and A. Calcagno from German to English (Cassirer, /).
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Development and Diversification .. Anchoring
The second process of generating social representations is ‘anchoring’. As Moscovici (a, p. , Moscovici’s italics, my translation) states: ‘If objectification explains how the elements represented by a theory integrate as terms of social reality, anchoring makes it possible to understand the way in which they contribute to expressing and constituting social relationships.’ To my mind, this portrayal of anchoring in Psychoanalysis () explains this process much better than Moscovici’s later publications. Through anchoring, the object is categorised. It is placed into a network of socially established knowledge and beliefs which may come from various knowledge systems and diverse sources, for example, from literature, religion, politics, or philosophy (Moscovici, a, p. ). In the subsequent pages of his book, Moscovici empirically explored anchoring in exactly this way, comparing his studied groups in terms of their political orientation, religion, attitudes, and knowledge of psychoanalysis. Not surprisingly, he found that, in interviews, these groups prioritised different meanings of psychoanalysis and he typified these interviews as conversations, confessions, suggestions, and associations with hypnotism and narcoanalysis (psychotherapy in cases of mental states induced by drugs). His rich findings linked social representations of psychoanalysis to other forms of representations underlying different kinds of values and actions. Moscovici (a, p. ) concluded that the process of anchoring is ‘protéiforme’, that is, multifaceted and covering a vast range of domains. In conclusion, οbjectification refers to an individual’s creation of an object by selecting its relevant features and organising them into a meaningful pattern (figurative schema). This activity is co-generated by values, judgements, and preferences of the social groups to which an individual belongs, and these characteristics have often been established over generations. Objectification is underlain by searching for meanings of objects in the outside world and by naming these (see also Cassirer, /, ). By naming, an individual creates (or recreates) the object of his/her attention. Anchoring is the process of categorising, naming, and evaluating an object and placing it into a network of socially established knowledge and beliefs as adopted by specific groups and sub-groups and their cultural milieu, for example, from literature, religion, or otherwise (Moscovici, a, p. ). In view of these characterisations of objectification and anchoring, I suggest that ‘naming’ has different meanings in these two processes of
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Psychoanalysis ()
representation. In objectification, naming refers to giving a name to a single object, for example, Peter, World Cup , Putin’s war. Naming in anchoring, in contrast, means giving something a name that places that object into a category. For example, giving Putin the name ‘butcher’ places the Russian president into a category of people whose profession is to kill animals and, in Putin’s case, metaphorically killing people as if they were animals. It can be said that objectification as an individual activity (underlain by collective values, beliefs, and judgements) is a meaning-making process. Anchoring transforms that meaning into socially shared knowledge, although this process may fail (see Chapter ). Objectification and anchoring are complementary processes, and to understand the theory of social representations, one needs to address them both. Moscovici was aware of the complexity of his undertaking. He concluded his discussion of objectification and anchoring by stating that he intentionally avoided a detailed description concerning the origin of these two concepts. He thought that objectification involved ‘polysemy – hypostasis, choice, reification – and then its genesis since the Alexandrian philosophy to modern existentialism’ (Moscovici, a, p. ) and all that would be too much for a doctoral thesis. He emphasised that his quest was for understanding phenomena, not for exploring scientific concepts. In other words, his project was to study folk knowledge and its expressions in language and communication. Moscovici’s uncertainty about how to deal with the complexity of these two processes of generating social representations is expressed in the fact that he did not directly address the question of how objectification and anchoring are linked together, although it is clear from his writing that he was aware of an overlap between them. However, he never attempted to explore their overlap and he concluded: ‘if we wanted to adopt the higher perspective to examine the links between objectification and anchoring, it would be impossible to arrive at a satisfactory conception’ (Moscovici, a, p. ). To my mind, his uncertainty about these two processes continued when, some years later, he reversed the order of presentation of these two processes: anchoring came first and objectification followed (Chapter ). Although many of his followers claimed that objectification and anchoring were dialectically or dialogically linked (Chapter ), the only analysis of this link has been made by Jorge Correia Jesuino (Chapter ). All one can say is that, in generating social representations,
Timo Häkli suggested to me that the difference between ‘naming’ and ‘categorising’ in anchoring, as presented by Moscovici, requires clarification.
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Development and Diversification
these two processes take place simultaneously, switching from one to the other and vice versa. .. Cognitive Polyphasia In the final section of Part I of Psychoanalysis (), which Moscovici named ‘Cognitive aspects of the theory of social representations’, he was concerned with social logic (in contrast to formal logic) that operates in daily life thinking; it takes diverse forms which clash with, contradict, and complement one another. Over centuries, philosophy and epistemology have made references to different kinds of knowledge and forms of thinking that humans acquire for different purposes. As knowledge and thinking pursue multiple routes, humans create links to others’ communications, anticipate their responses, reactions, and feelings. They take up and defend their positions; they judge, evaluate, argue, and act. For example, knowledge can be abstract and concrete, explicit and tacit, propositional and procedural, practical and theoretical, and so on. Likewise, philosophy and social sciences have referred to different kinds of thinking, for example, abstract versus concrete, convergent versus divergent, natural versus formal, logical versus illogical, and so on. Different directions of thinking may range from scientific to religious, from literal meanings to metaphoric interpretations, from jokes to formal expressions, and so on. Forms of thinking are suited to, and articulated in, different contexts of which they are part. While diversities of knowledge and thinking were well known for centuries, when Moscovici worked on social representations of psychoanalysis in the s and was concerned with the study of daily thinking, psychology was preoccupied with the question of correct thinking. Criteria for correct thinking were derived from the logic of syllogisms and from propositional and predicate calculus of formal logic. Such criteria were treated as the rules of rationality. However, it was known that both in daily life and in laboratory studies of thinking, humans did not follow such principles of formal logic and rationality (Humphrey, ; Henle, ) and, therefore, psychologists attempted to discover reasons for irrationality and for biases and illogical thinking (Marková, ). In her article ‘On the relation between logic and thinking’, Henle () suggested that errors in thinking were often due to subjects’ unintended interpretations of premises rather than to faults in reasoning. The well-known volume by Bruner, Goodnow, and Austin () titled A Study of Thinking explored categorisation and concept attainment in the laboratory. Bartlett ()
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Psychoanalysis ()
opened the door to a possible alternative approach by naming his book Thinking: An Experimental and Social Study. He devoted attention to thinking in different kinds of situations: in closed systems, where all information to solve a problem was already available, then in situations requiring new information to find a solution, and, finally, in artistic and everyday activities. Although Moscovici was probably not familiar with Bartlett’s () book on thinking at that time, the general mindset in psychology concerning daily thinking did not provide him with confidence to speak, in his ‘age of innocence’, about his views on natural thinking. He hypothesised that just as there are different kinds of knowledge in different cultures, societies, and local communities, one could refer to co-existing and different forms of thinking which express the relationships between an individual and his/her entourage (Moscovici, a, p. ). Thus, he postulated a hypothesis of cognitive polyphasia. The hypothesis of cognitive polyphasia is not concerned with the generally acknowledged fact that humans use different kinds of thinking in different situations. Rather, it refers to the co-existence of distinct kinds of social thinking in the same communicative situation arising when an individual both thinks and does not think something, believes and does not believe, feels and does not feel, and so on. Such mental ambiguities are conveyed simultaneously by multiple means. We can say that cognitive polyphasia is an expression of an internal dialogue within an individual with respect to evaluating his/her own, as well as others’, perspectives. For example, one can voice generosity and selfishness at the same time, likes and dislikes of the Other, rights of the Other and desires of the Self, and so on. Cognitive polyphasia is characterised by tension, conflict, and constraint rather than by equilibrium and adaptation: it is an inherently dynamic concept that expresses the multidimensional nature of thinking and the internal dialogue of the Self. .. Communication Genres In Part I of Psychoanalysis, Moscovici focused on language in conversations. He called a conversation a ‘primary genre’ in the formation of social representations taking place through interpersonal communication (Moscovici and Marková, , p. ). Part II focused on ‘secondary genres’ shaping social representations at the ‘mass’ level. This referred to public and mass communication in the media. Communications in the
Moscovici knew Bartlett’s (/) earlier book Remembering, which he lists in the bibliography of the first edition of Psychoanalysis.
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Development and Diversification
mass media have specific genres in which they express contents, intentions, and motives of institutions, and their rules, norms, and specific logics. Different communication genres shape social representation in specific ways. Moscovici’s concept of the diversity of communication genres fundamentally contrasted with the linear model of communication that was prevalent in the s and s based on the idea that communication consisted of a source, message, channel of communication recipient, and an outcome (Hovland, ). In Part II of Psychoanalysis, Moscovici explored in considerable detail three ‘secondary genres’ in the French press, namely, diffusion, propagation, and propaganda, with respect to the ways they portrayed psychoanalysis. ... Diffusion Diffusion was a communication genre in which messages in newspapers and magazines were unstructured, discontinuous, and disorganised, and relations between them were not clear. Messages were not hierarchical, and their fragments were unsystematic. Moscovici associated diffusion with public opinions; receivers could organise messages freely according to their own perspectives. Diffusion did not emphasise any specific behaviour and did not call for any action. I suggest that diffusion reminds us of Sperber’s concept of ‘the epidemiology of beliefs’ or ‘the epidemiology of representations’ (Sperber, ). According to Sperber, cultural phenomena can be viewed in terms of spreading epidemics. He maintains that representations are either mental or collective and that they spread in a similar way to diseases. Some forms of communication, like rumours or information provided by the media, may seem to encourage the metaphor of a spread by contagion. In diffusing information about psychoanalysis, there was little involvement on the part of the press. Articles in which psychoanalysis was mentioned were not constructed to report about psychoanalysis; psychoanalysis was viewed as already integrated into social reality and, therefore, there was not much fuss about raising it as an issue of concern. In diffusing information, the press established a relative equality between speaker and audience. It employed humour and cartoons, did not express clearly defined intentions, and kept different messages from the same source as unrelated; it maintained a distance between the speaker and the audience. ... Propagation Propagation was a communication genre promoted in the Catholic press. Propagation of psychoanalysis had a pedagogic tone and was logically
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Psychoanalysis ()
organised. It emphasised affect and the bond between a child and its parents and portrayed the family as providing a concrete model for a child. The Catholic press aimed to reconcile the Church orthodoxy with the necessity of adopting modern practices. Accordingly, its concerns were related to questions such as whether psychoanalysis was compatible with moral laws and religious principles. The Catholic press expressed authority and hierarchy rather than equality between a speaker and recipients. It had two main functions. First, it guided readers towards consensus in understanding the intellectual content of psychoanalysis and adopting unified attitudes towards psychoanalysis. The second function of propagation was to control behaviour of a group by establishing stronger links between members and restructuring the meanings of behavioural elements. Propagation appealed for caution concerning psychoanalysis and emphasised that patients might consider other kinds of therapies. While diffusion encouraged fragmented positions, propagation called for an overall perspective and emphasised joined affective, cognitive, and behavioural processes in relation to psychoanalysis. Whereas diffusion enabled the creation of opinions, propagation encouraged attitudes that could influence both representations and behaviour. While in diffusion receivers were not involved with messages, in propagation participants’ involvement was vital. ... Propaganda Propaganda was the communication genre used in the press of the Communist Party. Propaganda is commonly understood as dissemination of a doctrine or an ideology to the public, whether religious or political. It aims to have an impact on crowds rather than on single individuals and, therefore, this implies that it has a sociological or political significance. It conceives the world as strictly dichotomous and its aim is to produce an affective stereotype which is controlled by the whole structure and processes of institutions. Institutions are not satisfied with giving behaviour a new meaning: they try to inspire or reinforce behaviour by changing people’s minds. Moreover, Moscovici (Moscovici and Marková, ) argued that institutions have much broader aims than changing people’s minds; they have their specific goals and propaganda contributes to their achievement. For example, propaganda may help an institution to maintain an existing status quo, for example, through prayers or ceremonies, or to establish a new order, a new ideology, or a social representation. It would, therefore, make little sense to try to understand propaganda on its own. It is necessary to understand the external goals that an institution is trying to achieve.
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Development and Diversification
The Communist press connected psychoanalysis with propaganda against the USA. It described psychoanalysis as ideology, or as an educational programme of institutions or organisations, and as a tool for making political interventions. The propaganda argued that psychoanalysis penetrated every branch of knowledge, was an instrument of the bourgeoisie to combat the working class, and that it wanted to cover up the reality of social problems. It served ‘masters’ such as America, the police, fascism, or bosses, and the Communist press rejected it on scientific, philosophical, and political grounds. In propaganda, the Self–Other interaction has specific communicative features. As a form of communication that is directed at the masses, its aim is to influence them on some controversial or not-yet-established issues. To that extent, all multifaceted means, through which propaganda is displayed, have the same goal: to transform the heterogeneous thoughts of individuals into a homogeneous ‘collective mind’ of the masses and to lead those masses to a specific action. This goal determines the nature of the interaction between the Ego and the Alter. The propagandist or educator (the Ego) representing an institution, organisation, or movement transmits a message to the recipient (the Alter). To perform an effective monologue, propaganda either needs a strong Ego, that is, a leader, or it must make the object of the message credible and, of course, it may combine both strategies. ... Language and Action in Propaganda The study of language in propaganda is fundamentally important. An affective charge of stereotypical words increases by constant repetition. Moscovici drew attention to the effect achieved by propaganda in combining language and action. While in daily life language is by its nature normative, propaganda aims at creating a specific language by qualifying meanings of phenomena. For example, Communist publications did not make associations such as ‘psychoanalytic science’, ‘effective psychoanalytic therapy’, or ‘objectivity of psychoanalytic concepts’ but, instead, qualified psychoanalysis with words such as ‘the myth of psychoanalysis’, ‘American psychoanalysis’, and ‘bourgeois science’. Moscovici observed specific rules that propaganda followed in devising its own language: • •
The rule of selection: this refers to the choice of meanings the word acquires, for example, psychoanalysis as a symbol of American lifestyle. The rule of constraint: the meaning of the signifying word is reduced by an additional word, for example, ‘American psychoanalysis’, ‘the myth of psychoanalysis’.
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Psychoanalysis ()
• The rule of hierarchy: values are reflected in ranking words, for example, ‘Soviet’ or ‘proletarian’ rank high, while ‘American’ or ‘bourgeois’ rank low. These rules not only create a particular language of propaganda but also construct semantic barriers, and these not only erect ‘alternative representations’ (Gillespie, , Chapter ) but lead to conflicting actions, linguistic dysfunctionality, and distortions of meanings. As Moscovici states (a, p. ), the ‘rules’ conveniently describe processes that underpin all semantic considerations in shaping a new representation and, by implication, stimulate actions corroborating linguistic expressions. Following Piaget, Wallon, and Brunswick, Moscovici suggests that the influence of propaganda rests in the application of the rules of logic and its psychological features that shape language and actions. ... Communication Genres and Behaviour In the end, Moscovici posed the question as to whether there is any correspondence between communication genres and behaviour. To answer this question, he postulated a hypothesis linking diffusion, propagation, and propaganda to opinions, attitudes, and stereotypes, respectively. Following the work of Jean Stoetzel (see previously), Moscovici viewed opinions as unstable and malleable; therefore, diffusion, with its low level of organisation, converges with opinions. Links between different opinions are not obvious or necessary. In contrast, attitudes are psychological organisations with positive and negative orientations with respect to an object. The orientation is revealed by a series of actions or by general behaviour with a common meaning. An attitude is not a collection of heterogeneous opinions or responses but it is their organised arrangement. It has a regulatory function and a selective effect on everything a subject does or thinks about. The creation of an attitude is expressive of a subject’s relationship with a socially pertinent object. Finally, the correspondence between stereotypes and propaganda appears to be strong. Stereotyping refers to simplified, rigid, and immediate responses. The repetition of associations helps to establish stereotypes and polarised orientations in groups. Moscovici viewed the relations between diffusion, propagation, and propaganda, and opinions, attitudes, and stereotypes, as no more than a hypothesis. He thought that these relations called for more sophisticated explorations between communication and styles of behaviour, specific interactions, and processes.
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Development and Diversification
. Two Hypotheses In the ‘Afterword’ of Psychoanalysis (), Moscovici points out that each of the two parts of his book ends with a hypothesis statement. Part I raises the hypothesis of cognitive polyphasia. Part II postulates the hypothesis of the correspondence between communication genres and behaviour. In each case, Moscovici comments that his empirical results modestly confirm his two hypotheses but more work is needed. Science never completes its efforts and it is its virtue to always start again. Social sciences are concerned with complex issues and social psychology, specifically, starts at a low level. Nevertheless, a few signposts that it provides can be explored in depth. The question that guided all of Moscovici’s effort to be ‘a man of study’ was formulated as follows: ‘comment l’homme constitue-t-il sa réalité? On ne pouvait s’attendre à y répondre d’emblée’ (‘How does man constitute his reality? One couldn’t expect to answer it from the outset’) (Moscovici, a, p. , his italics).
. Conclusion Moscovici’s intellectual ‘age of innocence’ was also the age of uncertainties. Aware that his work did not fit into the current trends in social psychology, he tried not to overstep the expectations of his political and intellectual masters. After all, he was a ‘réfugié et apatride’ (refugee and stateless) until (Moscovici, , p. ). This, to my mind, may explain why he hesitated in adopting the idea of ‘cognitive polyphasia’, although throughout the whole of Psychoanalysis, he constantly referred to multifaceted forms of thinking and language use. Equally, it seems to me that Moscovici tried to appease his tutor Professor Stoetzel (Chapter ) because he used Guttman’s scales, which Stoetzel did not favour as his domain was opinion polls (Chapter ). In contrast to the generally adopted belief that Moscovici’s ancestor in the theory of social representations was Emile Durkheim, there is no evidence of that in the first edition of Psychoanalysis. Moscovici was aware of some of Durkheim’s work but his references to it were negligible. He appreciated Durkheim’s social approach to collective representations but was critical of his neglect of the psychological features of individuals and groups in the formation of social representations and of his static and Kantian approach. None of the reviewers of Moscovici’s Psychoanalysis in associated Moscovici’s work with that of Durkheim. Claude Faucheux characterised Moscovici’s book as an anthropological study of
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Psychoanalysis ()
our own society, referring to it as a ‘theory of social representations and communication’. Focusing on Moscovici’s historical, philosophical, and cultural resources, this chapter shows that in his ‘age of intellectual innocence’, continental philosophy and anthropology, Marxism, and the psychology of Jean Piaget played vital roles in his development of the theory of social representations. I suggest there is a remarkable similarity between Moscovici’s ideas and those of Ernst Cassirer, with whose work he was well acquainted and to whom he referred. Moscovici (a, p. ) characterised the theory of social representations as the theory of social knowledge that is acquired in and through language and communication. All main concepts of the theory of social representations, such as objectification, anchoring, cognitive polyphasia, and natural thinking in Part I, and diffusion, propagation, and propaganda in Part II of his book, are language-based processes. The theory of social representations is founded on a broad range of social and cultural determinants. Social representations are • a legitimate form of knowledge which is vital in social life, bringing together social interactions, thought processes, values, beliefs, images, and language • socially developed and shared in and through history and culture, and have practical aims and facilitate the construction of the reality that is common to the community.
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The Durkheimian in Psychoanalysis ()
. After Psychoanalysis () Having completed his doctoral thesis on Psychoanalysis, which he defended with tremendous success (Jodelet, ) in and subsequently published as a book in the same year, Moscovici (/ , p. ) thought that ‘the thesis provoked a certain unease’. First, he was aware that he was not a specialist in psychoanalysis. As an outsider to psychoanalysis, he supposed that his work was ‘an intolerable intrusion’ into the business and knowledge of another discipline. Second, and as Jodelet (, p. ) observed, the dominant approaches in social sciences at the time, such as structuralism in various fields (anthropology, semiology, linguistics, psychoanalysis) on the one hand and ‘suspicious theories’ such as Marxism and psychoanalysis on the other, discouraged a wider interest in the study of psychosocial phenomena. Finally, the study of symbolic relations between individual processes and social structures, Jodelet (, p. ) maintained, was viewed as an ‘idealistic’ approach and, therefore, attacked by positivistic, objectivist, and materialistic positions in the social sciences. There was yet another issue. The completion of Moscovici’s book coincided with his shift in intellectual interests (Moscovici, /, p. xxii). He did not intend to continue with the subject of social representations (personal communication) and, instead, he focused on the studies of history and philosophy of science (e.g., Moscovici, ), industrial reconversion and modernisation, (e.g., Moscovici, b; Moscovici and Vidal, ), and society, nature, and ecology (e.g., Moscovici, /, /, /). He also analysed Marxism and social psychology (Faucheux and Moscovici, ; Moscovici, ), studied influence processes and social change (e.g., Moscovici, ), and language (e.g., Moscovici,
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Psychoanalysis ()
b). In accordance with these shifts in intellectual interests, we find only exceptionally some references to social representations in his work, and he published nothing substantial on social representations until the second edition of Psychoanalysis in . Denise Jodelet () describes the first ten years after the publication of the theory as the ‘latency period’. In addition to shifting his intellectual interests, during that period, Moscovici became deeply involved in the building of social psychology internationally as well as locally. In ‘Annus mirabilis of ’ (Moscovici and Marková, , p. ff.), the two American social psychologists John Lanzetta and Leon Festinger each made proposals, based on different visions, to develop social psychology internationally. These proposals involved the idea of bringing together European social psychologists, the development of the Transnational Committee of Social Psychology, which facilitated exchanges of information, and mutual international collaboration. An American influence on building European social psychology was strong from the very beginning. Leon Festinger, who was deeply involved in the Transnational Committee, emphasised that psychology must be developed as an experimental science, applying scientific and statistical methods. Moscovici became the most active European social psychologist involved in the planning and organising of this international programme of the Transnational Committee. Finally, in , The European Association for the Advancement of Experimental Social Psychology was established in Royaumont Abbey, France, with financial support from the Royaumont Foundation and the Transnational Committee. Serge Moscovici became the president of the newly established Association. The Association was soon renamed The European Association of Experimental Social Psychology; in , the European Journal of Social Psychology was launched. Together with these events, Moscovici established his first laboratory in Reid Hall in Paris , in a building owned by Columbia University in New York. Subsequently, with a grant from the Ford Foundation, the laboratory found its home in the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme in Paris (for details of this development of European social psychology and of the search for American funds, see Moscovici and Marková, ).
These references are no more than examples of the enormous range of Moscovici’s topics and publications during the s and s. For a full bibliography of Moscovici’s publications during those years, see Buschini and Kalampalikis (). Members of the Committee were Mauk Mulder (secretary), Martin Irle, Gustav Jahoda, Serge Moscovici, Joseph W. Nuttin Jr, Ragnar Rommetveit, and Henri Tajfel.
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Development and Diversification
During the ‘latency period’, Moscovici’s students and collaborators were producing significant studies on social representations. These students and collaborators worked in Moscovici’s laboratory and in other laboratories and he acknowledged their excellent work in the ‘Preface to the Second Edition’ of Psychoanalysis (Moscovici, /, p. xxii). On the one hand, there was the work of Chombart de Lauwe, Herzlich, Jodelet, and Kaës, who worked in the fields of child development, anthropology, culture, and group processes in relation to social representations. On the other hand, there was the work of Abric, Codol, Flament, Henry, Pecheux, and Poitou, who were largely developing structuralist, experimental, and linguistic approaches in social representations. There were also other French scholars, particularly those of Marxist orientation, who were inspired by Moscovici’s work (e.g., Malrieu and Malrieu, ; Malrieu, ; Baubion-Broye, Lapeyre, and Malrieu, ). Philippe Malrieu, a Marxist and resistance activist during the Second World War, was one of the most significant developmental and educational psychologists after the War. As a specialist in child socialisation, he endorsed the work of the developmental Marxist psychologist Henri Wallon, to whose work Moscovici was attracted and to whom he referred in the first edition of Psychoanalysis in .
. The Second Edition of Psychoanalysis in Most authors, whether followers or adversaries of the theory of social representations, have overlooked the essential differences between the first and second editions of Psychoanalysis. As a result, over years, they have continued to refer to ‘Psychoanalysis (/)’. Moscovici, too, referred to the two editions in this way, as if they were the same book not requiring any substantial comment, except that the edition was a PhD thesis while the edition was a book. Moscovici stated that in the second edition, he modified the style and exposition of ideas and that he removed technical and theoretical information that was relevant only to a small group of specialists. These changes corresponded to his ‘personal and intellectual views on academic initiation rites and science’ (Moscovici, /, p. xxii). Although it may appear from Moscovici’s comment that the two editions are not much different, I emphasise that the differences between the two editions are fundamental: while the first edition was based on rich philosophical, sociological, anthropological, and psychological resources, in the second, Moscovici presented himself as a follower of Emile
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Psychoanalysis ()
Durkheim. The aim of this chapter is to consider this transformation. Before going into details of these changes, I suggest there might be several reasons for Moscovici’s transformation in his perspective: .
Moscovici might have had political and ideological reasons. As the first edition was viewed suspiciously in France as being related to Marxism on the one hand and to ‘idealism’ on the other, he might not have wished the second edition to be viewed in that way. In support of this suggestion, we find fewer references to Marxist scholars in the second edition. . By the time the second edition appeared in , Moscovici was an established and internationally recognised scholar. He was no longer in the ‘age of intellectual innocence’. He was very familiar with the international scene of social psychology and its leading figures, for example, Festinger, Lanzetta, Schachter, and perhaps he thought it wise to adopt ‘academic initiation rites’ promoted by the established scholars in social psychology and sociology and follow their examples of doing a social science. . By the time of publication of the second edition, both of Moscovici’s ‘pères’, Daniel Lagache (–) and Alexandre Koyré (–), were dead (Chapter ). While Lagache influenced Moscovici’s decision to study social representations of psychoanalysis, Alexandre Koyré was a great admirer of Durkheim. Moscovici must have known that, although he claimed (personal communication) that Koyré did not influence his ideas on Psychoanalysis but inspired his thoughts on minority influence. Koyré’s admiration of Durkheim and of Lévy-Bruhl (Zambelli, ) might have contributed to Moscovici’s transformation in the second edition of Psychoanalysis. Zambelli () commented that Koyré never missed any opportunity to express, sometimes misleadingly, his respect for Durkheim. Durkheim’s rediscovery of collective representations, according to Koyré (), was a resistant and hard reality that could only be compared, in terms of its philosophical and sociological importance, to Hegel’s ‘objective spirit’ (see also Moscovici, b).
There have been various forms of ‘idealism’ throughout the history of philosophy, that is, the perspective that humans acquire knowledge of external objects through mental processes, such as ideas, symbols, beliefs, and otherwise. In referring to ‘theories of suspicion’ in the s in France, Jodelet () comments that psychosocial processes were viewed as ‘idealist’ by the dominant schools of positivism and mechanistic tendencies. Let us remember that Durkheim developed the ideas of collective representations from Renouvier.
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Development and Diversification
. There seemed to be no theoretical reasons as to why Moscovici switched his loyalty to Durkheim. As he stated on various occasions, in his ‘age of innocence’, he knew very little of Durkheim’s work when working on the first edition, and he found the term ‘representation’ in the book by Père Lenoble, who referred to the French philosopher Renouvier but not to Durkheim. By the time of publishing the second edition, Moscovici had familiarised himself with Durkheim and it might have been politically and intellectually preferable to acknowledge Durkheim as the founder of ‘collective or social representations’. After all, Durkheim was a French scholar and, therefore, the term ‘collective representation’ was linked with the French tradition of scholarship. Moreover, Durkheim rejected Marxism and the Marxist model of the base and superstructure in various disciplines, for example, economics, politics, and sociology. . Moscovici was a very creative scholar who, as some of his colleagues used to comment, never said the same thing twice. Thus, is there any possibility that he genuinely changed his perspective on social representations in terms of Durkheim, whom he wished to modernise? One can only speculate about an answer to this question, and I shall return to it in the final chapter of this book. While none of these suggestions provide a clear answer for the transformation from the non-Durkheimian to the Durkheimian perspective, the truth remains that Moscovici’s original work in Psychoanalysis () was created with no direct inspiration from Durkheim. Nevertheless, Moscovici read some of Durkheim’s work and may have been indirectly influenced by certain aspects of his ideas. In , psychoanalysis was no longer rejected as an ‘American plague’ but became an accepted treatment of mental problems. The uprising in May and the liberation of sex contributed to the elevation of the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan and its Lacanian form, occupying a central role not only in the treatment of mental problems but as a form of intellectual movement (Cournut, ). In the s, the Communist
Most importantly, Durkheim rejected Marx’s theory that economy was the basis of social evolution. He argued, instead, that religion was the most basic social phenomenon from which all other collective activities such as law, arts, morality, and science – and, to that extent, collective representations – originated and subsequently transformed themselves. As he stated: ‘In principle, everything is religious’ (Durkheim, /, p. ; see the section on Marxism and sociology). There are no means to show that religion could be reduced to economics as Marx claimed. Durkheim considered Marx’s theory as a simplification: ‘the economic factor is rudimentary, while by contrast religious life is rich and pervasive’ (Durkheim, /, p. ).
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Psychoanalysis ()
Party was no longer the dominant party in France; the country rebuilt itself after the War and searched for its normative place on the international scene. Altogether, the year of was appropriate for publishing the second edition of Psychoanalysis. .. Social Representation: A Lost Concept In the ‘Preliminary Remarks’ and in its first chapter, the second edition of Psychoanalysis advertised itself as the study of a lost concept. Therefore, these two pieces set the scene for Moscovici’s rethinking of social representations. Here, he explicitly acknowledged Durkheim as the originator of the concept of social representations, valued his originality, and in trying to give the theory of social representations an intellectual lineage, he portrayed himself as his follower. In these two introductory pieces, Moscovici expressed himself along Durkheimian lines and this became highly significant for the future development, understandings, misconceptions, and confusions around the theory of social representations. .. Durkheim’s Collective Representations as Social Facts By the s, Moscovici was familiar with Durkheim’s ‘The Rules of Sociological Method’, where Durkheim aimed to establish sociology as a scientific discipline, as ‘the science of institutions, their genesis and their functioning’ (Durkheim, /, p. ). It should be a science like physics or chemistry and strictly separated from psychology, which was the science of the individual mind and of individual consciousness. Durkheim strongly insisted on the separation of psychology and sociology and explained their differences. Psychology was developing as an objective science studying the association of ideas of individuals, while it treated social life as having ‘no other substratum than the individual consciousness’ (Durkheim, /, p. ). This, Durkheim argued, was totally wrong: social facts differ from psychical facts not only in their quality but in their complexity (Durkheim, /, p. ; Némedi, , ). Social facts come from a different substratum (Durkheim, /, p. ) to individual facts; they do not develop in the same environments and depend on different conditions. Social institutions into which humans are born were created by previous institutions and cannot be uncovered by individuals’ mental processes. Therefore, sociology and psychology are concerned with different kinds of representations because the mentality of groups is governed by different rules to the mentality of individuals and
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Development and Diversification
is concerned with different contents: ‘the content of social life cannot be explained by purely psychological factors, namely by states of individual consciousness’ (Durkheim, /, p. ). To appreciate Durkheim’s insistence on social facts as being external to individuals, we need to understand his epoch. He strongly defended his position against the views of his contemporaries who argued that society comprises only of individuals. Their perspective implied that ‘social life can have no other substratum than the individual consciousness. Otherwise, it would seem suspended in the air, floating in the void’ (Durkheim / , p. ). Durkheim treated collective representations as almost physical entities; he argued that they are social facts and sociological methods must deal with them as things: ‘we do not say that social facts are material things, but that they are things just as are material things, although in a different way’ (Durkheim, /, p. ). Durkheim explained that researchers need methods that will study collective representations as physical entities to show how they attract or repel each other and how they join and separate. Social life is made entirely of representations; they express group thinking and impose themselves upon individuals as their fixed social reality, resistant to psychological influences. The social system, its structure, values, and ethical norms, presents individuals with collective representations as guidance for thinking and acting. A group expresses different symbols than do individuals and it thinks differently. Individuals do not understand the numerous causes of collective representations that impel them to act in a specific way: ‘We believe ourselves disinterested, whereas our actions are egoistic; we think that we are commanded by hatred whereas we are giving way to love, that we are obedient to reason whereas we are the slaves of irrational prejudices, etc.’ (Durkheim, /, p. ). Durkheim pondered, nevertheless, whether individual and collective representations could have something in common since they are both representations. Myths, legends, and religious and moral beliefs are concerned with a different kind of reality than are the contents of individual consciousness, but perhaps collective phenomena could be explored by social psychology: ‘What should be done is to investigate, by comparing mythical themes, legends and popular traditions, and languages, how social representations are attracted to or exclude each other; amalgamate with or are distinguishable from each other, etc.’ (Durkheim, /, pp. –). However, it was not clear what Durkheim meant by social psychology. He stated that social psychology was ‘hardly more than a term
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Psychoanalysis ()
which covers all kinds of general questions, various and imprecise, without any defined object’ (Durkheim, /, p. ). Although Durkheim’s theory of knowledge followed Kant’s static approach with respect to representations, there were two important points by means of which Durkheim went beyond Kant. First, in contrast to Kant’s concept of representations as being appearances of reality, for Durkheim, collective representations were social facts; they were reality. There were no things in themselves hiding behind collective representations. This was the perspective that Durkheim adopted from Renouvier (Chapter ). Second, Durkheim clarified that humans are not passive in adopting representations but attempt to modify them: ‘In thinking about collective institutions, in assimilating ourselves to them, we individualise them, we more or less impart to them our own personal stamp’ (Durkheim, /, p. ). He continued saying that we each adapt differently to identical physical environments, each create our own morality, our own religion, and our own technique. Social conformity carries a whole range of individual variations although possibilities of permitted variations are restricted and, indeed, more or less non-existent with respect to religious and moral phenomena, where deviations may be criminalised. .. How to Modernise Durkheim? In Psychoanalysis (), Moscovici argued that social representations must be clearly defined and, in contrast to Durkheim, he would explore representations in their active mode. A representation speaks, demonstrates, and symbolically expresses itself, and it produces and determines behaviour. It consists of socialised expressions, it organises images and language, defines stimuli that surrounds us, and provokes our responses and their meanings to those stimuli: ‘a social representation is a particular modality of knowledge, and its function is to shape inter-individual behaviours and communication’ (Moscovici, /, p. xxx, original in italics). Chapter in Psychoanalysis (), which follows ‘Preliminary Remarks’, is titled ‘Social Representations: A Lost Concept’ and provides the perspective for the whole book, referring to social representations as ‘almost tangible entities’ circulating around humans in everyday life, intersecting and crystallising through language. Expressing himself in a Durkheimian way, Moscovici states that it is through collective representations that humans are humans; collective representations form the basis of knowledge, beliefs, religion, symbols, images, and science.
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Development and Diversification
Let us remember that two of the suspicions raised against social representations in the first edition of Psychoanalysis were the alleged attachments to Marxism and ‘idealism’. This contrasted with Durkheim’s position which was anti-Marxist and viewed collective representations in terms of science. As societies develop, the less adequate representations approximate, slowly and gradually, to scientific representations. Therefore, by focusing on Durkheim’s social scientific perspective in the second edition, this could be viewed by professionals and the public as a path away from Marxism, ideology, and ‘idealism’ and, instead, towards the French social scientific concept of collective representations that had been forgotten. In the first edition, Moscovici made numerous references to Henri Wallon and to Jean Piaget (e.g., Moscovici, a, p. ) when he talked about the development of thinking, continuity and discontinuity of development, and cognitive polyphasia. Even though Piaget followed some of Durkheim’s ideas, for example, conceiving development as continuous rather than discontinuous and as a path towards the development of logical thinking, there were important differences between these two scholars. In contrast to Durkheim, Piaget was interested in the transformation of a child’s thinking and in his/her construction of social reality rather than in his/her response to a fixed environment (Moscovici and Marková, , p. ). In the second edition, references to Piaget, Lévy-Bruhl, and Wallon are minor and occur mainly as footnotes. And yet, in some of his writings, Moscovici’s shifts between Piaget and Durkheim remained quite striking: it was Piaget who taught Moscovici what social psychology should be (Moscovici and Marková, , pp. –) and in studying social representations, Moscovici wished to pursue the kind of research with adults that Piaget carried out with child thinking: to study common sense. In contrast, for Durkheim, true reality was scientific reality and common-sense thinking, which was inferior, would be eventually replaced in the development of humankind by scientific thinking – or, at least, would approximate scientific thinking (Pickering, a).
Piaget took up the Chair of child psychology in Paris in – where he, according to Moscovici, was not very happy. Moscovici used to see Piaget regularly in Café Balzar and had discussions with him (Moscovici and Marková, , p. ). Later, Piaget invited him to take up the Chair in Geneva, which he did not accept because he did not want to leave Paris and, instead, he proposed Willem Doise, who took that position in (Jodelet, , p. .). Rupert Brown (, p. ) refers to the same invitation by Piaget to Henri Tajfel who, too, rejected this proposal. I do not know which of these two invitations, to Moscovici or to Tajfel, came first.
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Psychoanalysis ()
As far as I am aware, neither Moscovici nor his followers posed the question about the role of Piaget and Durkheim with respect to the theory of social representations. Instead, they adopted the view that both Durkheim and Piaget played an important role in the development of Moscovici’s ideas, without going into any detail (e.g., Duveen and Lloyd, ; Jovchelovitch and Priego-Hernández, , p. ). However, Duveen (a), in his study of dynamic structures in a child, interpreted Moscovici’s work from the Piagetian perspective (Chapter ). While the reviewers of the first edition of Psychoanalysis (Chapter ) did not view Moscovici’s theory as Durkheimian, sixteen years later, in their comments on the notion of social representations, Baubion-Broye, Lapeyre, and Malrieu () asked: how does one distinguish Moscovici’s social representation from Durkheim’s collective representation? By asking this question, these authors did two things. First, in contrast to the reviewers of the first edition of Psychoanalysis, they drew attention to Durkheim’s collective representations as a counterpart of Moscovici’s social representations. Second, as they were convinced Marxists, these authors referred to considerable differences between these two kinds of representation. Durkheim’s collective representation consisted of a totality of given beliefs which organised relations among humans and among different aspects of social reality and values. In contrast, the authors emphasised that Moscovici’s theory was, above all, a guide for social action: for the actions of groups, for forms of communication, and for belongingness to communities. They interpreted social representations as an ideology in terms of Marxist historical materialism. Malrieu was an important Marxist developmental psychologist. However, in , such Marxist interpretation of social representations was rare as Marxism no longer dominated the intellectual atmosphere in France. Moscovici favoured the standpoint also adopted by his followers: he modernised Durkheim’s collective or social representation (e.g., Farr, ). However, it is very difficult to accept this claim due to the fundamental epistemological and conceptual differences between these two approaches. In the second edition, Moscovici expressed himself both in Durkheimian and non-Durkheimian ways. As a Durkheimian, Moscovici (/, p. ) claimed that social or collective representations were almost tangible entities circulating ceaselessly in the outside world, crystallising ‘through a word, a gesture, an encounter’. As a non-Durkheimian, Moscovici operated with concepts that did not exist and were even meaningless in Durkheim’s approach (objectification, anchoring, cognitive polyphasia, creating social reality in and through common-sense thinking). These conceptual and
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terminological disparities created substantial confusions both for adherents and for critics of Moscovici’s theory (Chapter ). .. Why Is the First Edition of Psychoanalysis Preferable to the Second Edition? In her thought-provoking reflections on the first and the second editions of Psychoanalysis, Denise Jodelet (, ) draws attention to some important differences between the two editions and asserts that, in her view, the first edition is preferable to the second. However, before I come to these differences, I wish to emphasise that Jodelet insists that the model in both editions is preserved: Moscovici’s original intention was to develop a theory of social knowledge. This intention comes through in both editions (Jodelet, , p. ) in several ways: •
in and through combining the analysis of processes and products of knowledge at individual and social levels • in the focus on relationships between social representations and public issues (e.g., in conflicts, disagreements, information) • in reaffirming social representations through describing their content through different dimensions and modes of elaboration • in the analysis of the processes of representations (objectification, anchoring) • in delineating natural thinking, and its logical properties, and in exploring functions of representations. Having confirmed that Moscovici pursued the same path in the study of social representations in both editions, Jodelet focuses on differences between the two editions. She prefers the first edition for several reasons. Above all, it is the first edition that is marked by its originality in proposing a new epistemological perspective for psychosociology in opposition to the existing formalistic and individualistic concept of rationality adopted in the philosophy of psychology. It is in the first edition where Moscovici developed his ingenious contributions to the theory of knowledge and of meaning. There, he characterised the theory of social knowledge in terms of a unity of concerns in the sociology of knowledge, social psychology, and anthropology, and he developed the concepts of objectification, anchoring, styles of communication, and cognitive polyphasia. Although in the second edition Moscovici followed the same path, some vital aspects of the theory were de-emphasised, or their meanings were shifted, while other features were brought into focus. I take the liberty to
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summarise Jodelet’s (, ) analyses of the second edition, as I understand them, along the following lines. • In ‘Preliminary Remarks’, social representation is defined as a modality of specific knowledge whose function is to elaborate behaviours and communication. • There is less attention given to socially shared knowledge and to situational factors that influence the processes of judgements of the object of representations; instead, there is more focus on natural thinking and its logic. • Less attention is given to social factors and ‘the social dimension is essentially tackled by accentuating the importance of language and communication in the production, functioning and efficacy of social representations’ (Jodelet, , p. ). • The sociology of knowledge is less discussed; instead, there are references to general social psychological literature and to important scholars in sociology, psychology, and linguistics. • Representations are considered as meanings: ‘they express group dimensions as well as cognitive and symbolic ways of naming and classifying social reality and coping with unfamiliarity. Moreover, they provide a new reflection on the diversity in forms of knowledge’ (Jodelet, , p. ). • There is more emphasis on the transformation (or vulgarisation) of scientific knowledge into daily thinking; in this process, cognitive aspects of social representations are subordinated to communicative and linguistic processes; the role of a social context is diminished as well as the material conditions of knowledge production. • A different accent is given to anchoring and objectification; anchoring now refers to the ‘familiarisation of the strange’; objectification is no longer underpinned by an individual’s selection and values in the construction of meaning. Jodelet explains her observation in detail. She points out that, in the first edition, values, moral taboos, and ethics of life were underscored and she asks: What does this ethic produce? First, a selective construction of knowledge. Second, a distinction between knowledge and meaning, which is crucial in the psychosociology of knowledge. This distinction is evident with the
I read this as a comment on a narrower concept of the theory of knowledge contrasting with that in the first edition, according to which the psychosociology of knowledge formed the theoretical bedrock of the definition of social representations rather than of behaviours and communication.
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•
There are changes in Part II in Psychoanalysis () with respect to communicative styles of the press. These were largely due to changes in the socio-political climate.
Jodelet’s (, ) comments highlight her deep familiarity with both editions of Psychoanalysis. Although she clearly favours the first edition, many of her comments are descriptive rather than evaluative. Jodelet leaves it to the reader to decide what her judgements are. She does not refer to Durkheim in either of her two articles; neither does she refer to Moscovici’s use of Durkheimian images (e.g., almost tangible entities) in the second edition of Psychoanalysis. However, Jodelet (, ) reflects on two basic changes that took place during the fifteen years that passed in-between the two editions. First, and not surprisingly, Moscovici’s personal, intellectual, and professional circumstances dramatically altered and these contributed to the development and modifications of his thinking about social representations. He was now an established and internationally known scholar. Second, Jodelet refers to the considerable developments that took place in the social scientific, political, and intellectual environment. For example, social psychology was a recognised domain of study not only in the USA but in Europe; psychoanalysis was no longer an ‘American plague’. Interactions between these two kinds of change were no doubt conducive to the transformations in Moscovici’s theory. Jodelet’s (, ) insightful observations and analyses were published too late to impact on Moscovici’s followers and adversaries who, still today, refer to ‘Psychoanalysis (/)’ and so ignore these vital differences between the two editions, leading to considerable confusions (Chapters and ). In my view, Jodelet’s (, p. ) comment that Moscovici’s emphasis on ‘the importance of language and communication in the production, functioning and efficacy of social representations’ was amplified in the second edition is deceptive. Jodelet is, of course, fully aware that
Moscovici (a, p. ) introduced the notion of the ‘principle of meaning’ (un principe de signification) as the ‘protéiforme’, that is, as having a multifaceted nature. It facilitates the understanding of the figurative schema of a social representation and, simultaneously, it enables its transformation in organising the components of a social representation, that is, its cognitive, valueand language-based activities.
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Moscovici’s accent on language and communication was essential for him from the very beginning of his thinking about social representations. In the first edition, his fundamental concepts, such as objectification, anchoring, and cognitive polyphasia, were already characterised as language-based processes (Chapter ), and Moscovici usually referred to his theory as a ‘theory of social representations and communication’. He conceived humans as symbolic and dynamic agents constructing their social realities in and through language, thinking, and (inter)acting. Language is constitutive of thought and thought is constitutive of language. These social psychological capacities of humans entered the original sense of social representations in the first edition (Moscovici, a, pp. ff.). The deceptive impression that language and communication were accentuated in the second edition of Psychoanalysis is given by the fact that the discussion of social factors has diminished. Therefore, the change of the balance between different constituents of social representations may have contributed to the appearance that language and communication became more important in the second edition.
. Concepts at the Heart of the Theory of Social Representations Let us re-emphasise that none of the fundamental concepts in the social representations of Psychoanalysis are derived from Durkheim. Moscovici developed them in the first edition (see Chapter ) before he knew much of Durkheim’s work and these concepts contradict Durkheim’s theory. They explain the construction of social reality; they are language-based, they express heterogeneity of thinking, interdependence between individuals and groups, among other features. In this chapter, I must return to objectification, anchoring, and cognitive polyphasia for two reasons: first, the meanings of objectification and anchoring differ from those in the first edition (see Jodelet, , ); second, I shall raise the question as to how objectification, anchoring, and cognitive polyphasia were developed by Moscovici’s followers. .. Objectification and Anchoring Moscovici explained in Psychoanalysis () that ‘objectification’ and ‘anchoring‘ are the central concepts of his theory (Chapter ). Likewise,
Claude Faucheux (), in his review of the first edition of Psychoanalysis, consistently referred to ‘the theory of social representations and communication’.
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in the second edition and its aftermath, he continued to treat these concepts as vital features of his theory. Despite that, we need to consider two important changes in the meanings of these two concepts. The first change was introduced in the second edition; the second change was made in the early s. To start with the first change, in the second edition, Moscovici accentuated that both objectification and anchoring concern the ‘familiarisation of the strange’ (Jodelet, , ). Objectification in the first edition was underpinned by values that gave sense both to the individual’s selection of relevant features of an object as well as to the process of schematisation (Jodelet, , p. .). In contrast, in the second edition, objectification referred to the transformation of an unfamiliar scientific object into something familiar, that is, into something that individuals associated with a customary event or experience. Or, as Moscovici said elsewhere, in objectification, an abstract idea becomes concrete; it is materialised (Moscovici, a, p. ). Jodelet observes that the emphasis of objectification in the second edition was placed on the scientific transmission of the knowledge (or vulgarisation) of an object rather than on the broadly conceived modalities of socially shared knowledge, as was the case in the first edition. Concerning anchoring, while in the first edition Moscovici focused on ‘the construction of the meaning in anchorage’ (Jodelet, , p. .), in the second edition, anchoring ‘transforms science into a knowledge that is of use to everyone’ (Moscovici, / , p. ). In other words, objectification and anchoring were both treated as familiarisation of the strange with little difference, if any, between these two concepts (or phenomena, as Moscovici preferred to say). In this way, it appeared as if they were collapsed into one concept. The second change in the meanings of objectification and anchoring refers to the reversed order in which Moscovici presented these two main concepts to his readers. In both editions of Psychoanalysis, he explained objectification first and then turned to anchoring. Let me repeat that, in the first edition, Moscovici defined objectification as a process of active selection of what is meaningful for the individual and, therefore, what leads to the formation of a figurative schema.
The phrase ‘making the unfamiliar familiar’ that Moscovici used in discussing anchoring and objectification was utilised by Bartlett (/) in his book on Remembering. On comparisons between Bartlett and Moscovici on these issues, see Wagoner (, ). This question was also raised by Jesuino () in his lecture on anchoring and objectification at the summer school of social representations and communication in Lisbon. Unfortunately, his insightful lecture was not published.
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Since the early s, Moscovici (e.g., , a) has discussed anchoring first and objectification second. He did not explain the reasons for this reversal and, as a result, not surprisingly, most scholars have adopted the latter order and assumed that the correct sequence of presentation of these two processes is anchoring followed by objectification. Intuitively, the reversed order makes sense: you familiarise yourself with strange phenomena by anchoring them to something that you already know. For example, if you encounter something strange, unfamiliar, and disturbing, such as a psychoanalytic interview, you make sense of it by associating it with something that looks familiar: a religious confession. But this is common knowledge, not discovered by the theory of social representations. Various psychologists have commented that in experiencing an unfamiliar and fear-producing phenomenon, we attempt to familiarise it (McDougall, ); when encountering an unknown or strange phenomenon, we try to fill in the gap by ‘going beyond the information given’ (Bruner, ). As Wagoner () reminds us, Bartlett’s (/) concept of ‘conventionalisation’ of images and memories, again, refers to the problem of coping with the unfamiliar. Bartlett () also expressed this common knowledge in his study of thinking by insisting that unfamiliar features of an object are invariably transformed into something that is familiar. When we apply this idea to social representations, it may seem reasonable to first anchor an unfamiliar object to something familiar and, subsequently, to objectify it, that is, to transform the abstract object into something concrete. Since anchoring relies upon making the unfamiliar familiar, it depends on memory and on experience and is, therefore, more passive than objectifying, which is the process during which an individual constructs the figurative schema consisting of a pattern of images. Not surprisingly, some scholars understood them as sequential processes. Thus, László (, p. ), who in his paper on narratives refers to ‘social representations theory’s preoccupation with objectification of anchored categories’, implies that anchoring comes first and is followed by objectification. The reversed order of objectification and anchoring, as Moscovici proposed after the publication of the second edition of Psychoanalysis, suggests that this order of presentation is important: the sequence in which these processes are presented implies fundamental effects on their meanings. Supposing that one starts with anchoring, one names an unfamiliar object and inserts it into a familiar category of objects or phenomena. Once the object or phenomenon in question is boxed into a category, one interprets its features in terms of the category into which it was boxed.
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For example, if a psychoanalytic interview is anchored to a religious confession, it evokes other meanings and contents of that familiar category, such as one’s sins, morality, or God’s forgiveness. Objectification then saturates those evoked and anchored meanings and contents with concrete details and images. However, while such interpretations of anchoring and objectification are meaningful, the originality of these two processes that was given to them in the first edition disappears. They are now no more than notions that have been known both to psychologists and to lay people for a long time. In contrast, if one starts with objectification, one selects what one considers to be the relevant features of the object in question: one forms its image, names it, and develops a figurative schema; this mental effort of an individual is achieved in and through interaction with his/her culture, socio-historical traditions, and socially acquired practices. Once we arrive at a figurative schema, we may anchor it to something we know from experience, literature, religion, and so on (Moscovici, a, p. ). For example, in our research on social representations of democracy in postCommunist countries, our participants chose as vital features of democracy not only freedom of expression and justice (as did our participants in Western countries) but also of market economy. For them, market economy evoked an expression of freedom and so it contrasted with command economy and state ownership (Marková et al., ). In other words, the experience of totalitarianism led to the selection of relevant features in objectifying the newly acquired democracy. In such a case, one first forms an image of an object, names it (objectification), and then anchors this image to a social category (religious, demographic, political). Jesuino () makes a very similar point concerning the order in which objectification and anchoring are treated. As he remarks, in the first instance, it might superficially look logical to treat anchoring, at the outset, as the comparing of a novel object with one that an individual already knows. Placing objectification after anchoring would mean that the object of representation is already enclosed before its representation can be developed, which distorts its intelligibility. In contrast, placing anchoring after objectification means that objectification becomes the principle of intelligibility. If we return at this point to Cassirer, for him, too, the process of objectification is the principle of intelligibility, largely dependent on language: ‘The utterance of affection always contains a will to objectification and a power to objectification’ (Cassirer, , p. ). The first stage, which is based on selective construction, uses signs, symbols,
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memories, and names. When we name something, we impose limits and properties on that object. In expressing ourselves in language, we also express what we are and what we wish others to know. The aim of language is to objectify, to generalise. Naming means building a common world in which people live together, express emotions and affects, all this leading to the formation of the meaning of an object in question. Moscovici considered naming as a fundamental part of the construction of social representations through objectification and anchoring and he kept returning to the question of naming in many of his publications (e.g., Moscovici a, ). Naming is one of the means used to create social reality and fix it: the human being is a namer (Chapter ). Name-giving is often accompanied by ceremonies, which reinforces that it creates a new social reality for the bearer of the name and for others. A new social reality becomes stabilised by the name, which also provides it with new contents and meanings. Giving names is an imaginative enterprise and expresses the ethical choices of the namer: it can convey hopes, judgements, evaluations, and condemnations. In this way, names not only stabilise but also initiate new social representations by giving them new meanings. Equally, removing a name or forbidding the use of a particular name is a symbolic activity which, in some situations, could result in punishment. In one of his last papers concerned with ethnic minorities, Moscovici (, p. ) evoked, again, objectification and anchoring as two language-based processes underlying social representations. In relation to objectification, everything in a social representation is ordered around a figurative kernel that in a sense ‘underlies’ all the images, notions or judgements that a group or society has generated over time. A minority’s clearest distinguishing feature is the figurative kernel of its representation. In the case of Gypsies, it is articulated around the nomadic/sedentary thema, and this thema is as basic as is the left/right thema in the social representation of political parties.
Anchoring, too, is embedded in language, images, culture, and the social environment. Humans share their social environments with others in and through symbolising and representing them to others: ‘We might say that the anchoring process has the effect of making what we assume to be our relationship with the world dependent upon our relationship with others’ (Moscovici, , p. ).
We may read a ‘figurative kernel’ as a ‘figurative schema’. Themata will be discussed in Chapter .
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Dialectic and Dialogical Relations between Objectification and Anchoring
The earlier discussion concerning the order of objectification and anchoring may suggest that one order in which these processes are presented is correct and the other is not and that, in view of the earlier discussion, objectification is the first process in the sequence followed by anchoring. Let us reject the idea that objectification and anchoring are sequential processes and let us assume, instead, that they are simultaneous processes that are dialectically related (e.g., Jesuino, ; Seca, ; Wagner and Hayes, ; de Rosa, a; Kronberger, ). It is possible that Moscovici’s uncertainty around how to express the complementary nature of these two main processes generating social representations could be related to their reversals in his writings. He never directly attended to the question of how objectification and anchoring are linked together (Chapter ) because he was aware of the complexity of this problem. Although dialectics was the method of Moscovici’s thinking, he did not apply it to connect objectification and anchoring. Dialectic relations, despite their diverse characteristics in philosophical and political literature, have a common feature: they all refer to back-and-forth movements between the opposing parties to arrive at a solution of the problem in question. This means that the opposing parties do not move as linear sequential processes. Jesuino () suggested that objectification and anchoring, because they are dialectically related, can be conceived as one overarching process rather than two processes. He proposed that objectification refers in semiotic terms to the production of a sign while anchoring can be conceived as its final product. This perspective opens the possibility of exploring the interaction between semiotics and social representations (see also Chapter ). Since objectification and anchoring are language-based processes, one can refer to them not only as dialectic but also as dialogical. They proceed simultaneously in a mutual tension and not in a successive straight line. The mind’s activities develop as a ‘spiral’, or as a ‘circle of understanding’ or a ‘circle returning within itself’ following simultaneously different directions, going forwards and backwards, acquiring new knowledge gradually through transformations rather than as a linear process (Hegel, –; Marková, , ; Valsiner, ). Nevertheless, one of the two processes (objectification or anchoring) may be temporarily in the foreground with the other in the background. Individuals and groups may shift their meanings going forwards and backwards depending on changes in their experiencing of the
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socio-cultural and political environment. For example, the contemporary Covid- pandemic exemplifies such shifts in and through the development of scientific knowledge, creating myths, disputes between health and economic matters, in international collaboration and in competition. Jodelet () draws attention to some serious gaps in the ways in which researchers have been advancing Moscovici’s original processes of objectification and anchoring. She points out that, while Moscovici, in developing each of the two processes, defined three phases, most researchers simplify them by usually referring to one phase only. Objectification is often reduced to the third phase, that is, naturalisation or the concretisation of abstract notions, while selection of ‘information’ and schematisation is ignored. Anchoring is largely studied as the familiarisation of the strange. One may suggest that these simplifications could at least partly result from a misunderstanding of objectification and anchoring as presented in the second edition of Psychoanalysis, where both processes appear to be collapsed into one and both refer to naming and to familiarisation of the strange. A notable exception to simplified understandings of objectification and anchoring is the work of Doise, Clémence, and Lorenzi-Cioldi (/ ), whose point of departure was Moscovici’s original formulation of these concepts in Psychoanalysis (). The authors emphasised that objectification is a capacity that enables communication and social relations and facilitates the dissociation of scientific or ideological knowledge from common-sense knowledge. Through anchoring, new elements of knowledge are incorporated into a network of familiar social categories, for example, rich, intellectual, artist, unbalanced people, women. In other words, anchoring links psychological and sociological phenomena together and moves them away from an emphasis on the individual. In conclusion, most students of social representations have treated anchoring and objectification as the ‘must’ of the theory, that is, as terms that must be mentioned when doing research on social representations. Nevertheless, theoretical and practical advancements are still awaited. Phrases such as the ‘crystallisation of the object’ or ‘crystallised into a representation’, which we often find in articles on social representations, do not serve as substitutes for a proper conceptual analysis. .. Cognitive Polyphasia and Heterogeneity in Thinking and Communication Cognitive polyphasia has been explored by researchers in social representations more successfully than anchoring and objectification, as it does not
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appear to be such an ambiguous concept. Nevertheless, we find comments that cognitive polyphasia has been understood in diverse and even contradictory ways. The editors of ‘Cognitive Polyphasia: A Special Issue’ (Provencher, Arthi, and Wagner, ) argue that the concept and the phenomenon of cognitive polyphasia is underdeveloped and has been referred to, for example, as modalities of knowledge, of thinking, of rationalities, as forms of knowing, forms of thought, and so on. They comment that this creates much confusion in researchers’ attempts to make sense of cognitive polyphasia. The concept should be developed and not used in contradictory ways. Moscovici (a) originally referred to cognitive polyphasia as a hypothesis with reference to different forms of thinking. He continued using the term ‘hypothesis’ in the second edition of Psychoanalysis, and most of his followers correctly understood that thinking and communication pursue diverse routes even in the same situation. For example, one might be attracted and deterred at the same time by a specific issue. True, one may pose the question about the meaning of the phrase ‘at the same time’. Does immediacy imply only to here and now or can one allow some time distance during which the individual and his/her entourage can be considered as being the ‘same’? From the s, students came up with new ideas and studied cognitive polyphasia in different domains of social psychology. This was partly due to their rejection of simplistic and formalistic models of rationality. For example, the concept of cognitive polyphasia dominated the different kinds of thinking and communication among villagers in Jodelet’s (/) research on social representations of madness. Cognitive polyphasia emerged from villagers’ necessity to cope with fear of mental illness and with being obliged to live together with ex-patients. Jodelet examined, in these contexts, the production of cognitive polyphasia from communication, from different modes of thinking, and knowledge. On one level, most villagers did not believe in medical dangers coming from people with previous mental illness. They knew that mental illness was not contagious and that a lodger with a past mental illness did not transmit germs or microbes as in the case of tuberculosis. On another level, they believed in contamination but these beliefs remained unspecified; they were unconscious and, therefore, were not explicitly articulated. Beliefs took the form of folk fantasies, superstition, and convictions of a magic power. Jodelet emphasised the persistence of multiple forms of speaking, thinking, and acting among villagers, ranging from ‘biological and social, to ancestral, indeed archaic, representations of insanity with their magic
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contents borrowed from the realms of animism and sorcery’ (Jodelet, /, p. ). At the same time, villagers were proud of living in modern ways, of using advanced technology like fast trains or television, and of being aware of new methods of medical treatment. Different types of co-existing knowledge, for example, scientific and religious beliefs, modern medicine and traditional treatments, the displays of contradictory emotions (also Provencher, ), provide a perspective missing in a formal logical approach to thinking and knowledge. Gillespie (), in referring to emancipated and polemical representations (Moscovici, ), suggests that the semantic barriers employed in representations are subtle means of enabling varieties of cognitive polyphasia (Chapter ). In developing similar ideas, Jovchelovitch and PriegoHernández () point out that diverse states of cognitive polyphasia draw attention to the continuous transformation of incomplete knowledge, showing embeddedness in social contexts and processes. These authors attempt to analyse the communicative processes underlying diverse modalities of knowledge. They make an innovative suggestion in introducing a typology of cognitive polyphasia based on the quality of Self– Other recognition or of non-recognition showing that the Self–Other relation determines the kind of modality of co-existence in different kinds of thinking. For example, does the Self acknowledge, reject, or dismiss the Other? The authors consider such and related questions as being central to identifying how the co-existence of varieties of cognitive polyphasia is worked out through knowledge modalities. Their comprehensive model shows the ways in which the terminology related to the Self–Other (non-) recognition differs in theories of different authors in social psychology. The co-existence of opposing contents, processes, and emotions are fundamental elements of cognitive polyphasia in all knowledge encounters and communication. The study of Wagner et al. () on representations of traditional healing methods and of modern psychiatric treatments showed that traditional representations (patterns of beliefs, practices of healers) co-exist together with modern medical beliefs. These diverse kinds of knowledge take place through communication patterns in which new representations are constructed. Various kinds of knowledge and beliefs are usually implicit and hidden in linguistic codes and in meanings of words, in different styles and modalities of thinking. They are mixed with the ideas of absent others, with commitments and loyalties, or with objecting, contesting, and rejecting the opinions of absent speakers. This research directs attention to shifts and changes in societies that move from
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traditional forms of thinking towards modern forms. Yet, it shows that traditional elements of representation, for example, of mental illness, are deeply embedded within communal life and drawn ‘into a more active form of reflection and change through this process of cultural contact, communication, and exchange’ (Duveen, , p. , his emphasis). Research linking local communities and representations of health and illness in North India and in Brazil highlighted the relations between the social features of situations and forms of thinking and their expressions in language, co-existence of modes of traditional and modern thinking, as well as transformations of social representations resulting from these relations (Wagner et al., ). In contrast to encounters between scientific and local knowledge, Mouro and Castro () explored cognitive polyphasia in situations in which local knowledge is confronted with legal innovations of new biodiversity conservation laws. The authors showed the Self’s attempts to reconcile diverse and opposite ways of thinking in conflicts with the institutional promotion of change. Altogether, we can conclude that different interpretations of cognitive polyphasia arise from researchers’ presuppositions about: •
relations between social representations, social knowledge, forms of thinking, human agency, and social context (e.g., Gervais and Jovchelovitch, ; Wagner et al., ; Provencher, ) contradictions between different social representations that an • individual may hold at the same time and, therefore, express in speech and action as adaptation, resistance, or change (e.g., Castro and Batel, ; Batel, ; Mouro and Castro, ) internal dialogues, internal arguing, and search for meanings of the • phenomena in question (e.g., Wagner et al., , ; Duveen, ). Finally, let me emphasise again that the concept of cognitive polyphasia has no equivalence in Durkheim’s collective representations – and, indeed, is contradictory to Durkheim’s position.
. Conclusion The aim of this chapter was to reflect on some crucial differences between the first and second editions of Psychoanalysis. Moscovici wrote the first edition during his ‘age of intellectual innocence’ when he knew only a little of Durkheim’s work; even the term ‘social representation’ came from Father Lenoble. He created his theory
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Psychoanalysis ()
independently of Durkheim’s collective representations. None of the main concepts of Moscovici’s social representations were derived from Durkheim; instead, his main concepts contradicted Durkheim’s collective representations. Apart from the two introductory pieces, that is, ‘Preliminary Remarks’ and Chapter , which provide a guide on how to read Psychoanalysis (), Durkheim is not mentioned further. In contrast to the first edition, in the second, Moscovici neither expressed any critique of Durkheim for ignoring the psychological features of collective representations nor of Durkheim’s connection with Immanuel Kant’s philosophy or his static concept of collective representation. Instead, in ‘Preliminary Remarks’ and Chapter , Moscovici instructs readers on how to interpret the second edition of Psychoanalysis in a Durkheimian spirit. Not surprisingly, therefore, the transparent association between Durkheim’s ‘collective representations’, ‘social representations’, or even ‘collective or social representations’ that Moscovici often used determined the understanding and interpretation of his theory after both in France and abroad. This line of thinking was often repeated in many of Moscovici’s subsequent writings, not only with respect to social representations but also in his discussions of myth, religion, morality, and otherwise. While in the two introductory pieces Moscovici expresses himself in Durkheimian fashion, the rest of the second edition follows the same path as the first. The major concepts of the theory, that is, objectification, anchoring, cognitive polyphasia, natural thinking, and communication, are discussed, although some of their meanings are changed or reformulated (Jodelet, , ). Jodelet’s two papers on the first and second editions pay no attention to Durkheim. The differences between the two editions to which she refers are important not only because they point to changes in Moscovici’s thinking but because they shift emphasis in the meanings of crucial concepts, and so they give a new perspective on the reformulated theory of social knowledge. While Jodelet could easily ignore Moscovici’s two introductory Durkheimian pieces in the second edition because she is highly knowledgeable about Moscovici’s thinking, this is not so for most readers for whom Psychoanalysis () is likely to be their first acquaintance with Moscovici’s work. They, therefore, have no choice but to read the second edition of Psychoanalysis along the Durkheimian
Durkheim is mentioned on p. in the English () edition, which corresponds to ‘la tradition durkheimienne’ on p. in the French () edition.
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perspective and try to make sense of the myriad of terms and concepts which make no sense in Durkheim’s theory of collective representations. Whatever the reason – or better, a mixture of reasons – for Moscovici’s revision of the second edition, it has had major effects on the interpretation of his theory in several directions. It was the second edition that was translated into other languages and, therefore, it was interpreted in a Durkheimian way even though the concepts held by Durkheim and Moscovici were totally different. The second edition was easier to read because it was smaller, having only pages ( pages in English) rather than the pages of the first edition. Such was the authority of Moscovici’s intellect that nobody, apart from Jodelet, was concerned with the differences between the two editions. Nevertheless, Jodelet did not mention the transformation of the non-Durkheimian first edition of Psychoanalysis into the Durkheimian second edition. The complex historical route of the theory of social representations and communication that took place between the two editions of Psychoanalysis remains puzzling. Yet, it is not this puzzle as such that was the most intriguing issue of the transformation that took place between the two editions but the confusion that followed. The concepts that Moscovici developed in the first edition of Psychoanalysis and retained in the second contradicted Durkheim’s theory of collective representations and, yet, Moscovici presented himself as a disciple of Durkheim. What was common to both scholars was the name of ‘collective or social representations’ and Moscovici’s adoption of certain Durkheim notions in the second edition (e.g., ‘almost tangible entities’). These notions contradicted Moscovici’s original concepts (e.g., objectification, anchoring, cognitive polyphasia) which were dynamic and existed only in and through interdependence with humans who created these concepts and the ensuing social phenomena. The inconsistencies and misinterpretations in Moscovici’s theory of social representations and communication that troubled both his followers and adversaries are the subjects of Chapters and .
Elsewhere, Moscovici (a, p. ) states that once representations are created, ‘they lead a life of their own, circulate, merge, attract and repel each other, and give birth to new representations, while old ones die out’. Compare this to Durkheim: ‘In “Individual and Collective representations” [Durkheim] argues that collective representations have their own life. This depends first on the whole, which, once formed, does not depend directly on the nature of associated elements . . . collective representations become autonomous realities and develop their own power “to attract and repel each other and to form syntheses of all kinds between themselves, which are determined by their natural affinities and not by the state of the milieu in which they evolved”’ (Stedman Jones, , pp. –).
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The ‘Great Smoky Dragon’
It is difficult to be an interpreter of another’s thoughts. Instead of resurrecting, through what one writes, the world invented by another person, at every moment one is tempted to reverse to one’s own. We revert to it by the very nature of things, and primarily from the conviction that the representations we share, the myths, the religions, the vision we have of the world . . . are the very substance of the links that binds us
(Moscovici, /, p. ).
. The ‘Great Smoky Dragon’: The Aftermath (Post Second Edition of Psychoanalysis) The emergence of ‘revolutionary theories’ in the natural sciences as well as in the social sciences can be followed by confusions and misunderstandings. Max Planck’s revolutionary quantum theory in physics diversified in the mid-s into several approaches that seemed to follow different courses according to physicists’ preferences and interpretations. On reflecting on this fact, Kaiser (, p. ) wonders ‘whether any coherent conceptual trajectory connected, say, Planck’s publications in with Heisenberg’s, Born’s, Jordan’s, Schrödinger’s, or Dirac’s papers in the mid-s’. The physicist John Wheeler characterised quantum theory metaphorically as a ‘Great Smoky Dragon’ where the researcher can see the tail and the head once, while they do not see the in-between, unknown smoky body. Wheeler argued that the tail of the dragon could be detected accurately; it was related to the source emitting the quantum elements. The dragon’s mouth, too, could usually be found. However, nothing definite could be found between these two points: ‘the body of the dragon dissolved into a puffy cloud of smoke’ (Kaiser, , p. ). According to Wheeler, this metaphor characterised the heterogeneous and competing
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approaches in quantum mechanics that emerged even among those who had previously seemed to follow a similar path. If we turn to the human and social sciences, we find a much bigger puffy cloud of smoke. These domains are concerned with the study of the human mind and of human activities that are incomparably more complex and unpredictable than the laws of physics. Not surprisingly, diversification of approaches in these domains displays a broad range of compatible, partly compatible, and discordant interpretations of a single social theory. The problem of competing understandings, interpretations, and innovations in the theory of social representations and communication is formidable. Moreover, Moscovici, just like any creative researcher, changed his ideas, proposed new images, hinted at novel concepts and approaches, and anticipated societal developments. Although these were often no more than sketches, suggestions of possibilities that he sometimes expressed on the spur of the moment and to which he never returned (e.g., hegemonic, polemic, and emancipated representations, Moscovici, ; hot and cold representations, Moscovici, ; Moscovici and Doise, /), they were taken up by his followers as authority. Initially, after the publication of Psychoanalysis (), two major projects were developed in France by Moscovici’s collaborators (Moscovici, /, p. xxii). They partly provided new interpretations, partly introduced new concepts, and opened the theory of social representations and communication to other social scientific perspectives. One group was advancing the theory as a scientific field, trying to capture social representations as structural phenomena and focusing on measurements and statistical techniques. Subsequently, researchers within this group differentiated two further approaches: the structural approach and the approach of organising principles. Although within their general frame both approaches foregrounded structures of social representations, and cognitive and social processes, each was developing along specific theoretical preferences. Nevertheless, researchers in these approaches were building systematically on each other’s perspectives, adding and developing new concepts and searching for mutual understanding. Still today, the structural approach openly seeks a rapprochement with the perspective based on organising principles (e.g., Lo Monaco, Delouvée, and Rateau, ). Both approaches attempt to develop scientifically valid and quantitatively based methods for the study of social representations. The other group of researchers viewed social representations from a very different epistemological perspective: social representations as symbolic processes embedded in culture, history, anthropology, and communication.
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They are always contextualised and value-laden. This group encompassed a plurality of approaches that gave the theory of social representations a strongly interdisciplinary quality. Within this group, some researchers focused more on anthropology, others on history, social development, imagery, symbolic communication, and countless cultural phenomena. Due to their holistic and multifaceted perspectives, individual researchers cannot be clearly fitted into one or other sub-group, and they usually cross disciplines and incorporate several domains of study. In general, members of each of the two major approaches, that is, structural/organising principles and anthropological, respect the work of the other approach and recognise its contributions. The researchers refer to contributions and achievements of the other approach but since their perspectives are widely different, such references appear to be more a matter of acknowledgement of the alternative, of politeness, and perhaps of a sense of belonging to the same intellectual guild than an expression of deep interest and commitment to the other approach. After the publication of Psychoanalysis (), the theory of social representations and communication diffused abroad. Over the years that followed, the openness of the theory was evaluated by students of social representations both as an advantage and disadvantage. On the one hand, it was seen as advantageous to offer an alternative kind of social psychology contrasting with traditional and individualistic theories and suggesting new and unorthodox ways of studying social psychological phenomena. On the other hand, the ‘versatility’ of the theory of social representations was not always considered an advantage: ‘While social representations may be superordinate to many social psychological phenomena, we need more work on an autonomous theory of social representations rather than marriages of convenience to fundamentally individualistic approaches’ (Allansdottir et al., ). The openness of the theory of social representations also led to an explicit suggestion that it was more appropriate to refer to distinct developments as ‘social representational approaches’ rather than to conceive of them as a single theory (Wagner, a, ). These approaches, Wagner explained, do not constitute a consistent and welldefined theory but refer to several trends that are not always compatible with one another, although each elaborates specific concepts or issues derived from Moscovici’s original theory. Moreover, it was not clear what constituted legitimate studies of social representations. Originally, many researchers assumed that the theory explored the transformation of scientific knowledge into daily knowledge. They thought that only later, perhaps due to Moscovici’s anthropologically
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minded colleagues, the theory took on a broader perspective and was conceived as the transformation of several kinds of knowledge (e.g., Wagner, ). Such an interpretation of Moscovici’s original intentions was due to readers’ unfamiliarity with the first edition of Psychoanalysis, particularly by those outside France. To many, it remained hidden that cultural-historical research of not just scientific knowledge but of different kinds of knowledge was undertaken in Moscovici’s first laboratory after the publication of the first edition. Although in the first edition of Psychoanalysis Moscovici was concerned with the problem of how scientific knowledge is transformed into common or spontaneous knowledge (Moscovici and Marková, , pp. –), his interests were much broader. Scientific and professional knowledge was only one source from which common thinking and common knowledge were derived. The other vital sources were culture, ideology, politics, and daily experience. Moscovici was attentive to the relation between rationality and culture, to the transformation of numerous kinds of thinking, and to the diffusion of one kind of knowledge into another in the cultural life of a society. Forms of transformation of knowledge were accompanied by cultural struggles, intellectual polemics, and oppositions between different modes of thinking. We can remind ourselves that such questions were posed by Cassirer (), with whose work Moscovici was familiar when writing the first edition of Psychoanalysis (Chapter ) and to whom he kept returning throughout his writings. This chapter is not a review of the extensive literature related to social representations; the interested reader can find reviews elsewhere. In outlining the main approaches to the study of social representations, I shall draw attention only to those studies that provide original visions of social representation or to those explorations that present and develop some new ideas and concepts. Some researchers contributed to different approaches, followed different ideas at different times of their careers, or even combined, at the same time, several streams of ideas. Before outlining the main approaches in some detail, let us pose the question: what was the position of Serge Moscovici with respect to these
Several handbooks on social representations have been published in French (Jodelet, ; Lo Monaco, Delouvée, and Rateau, ) and in English (Sammut, Andreouli, Gaskell, and Valsiner, ). There are also many texts on the theory as well as review volumes (e.g., Deaux and Philogène, ; Wagner and Hayes, ; Palmonari and Emiliani, ; de Rosa, a). The presentation of several approaches to the study of social representations as outlined in this chapter is largely based on the one adopted by Palmonari and Emiliani (), but there are other possible ways of classifying approaches to social representations (e.g., de Rosa, b).
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developments? What was his own contribution after the publication of the second edition of Psychoanalysis? He valued, respected, and supported structural and statistical approaches but even if he co-authored some papers in this area, he made hardly any substantial contributions to the theoretical or empirical developments in these domains. Instead, he actively endorsed and proposed new concepts and original ideas in the cultural, anthropological, and historical approaches to social representations and communication. Moscovici persistently insisted that his theory was – or should have been treated as – an anthropology of contemporary culture. It is concerned with the totality of experiences of social groups and individuals, their beliefs and knowledge, myths, images, history, as well as with their activities and social practices in daily living. In order to understand these phenomena, it is vital to study them in relation to one another as meaningful wholes. Moreover, the inseparable relationship between social representations and communication implies that representations are phenomena ‘in the making, not as already made’ (Moscovici and Marková, , pp. –). They are formed and transformed in and through relations of asymmetries, conflicts, discontinuities, and tension. For example, one cannot study influence and innovation processes between majorities and minorities by removing tension and engagement: ‘Whether in conversation or in influence processes, one deals with change, with negotiation between two opposing partners – one cannot exist without the other’ (Moscovici and Marková, , p. ).
. The Structural Approaches to the Study of Social Representations In the early years of the twentieth century, in European countries and in the USA, structuralism became prominent in the arts, literature, linguistics, and subsequently in sociology and ethnography. After the Second World War, structuralism took on various forms and new models were developing within this broad domain. In the s and s, some French intellectuals incorporated structuralism into their theories, for example, Lévi-Strauss into anthropology and Lacan into his form of psychoanalysis.
In contrast, Moscovici actively developed and contributed to laboratory studies and their statistical analyses in his theory of innovation (or influence). The theory of social representations was already referred to as an ‘étude anthropologique de notre propre société’ (anthropological study of our own society) in the review of the first edition of Psychoanalysis by Claude Faucheux (, p. ).
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New developments in structuralism took place when an Argentinian economist Prebisch () proposed a structuralist model in economics based on the concept of core/periphery. As an economist in Latin America, he was sensitive to disparities between countries in the centre of economic progress and those at the periphery, where economic growth was very slow. Conceptually, this move that distinguished between the core and periphery was important because it allowed for an account of a static core and a changeable periphery. The model diffused into other fields, for example, linguistics (Daneš, ; Hyams, ) and semiotics (Lotman, , ). Jean-Claude Abric defended his PhD thesis in Aix-en-Provence in , Jeux, conflits et représentations sociales (Games, conflicts and social representations), when structural core/periphery models were already used in other domains. Abric (a) claimed that, in devising his own core/ periphery model, he was inspired by the social cognition theories of Fritz Heider () and Solomon Asch () and saw their work as the precursors to his ideas. Abric’s well-known model (e.g., b, ; Moliner and Abric, ; Rateau and Lo Monaco, ) consists of a core, which is made up of a limited number of elements that are supposedly stable over time, are evenly distributed among group members, and so provide a consensus for a representation. The core functions as a cognitive and psychosocial stabiliser of a representation. It generates and modulates its meaning and organises its structure. While the structure is determined by consensus within a group that secures its relative stability, at the same time, it must allow for divergences among members of a group and so for variability and change. It is the other part of the model, the periphery, that allows for this. The periphery consists of elements that change over time and are unevenly distributed among individuals. They reflect relevant individuals’ experiences in daily life. Moreover, since the core is constituted by elements that define the object of representation, it presents a homogeneous structure that does not depend on the context (Abric, b). In contrast, peripheral elements arise from individuals’ and groups’ experiences and are dependent on context. They engage with contradictions and changes in life experiences, allowing for a group’s heterogeneity (Rateau and Lo Monaco, , pp. –). Although Abric did not derive his model from Moscovici’s theory but applied his own model to the theory of social representations, he nevertheless regarded his structural model to be closely linked to Moscovici’s concept of ‘figurative schema’ (e.g., Rateau and Lo Monaco, ).
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The ‘Great Smoky Dragon’
In Abric’s last paper, co-authored with Moliner, the authors go even further and state that ‘the notion of central core stems directly from that of figurative schema but it focusses more on the contents of stabilised representations’ (Moliner and Abric, , p. ). They interpret the figurative schema in relation to objectification and as a cognitive process of transformation of an abstract meaning into a concrete meaning. So conceived objectification is assumed to be in line with the concept of figurative schema as a structured and a structuring image. In his model, Abric (; Rateau and Lo Monaco, ) focused on the contents of stabilised representations and proposed to go beyond Moscovici’s genetic perspective which prioritised social representations as structuring phenomena in movement. It appeared to Abric that the idea of social cognition, which he allegedly adopted from Fritz Heider () and Solomon Asch (), fitted well with Moscovici’s ideas. Moliner and Abric (, p. ) interpreted Moscovici’s position as follows: From these early to more contemporary works on social cognition, the theory of social representations adopted the same epistemic stance. For Moscovici (/), social representations are organised in three dimensions, which are also elements of their analysis or comparison (information, field, and attitude) . . . More precisely, a social representation can be described as a set of elements between which individuals establish connections. In that perspective, social representations are cognitive structures.
Yet, let us reflect on this quotation. Did Moscovici ever adopt the ‘epistemic stance’ of social cognition as the authors state? This is a vastly brave claim considering that ‘social cognition’ is a very broad umbrella term with a multitude of meanings and it would hardly be possible to refer to any single ‘epistemic stance’. Such an interpretation of Moscovici’s epistemology is even more curious because in as early as , at the conference in Aix-en-Provence, Moscovici clearly dissociated himself from the epistemology of social cognition (Moscovici, ). There, he gave numerous reasons why, in his opinion, social cognition was headed for an impasse from the very beginning. He provided epistemological, conceptual, and methodological grounds as to why linking these two approaches was totally inappropriate. He also pointed out that any cognition theory which did not assign the basic role to culture as creating language, types of interpersonal relations, knowledge, and institutions was irrelevant to his theory. He insisted that only social representations can restore the relevance of these phenomena. The structural model held by the team in Aix-en-Provence (Jean-Claude Abric, Claude Flament, Pierre Vergès, Christian Guimelli, Michel Morin,
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and Pascal Moliner, among others) has enjoyed high success from its beginning. Its simple structure has been easily understood. The theory has been profoundly concerned with methodology and highly suited to experimental work. Its development over the years has been excellently accounted for by Rateau and Lo Monaco (). The authors trace the productive journey of the model from the original, early concept of core/ periphery up to . They discuss the most recent, innovative, and redeveloped concepts. These involve newly elaborated relations between attitudes and social representations, the hierarchy of elements in the central core, the mute zones in social representations (i.e., cognitions or beliefs that are not vocalised due to normative social pressures and to masking of certain representational fields), among other concepts. In developing the model of consensus and divergencies, Moliner () reformulated the relations between contents of the core/periphery by including individuals’ evaluations (attitudes/values) of these contents. By giving more emphasis to divergencies resulting from individuals’ judgements and evaluations, the structural approach took on a socio-dynamic perspective. This inspired the search for integration of the structural model with the theory of the Geneva School (Rateau and Lo Monaco, , pp. ff.). The international success of the core/periphery model has been particularly strong in Latin America (after all, the model was first formulated by the Argentinian economist Prebisch in , as stated earlier). It is the most widely known approach to social representations and has many contemporary followers. Pereira Sá () recalls that Abric persisted in referring to the core/periphery model as being complementary (Abric, ), rather than replacing or being an alternative, to the general theory of social representations. In this way, Sá states that the Aix school is close to ‘other complementary perspectives – the Paris School (if Denise Jodelet allows me to label it as such) and the Geneva School – which also grew out from the “Moscovician” matrix of social representations, itself being a “grand theory” according to the inspired definition of Willem Doise’ (Sá, , p. .). Pereira Sá continued by saying that this complementary core/periphery model increased the explanatory power of social representations and constructed these as mobilising actions in daily life. Nevertheless, it is notable that the claim of the core/periphery model as being complementary to Moscovici’s model was never raised. One must conclude that Abric was aware of the differences between his structural approach and Moscovici’s approach, though he keenly emphasised the closeness, and even the derivation, of his model from Moscovici’s theory.
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Abric was interested not only in the theoretical modelling of social representations but, most importantly, in their practical use (Abric, a). Although Moscovici did not actively contribute to the Aix-en-Provence structuralism, he always supported and appreciated the hard work of his colleagues in Aix-en-Provence. His own structural perspective of social representations (or better, a constructivist perspective) was derived from other sources. First, his theory was informed by philosophers and anthropologists who were either structuralists (e.g., Lévi-Strauss) or were at least sympathetic to structuralist perspectives (e.g., Marx, Cassirer). Moscovici’s concept of a dynamic structure was a feature of his concept of objectification, which he understood as an individual’s activity in selecting, deselecting, and re-selecting features of an object of representations. While being the product of an individual’s activity, objectification was underscored by activities (images, evaluations, judgements) of a social group or community that were generated and established over time. Second, although Moscovici did not accept Piaget’s idea that changes in structures are determined by pre-established stages, he adopted Piaget’s constructivist perspective: transformations in social representations are due to their dynamic structures. These transformations, which involve values and judgements, are always embedded in communication and in ‘lived experience’ in which representations and activities take place.
. Organising Principles in the Study of Social Representations There are at least three striking features of Willem Doise’s approach to social representations which are directly derived from Moscovici’s theory. First, Doise insists on the interdependence of social psychological and sociological domains, viewing social representations as specific types of knowledge that take place in and through social relations at the level of the individual, group, and society (Doise, , pp. ff.). These interdependent social relations are the organising principles of social representations (Doise, , ). Organising principles refer to systematic variations attributed by individuals and groups to different dimensions of the structure of social representations, to their opposing and conflicting features, and to their hierarchical relations. Organising principles play an important role in daily thinking and in social norms. Social norms are anchored in three ways to social representations: • psychological anchoring that concerns an individual’s positions with respect to attitudes or value choices
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• •
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psychosociological anchoring that refers to the perception of relations among social groups and social structures sociological anchoring that refers to the belongingness of individuals to groups and to their shared social relations and experiences, for example, the effect of economic status, religious, political, or cultural differences.
Over the years, Doise (, ) and his colleagues have systematically explored the organising principles of the social representation of human rights and values, and the political activism of individuals, groups, and institutions (governments). The second feature of Doise’s approach is his insistence on the distinction between systems and metasystems. Following Moscovici (/, pp. ff.), Doise considers social representations as metasystems and defines them as organising symbolic principles that are linked to specific social relations both in psychology and sociology (Doise, , , ). Let me explain. Doise’s point of departure is Moscovici’s suggestion that humans operate with two cognitive systems in their effort to differentiate and apprehend phenomena in the outside world such as individuals, objects, or events. One system enables the formation of associations, categories, inclusions, and deductions. The other cognitive system, or metasystem, establishes normative relations among materials obtained from the first system by reworking and organising them. Therefore, the first system concerns ordinary operational relations while the metasystem establishes normative relations and normative values which check, test, and direct both systems (Moscovici, /, p. ). Doise insists on the importance of the distinction between systems and metasystems because this is vital for understanding the meaning of the concept of social representations and for the study of social regulations and cognitive functions. He regrets that this important distinction has not been taken up by other researchers and that it even disappeared from Moscovici’s subsequent work. Doise further notes the importance of Moscovici’s assumption that cognitive processes presuppose dialogue, which was confirmed by the responses of the participants in Moscovici’s study of psychoanalysis. Natural thinking and communication were never neutral transmissions of information, but in making judgements, humans constantly expressed a position ‘for’ or ‘against’; they accepted or rejected a specific view and shaped their styles of communication through controversy. Willem Doise’s third significant contribution concerns his analysis of the second part of Psychoanalysis. This part, which is devoted to the
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The ‘Great Smoky Dragon’
interdependence between symbolic thinking and communication systems, was largely ignored by students of social representations. Here, Moscovici showed the ways in which cognitive functions were inserted into the organisation of symbolic relationships between social actors. In this context, Doise argued for a non-consensual definition of social representations. This argument is theoretically important because it demolishes a common misinterpretation of social representations that conceives them as a consensus of thinking (Doise, , p. ). Instead, Doise emphasises that it is a gross simplification to conceive social representation merely as a consensus of thinking (see also Moscovici and Doise, /). Social representation, which is underlain by the concept of organising principles (Doise, , ), presupposes variability of beliefs which ‘may result in different or even opposed positions taken by individuals in relation to common reference points’ (Doise, Clémence, and Lorenzi-Cioldi, / , p. ). In their explanation of the concept of non-consensual social representations, Doise, Clémence, and Lorenzi-Cioldi (/) argue that multivariate statistical methods, such as factor analysis, correspondence analysis, and discriminate analysis, all aim to elucidate differences, and not consensus, between individuals’ responses. Therefore, the authors expound on different kinds of statistical techniques for quantitative data analyses to study social representations. The idea of non-consensual representations became attractive to the structural approach in seeking mutual rapprochement. While originally Abric argued for consensus, the developments by Moliner and his colleagues (see earlier) show that two principles, consensus and divergencies, function in the central core and periphery. Doise, Clémence, and Lorenzi-Cioldi (/) have carefully analysed the styles of different kinds of communication in the mass press as accounted for in Part II of Psychoanalysis, that is, of diffusion of knowledge, propagation of educational goals, and propaganda of an enforcing agenda. Concerning Moscovici’s hypothesis linking these styles of communication with opinions, attitudes, and stereotypes, Doise Clémence, and LorenziCioldi (/) argue that only stereotypes can be considered as building a shared consensus within a group or sub-group. Here again, the authors regret that the heuristic value of the distinction between opinions, attitudes, and stereotypes has not been much acknowledged by social psychologists and that research into cognitive organisation and communicative systems in various modalities of knowledge is rare. One major problem with the study of social representations is that they are composed of collections of opinions, attitudes, and stereotypes whose
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organising principles must be pieced together. Therefore, different kinds of quantitative data analysis methods are essential to cope with this difficulty (Doise et al., /). The authors concluded their book by stating that, from the beginning, the French authors, such as Moscovici, Herzlich, Chombart de Lauwe, and Jodelet, ‘heavily relied on what is now called discourse analysis’ (Potter and Wetherell, ) in which ‘objectification and anchoring were forged to account for characteristics of discourse as produced in interviews, newspapers, or novels’ (Doise, Clémence, and Lorenzi-Cioldi, /, p. ). Unfortunately, this comment on the French authors did not help to ease the confusion concerning the relations between discourse analysis and social representations (Chapter ). One may assume that the authors tried to privilege their approach according to which social representations are defined as ‘principles that generate individual positioning linked to specific insertions in sets of social relationships. This is perhaps the most important result of the use of quantitative data analyses techniques in the study of SR’ (Doise, Clémence, and Lorenzi-Cioldi, /, p. ).
. Socio-cultural/Anthropological Approaches to the Study of Social Representations ..
The Interdependence between Inner and Outer Worlds
Perhaps the most significant difference between the structural and organising principles approaches on the one hand and socio-cultural/ anthropological approaches to the study of social representations on the other concerns their relations to the outside context. In the structural and organising principles approaches, outside contexts are methodically explored. In the structural approach, the core is constituted of a homogeneous structure of elements independent of context (Abric, b). Peripheral elements, however, are dependent on the context because they arise from the heterogeneous experiences of individuals and groups who engage with changes in everyday life (Rateau and Lo Monaco, , pp. –). In the organising principles approach, there are relations between social psychological and sociological domains, and these are systematically explored in specific outside contexts as non-consensual relations in social representations (see earlier). In contrast, in socio-cultural/anthropological approaches, the relation between the inner world of humans (individuals, groups) and the outside world of other individuals, groups, and institutions, in their relevant
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temporal and geographical situations, is interdependent in the sense that it is unique in each case. This means that the inner world of humans and the outside world define each other. An individual or group selects specific features of their outside world that they consider relevant and mutually transform both the inner and outer world into their new social reality. This mutual interdependence between the inner and outer world underlies much of anthropological research and is not specific to the social representational approach. Early researchers of social representations, having adopted the socio-cultural/anthropological approach, such as Moscovici himself, Chombart de Lauwe, Herzlich, Jodelet, and Kaës, integrated the concept of the interdependence between the inner and outer world into their theories and empirical explorations. This also means that the uniqueness of this interdependent relation cannot be analysed in statistical terms. In each case, the individual and his/her entourage form an unrepeatable unit (Chapter ). Claudine Herzlich (/, p. ) emphasises the specificity of the social representational approach: ‘it is always the relation of the individual to society with which we are concerned’. In her study of health and illness, Herzlich analyses the facilitating and constraining forces of the external environment affecting individuals’ choices and their commitments. Moscovici developed this idea further: ‘society is an institution which inhibits what it stimulates. It both tempers and excites . . . increases or reduces the chances . . . and invents prohibitions together with the means of transgressing them’ (Moscovici, /, p. ). Denise Jodelet (/) developed the concept of interdependence between individuals and groups with respect to the outer world by treating social representations as ‘structured fields’. By ‘structured fields’ she means relations between the contents contributed by the participants (or the Ego and Alter) and by the principles that organise contents, like cultural schemata, norms, and so forth. Jodelet’s concept of a ‘structured field’, I suggest, means something like the concept of an electromagnetic field in the physics of relativity. The electromagnetic field is a totality of forces that exist ‘between the two charges and not the charges themselves, which is essential for an understanding of their action’ (Einstein and Infeld, / , p. ). Thus, a ‘force between particles’ rather than the ‘behaviour of single entities’ defines the field. Equally, we cannot understand the specificity of the theory of social representations without conceiving the concept of the force of interaction that binds elements to one another. In Jodelet’s concept of the structured field, individuals and groups are viewed as participants with specific features (experiences, preferences, desires)
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functioning in concrete cultural situations. Their internal interaction (in contrast to external interaction, such as in the analysis of variance) constitutes a new reality: the interacting components define one another as complements, whether this involves institutions vis-à-vis the environment, institutions vis-à-vis groups, one group vis-à-vis another group, or a social representation vis-à-vis culture (Marková, a, ). Like an electromagnetic field, the structured field of social representations is dynamic. It is open to participants’ new experiences and to social change. The perspective of social representations as the anthropology of modern culture implies that the study of such complex phenomena as Moscovici’s psychoanalysis in , Jodelet’s study of madness, or Herzlich’s study of health and illness cannot be written up with any justification as single papers. Complex studies require the total treatment and understanding of these phenomena in their holistic manner and are best presented as books. For example, more recent socio-cultural studies published as books include: • •
Kalampalikis’s () research on the historical dispute between Greece and the Republic of Macedonia over the name Macedonia Jovchelovitch and Priego-Hernández’s () research on underground sociabilities in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas. ..
Imagination, Images, and Imaginary
Imagination is one of the basic mental capacities that define humans as species. Its centrality simultaneously presupposes other defining capacities of humanity, such as forms of thinking and knowing, language, making ethical judgements, holding values, and symbolic activities. All these capacities generate, maintain, and transform social representations and communication. The role of these capacities and their relations were already formulated in the first edition of Psychoanalysis and were further supported in the second edition. Since imagination is one of the foundations of the human mind, it cannot be destroyed without destroying the human being as the human being. The products of imagination are images and can be manipulated for various purposes, for example, political, ideological, or religious (Marková, ). Students of social representations explored images in interactions and activities in daily life (Herzlich, /; de Rosa, ; Jodelet, / ; Arruda and de Alba, ). Such images, these authors observed, are often the re-expressions of archaic beliefs that, for centuries, have been embedded in collective thinking and traditions (see later).
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Some researchers of social representations have portrayed images in drawings. They express, even better than language, historically embedded experiences of individuals’ and sub-groups’ knowledge and feelings about living places (Guerrero, ). For example, drawings representing mental maps of Paris (Milgram and Jodelet, ) showed that in drawing maps, participants transmitted images pertaining to the professions to which they belonged (e.g., butchers were drawing slaughterhouses). Images based on drawings of maps of the city of Mexico (Arruda and de Alba, ; de Alba, ) showed that the symbolic construction of the city was an imaginary sphere featuring mythical references, mystical beliefs, reveries, and urban legends, which had no correspondents in the real world. Drawings sometimes reproduce ancient images of isolated and dangerous places. An interesting theoretical issue in empirical research on mental maps of Brazil was the presence of blank spaces in the centre and centre-west regions (Arruda and Ulup, ). The authors maintain that the void spaces on the maps coincide with the colonial occupation of these territories. These empty places may serve as reminders of the past in collective memories of colonialism. Thus, emptiness does not always mean non-existence but a choice or a defence (Arruda, Gonçalves, and Mululo, ). The creation of visual images has become a powerful means of influencing or changing social representations used by the press, advertisements, and campaigns, whether political, health-related, or otherwise (Joffe, ). Visual images in the press have been particularly influential in staging photographs that capture public representations. Powerful images used in the press were found to be related to the public’s representation of genetic engineering. For example, genetically modified tomatoes were presented as if manipulated by unknown agents and the public viewed them as if they were injected with genes. This reminded viewers of inoculation and insertion of foreign materials into bodies known from medicine and chemistry (Wagner et al., ; Wagner and Hayes, ). ‘Social imaginary’ goes far beyond the concept of images (Arruda, ). Social imaginary refers to the creative capacity of humans to make visions of their collectively shared existences, values, institutions, and practices (e.g., Castoriadis, ; Taylor, ). It is historically determined and specific to the society in question. Taylor () characterises social imaginaries as the shared visions organising common practices based on ideas that underlie the concept of togetherness. These common practices are accomplished in and through engaged interdependencies of the Self and Other(s) in the formation of the moral order which is tied to markets and the public sphere.
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Illustrating the concept of ‘social imaginary’, Arruda () emphasises that the findings of research based on drawing maps not only concerns physical and geographic spaces but also involves socio-historically shared experiences, practices, and identities. In drawing maps, humans express their social imaginary through memories, feelings of belonging, desires, and other mental states which modify spaces as they are experienced. The study by de Alba () analysed thirteen maps of the imaginary of Mexico City throughout a period from the sixteenth to the twentieth century to understand both urban memory and imaginaries that sustain the current representations of today’s residents. Despite the city’s transformations and its representations, there are elements that maintain its territorial identity and recreate urban memory (mythical, social, architectural). De Alba treats image as a form of communication with a double message: denotative and connotative. The denotative message refers to aspects of the image that make it an analogy of reality. The connotative message leads viewers to seek social, cultural, and historical referents in which such images acquire meanings. It points to what has changed or remained preserved in different maps throughout time until the present and enables the comparison of professional maps with drawings of maps by non-specialists. The maps devised by residents express their personalaffective and socio-cultural urban experiences that form part of their identity. Drawings bring out archaic symbolic images that endured in social imaginaries for centuries (de Rosa, ; Duveen and de Rosa, , p. ). Yet, despite these illuminating findings about collectively shared experiences, as Arruda () points out, relations between social imaginary and social representations have rarely been conceptualised and explored in any depth. ..
Collective Memory and Myth
Historical perspectives on collective memory and their influence on historical studies of social representations have been well documented (e.g., Jodelet, /; Jodelet and Haas, ). These studies show that in social representation, accounts of history and collective memory are mixed and they both organise and transform representations. Such accounts are never neutral cognitive narratives but evaluations and justifications of historical events; they are filled with tensions, fear, and danger as well as hopes for the future. The past can be viewed with nostalgia or as a reminder of terror; as a golden age of happiness or as a time of sadness;
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as a judgement of ethical or unethical conduct of Selves and Others; and so on. Memories are not stable facts to which one can repeatedly refer but are imaginative reconstructions and re-interpretations of past, present, and future expectations. Collective memories involving rich forms of imaginations about indigenous peoples in different parts of the world significantly contributed to generating ideas and images about other peoples (Jahoda, ). Such images forge ethnic, social, and national identities and contribute to reinterpretations and rewriting of histories of politics and ideology (e.g., Kalampalikis, ; Psaltis, ; Phoenix, Howarth, and Philogène, ; Nicholson and Howarth, ). Collective memories of daily life during Communism, governed by explicit and implicit rules of institutions, and of their transformations were participants of numerous studies (e.g., Neculau, ; Raudsepp, Heidmets, and Kruusvall, ; Tileagă, ). These studies were largely structured along the theme of coping with the collectively imagined Communist enemy who disrespected human rights and national values and physically and morally abused citizens over many years. Constance de Saint-Laurent () developed a model of three roles of collective memory fundamental for the imagination of collective futures. First, she described two grand political plots that originated in the French Revolution and showed that these opposing frames of reference still resonate in contemporary parliamentary debates and political imaginations in France. Second, she documented that past experiences serve as examples of analogical events and, thus, they guide the logic of historical reasoning. Finally, historical cases provide generalisations for the understandings of how the world works. Studies of collective memory bring us to consider yet another issue: the relation between a social representation and a myth. Moscovici (/ , p. ) insisted that myths must not be confused with social representations because mythical thinking is traditionally associated with archaic images and primitive thought. However, as we saw previously, daily thinking reactivates ancient myths and creates new ones. Myth does not disappear with scientific progress, technology, and mass education but is present in everyday reasoning; it permeates everyday practices (Paredes and Jodelet, ) and reactivates itself in dangers, for example, during periods of emergent infectious diseases. Moreover, the mixture of myth and reason features in the propagation of ‘scientific myths’, for example, the death of the universe or the Big Bang (Moscovici, ). Drawing boundaries between science, scientific myths, religious myths, as well as
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myths in everyday thinking is hardly possible. The idea of an orderly and coherent universe was a feature of the Judeo-Christian religions and of monastic doctrines. The emerging modern science in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries adopted the monastic doctrine of the orderly universe and, in many respects, it followed its logic (Jacob, /).
. Sociogenetic Approach Willem Doise took up the Chair in Geneva in and, in his early years, he initiated experimental studies into the effect of social interactions on the development of child intelligence and cognitive structures. Using classic Piagetian experimental situations, he and his colleagues found that in interactionally conflictual situations, pairs of children perform better on spatial representation tasks than single children do (Doise, Mugny, and Perret-Clermont, ; Doise and Mugny, ; Perret-Clermont, ). Consequently, these authors developed the concept of socio-cognitive conflict as a mechanism of cognitive development. Such tasks and their variations have been coined the ‘sociogenetic approach’, and this phrase has been extensively used by students of social representations. The major theoretical contribution in sociogenetic approach was made by the connoisseur of the theory of social representations, the late Gerard Duveen. In contrast to other specialists in social representations, Duveen persistently referred to the relation between Moscovici and Piaget rather than to Moscovici’s relation to Durkheim. He reminds us that it was Piaget who suggested to Moscovici what could be social psychology (Moscovici and Marková, ; Duveen, a) and, not surprisingly, Piaget appeared at significant points in Moscovici’s writings. Duveen posed the question: in what ways exactly did Piaget inspire Moscovici? He responded to this query by referring to Moscovici’s concern with the study of structures and social change. In Duveen’s (a, p. ) words, ‘most characteristic of Moscovici’s socio-psychological imagination is the attempt to thematise change’ or, even better, ‘it is the way in which change is thematised in Moscovici’s social psychology which is distinctive’. Moscovici was always critical as well as appreciative of Piaget. In contrast to Piaget, Moscovici did not accept the idea that changes in structures were determined by pre-established stages but, instead, was sympathetic to Merleau-Ponty’s perspective of development understood as a dynamic and open system. Merleau-Ponty () did not view a child’s representations as being initially inadequate or irrational and only gradually, through the passage of cognitive stages, reaching mature and logical adult
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thinking. Instead, Merleau-Ponty emphasised that children’s mental processes and activities are adequate to their ‘lived experience’ in which these processes and activities take place. Duveen builds on Piaget’s constructivism, structuralism, and rationality but diverges from Piaget by developing his own position. Piaget applied the concept of construction to a child’s cognitive development, which is accomplished through progressing to subsequent stages of learning, discovering, and integrating new knowledge. He adopted the idea of step-bystep progression from beliefs to knowledge in relying upon the classic, that is, Kantian, form of rationality. This meant that, just like Kant, Piaget excluded from reasoning and intellectual processes those activities (partly or totally) based on motives, desires, or emotions, that is, ‘irrational’ activities (Kant, /). The Piagetian rationality, just like the Kantian rationality, is universal. All children pass through the stages of operational development and gradually construct higher forms of reasoning. Rather than adopting Piaget’s model of Subject–Object in a child’s development of knowledge, Duveen embraced the triangular relation in the Ego–Alter–Object (Moscovici, a). This means that Duveen’s constructivist position was inherently social: a child does not acquire knowledge solely through his or her own reasoning and through the processes of adaptation and accommodation. A child always constructs knowledge in the dynamics of social life which involve the transformations of values and ideas that are embedded in communication and in social practices. The triangular relation Child–Child–Task/Object became a fundamental unit of analysis of Duveen’s studies of interaction and knowledge. Duveen and Psaltis (/, p. ) referred to Piaget’s hesitation concerning the role of social interaction in the development of a child’s intelligence. The authors pointed out that, even in his most sociological writings, Piaget did not appreciate the constitutive importance of social interaction in the genesis of structures. In contrast, social interaction is the leading force in Duveen’s concept of microgenesis (Chapter ). The Child–Child–Task/Object in Duveen’s studies portrays the Ego–Alter– Object triangular model as the epistemology of social representations. In building on Doise’s and others’ ideas of socio-cognitive conflict, Duveen explored the epistemic reasoning of young boys and girls in their explanations of moral arguments. He showed that a child’s arguments can be stronger or weaker depending on their autonomous or heteronomous standing and on their gender. He further developed Piaget’s () distinction between co-operation and constraint and showed that a child’s
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cognitive conflicts cannot be explained by considering him/her as the only agent engaged in the world. Instead, cognitive conflicts involve relations between the Self, valorised Others, and an Object (Psaltis, ) in and through the triadic process of Child–Child–Task/Object (Leman and Duveen, , ; Psaltis and Duveen, , ; Duveen and Psaltis, /; Psaltis, Duveen, and Perret-Clermont, ). Cooperation or conflict arise from various forms of interactional asymmetries and these may have different effects on resolving socio-cognitive conflicts. Psaltis () clarifies that co-operation and conflict take place at different levels, such as individual (cognitive), situational (e.g., interaction, task), and macrosocial (social representations of gender/identities). Developmental, situational, and societal constraints carry the symbolic value of social representations and, Psaltis () insists, cannot be understood in terms of discursive practices guided only by rights and duties resulting from the ‘here-and-now’ talk and positioning of Davies and Harré (). Duveen’s triadic epistemology presupposes not only knowledge and beliefs but the totality of human experience embedded in, and accumulated through, history and culture. Knowledge and beliefs include the struggle for social recognition, desires, their symbolic transformations, ethics, and morality, as well as the judgements and evaluations of the Self–Other relations and of objects of knowledge. This epistemology of living experience and of daily thinking would count as irrationality in Cartesian and Kantian thought.
. Communication Approach Moscovici (Moscovici and Marková, , p. ) insisted that it was essential from the very beginning to establish a relationship between communication and social representations: they condition one another because humans cannot communicate unless they share some common presuppositions and knowledge about the phenomena in their environment, and a socially shared knowledge enters their interaction when it becomes an object of interest and of communication. In the first edition of Psychoanalysis in , Moscovici had already conceived communication along two main genres: conversation/dialogue as a primary genre, which he explored in Part I of Psychoanalysis, and diffusion, propagation, and propaganda as the three secondary genres in mass communication, which he explored in Part II.
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.. Conversation/Dialogue Moscovici conceived interpersonal conversation/dialogue as a primary communication genre because it is a phenomenon that holds society together. Conversations and dialogues are directed at the Other and reciprocal relations generate manifold new forms in thinking and communicating. Humans’ passion for knowing and for talking go together. Rosenzweig’s () observation that thinking is essentially a dialogue (Marková, ) or that we think through our mouth emphasises the role of conversation in the genesis of social representations (Moscovici and Marková, , p. ). Moscovici regarded conversation and dialogue as combats between participants. In meeting places, whether in clubs, cafes, streets, or elsewhere, people express their opinions, agreements, disagreements, and arguments. Conversations are filled with tension. The Self and the Other are social agents with their own histories, aims, intentions, and desires. They attempt to establish intersubjective relations, to dominate one another, to co-operate, to obstruct, and to influence; they trust and distrust one another, they may play an authentic game or try to deceive one another. In and through interviews and dialogues, in Part I of Psychoanalysis, Moscovici observed that his participants were ‘amateur politicians, doctors, educators, sociologists, astronomers’ (Moscovici, , p. ) who used linguistic conventions and established communicative genres as well as invented novel forms of expression. ..
Communication as Influence
Just like Willem Doise, so Gerard Duveen explored communication in Part II of Psychoanalysis. Although these two scholars used different approaches in their analyses of Psychoanalysis, the unifying feature of their perspectives is the view that communities are not held together by reproducing identical thoughts, beliefs, and contents of communication but by the ways in which they establish various discourses (Doise, Clémence, and Lorenzi-Cioldi, /; Duveen, ). In other words, in taking different perspectives, groups communicate, express their aims and intentions, influence one another, and preserve and transform social representations. In the context of Part II of Psychoanalysis, Duveen () posed important questions such as: to whom were different images of psychoanalysis directed in using different communication genres? What were the relations between individuals and mass media? As he maintained, in acknowledging
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images as if they had been directed at them, individuals solidified them thereby making their influence even more powerful. In outlining different communication genres, that is, diffusion, propagation, and propaganda, Moscovici suggested that each genre was directed at a different type of group structured through distinctive social psychological organisations. Here again, Duveen reminds us that the notion of a group does not imply homogeneity; instead, one must consider the kinds of different representations of those who constitute the in-group and out-group in each instance. Finally, Duveen poses questions about the types of communicative genres that could be identified in current forms of mass communication. Could we still identify diffusion, propagation, and propaganda as the three communicative genres in the media or would we identify, today, some other forms? Duveen’s questions appear even more pressing in view of the contemporary dramatic technological and societal transformations: •
•
•
Moscovici (a) derived his analyses of diffusion, propagation, and propaganda from texts undertaken at a time when mass communication was largely based on the circulation of newspapers and journals. In the contemporary world, it is not so much that texts have disappeared (though the circulation of newspapers has decreased) but that, in mass communication, there has been an extraordinary increase in the circulation of powerful images. Such images may, through their dramatic content, manipulate our senses (vision, hearing, touch, smell), affect knowledge acquisition, and influence our beliefs. Is the circulation of images, just like verbal texts, linked to distinctive forms of social psychological organisation? Technological advancement in internet communications and, more specifically, social networking and the creation of virtual communities are prone to produce forms of influence processes and human– computer interactions that are unlikely to be accommodated with those explored by Moscovici in Psychoanalysis. The use of new forms of communication such as zoom, videoconferencing, and otherwise, endorsed by the restrictions caused by pandemic diseases, demands new forms of interaction and influence processes. ..
Semantic Barriers
Propaganda, as we have seen, constrains dialogue because it is defined by a strict hierarchy between the source of information and the recipient. In his analysis of propaganda in Psychoanalysis, Moscovici (a, /)
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identified two strategies that preclude dialogical communication, which he called ‘semantic barriers’ in communication. One strategy employed rigid oppositions between different perspectives, mutually negating one another and precluding any negotiation. The other employed a transfer of meaning. It referred, for example, to adding an adjective which totally changed a meaning; for example, it changed psychoanalysis to ‘American psychoanalysis’ and so created a political issue from this matter. Moscovici showed that cognitively and emotionally loaded words are tied both with thoughts and actions. These ties could become psychologically so strong that they might lead to confusion between words, things, and actions. In changing names, things obtain a new quality. Propaganda uses this well-known fact to the extreme. It erases differences between words and actions by substituting words for actions. Gillespie () makes a significant theoretical contribution to Moscovici’s ideas by proposing further ways in which semantic features preclude dialogue and build alternative representations of the phenomena in question. In addition to negation and transfer of meaning, Gillespie proposes another five means of creating semantic barriers: • ‘Prohibitive thoughts’, which encourage dangerous ideas; for example, ‘psychoanalysis is the work of the devil’. • ‘Separation’, which is a semantic strategy that disconnects the two positions in question; for example, it suggests that psychoanalysis and science are different domains that have nothing in common with one another and, therefore, there is nothing to discuss. • ‘Stigma’ refers to the phenomenon in question as inferior, as not worthy of serious consideration; for example, only second-rate individuals would consider psychoanalysis as therapy. • ‘Undermining the motive’ labels psychoanalysts as charlatans, conmen, or sex maniacs. • ‘Bracketing’ is a semantic strategy that distances the phenomenon from the activity it proposes to carry out. In an example from Moscovici’s (/, p. ) study, one interviewee states: ‘Psychoanalysis . . . claims to be able to explain the origin and development of society in terms of conflict with the libido.’ In this case, the speaker dissociates himself from believing that psychoanalysis explains anything and, instead, makes an indirect statement about what psychoanalysts believe. Gillespie’s analysis of semantic barriers shows strategies as imposing a monologue on the ruling speaker and also implies that words are actions that have an imaginative, and indeed magical, power over events (Piaget,
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/). Gillespie shows in his later article that some barriers might operate in certain contexts but not in others, for example, in inter-group conflicts, in negotiations and flattering, in which ‘in-groups’ delegitimise, avoid, and limit ideas of out-groups (Gillespie, ). The confusion between words, things, and actions, and inferences made between them, was common in Stalinist political trials where differences between words and actions were erased and words were treated in the same ways as actions. For example, Andrey Vyshinski, who was the most infamous state prosecutor during Stalin’s political trials, instructed that it was not necessary to define precisely what ‘terrorist statements’ and ‘terrorist acts’ were. It was sufficient to point to or to produce a label, the meaning of which could remain unspecified. In and through veiled language, one proceeded from criticism to espionage and to terrorism (Tucker, , p. ). The aim of veiled language, which made words and acts equivalent, was to destroy the confessor’s vision of the Self, his/her self-regard, and make him/her acknowledge non-existent crimes (London, ). In similar contexts, Halfin () referred to cases of politically accused persons who were renamed and their new labels, for example, ‘traitor’, declared their deeds and gave them a new identity. For example, if an individual was labelled as a traitor, he/she was explicitly prohibited from using certain words, specifically, ‘Party’ and ‘comrade’. London (, p. ) gives evidence from his interrogation: ‘You are forbidden to mention a Party here. You are forbidden to mention the name of any of our comrades directing the Party. You are a traitor who has nothing in common with the Party’ (Marková, b). While semantic barriers are particularly effectful in political propaganda, some of them become part of daily dialogues, negotiations, or manipulation of the other interlocutor. In referring to objectification in psychoanalysis, Moscovici commented that words that would describe someone as stubborn or quarrelsome could be then re-described as aggressive, repressed, or having a complex. In other words, naming something or someone means to objectify, to make something real through speech and, subsequently, turn it into habitual social practice.
. Conclusion The tremendous interest in the theory of social representations led to many understandings and interpretations of Moscovici’s theory. As stated at the beginning of this chapter, Moscovici was aware of difficulties involved in interpreting another’s ideas because we tend to interpret others
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from our own position and so are liable to misinterpretations. Despite that, he never publicly disapproved of the varied interpretations of his theory by his followers. He frequently claimed that he was not an owner of his theory (personal communication) and, therefore, he did not think he had the right to legitimise or de-legitimise the work of researchers who were inspired by his theory (de Rosa, , p. ; Jodelet, ). Of the approaches that subsequently emerged, the structuralist approach became the most well known, although it was not originally derived from Moscovici’s theory. The success of the structuralist approach seems to be due to its simple structure that has been easily understood, to methodological rigour, and to its excellent suitability for experimental exploration. The researchers have been, and still are, dedicated to developing its scientific credibility based on the systematic treatment of core and periphery and of precise, easily defined concepts. However, as we shall see in the next chapter, these features led to criticism and rejection of the theory of social representations by many social psychologists because the structuralist approach was viewed as following a rigid and cognitivist stance. Critics placed it into the same camp as individualistic and cognitivist psychology. Moscovici’s own perspective that social representations are organised in structures followed a different route. His aim was to redefine social psychology by focusing on the symbolic functions of social representations and their power to construct social reality. The approach of the Geneva School is directly derived from Moscovici’s theory. Willem Doise’s organising symbolic principles are linked to specific social relations at the level of the individual, group, and society in psychology and sociology. The Geneva approach made a significant contribution to the analysis of different styles of mass communication in the second part of Psychoanalysis. It insisted on a non-consensual definition of social representations and emphasised the variability within social representations that is underlain by the concept of organising principles with a multiplicity of processes and functions. The defining concept of socio-cultural/anthropological approaches is the interdependent and unique relation between the inner world of humans (individuals, groups) and an outside world (other groups, ‘society’, culture). Imagination, images, and social imaginary play central roles alongside other defining capacities of the human mind such as forms of thinking and knowing, language, and symbolic activities. The concept of ‘social imaginary’ refers here to the creative capacity of humans to make visions of their collectively shared existences, values, institutions, and practical actions. Myth does not disappear with scientific progress,
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technology, and mass education but continues to be present in everyday reasoning and permeates everyday practices. Memories are not stable facts to which one can repeatedly refer but are imaginative reconstructions and re-interpretations of past, present, and future expectations. The major theoretical contribution to the sociogenetic approach by Gerard Duveen and his followers was the emphasis on the dynamic structures of social representations. In order to understand transformations in social representations, we need to recognise the dynamics of the organisation of values, ideas, or practices always embedded in communication whether interpersonal or mass-mediated. Communication and social representations condition one another: we communicate our shared parts of social realities; and our partly shared social realities induce us to convey them to others. Interpersonal conversation/dialogue is a primary communication genre, and diffusion, propagation, and propaganda are three secondary genres in mass communication. Technological advances in social networking through the Internet are likely to produce new kinds of influence processes, create new semantic barriers to dialogical communication, as well as provide novel opportunities for understanding interdependencies between communication and social representations.
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Pseudo-dialogues and Building Bridges
. The Theory Travels Abroad After the publication of the second edition of Psychoanalysis in , the theory of social representations permeated abroad, particularly to European countries and later to Latin America. By that time, Moscovici’s work on attitudes and opinions, influence processes, language, and ecology was printed in English and well known. The second edition of Psychoanalysis, published in France in , was timely. The ‘crisis’ in social psychology in the s led to emphasis on the social, cultural, and dynamic nature of humans and on social psychology as a historical science (Gergen, ). Taylor’s () Explanation of Behaviour, Harré and Secord’s () The Explanation of Social Behaviour, Israel and Tajfel’s () The Context of Social Psychology: A Critical Assessment, and Berger and Luckmann’s () The Construction of Social Reality were severe critiques of mechanistic and individualistic approaches in social sciences and prepared the ground for other perspectives offering alternative theories of social knowledge. Dominant views on language as a system of signs and as an innate, ready-made tool were also severely criticised and the role of language in communication was prioritised over static and formalistic theories in linguistics. The importance of language in the community and in interpersonal relations (e.g., Moscovici, b; Rommetveit, ; Marková, ) coincided with the rediscovery and English publications of Lev Vygotsky’s (/, ) studies on speech and thinking. The first glimpse of Moscovici’s theory of social representations appeared in English in the preface to Claudine Herzlich’s (/) book Health and Illness: A Social Psychological Analysis. The preface included Moscovici’s often-quoted definition of social representations. This was followed by Moscovici’s () article ‘On social representations’ and by his chapter on ‘The phenomenon of social representations’
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(Moscovici, a). The great international interest in these publications was due both to the originality of Moscovici’s thinking about social knowledge and language, offering a social perspective on these capacities, and to the context of vigorous debates about social psychology. When the theory of social representations and communication became a subject of intense interest during the s, its acceptance was mixed. On the positive side, the theory was viewed as offering a truly social ‘social psychology’. Michael Billig () acknowledged Moscovici’s theory as one of the most important developments in European social psychology characterised by intellectual ambition, revolution in thinking, and methodological innovation. Other authors were also sympathetic, although many had reservations and viewed the theory as underdeveloped, inconsistent, and ambiguous. Despite their unease, some critics emphasised the importance of a debate within the camp of those who opposed individualistic and mechanistic approaches in social psychology. Debates within their own camp were thought to be important for dialogical arguing and for avoiding passive compromises or monologues. Debates were viewed as healthy signs in exploring the adequacy of different approaches (e.g., Potter and Billig, ). Rom Harré (, p. ) described himself as a fellow traveller with Moscovici (a) and Farr (); however, he argued that the theory needed further elaboration and advocated that it should adopt a discursive social psychology approach. On a more negative side, most disputes between Moscovici and his critics could be called pseudo-dialogues: each party started from their own premises that were often incompatible with those of the other party without trying to understand the other’s point of view. Moscovici’s critics, although attempting to be constructive, made suggestions for the advancement of the theory based on their own approaches. Thus, Billig () proposed a rhetorical approach; Harré () and Potter and Wetherell () advocated a discursive approach. Gustav Jahoda () recommended the perspective of social cognition and Hewstone and Augoustinos () suggested an approach from the standpoint of attribution theory. With each dialogical party exposing their own viewpoints, proper arguments and exchanges of ideas were hardly possible. In addition, there were striking terminological problems on both sides of the communicating partners which precluded a productive dialogue.
. Problems of Terminology and of Meanings As Moscovici was rethinking his theory, he kept changing his terminology and the meanings of the terms he used. This problem was already lurking
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in the first edition of Psychoanalysis in but became magnified in the publication of the second edition and thereafter. Moscovici’s casual and sometimes arbitrary use of words such as ‘information’, ‘attitudes’, ‘meaning’, ‘knowledge’, ‘naming’, ‘cognition’, and so on did not make the reading of Psychoanalysis easy when these words referred to different phenomena and contexts without any explanation. For example, while for Moscovici ‘communication’, both as a notion and phenomenon, was value-laden, was part of his theory of social representations, and orientated towards other participants, this was not apparent when he referred to it as ‘information’. Equally, Moscovici’s critics did not question whether their usage of terms such as ‘cognition’, ‘information’, ‘attitude’, ‘representations’, ‘anchoring’, ‘objectification’, and others corresponded to the meanings given to these terms by Moscovici. Most often, the critics attributed to these terms meanings from disciplines in which they referred to fixed or universal concepts. ..
An Example: Social Representations and Attitudes
In order to illustrate some of these difficulties, let us consider the term ‘attitudes’ in relation to that of ‘social representations’. At the start of his research, Moscovici rejected studying attitudes towards psychoanalysis, that is, he did not intend to explore whether his participants liked or disliked psychoanalysis (Chapter ). Instead, he planned to study social representations in terms of contents and dynamics. Nevertheless, although in his early works he clearly stated his position concerning attitudes and social representations, it became less apparent to readers of Psychoanalysis where ‘attitudes’ alongside ‘information’ and ‘representational field’ constituted the three dimensions of social representations (Moscovici, a, pp. –, /, pp. –). Attitudes, during their long and significant history in social sciences (e.g., Allport, /; de Rosa, ; Sammut, ), have been conceived in various ways. Unfortunately, Moscovici did not clarify their role and meaning in social representations. Therefore, the question of the difference between these two concepts kept returning again and again. Even in the late s, I raised this issue in my dialogue with Moscovici (Moscovici and Marková, , ) because, like others, I did not understand the difference between these concepts despite the amount of literature devoted to this issue. For example, the individualistic construct of attitudes (e.g., Farr, ; Graumann, ) was often contrasted with social attitudes in the research of Thomas and Znaniecki (–), and social representations were compared with the latter concept (e.g., Jaspars and Fraser, ; Fraser, ).
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However, Moscovici did not see the issue in terms of ‘individual’ versus ‘social’. Instead, for him, the study of attitudes was no more than a study of ‘pre-behaviour’. In other words, he thought that if researchers study attitudes, they assume that this will result in the possibility of predicting and changing behaviour: to study attitudes means that a researcher presupposes their correspondence with behaviour. Moscovici explained that social psychologists ‘studying behaviour are not really interested in people’s knowledge and in their symbolic world’ (Moscovici and Marková, , p. ). Yet, at the same time, he claimed: ‘Frankly, I do not know why the concept of attitude is opposed to that of social representation, since it is one of its dimensions’ (Moscovici and Marková, , p. ). He was concerned with the study of values, and these were at least partly explored as attitudinal ‘likes’ and ‘dislikes’ or as evaluations and judgements of objects. To that extent, he conceived attitudes as part of natural thinking and, therefore, of social representations. His lack of explanation, however, meant that readers often interpreted attitudes in accordance with classic textbook definitions. It was not surprising that some researchers altogether dismissed the difference between attitudes and social representations. In his chapter ‘Social representation of welfare and economic inequality’, Furnham () refers to studies of social representations carried out over thirty years but, in fact, all of these were studies of attitudes using the Gallup poll. He states: ‘In their extensive and scholarly review of press and public attitudes to (or more correctly social representations of ) welfare, Golding and Middleton () report considerable evidence from numerous countries of what they call the welfare backlash – namely negative attitudes to welfare’ (Furnham, , p. , my italics). Opinion surveys, and indeed ‘mammoth’ surveys of world history cross-nationally involving several dozens of countries and nations (e.g., Hilton and Liu, ; Liu and Sibley, ), have been carried out under the names of world histories of social representations. Of course, one cannot object to calling these surveys ‘social representations’ if one wishes to. However, it is objectionable that these surveys are directly linked with Moscovici’s theory of social representation, concepts of anchoring, and hegemonic social representations. They misleadingly suggest that Moscovici’s social representations are opinions and can be explored by survey methods. ..
Meanings Lost in Translations
Another terminological problem in relation to social representations arises from the translation of terms from one language to another. Meanings of
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terms such as ‘knowledge’, ‘attitude’, or ‘objectification’ change over time as new ideas develop or fashions alter. For example, the translators of Cassirer (/, p. xxii) comment that the German word ‘Erkenntnis’ used by Kant was originally translated into English as ‘knowledge’ but, more recently, as ‘cognition’. Equally, the Russian term ‘soznanie’ in Bakhtin’s work, which means ‘understanding’, ‘knowledge’, or ‘comprehension’, is translated into English as ‘cognition’. ‘Cognition’, which has become in recent years a fashionable ‘scientific’ term, conveys meanings that were hardly intended by Kant or Bakhtin. Comments on the French and English meanings of ‘representations’ have been made by many (e.g., Pickering, b; Marková, ). Jodelet (), writing about forms of social knowledge, refers to the problem of translation of the French terms ‘savoir’ and ‘connaissance’, which do not have proper equivalent words in English. ..
What Are Social Representations?
Although Moscovici’s critics accused him on many occasions of not having defined social representations, he had presented his position clearly in the first edition of Psychoanalysis (see Chapter ). There, he contrasted his concept of social representations involving the interdependence between individuals’ and groups’ contributions to modalities of social knowledge with Durkheim’s collective representations, which excluded psychological features of an individual’s mind. With his aim to develop the theory of social representations as a theory of social knowledge, Moscovici described social representation as a psychological organisation of a modality of social knowledge by means of which humans construct their social reality (Moscovici, a, p. ). Throughout the first edition, Moscovici explained the meaning of this definition in developing the concepts of natural thinking, language and communication, objectification, anchoring, and cognitive polyphasia. This ‘modality of social knowledge’ is distinguished from other kinds of knowledge, for example, from scientific knowledge, specialist knowledge, and otherwise. It is a legitimate kind of knowledge which is important in social interactions and daily thinking. With these considerations, two questions arise: first, why was Moscovici continuously accused of not providing a definition of social representations when, in fact, he defined them in the first edition of Psychoanalysis? Second, why did he not stick to that definition but continued to defend himself in stating that no good science provides definitions at the beginning of its inquiry (e.g., Moscovici, /)? In other words, he agreed
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that he did not define social representations and shielded himself by providing more and more definitions or characteristics of social representations in order to satisfy his critics. Let us consider some of his definitions and responses to his critics (see also Purkhardt, ): • • •
•
• •
•
‘Attitudes’, ‘information’, and ‘representational field’ are the three dimensions of social representations (Moscovici, a, pp. –; /, pp. –). ‘Social representation is defined as the elaborating of a social object by the community for the purpose of behaving and communicating’ (Moscovici, , p. ). Social representations are ‘systems of values, ideas and practices with a two-fold function: first to establish an order which will enable individuals to orient themselves and master their material world and second, to facilitate communication’ (Moscovici, /, p. xiii). ‘By social representations, we mean a set of concepts, statements and explanations originating in daily life in the course of inter-individual communications. They are equivalent, in our society, of the myths and belief systems in traditional societies; they might even be said to be the contemporary version of common sense’ (Moscovici, , p. ). ‘Social representations are “systems” of preconceptions, images, and values, which have their own cultural meaning and persist independently of individual experiences’ (Moscovici, , p. ). ‘When we speak of social representations, we have in mind a network of concepts and images tied together in various ways according to the interconnections between the persons and media that serve to establish communication’ (Moscovici, , p. ). Finally, ‘social representations appear as a “network” of ideas, metaphors and images. More or less loosely tied together and therefore more mobile and fluid than theories’ (Moscovici, /, p. ).
It seems remarkable that none of these characteristics or definitions include the central supposition on which Moscovici’s theory is based: that the theory of social representations is one of social knowledge and communication jointly constructed by individuals and groups. ..
The Narrow and the Broad Conceptions of Social Representations
One may discern two distinct ways in which Moscovici and his followers speak about ‘social representations’ (Marková, , pp. ff.): the
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narrow and the broad. The narrow conception refers to concrete empirical studies of social representations in their diversified approaches (structural, organising principles, socio-cultural/anthropological, sociogenetic, and communication). The broad conception of social representations is an overarching (socio-)historically and culturally based philosophical perspective; it emphasises the interdependence between human capacities and activities taking place in their social environments in constructing social reality. Relations between the narrow and broad conceptions of social representations are often ambiguous because empirical approaches may follow some theoretical presuppositions that do not apply to those of the broad conception. Nevertheless, the two conceptions percolate throughout literature on social representations and their ambiguous relations have become a source of some confusion for Moscovici’s followers and adversaries. ... The Narrow (Concrete) Conception of Social Representations Just like Moscovici, his students and associates kept producing more and more definitions that suited their empirical purposes. Saadi Lahlou expressed his view on this point in aesthetic terms using a metaphor of Cézanne’s apples: There are perhaps as many definitions of social representation by Moscovici, who is the founder of this notion, as there are paintings by Cézanne representing apples. They are different every time; every time they represent apples in a particular context and light, but always, they express ‘the apple’. Other painters, followers of Cézanne, painted apples that are recognisable as apples by their family resemblance, but these were each time different: were they less adequate than Cézanne’s images of apples? That depends on the talent of the painters. Either way, one cannot, with a singular point of view, exhaustively describe an object that has multiple features. And, in fact, many definitions have been proposed (Jodelet, , ; Doise, ; Abric, b; etc.) (Lahlou, , pp. –, my free translation).
Lahlou further suggested that it was not surprising that different authors provided different definitions in specific contexts. He viewed such definitions themselves as representations of the concept, and they were created in order to fit into the pattern of discourse in which the concept was used. One could use another example, such as a painting of a hand which, again, has a modifiable shape depending on its use as a versatile tool. Let us raise one issue with Lahlou’s aesthetic metaphor of Cézanne’s paintings of apples, which are usually presented as ‘still life’. While
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Lahlou’s metaphor of an apple represents ‘still life’, Moscovici did not conceive social representations as still but as phenomena changing in time and movement, for example, in social influence, transformations of one kind of knowledge into another, in political processes, development of child experiences, among many others. Examples of such concrete processes are health and illness (Herzlich, /), madness (Jodelet, /), or human rights (Doise, ). As Moscovici () stated, whenever social knowledge is generated and communicated, it becomes part of collective life and can become a subject matter for the study of social representations. This knowledge can be used to solve social problems or to explain coping with the collective effects of disasters such as an outbreak of an epidemic, for example, HIV/AIDS, or tragedies, such as Chernobyl. But artists, too, struggle to express life in change in their paintings and sculptures. In his television series ‘The Age of the Image’, the art historian James Fox () suggests that, in his painting of apples, Cézanne was not representing a traditional ‘still life’ painting. Fox explains that Cézanne, who was interested in technology bringing about unprecedented developments in speedy machines, movements, and communications, tried to capture transformations in time as movement. Many of his late paintings of apples, although still labelled as ‘still life’, have difficult compositions, making it hard for viewers to recognise what is in the foreground and the background, where an object is placed, and where it starts and finishes. And yet, as Fox points out, this mixing and twisting of perspectives was the painter’s deliberate choice in his attempt to move away from static paintings to those capturing time and movement (Chapter ). ... The Broad Conception of Social Representations Since the seventeenth century, studies of social thinking and awareness of different forms of knowledge, together with interest in language and communication as cultural processes, gradually became antidotes to Cartesian rationalism on the one hand and crude empiricism on the other. Since the nineteenth century, the concept of representation as a cultural and epistemological phenomenon circulated in human and social sciences. Moscovici () reviewed its rich history in myths, beliefs, collective superstitions, and forms of social consciousness as these phenomena infused the work of Simmel, Weber, Durkheim, Lévy-Bruhl, Freud, Piaget, and Luria. In their works, relations between individuals and collectives involved constraints of dominant and emerging representations, conflicts, and co-operation among groups and their changes and were features of disparate forms of social knowledge. Anthropology and sociology endorsed the perspective that mentalities and rationalities in societies
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were shaped by their (socio-)cultural conditions. This implied that distinct types of mentality and rationality corresponded to distinct types of society, its institutions, and practices. Diverse rationalities underlie radical epistemological differences between sciences and daily knowledge. While sciences employ logic that is born under specialist conditions, collective or social representations employ rationality that is suited to daily living. In this context, the ideas of the French anthropologist Lucien Lévy-Bruhl played an important role in Moscovici’s thinking. Lévy-Bruhl focused on contrasting types of rationalities across different world cultures and on the unique relations between cultures and forms of thinking in different societies. In view of these broadly conceived representations in sociology and anthropology, Moscovici thought that it was vital to establish the ‘age of social representations’ in social psychology and to create social representations as an anthropology of modern culture. In analysing the work of scholars who were developing the concept of representations in social sciences, Moscovici insisted that the true originator of representations was Durkheim (Chapter ). Moscovici (a, p. ) commented that Durkheim, in describing collective representations, involved a whole range of intellectual forms such as sciences, religion, myth, modalities of time and space, ideas, emotions, and beliefs existing in a community. Moscovici thought, however, that such an inclusive conception was too broad and, therefore, the chance of grasping representations was too small. Despite that, a Durkheimian scholar, Giovanni Paoletti (/, p. ), had a different view. He commented that Moscovici’s concept of social representations as used in contemporary social psychology was broader than Durkheim’s collective representations! Moscovici’s followers and adversaries were faced with the question of how the narrow and the broad conception of social representations fitted together or even what they had in common. Therefore, it is hardly surprising that Moscovici’s critics kept asking ‘what are social representations?’
. Pseudo-dialogues about Social Representations ..
Exchanges with Rom Harré
Since Moscovici often referred to Durkheim as his predecessor, Rom Harré viewed social representations from the Durkheimian position.
In several papers, Denise Jodelet () made significant contributions to the study of the broad meaning of social representations in the context of social sciences and their epistemology, history, and social thinking.
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Harré was an ardent critic of individualistic and mechanistic approaches in social psychology and welcomed Moscovici’s promising theory that, he thought, was addressing the same issues as he did himself. Since the s, Harré was preoccupied with the question of the interdependent relation between the Self and Others and embraced Moscovici’s idea of bringing ‘social’ into ‘individualistic’ social psychology. He viewed the concept of social representations as having the potential of being developed along Wittgenstein’s lines (Harré, , ). Since Moscovici, just like Durkheim, conceived representations as floating entities circling around, Harré asked: why did Moscovici change the name from ‘collective representations’ to ‘social representations’? What is ‘individual’ and what is ‘social’ in his theory? And Harré commented that, in his view, ‘social’, that is, a plurality of persons, can be conceived in social representations in two ways: as an aggregate of persons or as a structured group (Harré, , ; Harré and Moghaddam, ). In the former case, ‘social’ refers to a set of similar individual representations. In the latter case, ‘social’ means a supra-individual entity, the members of which share common knowledge but this knowledge is not the property of any single individual. Harré understood that Moscovici adopted the former position, according to which social representations were distributed in aggregates rather than in structured groups. The latter case, which, according to Harré, would be preferable, conceived representations as expressed in joint practices or actions of people in a certain community or group. According to Harré, Denise Jodelet (/), in her study of madness, conceived representations as social practices. In her study, villagers construed effective practices by ways of talking and acting and so distanced themselves from their lodgers. Their understanding of psychological phenomena was managed through practices of everyday life. Harré argued that Jodelet’s ‘structured fields’ and ‘structuring nuclei’ are ‘ways of referring to sign systems and their hierarchical organisation, sign systems which we put in use in living out the narratives of everyday life and providing discursive versions of them when the situation seemed to require them’ (Harré, , p. ). Harré thought that the concept of social representations required considerable rethinking. He proposed how social representations could be developed to account for groups as structured and advocated a discursive approach based on Garfinkel’s perspective. Technically, he said, all actions, whether verbal or material, must be understood under the umbrella of
The same question was posed by one of Moscovici’s followers, von Cranach (), who used the term ‘individual social representations’.
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Austin’s () speech act theory and, specifically, of illocutionary and perlocutionary effects. Although Moscovici and Harré shared many concerns about the individual, society, groups, and agency, philosophically, they followed diverse lines that led them to address these concerns differently. Harré’s discursive approach followed the moral order of the speech act theory, which ascribed, contested, or refused rights, obligations, and duties in local discursive practices. He emphasised practices which constrained groups from performing certain acts (Harré, , p. ). Cultures and historical events prevent or prescribe activities and moral beliefs and, accordingly, daily episodes unfold into unique storylines with specific distributions of rights and duties. In other words, the force of language in speech act theory is given by illocutionary (for example, a promise) and perlocutionary (for example, accepting or doubting a promise) acts. Moscovici’s philosophy of moral order was derived from Pascal, Spinoza, and Durkheim, and he viewed values as dynamic and driving forces of human invention and innovation (Moscovici, a). Making evaluations and judgements of events and of humans is indispensable in all interactions in daily living. His interactional epistemology of the Self– Other–Object (Ego–Alter–Object) was his response to what is ‘social’ and ‘individual’ (see Part II). The Ego–Alter jointly generate their social reality, that is, objects of knowledge, beliefs, evaluations, judgements, and images, and so postulate the triangular epistemological relation of Ego–Alter– Object. Moscovici (b) found Harré’s interpretation of social representations as misconceived. However, he did not wish to defend his position but to initiate a dialogue. Moscovici restated that Durkheim was the first to emphasise the role of collective representations embedded in our language, institutions, and customs and, to that extent, they constitute social thought which must be conceived as a complement of individual thought. It is vital that Durkheim’s concept, separating individual and social representations, is abandoned. Relations between individuals are intellectual, moral, imaginary, and motivate people to act and join in with shaping common reality. This means that social psychology is, above all, a historical and anthropological science. Moscovici did not understand why Harré repeatedly asked the question about his change of notion from ‘collective’ to ‘social’. In his response, Moscovici pointed out that traditions must be broken from time to time; the notion of ‘collective’ was outmoded. ‘Social’, which characterises a modern society, refers to ‘an unceasing bubble and permanent dialogue’ among humans who carry out
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both external and internal dialogues, and representations adapt to their flow. Most psychological theories explain human behaviour in terms of single factors, for example, attribution and social learning, or of single goals such as the need for achievement, consistency, equilibrium, and otherwise. In these theories, all other human capacities, activities, motives, beliefs, values, imagination, fears, hopes, and so on seem to be ancillary. Moscovici pointed out that, throughout his life, just like Harré, he himself was trying to answer the questions of who the Other is, who the individual is, and what society is. He rejected ‘taxonomic social psychology’, in which the relations between an ‘individual’ and ‘social’ amounted to aggregates rather than to interactions (Moscovici, a). Moscovici emphasised that he had argued very early in his career against the concept of groups as aggregates. Rom Harré appreciated Serge Moscovici as one of the leading personalities in social psychology and named him as such in his book on key thinkers in psychology (Harré, ), which pleased Moscovici enormously (personal communication). However, even after many years of debates, Harré still held his perspective that social representations are not different from collective representations. He viewed Moscovici as the most important Durkheimian scholar in social psychology. Later in his life, Harré appreciated that social representations did not refer to a single concept but to a cluster of concepts that emphasised shared knowledge or beliefs among a group. But he was still convinced that Moscovici took the position of holding a group as an aggregate of individuals. Harré (, p. ) stated: ‘Ironically, a social representation is a special case of an individual representation in which all the individual representations in a group are similar. As a result of sharing in this sense, a group of people displays a common pattern of belief, and a common reaction to situations and people.’ Harré thought that, in contrast, in Jodelet’s case, people were tied together by common practices. And they acted rather than responded. Nevertheless, Harré added, her position was difficult to understand in detail. All these misunderstandings resulted from Moscovici presenting himself as a follower of Durkheim without explaining what was Durkheimian in his work. He got entangled in a perspective that he could not justify. .. A Pseudo-dialogue with Gustav Jahoda Gustav Jahoda’s critique was largely based on Moscovici’s () article on social representations and on the second edition of Psychoanalysis. He acknowledged Moscovici’s appreciation of Durkheim and his claim that
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he was Durkheim’s follower. However, Jahoda observed that Moscovici also dissociated himself from Durkheim. Above all, Moscovici claimed that Durkheim had defined collective representations too broadly, embracing all intellectual activities and, therefore, ‘grasp all, lose all’ (Moscovici, a, p. ). While ‘myth’ dominated the whole of the ‘primitive man’s’ intellectual universe, the modern man is diversified. A social representation is more restricted than a collective representation and is only one of the ways by means of which humans apprehend the concrete world (Moscovici, /, p. ). This, however, Jahoda did not understand. He stated that he did not ask for a definition of social representations but that he would like to know what social representations are not. While Moscovici was critical of Durkheim for his open-ended use of collective representations, Jahoda thought that for Moscovici, too, everything was a social representation (see also Paoletti, /, p. ), except for the ‘reified universe of science’. If everything is a representation, the concept becomes redundant. Secondly, Jahoda understood that Moscovici had departed from Durkheim who had conceived collective representations as irreducible explanatory devices. However, since Moscovici treated social representations as ‘independent variables, explanatory stimuli’ (Moscovici, a, p. ), Jahoda questioned this contradiction. Yet, one of the strangest ideas that Moscovici adopted from Durkheim, Jahoda thought, was conceiving representations as social entities with a life of their own, communicating between themselves, attracting and repelling one another, and acting upon humans with an irresistible force (Moscovici, a). At the same time, individuals and groups are not passive receptors but ‘think for themselves, produce and ceaselessly communicate their own specific representations’ (Moscovici, a, p. ). Jahoda thought that these contradictory claims could not be supported. Jahoda suggested that social representations should be reconstructed. He thought that one possibility of reconstruction could be based on Doise and Palmonari’s () proposal that social representations could be treated as an umbrella term or a generic label for all social psychological domains. Just like the concept of ‘development’ in child psychology is generic, so ‘representation’ could become such a concept in social psychology and embrace all theoretical perspectives arising from that. Other possibilities of reconstructing social representations would be more difficult though still possible: it would be viable to exclude some topics from these broad representational domains or to connect with the growing field of social cognition.
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Moscovici’s () response to Jahoda () was highly elaborate with plenty of imaginative examples from literature, philosophy, and anthropology; he did not address Jahoda’s questions directly but provided extensive justifications and defended his position on social representations. While he did not aim to convince others about his views, he wished to move the dialogue forward. But the dialogue did not move forward because there was no common ground to their arguments. Jahoda, whose expertise was in cross-cultural, cultural, and developmental psychology, asked for the difference between Durkheim’s ‘collective representations’ and Moscovici’s ‘social representations’, illustrating his queries through examples from Moscovici’s publications. Moscovici () named the first section of his response to Jahoda ‘A misunderstanding about social psychology’, and most of his lengthy article justified the importance of the concept of representation in history, philosophy, and social sciences: ‘the phenomenon of social representations was introduced into social psychology as an innovation some years ago. It later became the unifying component of cognitive psychology and is now spreading among other sciences as well. That alone is sufficient justification for its existence’ (Moscovici, , p. ). However, he emphasised that, in social psychology, the concept of representations did not have a niche because social psychology was individualistic and mechanistic and did not recognise it was a historical and anthropological science. Moscovici pointed out that there were three ways in which ‘representations can become social, depending on the relations between group members’ (Moscovici, , p. ). Here, he introduced the notions of hegemonic, emancipated, and polemic representations – an intuitive and interesting classification to which, unfortunately, he did not return in subsequent writings and was rarely elaborated by his followers (but see Gillespie, ). We may conclude that Rom Harré and Gustav Jahoda asked pertinent questions about the difference between Durkheim’s concept of collective representations and Moscovici’s concept of social representations. In responding to their queries, in his magnificently elaborated rhetorical literary style, Moscovici provided them with knowledge about representations in social sciences with which they were familiar. Both Harré and Jahoda were prestigious scholars who embraced a philosophical, cultural, and historical perspective of social knowledge and conceived social psychology as a historical and anthropological science. Moscovici did not explain what he adopted from Durkheim in developing social representations and, therefore, their dialogues did not fulfil any effective role.
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Throughout many of his writings, Moscovici very much appreciated Durkheim as a great philosopher, as the creator of the theory of collective representations, and as the founder of sociology (e.g., Moscovici, b). However, despite Moscovici’s insistence in the second edition of Psychoanalysis that he was Durkheimian, the role of Durkheim in his creation of the theory of social representations and communication remained unconvincing. ..
Pseudo-dialogues with Discursive/Constructionist Psychology
Pseudo-dialogues with discursive psychologists of the Loughborough School in the UK and/or with constructionists, for example, Gergen, did not involve questions being put to Moscovici, but his critics made direct claims and judgements about the theory of social representations. They did not reject Moscovici’s theory because they saw many common features with their own positions. For example, Potter and Wetherell (), in their book Discourse and Social Psychology, even named one chapter ‘From representations to repertoires’ to make their point that discourse analysis and the theory of social representations share some common interests. However, they claimed that the theory of social representations needed improvement because it lacked coherence, was sloppy, and had theoretical and methodological weaknesses. It made over-generalised claims about consensus and failed to satisfactorily conceptualise the role of discourse (e.g., Litton and Potter, ; Parker, ; Potter and Wetherell, ). Epistemologically, British discourse analysis was committed to radical discursive constructionism and opposed individualistic cognitive epistemology. Potter and Hepburn () explained that constructionism adopted a rhetorical approach to discourse and that it was methodologically relativist. A constructionist approach conceived a situated discourse as the central topic of research; it studied descriptions, claims, reports, allegations, and assertions as part of human practices. The study of discourse together with constructionist epistemology provided apparent parallels with social representations, yet the two approaches existed independently (see the internet communication between Deriabin and Gergen, ). Deriabin and Gergen () commented that, intellectually, social representations vacillated between structuralism and cognitivism in order to be accepted by the cognitive paradigm in social psychology. This contrasted with most social constructionist work, which was committed to a microsocial approach and antithetical to cognitivism. Nevertheless,
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Gergen thought that there was every good reason for having a dialogue with social representations. Moscovici’s (, b) responses to discursive psychology and constructionism were rare and brief and did not show any deep interest in the matters that these approaches raised. Critiques of Moscovici’s opponents were directed against concrete claims, taken out of context and without any attempt to understand his position. Therefore, there was little to say in response. Moscovici either rejected these critical judgements or expanded his views on cognitive psychology, information processing, and different forms of structuralisms (Moscovici, b). Although he acknowledged that there might be some common features between discursive psychology and social representations, a discourse is not a social representation; images, concepts, and actions cannot be entirely expressed in language. Overall, pseudo-dialogues with discursive psychology and constructionism resembled monologues carried out by each party independently of the other participant. .. How to Understand Critiques of Social Representations Moscovici’s followers and colleagues tried to make sense of the negative critiques of his theory. They conceived some critiques as justified, others as misinterpretations, and still others as offering constructive proposals on how to develop and refine the theory. Critiques, as well as interpretations, of the theory concerned a variety of issues. Reviews summarised these wellknown critiques along assorted criteria (e.g., Räty and Snellman, ; de Rosa, ; Voelklein and Howarth, ). For instance, Voelklein and Howarth () drew attention to four central issues: ambiguities in defining social representations, alleging social representations as deterministic, criticisms of the theory as being cognitively reductionist, and criticisms as being uncritical. De Rosa () pointed out that to avoid confusions, it is necessary to distinguish between a social representation as a concept, as a phenomenon, and as a metatheory. These thoughtful reviews genuinely searched for answers to critiques and attempted to describe problems with the theory as well as with the critiques, and to classify and categorise these issues on both sides. All of them are based on Moscovici’s second edition of Psychoanalysis, and on subsequent articles (mostly on those published in English), and, therefore, on its Durkheimian angle mixed with terminological problems. These critiques are easily accessible and will not be repeated here.
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. Linking Social Representations with Other Social Theories The tremendous popularity of Moscovici’s approach, challenging mechanistic and individualistic perspectives in social psychology, inspired many questions about the relations between the theory of social representations and other social psychological theories. Questions came both from insiders who wished to make bridges between social representations and other theories as well as from those who worked in other domains and questioned possible links between their own theories and those of social representations. This was natural because connecting various social approaches would strengthen the camp of those who rejected individualistic forms of studying social behaviour. These efforts have been thriving since the s and continue to the present, although only a few of them have succeeded in making theoretical and practical advancements. Numerous efforts to construct bridges between social representations and other approaches have been published in handbooks, journal articles, and book chapters. Some of them attempted to make links between underlying common meanings, while others were satisfied with searches for similarities in using the same notions, for example, ‘attitude’, ‘cognition’, ‘interaction’, ‘language’, and so on. For still others, the terms ‘social representation’ or ‘representation’ became labels that identified researchers as studying certain domains of ideas. In other words, using the labels seemed to be enough for bridging efforts. .. Linking Social Representations and Identity Moscovici’s ‘social representations’ and Tajfel’s ‘social identity’ (e.g., Tajfel, , ) were major efforts in post-War European social psychology to create foremost contributions to social theories. Both Moscovici and Tajfel were deeply influenced by the horrors of the Second World War and its aftermath, which they experienced in tragic circumstances, and their subsequent work in social psychology bore significant marks of that experience. Moscovici and Tajfel motivated the new generation of social psychologists in Europe and elsewhere both through their research and their building of the European Association of Social Psychology. Both the theories of social representations and of identity required attention to the historical, political, and cultural circumstances of individuals and groups and, therefore, the question of how these two theories were related was most natural. Numerous publications devoted to their relationships
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explored conflict and co-operation between and within groups, migration, threats to identities, nationalism, acculturation, among many others (e.g., Lloyd and Duveen, , ; Breakwell, ; Deaux and Philogène, ; Howarth, ; Moloney and Walker, ; Andreouli, ; Phoenix, Howarth, and Philogène, ). Despite these efforts, it was not easy to describe how to relate these theories. Although the two theories were based on similar presuppositions in their emphasis on the interdependence between individuals and groups, they had different theoretical and methodological priorities. Among these, while Moscovici’s focus was to develop a theory of social knowledge using anthropological methods, Tajfel’s emphasis was on the study of social identity of in-groups and out-groups using laboratory experiments. Moreover, neither Moscovici nor Tajfel were motivated to create links between their theories, each defending their own territory. Despite that, social psychologists were aware that social representations and social identity touched on crucial human phenomena, such as group relations, intergroup conflicts, acculturation, among many others. For some researchers, these two theories appeared to define each other (Wagner and Hayes, , p. ); for others, ‘identity is representation’. Such issues even led to the question of whether identity or representation comes first (Brewer, ). Considering that there are several different approaches both to social representations and to social identity, one might expect that more subtle questions would be asked, such as what kinds of representations and what kinds of social identities could be linked? However, such questions were rarely raised and, instead, general ways were sought to link these approaches. This was exemplified by a proposition made by Elejabarrieta () suggesting that the two theories could be linked together with the help of Harré’s (; Harré and Van Langenhove, ) social positioning theory. He explained that it was in and through interpersonal discursive practices in communication, negotiation, and multiplicity of participants’ positions that both social representations and identities developed. It was Gerard Duveen who made a major epistemological contribution in advancing the representations–identity relation. Duveen conceived social identity and social representations as mutually interdependent in their origin and, therefore, inseparable. Just as we are born into social representations, we are born into social identities and adopt them
For some colourful details, see Brown (); for relations between these two scholars, see also Moscovici and Marková ().
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Pseudo-dialogues and Building Bridges
implicitly as part of social reality. Throughout sociogenesis, in and through social interaction, both identity and social representations are elaborated and negotiated (Duveen and Lloyd, , p. ). Duveen (b, p. ) argued that ‘representations always imply a process of identity formation’. Just as there is a multiplicity of social selves (James, ), we can distinguish between different types of social identity with respect to different kinds of social representations. In taking this perspective, the question frequently asked by social psychologists ‘what is the relation between identity and social representations?’ is meaningless; first, either it assumes that these two processes are independent of each other rather than interrelated in their origin or it assumes that there is only one kind of representation and one kind of identity rather than multiple kinds of each. It appears that Duveen’s concept of identity was influenced by the position of the Romanian humanist, Marxist philosopher, and sociologist Lucien Goldmann (–). In applying his method of ‘genetic structuralism’, Goldmann attempted to synthesise György Lukács’s Marxist philosophy and the genetic epistemology of Piaget. For Duveen, Goldmann’s () approach offered a historically and culturally based social perspective on child development and the acquisition of identity. Identities are constructed in cultures, which for Duveen meant that they are constructed in social representations. Duveen acknowledged Goldmann’s ideas that stabilities and changes in identities are linked to social influences as cultural phenomena. Identities are not fixed forms of consciousness but are the possible forms of consciousness because they develop in changing worldviews (see also Chapter ). Duveen thought that identities constrain representations in the sense that they determine what forms of consciousness individuals or groups might find acceptable and what they might resist. He also appreciated that Goldmann linked identity to communication and to the question of what was possible to communicate and what was incommunicable. In problematic communication, cultural identities become particularly visible (Duveen, ). Although Duveen studied relations between social representations and identity in the field of gender in child development, he made it clear that his epistemic approach had implications for other kinds of identity formation, for example, nationality, religion, group belongingness, or political commitment. However, these processes are specific in each case; identity formation in marginalised groups has different characteristics from identity formation in middle-class families; the researcher must consider the pervasiveness and variation of such specific processes.
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Duveen () further showed that a child experiences constraints in multitude interactions with others and that these shape and fix gender identities. As already indicated in Chapter , these dialectic and genetic processes define structures that develop in microgenesis and affect ontogenesis and sociogenesis (Duveen, , pp. –), leading to the development of symbolic values of social representations. ..
Linking Social Representations with Harré’s Positioning Theory
In the Introduction to the Special Issue on ‘The relation between social representation theory and positioning theory’, the editors (Van Langenhove and Wise, ) succinctly summarise what should be the aim of social psychology. Social psychology should not be concerned only with behaviour and capacities to do things but also with what humans are approved to do, that is, it should be concerned with normative and ethical issues. Throughout his career, Harré regarded humans as agents who take up a moral stance and attribute rights and duties to themselves and others and mutually construct their local meanings. For many years, he kept developing this perspective in the social positioning theory (e.g., Davies and Harré, ; Harré and Van Langenhove, ), which he conceived as a method of analysing the attributions and resistances to ascriptions of rights and duties within the cultural and discursive field. The concept of ‘position’ covers a wide range of assignments of rights and duties of the Self and Others. The moral order of these activities and of knowledge is embedded in the speech act theory in which the Selves and Others ascribe, contest, or refuse rights, obligations, and duties in local discursive practices. Harré linked positioning theory to cultural psychology because it is through ‘positions’ that people access their cultural resources (Harré, , p. ). Different societies develop their specific norms for the ascription of rights and duties, which reflect their historical, political, economic, and environmental concerns (Harré and Moghaddam, ). Positioning theory is concerned not only with assignments of rights and duties to act but also with ‘epistemic positioning’, that is, the ways in which knowledge, beliefs, and ignorance are distributed and contested. These are issues which, as Harré observes, have hardly ever been explored despite their far-reaching societal implications. They raise questions as to who has rights and access to knowledge, why certain kinds of knowledge are concealed, how ignorance is imposed through false beliefs, and so on.
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Pseudo-dialogues and Building Bridges
While the traditional concepts of social psychology like Heider’s ‘balance’, Festinger’s ‘dissonance’, and Tajfel’s ‘social comparison’ treat humans as basically passive and automatised beings ignoring their activity, the concept of ‘positioning’ focuses on rights and duties which call for active human engagement. Here, Harré comes close to the theory of social representations, which, too, conceptualises humans as agents and rejects concepts such as ‘social comparison’ or ‘balance’ (Moscovici, ). Harré and Moghaddam () viewed the relations between social positioning and social representations in terms of focusing on valorisation. The authors remind us that groups must be viewed as a collective in which there are real relations between members, for example, engaging in a conversation, and which are not viewed as aggregates. The authors recall Jodelet’s (/) study on representations of mental illness as an example of means by which villagers in her study attributed the rights and duties to their lodgers with past mental illness. Herzlich’s (/) study of social representations of health and illness, too, showed how the position of ‘being ill’ affected the attributions of rights and duties. In other words, ‘positioning is deeply embedded in the whole programme of social representations research . . . and that requires attention to the way rights and duties are distributed among the people who share the representation’ (Harré and Moghaddam, , p. ). Questions of morality are expressed in speech, communication, and daily actions as features of social representations. Social positioning researchers see the possible links with the theory of social representations in and through interests in values, social knowledge, identity, and societal and cultural issues (Harré and Van Langenhove, ; Andreouli, ; Van Langenhove, ). For example, Van Langenhove and Wise (, p. .) refer to four major social competences that could be appropriated both in social positioning theory and in social representations. These involve knowledge of presenting one’s position in social situations, recognising relevant situations, recognising the appropriateness of a performance, and knowledge about the rules or conventions that apply in each situation. Van Langenhove () claims that both the positioning theory and social representations are involved in the study of these issues and can jointly develop conceptual tools to improve understanding of how humans employ knowledge and moral judgement in daily situations. Concerns with values, ethics, and moral judgement form basic links between the theory of social representations and positioning theory. These concerns are part of the epistemology of both theories.
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Linking Social Representations with Discursive Psychology and Social Construction
Recent attempts to explore links between social representations and Loughborough discursive psychology have gone far beyond the pseudodialogues in the s and s (see earlier). Psychological discourse analysis, just like the theory of social representations, has become highly differentiated. It became very popular among critics of perceptualcognitive and mechanistic approaches in social psychology because it was viewed as being concerned with societal issues, for example, racism, migration, and others, and as a medium for action. Batel and Castro () retraced the history of earlier discussions and disputes concerning compatibility and incompatibility between the two approaches and reopened the debate about their reconciliation. Both approaches had remained marginal in social psychology (Augoustinos, ) and reopening the debate could lead to a stronger social psychological exploration of the construction and transformation of meanings through language, discourse, and communication (Batel and Castro, , p. ). While these authors present thoughtful and coherent arguments for reconsidering bridges between the two approaches, it appears that such a possibility is less likely than ever before (Augoustinos, ; Potter, ). While in the past both approaches were concerned with politically loaded social phenomena, the divergence between them has grown larger over time. Researchers in social representations still emphasise the study of transformation of meaning-making, social change, and culture and are concerned with the study of macrophenomena such as ecology and health, and technological and political problems. Loughborough discursive psychologists, on the other hand, turned towards a systematic and rigorous conceptual analysis of details of minor stretches of interaction. They now study the turn-by-turn dynamics of interactions and their sequential organisation. Potter (, p. ) does not see it beneficial ‘to blend disparate traditions, concepts, and theories as that risks confusion about methodological and theoretical issues’. What originally seemed to be minor problems when he suggested the path from repertoires to social representations became major problems with the diversification of both approaches based on disparate traditions and concepts. The bridge between the two approaches can no longer be built because contemporary discursive psychology follows a different direction.
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Pseudo-dialogues and Building Bridges
.. Even More Bridges? Efforts to build bridges between theories could, indeed, be very profitable if researchers seek some common theoretical or epistemological criteria underlying those approaches. However, it has become common to build bridges from superficial similarities between different theories. Among the most frequent efforts have been searches for links between social representations and social cognition in pursuing the belief that social representations ‘subscribed to a cognitive epistemology – a perceptualcognitive metatheory that shares similarities with traditional cognitive approaches’ (Augoustinos, , p. ). Both approaches are ‘social’ and differences between them appear negligible: ‘in the representations program the “social” is often the figure and the “cognitive” the ground, whereas in social cognition these “figure–ground” are inversed’ (Kruglanski, , p. ). Kruglanski explains that social cognition studies social phenomena in the minds of single individuals. Social cognition experiments attempt to discover the general principles of how humans remember, think about, and perceive social stimuli. In contrast, ‘social’ in the theory of social representations explores how socially relevant contents, for example, biotechnology, psychoanalysis, or public spaces, are thought about by groups of people. The recognition that the term ‘social’ refers to many phenomena and meanings, ranging from ‘aggregates’ to ‘structured groups’ and to ‘national symbols’, seems to be overlooked. Attempts to gloss over this fact lead to the construction of deceptive bridges in the air. In a series of studies, László (e.g., ) regards narratives as closely linked to social representations because a social representation ‘resembles narrative psychology in several respects’ (László, , p. ). Both social representations and narratives are engaged in the study of meaning construction, are instruments linking individuals’ past, present, and future into a coherent structure in a story, are concerned with identity, and otherwise. In the search for construction of meanings, both approaches use empirical methodologies, for example, interviewing or ethnographic methods, and there appears to be great potential for automated content analysis. But while the study of narratives and social representations might provide resources for mutual links, these would need to be developed beyond the general understanding that it refers to a coherent account of events involving some temporal or causal consistency. One would need to show how, or whether, from animated examples of storytelling, one can develop theoretical concepts linking narratives and social representations.
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Several scholars proposed bridging the dialogical self theory of Hermans and Kempen () and the theory of social representations. In efforts to link these two theories, it was suggested that social representations would provide the content while the dialogical self theory would provide the dynamics which are allegedly missing from social representations (Boulanger, a, b; Boulanger and Valsiner, , p. ). Finally, as more and more students, researchers, and practitioners have become familiar with the notion of ‘social representation’, the term has become widely used across social sciences. Consequently, publications using the phrases ‘social representations’ and ‘collective representations’ in titles of books, papers, reports, and others have colossally increased but they may have little, or nothing, to do with the theory of social representations, even if they refer to Moscovici. It is likely that some authors might think that the term is a fashionable substitute for ‘attitudes’, ‘opinions’, ‘ideas’, ‘point of view’, ‘common knowledge’, and otherwise. Chapters on social representations of the car, of the male driver, of an accident, of the euro, of taxis, of world history, of post-modern history fill pages in handbooks of social representations without any attempt to clarify how or whether they are related to Moscovici’s theory. For example, in exploring men’s or women’s habits as car drivers, or in studying attitudes to the euro, such publications do not develop any of the key concepts of the theory, nor are they concerned with the transformation of ‘unfamiliar’ into ‘familiar’ phenomena. Joining a new movement through the superficial attachment of a name is a well-known phenomenon and detrimental to the theory. More than thirty years ago, Gustav Jahoda () had already drawn attention to this issue when he pointed out that the term ‘social representations’ in many studies was redundant or could easily be substituted by many other words.
. Conclusion Moscovici’s great creativity and capacity to combine ideas from natural and social sciences, literature, and philosophy had a high impact on adopting the theory of social representations and communication internationally and on the pursuit of Moscovici’s aim to develop a truly ‘social’ social psychology. At the same time, many features of the theory were criticised for their incoherence and for being underdeveloped. Dialogues between Moscovici, his supporters, and adversaries had limited success because the participants followed their own lines of thinking without
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Pseudo-dialogues and Building Bridges
attempting to understand the other party. The question of the relations between Durkheim and Moscovici remained unexplained and confusing. In their efforts to apprehend the theory, researchers and students searched for links with other social psychological theories. Some of these efforts pursued deeply based ontological and epistemological foundations, for example, identity approaches or Harré’s positioning theory. The search for such bridges was beneficial when it compelled researchers and professionals to reflect on their own perspectives in relation to those of others, to reflect on the use of theoretical concepts and on methods applied to solving problems. Other bridging attempts were based on less fundamental connections, such as similarities in terminology used in various approaches, or on superficial resemblances. Still other attempts simply used the phrase ‘social representation’ as a substitute for already established notions, for example, ‘attitude’ or ‘opinion’, and so contributed to the routinisation and trivialisation of the theory. As a result, the phrase ‘social representations’ has sometimes become a trademark, a passport to the club of believers whatever their comprehension and interpretation of the theory may be. Moscovici rarely ever returned to many of the insights that he proposed on the spur of the moment. Both Moscovici’s followers and adversaries either implicitly indicated or explicitly proclaimed that the theory of social representations, despite being revolutionary and promising, is unfinished or underdeveloped (e.g., Jahoda, ; Harré, ; Valsiner, ; Howarth, ). In focusing on specific unfinished and underdeveloped issues, in Part II of this book, we shall suggest selected possibilities for their rethinking and further development in the dialogical perspective.
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The Dialogical Perspective of the Theory of Social Representations and Communication
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Social Representations and Common Sense
We are coming to a contentious issue that has been very little discussed in the literature on social representations and communication and a question that has never received a satisfactory answer: what is the relation between common sense and social representations? For Moscovici, social representations and common sense were very closely linked but the nature of this link necessitates attention. This question becomes even more debatable when we consider it, in this chapter, in the context of concepts that Moscovici related to common sense such as the unconscious and themata. In referring to the multitude forms of knowledge in social representations, researchers use different phrases such as ‘common knowledge’, ‘lay knowledge’, ‘common-sense knowledge’, ‘common sense’, ‘folk knowledge’, ‘social intelligence’, ‘popular knowledge’, ‘collective representations’, or even ‘common-sense representation’. These notions bring to attention the perspective that all forms of social knowledge and communication are produced, maintained, shared, and transformed collectively. In the s, this was a novel perspective in social psychology and it closely aligned Moscovici’s theory of social representations with theories of knowledge in social anthropology and sociology. Nevertheless, while it is fully acceptable in the vernacular to use a broad variety of notions to refer to social forms of knowing, the free exchange of such a myriad would hardly contribute to building a theory of social knowledge in psychology. Among this multitude of notions, ‘common sense’ and ‘social representations’ are most frequently mentioned together and even used indistinguishably. Moscovici fundamentally differed from Durkheim with respect to his views on common sense. As clarified in Chapter , Moscovici’s interest was to understand the transformation of one kind of thinking and knowing into another, particularly of scientific thinking and knowing into common
Detailed discussion of common sense is included in my book The Dialogical Mind: Common Sense and Ethics (), on which I shall rely in this chapter.
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Dialogical Perspective
sense and daily thinking. In contrast, Durkheim (/, p. ) rejected epistemological approaches built on common everyday thinking because such empiricism, based on experience, concealed reality. As such, common sense was totally different from collective representations because the latter referred to reality and were products of rational thought. Durkheim considered some collective representations as more scientific than others and, therefore, these represented reality better than others; the less perfect representations turned more scientific during the sociohistorical process. Nevertheless, even less adequate collective representations had nothing to do with common sense, which for Durkheim was a vulgar kind of thinking and knowing based on arbitrary and irrational images (Pickering, a). Despite their vital differences, it seems that Moscovici never referred to his and Durkheim’s contrasting perspectives on common sense.
. What Is Common Sense? Let us remind ourselves of the enormous literature on common sense in history, human and social sciences, and philosophy (e.g., van Holthoon and Olson, ). Common sense is a concept of enduring importance and interest. References to common sense are continuously made in everyday talk, politics, or economics. Common sense is not usually defined but assumed to be self-evident. Its self-evidence is linked to the fact that similar experiences of humans produce similar responses in a variety of uniform circumstances (e.g., Vico, /; van Holthoon and Olson, ; Lindenberg, ; Husserl, /). These uniformities could be physical, such as repeated experiences of the weather, tide, weight, qualities of materials like hardness or softness, or resistance. They could refer to biological regularities like birth, growth, and death, pain, the need for food, sleep, and rest. Finally, social uniformities denote dialogical interactions and relationships, norms of politeness, responses to fear of unknown Others, expressions of love and hatred, of gratitude, among many others. Different cultures reflect on such uniformities in their specific ways and have numerous words to express regularities of life experiences and their relations. Physical, biological, and social interactional uniformities and regularities, which are sensed as repetitions and relative constancies, are passed on over generations and become experienced as common sense. Common sense, in this perspective, has become an implicit and normative guide for daily acting. According to Giambattista Vico’s (/) analyses, in and through constructing common-sense knowledge, humans reveal their agency and
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Social Representations and Common Sense
capacity to create their own history. They humanise and dehumanise nature through their activities and establish communities, social institutions, traditions, and political organisations. Symbolic gestures, transmitting common sense, are understood by members of a community because they grasp, as Vico often repeated, their ‘needs and utilities’. Common sense, as a historical and cultural achievement of humankind, becomes routinised as the core of socially shared knowledge (see later). The idea of human agency in constructing history was adopted by humanistic social scientists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It was also embraced by Karl Marx (/, p. ), who, in Capital, acknowledged Vico’s contribution. For Vico, just as for many social science scholars, common sense is an intuitive capacity of humans that functions under the level of awareness. It is ‘judgement without reflection, shared by an entire class, an entire people, an entire nation, or the whole human race’ (Vico, /, § ). Transmitted and stabilised over generations, ‘uniform ideas’ based on ‘underlying agreements’ are regularly repeated. They become fixed in the human mind and in daily activities and provide resources for commonsense knowledge. In other words, uniformities in natural and social circumstances are linked to uniformities in the experiences of humans, leading to their common-sense responses. Serge Moscovici () discovered ideas of common sense in Lenoble’s () Essai sur la notion d’expérience that inspired him as early as (Chapter ). He adopted Lenoble’s perspective according to which there are different kinds of common sense in various cultures and historical periods. Later, Moscovici (/) also found this idea in the work of the French philosopher Bergson (/, p. ), who claimed that common sense is a social sense. This literature on common sense suggested to Moscovici that common sense is expressed in and through language, natural thinking, and daily activities. In daily talk, references to common sense imply that humans should be sensible or have good judgement and so prudent in making decisions. Daily claims that something is or is not common sense, that someone has or does not have common sense, or that, in a specific case, it is reasonable to follow common-sense instincts rather than governmental guidelines show that common sense performs a variety of functions. It allows
This refers to the UK governmental double standards with respect to the case of the senior advisor to the UK government Dominic Cummings. While he participated in the creating of guidelines for everybody’s conduct during the lockdown in the UK due to Covid- in , it was accepted by the prime minister that in Cummings’s case, he followed his ‘common-sense paternal instincts’ rather than the guidelines that the government expected everybody else to follow.
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Dialogical Perspective
judgements about mental processes, about actions in daily life, politics, health-related advice, and otherwise. It is a guiding force for actions by means of which, historically, people created themselves, their symbols, purposes, and needs; common sense is a fundamental capacity of humans that directs people how to live. When it is interiorised, and becomes routinised in daily life, it sinks into taken-for-granted or automatic responses. Yet, the question ‘what is common sense?’ requires a broader consideration. Common sense in one culture may not be common in another because the use of words and communication, as well as of other symbolic activities, is context-dependent. For example, proverbs are totally contextdependent and meaningful only in local contexts. If we consider proverbs as single and separate propositions without contexts of which they are part, one proverb may appear to contradict another. For instance, some proverbs emphasise the value of change (e.g., ‘Change your dwelling place often, for the sweetness of life consists in variety’; ‘Change of pasture makes fat calves’) while in other situations, a change refers to a disaster (e.g., ‘A tree often transplanted bears not much fruit’; ‘Three removals are as bad as a fire’). In these examples, common sense refers to concrete situations and expresses interdependent relations between proverbs and their contexts in folk wisdom. Thus, what is common sense in one context does not imply that it is in another. Let us return to the differentiation made earlier (Chapter ) between the general (broad) perspective of the theory of social representations, according to which social representations are the anthropology of modern culture, and the specific (narrow) perspective, according to which social representations are concrete social phenomena. I suggest that commonsense knowledge is treated differently in the broad and in the narrow perspectives of social representations. ..
Common Sense in the General (Broad) Perspective of Social Representations and Communication
The general perspective of social representations and common sense aligned Moscovici’s theory with social anthropology and sociology. He kept expressing this alliance by stating that social representations are the anthropology of modern culture. Let us recall in this context that Moscovici’s original interest was to contrast ‘the contemporary versions of common sense’ with scientific knowledge. He explained that the diffusion of scientific knowledge into daily knowledge is not irrational but an imaginative route of knowing (e.g., Moscovici, a, /, ). He thought that daily thinking is a
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rational process with its own logic enriched by people’s experience. In that context, social representations ‘are the equivalent, in our society, of the myths and belief systems in traditional societies; they might even be said to be the contemporary versions of common sense’ (Moscovici, , p. ). Myth and belief systems in primitive societies formed ‘a total science’ which reflected practices and understandings of nature and guided social relations (Moscovici, /, p. ). In contrast, social representations in a modern society are only one way in which humans understand nature and social relations. Views about differences between scientific and common-sense knowledge have had a long history in social sciences and in philosophy. In France, the question as to whether science and common sense form a continuum or whether they are strictly separated was widely discussed and disputed. Many French scholars adopted the idea that science and common sense are strictly separated: science is logical; common sense is illogical; people must get rid of irrational common sense and be trained to think scientifically. True knowledge of the social world cannot be attained through common sense because of the ‘epistemological rupture’, which totally separates these two kinds of thinking and knowing. This was also the position of Durkheim. Moscovici had a different idea. Common sense exists in rich and heterogeneous forms; it not only provides new ideas about a variety of phenomena but serves as evidence that people think rationally. For example, common sense is rational within concrete situations of daily life; scientific knowledge is rational within its domains of scientific practices. Like many of his predecessors, for example, Whitehead, Meyerson, or Husserl, Moscovici claimed that scientific and common-sense thinking form a continuum. In this view, he distinguished between two kinds of common-sense knowledge. One form, which Moscovici called ‘first-hand knowledge’ or an old common sense, is spontaneous and naive. It is based on traditions and consensus, as well as on diverse forms of natural thought, and is a resource for the development of scientific knowledge. It comprises images, daily language, and metaphors: ‘things are named, individuals are classified, spontaneous conjectures are made in the course of action or ordinary communication’, and they are accepted by everybody (Moscovici and Hewstone, , p. ). Moscovici insisted that there is a close relation between common sense and language; words have power to master social reality by naming things. Here again, Moscovici () recalls Cassirer’s (, p. ) ideas about the power of words and, specifically, of names. To possess a name of a thing means to gain power over the object so
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Dialogical Perspective
named. For Moscovici, just as for Cassirer, language has a major significance for the construction of the world of representation and for grasping essences of reality (Cassirer, /, p. ; Moscovici, , p. ). Ideas do not exist before language; they arise in and through language use. In contrast, ‘second-hand common-sense knowledge’, or ‘new common sense’, is a secondarily built consensus resulting from the transformation of scientific knowledge into daily thinking (or into common sense). Modern methods of communication, by means of which science is diffused by instruction, daily conversations, and the media, promote public understanding of science and contribute to the formation of a ‘new common sense’. Altogether, old and new common senses produce enriched forms of knowledge which include both non-reflected and reflected experiences of reality. Common-sense knowledge has become ‘the kernel of our consensual universe’ and we recognise in it historical and cultural meanings of our experiences and activities (Moscovici, /, p. ). In his broad conception of social representations and communication, Moscovici conceived common sense as natural thinking in daily usage. He did not distinguish between common sense and other forms of socially shared knowledge. For example, ‘ordinary knowledge, common sense if you prefer, is really something other than an “expertise” in everyday thinking. It implies a combination, sometimes deficient and sometimes overabundant, of very different types of thought and of information’ (Moscovici, a, p. ). The main difference between common sense and expert knowledge refers to the heterogeneity of the former and the homogeneity – or a singularity of information – of the latter. And to that extent, ‘Common sense, popular knowledge – what the English call folk science – offers us direct access to social representations . . . the vast field of common sense, of popular sciences, allows us to grasp social representations in vivo, to grasp how they are generated, communicated and put to work in everyday life’ (Moscovici, /, pp. –). If we adopt the perspective of such close relations between common sense and social representations, we need to understand in what ways Moscovici’s ‘direct access’ takes place and how it generates social representations. Many researchers have understood that common sense and social representations are very closely associated or even that they refer to the same phenomenon. As a result, the terms ‘common sense’ and ‘social representations’ are often used interchangeably; sometimes we read that scientific knowledge transforms into social representations and, on other occasions, that scientific knowledge transforms into common sense, or that social representations are par excellence common sense.
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In conclusion, the general (broad) perspective of social representations and communication brings into focus two main issues. First, Moscovici argued that common sense is a rational process of natural thinking and of lay knowing. Second, he was concerned with the transformation of one kind of knowledge into another. However, he did not clarify whether he considered social representations and common sense to be the same phenomenon; neither did he distinguish between different kinds of socially shared knowledge and of common sense. .. Common Sense in the Specific (Narrow) Perspective of Social Representations and Communication I insist that when we pose the question about the relation between common sense and the narrow perspective of social representations, we encounter different kinds of relations between these phenomena to those in the broad perspective. I suggest that in the narrow perspective, for example, in social representations of mental health, democracy, totalitarianism, and so on, we are not primarily concerned with the question of rationality of common sense. Instead, here we are concerned with the change from unconscious and non-conscious thoughts into conscious beliefs and knowledge, and vice versa, in the formation and transformation of social representations of specific phenomena. I identify two kinds of such relations between common sense and social representations in Moscovici’s work and, using his terms, I name them the unconscious and themata, respectively. Origins of both relations can be traced to Moscovici’s dialectical thinking in the first edition of Psychoanalysis.
. The Unconscious Moscovici’s (a) Psychoanalysis brings to attention the concepts of conscious and unconscious that were part of his figurative schema in which
Let us note the use of two terms: the ‘unconscious’ and the ‘non-conscious’. Moscovici used the unconscious in his figurative schema in developing social representations of psychoanalysis where the ‘unconscious’ referred directly to Freud’s usage of the term. However, Moscovici (a) also refers to the unconscious as a cultural phenomenon with a long tradition in human and social sciences. We find this notion in Romanticism in the eighteenth century, for example, in Coleridge. After this, the ‘unconscious’ has been used in human and social sciences, for example, by Herbart, Janet, James, Le Bon, and many others, where it has included both individual and mass unconscious. The ‘non-conscious’ is used less often and usually refers to automatic and/or taken-for-granted processes performed without awareness. As far as I am aware, the non-conscious and unconscious have not been strictly distinguished in either literature or daily speech. Moscovici’s article ‘The Return of the Unconscious’ (Moscovici, a) contains both terms without distinction. In this
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he outlined how psychoanalysis became a social representation. In this schema, he brought together unconscious, repressed, and conscious processes and tied them into a psychoanalytic ‘complex’ (Chapter ). In other words, the figurative schema Unconscious–Repression–Conscious Mind explained the psychic organisation in the social representations of psychoanalysis. Moscovici also clarified that the unconscious and the conscious mind can be viewed as a dialectic inversion of categories in dyadic pairs such as conscious–unconscious, hidden–apparent, inner–outer, and so on. In psychoanalysis, Repression was part of the figurative schema Unconscious–Repression–Conscious Mind, indicating that an attempt to supress the libido referred to a conflict between the unconscious and conscious mind. In contrast, in his treatment of crowd psychology, Moscovici (/) commented that repression may take different forms and, therefore, different meanings. Repression could be due to external causes such as the force of police, fear of humiliation, among others. There could also be internal causes leading to repression of ideas such as feelings of collective guilt, corruption and shame, and other forms of collective taboos which the collective might try to suppress. Nevertheless, these forms, too, become part of the structure of social representations of the phenomena in question. Rather than repression, part of the structure of social representations could be admiration (Moscovici, /). Moscovici suggests that repression and admiration are two diametrically opposed solutions to the problem of leadership in mass psychology. While in repression obedience arises from force, admiration leads to obedience due to trust. Admiration can refer not only to respect for a leader but also to societal phenomena such as democracy or cultural events. Therefore, figurative schema takes different forms and the unconscious and non-conscious on the one hand and the conscious on the other obtain different meanings. For example, non-conscious, unconscious, and conscious beliefs play a vital role in lay knowledge of haemophilia, the genetically transmitted blood disorder (e.g., Marková et al., ; Marková, ). We found that non-conscious and taken-for-granted beliefs were linked to blood mysticism prevalent in religions and mythologies and to implicit fears of blood impurity. These were transformed into the conscious fear of touching a person with haemophilia. All such features contributed to the formation and maintenance of lay representations of book, I use ‘non-conscious’ when discussing taken-for-granted processes, such as themata (see later), or automatic thoughts.
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haemophilia. Another example is Jodelet’s (/) study of villagers hosting ex-patients with mental illnesses in which the villagers’ behaviour towards their guests was guided by unspecified and non-conscious beliefs that took the form of folk fantasies, superstition, and convictions of a magic power (Chapter ). Such contents and processes of psychic organisation play vital roles in the study of unfamiliar, strange, or fearful phenomena or in imagined situations. Throughout his career, Moscovici was preoccupied with the role of the unconscious and its reversal, although this feature of his work has not attracted much attention from his followers. The unconscious is a dangerous theme, Moscovici (a) reminds us, because its discovery in psychology at the beginning of the twentieth century ‘broke the ancient codes of decorum that protected a respectable psychology from the intrusion of madness and crowd psyche upon its domain. It required putting an end to the separation between the normal and the abnormal, the individual and the collective’ (Moscovici, a, p. ). Yet, despite attempts to exclude references to the unconscious from ‘decent’ social studies, Moscovici observed that some social science researchers, for example, Weber, Mauss, and Lévi-Strauss, drew attention to the unconscious. They showed that societal phenomena which are rooted in culture and language, such as beliefs, relations with others, and institutions, have been largely created unconsciously rather than with a preconceived plan. Social psychology, too, should involve itself in the study of the unconscious because, in Moscovici’s opinion, it is ‘the most significant discovery in the history of psychology’ which provides the ‘greatest contribution to world culture’ (Moscovici, a, p. ). Here, the common-sense beliefs, or irresistible beliefs, come in.
. Common Sense as Irresistible Beliefs Moscovici argued that two kinds of beliefs must be distinguished resistible and irresistible. Resistible beliefs are those that humans may hold about daily events or objects, those which express perspectives that individuals acquire during learning, or those which refer to expectations. For example, one can express a propositional attitude such as ‘I believe the Labour Party will win the next election’ or ‘I believe she is not trustworthy’. Such beliefs are based on experience, on statistical evidence, on expectations, and so on. With more information, these can be discarded or replaced by other beliefs. In other words, one can resist such beliefs. We may say that they belong to forms of socially shared
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knowledge (see later) based on obtained information and can be abandoned following more information and more learning. Resistible beliefs are not common-sense beliefs. Moscovici observed that experiments in social psychology studied primarily resistible beliefs, which can be easily abandoned. For example, researchers gave their subjects instructions and expected that they would behave accordingly and, after debriefing, return to their previous states of mind as if nothing had happened during the experimental procedure. Such assumptions led to hot disputes in relation to Milgram’s and Zimbardo’s experiments in which subjects agreed to carry out unethical procedures on others. Clearly, in these experiments, the researcher naively assumed that after the experiment, debriefing would return subjects to their previous states of mind, ignoring that the experimental instruction to subjects to behave in an unethical manner could have a lasting effect on their irresistible, deep-seated ethical beliefs (e.g., Blass, ). In contrast to resistible beliefs, which can be changed with new information, with arguments and experience, irresistible beliefs are entrenched in the mind. Ideologies, religious beliefs, morals, common-sense beliefs, and otherwise defy arguments, logic, and experience because they are ingrained in individual and collective thought. Assumptions of psychological researchers that post-experimental debriefing will erase subjects’ guilt for inflicting pain in experiments and revert their minds to their preexperimental state ignore subjects’ irresistible beliefs. Such beliefs are projected into subjects’ thinking and experimenters can do nothing about them. If we believe that Friday is an unlucky day or we keep avoiding number thirteen on our houses or seats on aeroplanes because this number brings bad luck, such beliefs cannot be changed by providing more information or by persuasion: ‘Irresistible beliefs are like perceptual illusions: we are not at liberty to dismiss them, to have them or correct them if need be. Like many ideas, memories, or rituals, they take possession of us and are inadvertently associated in a manner, as it were, independent of our reasoning’ (Moscovici, a, p. ). Irresistible beliefs exist both in individual and in collective thought. They may arise from an individual’s psychopathology, such as obsessions, emotions, mental history, or compulsive behaviour, as thoughts that continuously return and possess an individual’s mind. From the perspective of social representations, it is the collective thought, such as political and religious doctrines, ethnic beliefs, stereotypes, symbolic ceremonials, obsessional conversions, prejudices, and shared meanings, which is the source of irresistible beliefs. As Moscovici (a, p. ) stated:
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‘common-sense beliefs are of an irresistible kind’. Their irresistibility is attached to shared values embedded in culture, political convictions, speech, and mental life in a community. Irresistible beliefs that arise from historical encounters of humans in physical, biological, and social experiences become interiorised as taken-for-granted, un-reflected common sense. As they become the core of historically and culturally embedded general knowledge, in ordinary discourse, we do not need to speak about them because they are implicitly considered as true. If we ask about things that ‘we are supposed to know’, our quest for explicitness could be viewed as an offence (Rommetveit, ) or as an indication that something is not quite right with the one who poses the question. Moscovici () was convinced that collective thought in mass psychology was just as important as psychoanalysis in considering the unconscious as a fundamental cultural phenomenon that shaped stories in a coherent manner and directed behaviour in a specific way. The unconscious has become connected with masses, crowds, and the irrationality of the collective and thus it threatens the highest rational values of an individual’s consciousness. The division between masses and an individual, and, to that extent, between the unconscious and the conscious mind, has led to questions about the influence of the collective unconscious on the conscious thought of an individual. Populist political parties and their ideological leaders incite mass conversion and replace ordinary thinking with forms of beliefs based on the will of charismatic leaders. Leaders such as Mao, Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Trump, or Putin have been successful not only by bringing masses under their control but by inspiring in them their own will: ‘Whenever individuals come together . . . they mix, fuse, radically change, acquire a shared nature which stifles their own, are subject to a collective will which silences their own . . . Irrationality has been removed from science and technology only to become concentrated in the area of political power’ (Moscovici, /, pp. and ). In contrast to irresistible beliefs that generate common sense from historical encounters (physical, biological, social), irresistible beliefs engendered from the influence of populist political parties and their charismatic leaders turn humans into automatons or sleepwalkers who may commit reprehensible acts (Moscovici, /, p. ). These irresistible beliefs arise from the voluntary submission of masses to a ‘collective will’ which, in fact, is the leader’s will. Here, we see the other side of common sense. It is the will of such effective leaders that controls the will of masses and becomes their common sense. The exaltation of collective will is strengthened in spectacular ceremonies in which masses show their faith and commitment to a
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leader, and the collective ‘“we” speaks through his individual “I”’ (Moscovici, /, p. ). For example, in , the world witnessed an extraordinary event in which the defeated president of the USA, Donald Trump, repeated a baseless claim that elections were stolen from him. The masses that followed him did not need any evidence about the case; they accepted Trump’s words on face value without thinking, evaluation, or judgement. Their belief could not be shaken by any arguments or evidence. Trump did not need to appeal to ethics and responsibility; whatever he said was accepted by the masses as the truth. In conclusion, resistible and irresistible beliefs have different and farreaching implications in the theory and practices of social representations. Resistible beliefs can be changed by arguments, experience, and observation and are not common-sense beliefs. In contrast, irresistible beliefs are entrenched in individuals’ minds and are common-sense beliefs. This does not mean that common-sense beliefs do not change over time. In discussing Lenoble’s ideas in Chapter , we drew attention to different kinds of common sense and their changes in histories, cultures, and languages. Some irresistible beliefs, when questioned and negotiated, may lead to passionate and violent arguments and remain fixed in the mind when they are attacked. Others may turn into resistible beliefs without any firm commitment and so have a different potential for the maintenance and change of humans’ activities to irresistible beliefs. Whatever courses thematisations of beliefs take, they will have effects on forms of socially shared knowledge and on social representations. In daily life, in political, health, and environmental discourses, irresistible and resistible beliefs have different influences in persuasion, negotiation, and arguments; they affect individuals’ and groups’ commitments, responsibilities, ethical choices, and human passions.
. Themata .. Binary (Bipolar) Oppositions versus Themata Scholarly literature refers to different kinds of thinking in oppositions throughout the history of humankind. It explores thinking in antinomies in many cultures of the world, contrasting their diverse forms in ancient Greece and China as well as in modern philosophy and human and social sciences. The broadly based anthropological, historical, and sociological evidence of thinking in polarities and antinomies shows that some dyadic antinomies have been conceived as strictly separated from one
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another while others are mutually interconnected. Let us consider these two kinds. Ancient Greek thinking in polarities strictly separated pairs of opposites: if something is true, the opposite must be false; darkness excludes light and so on. Such dyadic oppositions are known as binary or bipolar. They were part of the Greek quest for discovering invariant states and certainty in nature, science, and the human mind. Throughout the twentieth century, binary or bipolar oppositions became important concepts in structuralisms in anthropology, linguistics, sociology, literature, and cultural studies. Their elaboration in linguistics was attributed to Ferdinand de Saussure. Although structuralism has lost its original appeal and been largely replaced by other approaches, the idea of binary opposition remains powerful. Binary oppositions, which refer to mutual exclusion of opposite features, are assumed by their proponents to be fixed in the mind and language. The contrasting idea of interconnected opposites that mutually transform one another already existed in the ancient Chinese philosophy of Yin and Yang. Their dynamics were conceived as controlling natural phenomena, alternatively waxing and waning in their oppositional courses. The work of opposite forces in ancient Chinese philosophy was conceived as vital for the wisdom of science, and it was not possible to consider one force without the other. The idea of interdependent forces of oppositions reappeared in Hegelian dialectics in the early nineteenth century, in the principle of complementarity of the physicist Niels Bohr, as well as in contemporary dialogical thinking (for a discussion of diverse conceptions based on oppositions in thinking, see Marková, ). Moscovici’s adoption of the concept of interdependent oppositions was already evident in Psychoanalysis in . In developing the concept of objectification, he referred to a transposition of categories such as hidden– apparent, involuntary–voluntary, and inner–outer. Moscovici’s interest in dialectic antinomies in nature and in human society was part of his general philosophical outlook adopted from Hegel and Marx, which he viewed as the basis of movement and progress. When he articulated social psychology as a discipline in movement, Moscovici conceived it as doubly orientated with respect to several kinds of dyadic microsocial versus macrosocial oppositions in tension (Faucheux and Moscovici, ; Chapter ). Later, Moscovici (Moscovici, b; Moscovici and Vignaux, / ) adopted Gerald Holton’s (, /, ) concept of
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themata, that is, the idea of antithetical or dialectical oppositions, and developed it in social representations and communication. Although Holton’s (/) analysis of themata refers, above all, to scientific imagination, themata as dialogical oppositions in thinking (Marková, , ) are implicitly shared by members of a community in daily thinking, and in artistic, literary, aesthetic, or other processes (e.g., good– bad, moral–immoral, justice–injustice). Since they are implicitly shared as common sense, themata do not usually appear in speech. The idea of thema–themata as a common-sense core enabling the generation of social representations is very productive. As both Holton and Moscovici admit, this idea has historical precedents. Holton (/ , pp. ix–x) maintains that techniques analogous to thematic analysis have been previously used in cultural anthropology, linguistics, and content analysis. Moscovici and Vignaux (/, p. ) likened themata to ‘archetypes’, which the authors placed into inverted commas. This notion recalls Jung’s () The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. However, unquestioned oppositions may become a source of dispute, interest, negotiation, tension, or conflict among individuals, groups, and
Let us emphasise that the concepts of thema (singular) and themata (plural) refer to dyadic oppositions, for example, freedom–oppression, hard–soft, old–new, big–small, and so on. These are dialectical, that is, relational oppositions. They are different from the concept of ‘theme’, which refers to a subject of text (a narrative, a topic), of speech, of music, and otherwise. The phrase ‘thematic analysis’ may refer to both, that is, to the analysis of thema–themata and to the analysis of themes. Unfortunately, Holton’s (, /, /) texts do not clarify the distinction between ‘theme’ and ‘thema–themata’ as he uses these notions indiscriminately. I suggest that to understand the core of Holton’s idea, the reader should consult his characteristic of themata as ‘antithetical dyads or triplets of themata – for example, atomicity/continuum, simplicity/complexity, analysis/synthesis, constancy/evolution/catastrophic change. Such posits help to explain the formation of traditions or schools, and the course of controversies’ (Holton, /, p. ix). In his thematic analysis, Holton (/) makes a distinction between a thematic concept, methodological thema, and thematic hypothesis. Equally, in their article that introduced themata into social representations, Moscovici and Vignaux (/) mixed together the notions of themes and themata and in reading their article, we need to separate the grain from the chaff. I suggest that we adopt the authors’ perspective that social representations are derived from preconceptions of long duration, and that these usually take the form of ‘systems of oppositions (i.e., terms which are contrasted in order to be related) relative to the body, to being, to action in society and the world more generally; each language bears witness to this’ (Moscovici and Vignaux, /, p. ). As an example, the authors refer to the thema man–woman because this opposition of a very long duration allows the derivation of further sub-themata. Considering the lack of clarity both in Holton’s and in Moscovici’s texts about notions of theme, thema, themata, thematic component, methodological themata, and thematic analysis, it is advisable that researchers define meanings they attribute to these notions. This is important particularly if a researcher collects data from interviews and focus groups and extracts themes, topics, or narratives from these and subsequently derives themata from them, that is, dyadic oppositions (e.g., moral– immoral, fixed–changing).
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societies. When such situations occur, the relevant unquestioned oppositions rise to awareness; they start to generate concrete contents, raise questions, and produce disputes (Marková, ). Depending on the circumstances, they topicalise contents and arguments in different directions: they become thematised in speech and communication and are no longer common sense. Themata enable creativity, lead to discoveries, and assume openness in different kinds of explanation. In its concrete forms, thematisation takes place both on collective and individual planes. The collective component of thematisation is embedded in culture, social events, and history while the individual component is unique to each person and due to his/her experience and general imaginative and thinking capacity. Moscovici not only adopted the concept of themata but placed it ‘at the heart of social representations’; he likened themata to ‘concept images’, ‘primary conceptions’, or ‘primitive notions’ (Moscovici, b; Moscovici and Vignaux, /, pp. –; Marková, ). Since themata are interdependent with their socio-cultural and historical environments, this implies that their meanings are continuously thematised and re-thematised. Themata such as justice and injustice, freedom and oppression, or equality and inequality are interpreted so contrarily by individuals and groups that disagreements in daily life, politics, and economics often threaten to undermine societal order and lead to violence. Such divergent perspectives on ‘the same event’ move societies forwards and backwards: they are at the heart of revolutions and of misunderstandings. What is common sense in one group or community is a perversion in another group. Representations of justice–injustice belong to the most important thematic components in daily thinking and may lead to requests for public inquiries that can last several decades in struggles for democracy (e.g., Moodie, Marková, and Plichtová, ). ..
Female–Male as a Binary Opposition and as a Thema
At first sight, it may appear that binary oppositions and themata refer to the same kinds of phenomena and, therefore, the difference between them is often misunderstood and confused. For example, we can read in a recently published scholarly book that themata are simplified binary oppositions and there are many other examples of such vulgarisations. To clarify the difference between these two concepts, let us consider the binary opposition female–male on the one hand and female–male as a thematic concept on the other.
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A humoristic though serious exposition of a binary opposition female– male is presented by Berger () in his analysis of the American television comedy Cheers. He named his study ‘Professor Ferdinand de Saussure goes to a bar’, drawing on de Saussure’s semiotic theory to show numerous contrasts between the characters played in Cheers. Specifically, Berger introduced the binary opposition female–male and their attributes (e.g., female – worker, useless, vulnerable, blonde; male – boss, handy, worldly, dark hair). Two characters, Diane and Sam, are involved in a ‘battle of the sexes’; Diane compares Sam with her fiancé Sumner, telling Sam that Sumner is ‘everything you’re not’. Berger refers to de Saussure’s claim that concepts are differential and defined negatively by their relations with other concepts in the system: ‘Their most precise characteristic is in being what the others are not’ (de Saussure, /, p. ). Berger’s humoristic analysis captures binary oppositions as strictly defined and mutually exclusive. Structuralisms have adopted so defined binary oppositions as vital concepts organising language, thought, and all cultural phenomena in their synchronic (rather than diachronic or developmental) domains. Female–male as a thema or a thematic concept (rather than a binary opposition) has had a very long career in the history of humankind and undergone tremendous variations in meanings across cultures and history (Moscovici and Vignaux, /). It has been thematised in numerous ways, bringing out different thematic components of females and males, for example, ‘female ethics of care’ versus ‘male concern with rights and rules’ (Gilligan, ). Female-male as a thematic concept focuses on transformations of interdependent dialogical oppositions, for example, motherhood/fatherhood, rights/duties, biological equalities/inequlities, among others. Their thematisations still dominate public discourse in all parts of the world. While in some countries public discourse is directed towards assuring an equal treatment of men and women in all spheres of life (economy, politics, education), in others, it is orientated towards the struggle for basic rights for women (in sexuality, against honour killing of women, women’s involvement in daily activities, and so on). And, of course, contemporary concern with ‘transgender identities’ brings into focus even more interdependencies and variations in relation to the thema female–male. In conclusion, themata are phenomena that change over time. They are potentialities at a non-conscious level and implicitly shared by communities, providing substantial resources for common-sense knowledge. They may perpetuate implicitly through generations without being brought into explicit awareness. If they become thematised in speech and communication,
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they are no longer implicit common sense. In and through argumentation and negotiation, they create tension and conflict and are likely to generate new social representations. Bringing themata into consciousness stimulates social change. ..
Themata in Social Representations
Moscovici did not often return in his publications to the concept of themata but in one of his last papers on social representations and ethnic minorities, he argued that the concept of ‘Roma’ or ‘Gypsy’ has been historically construed around thematic components such as nomadic versus sedentary, pure versus impure, beggars versus musicians, and so on. ‘Roma’ have been thematised either negatively, and referred to as beggars and delinquents living outside the law, or positively as musicians and travelling entertainers (Moscovici, , p. ). Having been established and maintained for centuries, such and other thematic components circulate in public discourse as common sense and justify the social interaction between citizens as majorities with ‘Roma’ as minorities. Relative stabilities and changes of these dichotomies are determined by temporarily held societal preferences and beliefs about minorities. Thus, we find that, on the one hand, the taboo precluding the contact of members of majorities with Gypsies perpetuates their discrimination in various parts of European countries. On the other hand, we witness changes because the unquestioned themata concerning ‘Roma’ are brought to public awareness as discrimination of minorities and demands for human rights. To accord with these demands for human rights, the legal protection of ‘Roma’ families and groups has been launched in all European countries (Moscovici, , p. ). ..
Thematisation of the Epistemological Thema Self–Other
Let us propose that the central epistemological thema in Moscovici’s conception of social representations as anthropology of modern culture is the dyad Self–Other. The eminent anthropologist Ruth Benedict (, pp. –) observed that in human prehistory, ‘we’ and ‘they’ already defined interpersonal relations. In human and social sciences, the thema ‘we–they’ dominated anthropological and cultural studies from the seventeenth-century concerns of Vico to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the philosophies of Hegel, the Marburg School, Cassirer, Bakhtin, and many others. The Self and Other are intimately bound
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together by ethical relations: humans evaluate one another, they trust and distrust each other, they take responsibility for one another, and they attempt to avoid responsibility. Selfhood arises in and through interdependence with others (Ricoeur, /) through themata that involve ethical considerations, self-promotion, and the denigration of the Other. In social psychology, the research team led by Hélène Joffe has explored social representations of risks from emerging infectious diseases, climate change, and earthquakes (e.g., Joffe and Haarhoff, ; Joffe, ; Joffe, Washer, and Solberg, ; Joffe et al., ; Smith and Joffe, ; Smith, O’Connor, and Joffe, ). For these authors, the Self–Other(s) is an epistemological and unifying thema that arises from common sense and shapes public engagement with a diverse range of threats. From the Self– Other, these authors derived other themata, such as identity protection versus identity spoiling, clean versus dirty, moral versus immoral, among others. The relation between the Self and Others never amounts to neutral knowledge (Smith, O’Connor, and Joffe, , p. .) but is imbued with emotions: ‘The strong emotional impulse to protect the self and denigrate the other drives the way themata manifest in thought and behaviour, with very tangible consequences for intergroup relations and behavioural responses to risk’. Emotions carry ethical evaluations which the Self–Other interdependence cannot escape. Ethical considerations, self-promotion, and rejection of the Other can be of long duration, often perpetuating implicitly without being brought to explicit awareness. As the authors note, it is only when themata are brought to conscious attention that the change in behavioural patterns and in social representations can take place (Joffe, ). Another research group led by Gail Moloney also focuses on the centrality of the Self and Other(s). In their studies of organ and blood donation (e.g., Moloney, Hall, and Walker, ; Moloney, Williams, and Blair, ; Moloney, Walker, and Charlton, ; Moloney, Gamble, Hayman, and Smith, ), these authors suggest that the Self–Other has a ‘generative potential’. For example, it underpins the public understanding of blood donation and affects an individual’s engagement or disengagement with donating blood. This basic thema activates the occurrence of other themata and generates representations that are either salient for the Self, like anxiety, or fear of needles, or for the Other, like helping Others and saving their lives. The authors emphasise that thematisation is driven by the ways these issues are understood in specific contexts, times, and places. They show the co-existence of contradictory understandings of the issues in question. These issues manifest themselves
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as multiple voices created by fear of pain and danger to the Self and, at the same time, by willingness to help Others and improve their health prospects and lives. Our own research on HIV/AIDS in Scottish prisons, as well as in the studies of haemophilia, also showed that the thema Self–Other was linked to the perception of risk, blaming the other, and the search for social recognition (Marková et al., ). For some patients, the knowledge of the disease and its spread was less important than their fear that they could be rejected by Others if their positive HIV status became known (Marková et al., ). Although patients and their families were aware that the virus did not spread through daily contact, their knowledge was mixed with unconscious beliefs about the spread of the virus. For example, families tried to keep a ‘clean house’ and associated the disease with uncleanliness even though they knew that the virus did not spread by daily contact. Their representations resulted from mixtures of traditions, established common-sense knowing, fear, and Self–Other interactions.
. Common Sense and Other Forms of Socially Shared Knowledge Let us remind ourselves that common sense is rooted in human agency and in the capacity to creatively respond to needs and utilities in physical, biological, and social environments. As it becomes stabilised and routinised in communities over generations, common sense serves as a guide to normative daily actions. In many daily situations, however, humans find themselves in unfamiliar circumstances in which they experience crises, extraordinary events, moral dilemmas, and changeable situations. Routines break down and customary guides of common sense are not enough to solve unfamiliar problems. Such conditions require learning, imagination, inventiveness, taking risks, instant actions, and otherwise to cope with the unpredictable circumstances. In addition to common sense, in coping with phenomena in daily life, humans employ other forms of socially shared knowledge. These may involve, for example: • forms of knowing that are attained in training, personal experience, social interaction, and communication with others • expert forms of knowing, for example, philosophical, scientific, professional, or religious, knowledge of localities, daily skills, sport activities, and so on
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•
routines and automatic knowledge such as walking, practical skills, for example, speaking, recipe-like knowledge that prescribes, proscribes, or makes injunctions • collective routines, for example, celebrations of religious, pagan, or political occasions that are guided by regularly repeated traditions (e.g., Christmas, Easter, Halloween, Independence Day, etc.) – it is only when something interrupts their relatively homogeneous performances, such as a war or a pandemic, that people become aware of the impossibility of carrying out such traditions • forms of socially shared knowing that are construed directly through gaining information, arguing, reflecting upon unquestioned meanings, evaluating pros and cons of specific positions (e.g., ‘no entry’) • implicit common-sense forms of knowing mixed with ‘expertise’ knowing (e.g., professional, scientific) in coping with practical problems in the domains of health, politics, economy, localities, and everyday communicative and practical activities. Lists of forms of socially shared knowledge can be endlessly extended and serve as a reminder that socially shared knowledge serves different purposes and has different aims; it is characterised by tensions, contradictions, vagueness, and ambiguities, as well as by regularities and recurrent themes. Such multiple forms of socially shared knowledge are discussed and disputed and may interfere with each other. They are based on traditions and future expectations and require coping with emotional and relational problems. Let us remember that cognitive polyphasia, one of the main concepts of the theory of social representations, emphasises the coexistence of different forms of socially shared knowledge, for example, routinised versus reflexive, unquestioning versus questioning, resistible versus irresistible (Chapters , , and ). Recent research on cognitive polyphasia, perhaps more than any other evidence, draws attention to different kinds of socially shared knowledge and to their ambiguities and paradoxes (Gillespie, , ). As an example, we may remind ourselves of problems arising from cultural, often unquestioned habits of meat-eating on the one hand and loving pets and caring for the welfare of animals, together with addressing ecological problems, on the other. These controversies inspire researchers in different countries, for example, in Cyprus (Panagiotou and Kadianaki, ) and in Finland (Häkli and Hakoköngäs, ), to explore these conflicts and paradoxes arising in daily discourse as well as in political and scientific encounters.
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Social Representations and Common Sense ..
Testing Socially Shared Knowledge
As humans share knowledge and know that others have capacities to obtain the same kinds of knowledge, they can employ a variety of cunning skills to prevent others from gaining certain kinds of evidence. They may attempt to mislead others and express fake intentions which they want the Others to adopt. For instance, individuals may be unsure whether certain important personal issues, for example, knowledge about their illness or weakness, past crimes, and otherwise, is known to others. If one is not sure about the views of others, or may not wish to reveal true thoughts because it might be embarrassing and threaten his/her social status, one can attempt to test the boundaries of socially shared knowledge. Testing the boundaries of shared knowledge is a frequent strategy in dialogues of any kind. The use of various linguistic and communicative strategies, for example, questions, suggestions, certain contents, and so on, enables the testing of knowledge of others to avoid losing face (Collins and Marková, ). Common sense surely forms part of these strategies but is mixed with other forms of socially shared knowledge. All available resources are employed to arrive at meanings of such complex personal and public phenomena. ..
The Distribution of Forms in Socially Shared Knowledge
Neither personal meanings nor forms of socially shared knowledge, including common sense, are distributed homogeneously among individual members of a community (Luckmann, ; Moscovici, ). Each instance of interpersonal and inter-group communication takes place in a new context even if the difference between the previous and new context is very small. Therefore, each such instance modifies meanings of symbols and of knowledge and so generates a new representation of the referent (Karcevskij, /, p. ) and imposes asymmetries between speakers. Other differences arise from specialised forms of knowledge and communication. In societies where the specialisation of knowledge is not very high in the sense that everybody can do many different things, the proportion of common sense in relation to specialised knowledge is high. However, with the increasing social division of labour, forms of specialised knowledge increase and, correspondingly, common-sense knowledge decreases (Luckmann, ). Due to technological advancements, different forms of socially shared knowledge and common sense are becoming intermingled through new forms of communication via the Internet, social
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Dialogical Perspective
media, and artificial intelligence. Specialised and common-sense knowledge merge with one another through high-tech devices in daily life and the release of specialised discourse into common sense and socially shared knowledge. Terms such as ‘genes’, ‘Covid’, ‘Zoom’, ‘vaccine’, and many others have been incorporated into daily language, and into public images, and make it hard to even distinguish between image and reality. These changes in human–technology interactions present new challenges for social theories including social representations and communication. They are embedded in networks of interpersonal and institutional relations of trust and distrust, commitments and responsibilities, as well as in attempts to escape these relations. Finally, not everybody has the same access to specialised branches of knowledge. Questions about the manipulation of knowledge and beliefs for political purposes arise both in totalitarian regimes and in modern democracies: who has rights and access to knowledge? Why are certain kinds of knowledge concealed from others? How is ignorance imposed through false beliefs (Harré, )? These issues have rarely been explored despite their far-reaching societal implications. Multiple forms of socially shared knowledge, for example, of daily phenomena, professional practices, communicative routines, and various types of experience, are both unconscious and conscious. It is impossible to empirically separate common-sense knowledge from other forms of socially shared knowledge; they co-exist, interfere with one another, and affect one another. If common sense is part of general socially shared knowledge, and if it is difficult to distinguish it from other forms of social knowing, is there any reason to treat them as distinct forms of knowledge? In order to consider this question, we must reflect on far-reaching implications of the distinction between resistible and irresistible beliefs. While the former are not common-sense beliefs and can be changed by arguments, experience, and observation, the latter are deep-rooted in individuals’ and groups’ minds as common-sense beliefs. Therefore, different forms of socially shared knowledge have different impacts on discourse in daily life, political debates, negotiations, as well as on commitments, responsibilities, and ethical choices of individuals and groups.
There have been various attempts in the sociology of knowledge, mainly inspired by the phenomenology of Schu¨tz, to distinguish common sense from other forms of social knowledge. Giddens () attempted to distinguish between mutual knowledge and common-sense knowledge, referring to the former as incorrigible and to the latter as corrigible; Luckmann () found it preferable to distinguish between general knowledge, with common sense being the hard core of it, and special knowledge, for example, science, religion, or philosophy.
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Social Representations and Common Sense
Focusing on different forms of socially shared knowledge, Jodelet () refers to intervention practices in which specialist knowledge and lay meanings based on experiential knowledge co-exist (e.g., in education or health) and lead to frequent conflicts. The ever-increasing struggle for human rights, distrust of professionals due to scandals, for example, HIV/ AIDS, the explosion of mass communication and of social media, contribute greatly to the growing gap between professional knowledge and experiential lay meanings. All this mitigates against public acceptance of specialists’ ‘truths’. These issues, involving specialist knowledge, politicians’ desires, and experiential meanings of the lay public, have farreaching societal implications (Harré, ) and call for attention by the social sciences. Implications of this growing gap are crucial in areas that require behavioural changes on the part of the public to improve wellbeing, such as patients’ compliance with medical treatment and vaccinations and changes in behaviour, such as stopping smoking, drug abuse, and so on. Distrust and beliefs about concealed knowledge may lead to ideas about conspiracy and conspiracy theories and encourage the search for explanations by intentions of specific agents. Jodelet () argues that three forms of activities interconnect social representations and professional interventions: social representations can modify thinking of individuals or groups about a practical issue; they can transform practices and these, in turn, can lead to the transformation of representations; they intentionally direct production of changes in activities of individuals and groups. These activities are constantly changing due to the experiences of individuals involved, to the advances in science and in technology. They are also due to debates about the roles of clients who obtain access to information and become actively involved in decision
Conspiracy as a social phenomenon is experienced as mysterious and as a prohibition of knowledge (Moscovici, ). Moscovici qualifies it as one of the omnipresent themata that has been present in human societies since the beginnings of humankind. Conspiracies have always been viewed as pervasive ‘crimes of solidarity, in solidarity, and against solidarity’ (Zukier, , p. ). Some people have access to the truth and others are prevented from having it. But it is not simply knowledge or truth that is important but the involvement of a voluntary action and an intention of an agent to harm. As Moscovici () observed, the history of conspiracies is the history of oppositional perspectives, or even of polemical representations, during which specific situations are dramatised and raise passions (e.g., Kennedy’s assassination, the HIV/AIDS pandemic, the Covid- pandemic, etc.). Since conspiracies function as common-sense beliefs that are irreversible and, therefore, not destructible, it is hard or even impossible to eradicate them. The QAnon conspiracy theory claims that there is a war between ‘good’ and ‘evil’ in which President Trump represents the good. QAnon followers are awaiting the Storm, that is, the mass arrest of people in high-powered positions, and the Great Awakening, an event in which everyone will attain an epiphany, that is, the realisation that QAnon theory was correct. QAnon conspiracy theories often conceive Q as a patriot or saint.
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making with respect to their needs. Such changes incorporate professional and lay meaning-making processes and call for abolishing the distinction between theory and application and, thus, between pure and applied sciences, particularly in health research (Jovchelovitch and Gervais, ; Morin, ; Jodelet, , ) and in education (Garnier and Rouquette, ).
. Conclusion Extensive literature shows the lasting interest in common sense in human and social sciences and its relation to scientific knowledge. In daily life, common sense refers to established uniformities of a physical, biological, and social nature and is usually assumed to be self-evident. Humans sense such uniformities as constancies passed on over generations and common sense is an implicit and normative guide for daily acting. Although Moscovici always insisted that social representations and common sense are very closely related, he did not explain the nature of their relations. Moreover, although he argued that daily knowledge is heterogeneous and takes different forms (e.g., cognitive polyphasia), most surprisingly, this line of reasoning did not relate common sense and social representations. I suggested that relations between common sense and social representations are different in the broad and narrow perspectives of social representations. In the broad perspective, Moscovici distinguished between two forms of common-sense knowledge: historically, first-hand common-sense knowledge generates scientific knowledge. It is based on traditions and consensus comprising daily thinking and language, images, and metaphors. Secondhand common-sense knowledge results from the transformation of scientific knowledge into daily knowledge. In the narrow perspective, Moscovici was not primarily concerned with rationality of common sense but with reversals of unconscious into conscious beliefs and knowledge, and vice versa, in the formation and transformation of social representations of specific phenomena. I identified two sources of such reversals: the unconscious (and non-conscious) and themata. In analysing the psychic organisation of the social representation of psychoanalysis, Moscovici brought together unconscious, repressed, and conscious processes and tied them into a psychoanalytic ‘complex’. Conscious–unconscious are dialectic transpositions just like other dyadic pairs, for example, hidden–apparent, inner–outer. Unconscious irresistible
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Social Representations and Common Sense
beliefs are deep-seated and cannot be easily disposed. Resistible beliefs are those that humans may hold about daily events or objects; they can be discarded or replaced by other beliefs. Resistible and irresistible beliefs, and conscious and unconscious forms of socially shared knowledge, have distinct effects on stability and change of social representations and communication. In other words, when common sense is conceived as opposite to science, different features are prioritised in comparison to situations in which common sense is conceived as an irresistible belief instigated by the will of a political leader. Themata are dialogical oppositions that are embedded in history and culture. They are implicitly shared by members of a community as basic sources of common-sense knowledge. The central epistemological thema of common sense in social representations is the Self–Other. When, for one reason or another, themata are questioned, argued, and transformed in thematisation, they are no longer common sense. They may again stabilise, be accepted by a community, and be taken for granted in their new forms; then, they may turn, again, in their new forms, into common sense. Common sense is a form of socially shared knowledge but not all kinds of socially shared knowledge are common sense. In addition to implicit common-sense knowledge, social representations employ other forms of knowledge arising from daily experience, training, skills, and otherwise. When routines break down, different forms of knowledge and actions are required to cope with unpredictable circumstances, for example, imagination, inventiveness, trust, and taking risks.
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Meanings and Knowledge as Semiotic Processes
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Social Representations as Symbolic Processes
In the Preface to the second edition of Psychoanalysis, Serge Moscovici (/, p. xxiii) confessed that his ambition was ‘to redefine the problems and concepts of social psychology by emphasising their symbolic function and their power to construct the real’. To achieve this goal, he constructed the theory of social representations and communication as one of social knowledge. Let us suggest that the prerequisite for redefining social psychology in terms of symbolic functions lies in two major and complementary processes: first, in the meaning-making processes of humans to satiate their thirst for understanding and creating phenomena in their environment, and, second, in the transformation of individuals’ meanings into socially accepted symbols of their social reality. These two processes, vital for the development of the theory of social representations and communication, bring into focus the notions of ‘meanings’, ‘knowledge’, and their various forms and relations. Since ‘any representation is a representation of something’ (Moscovici, / , p. , his emphasis), the represented something (the object) obtains a status of a sign and getting to know it means making it significant (Moscovici, /, p. ). In other words, the study of signs and signification is fundamental for a proper understanding of the theory of social representations and communication. Moscovici’s perspective of signs and symbols transformed over time as he developed the theory of social representations. Despite that, his formulations of signification processes remained abstract and, thus, it appears that researchers found Moscovici’s ideas of semiotics difficult to understand. They often raised the question of the links between semiotics and the theory of social representations and argued that these should be explored (e.g., Ruggieri and Rochira, ; Veltri, , ; Hakoköngäs and Sakki, ). The researchers largely disregarded the fact that Moscovici had devoted attention to these links already in the first and second editions of Psychoanalysis (Moscovici, a, /).
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Meanings and Knowledge as Semiotic Processes
Before considering Moscovici’s ideas about social representations and semiotics, let us start with a word of caution about semiotic terminology. Meanings of terms such as ‘signs’, ‘symbols’, ‘semantics’, ‘semiotics’, ‘semiosis’, ‘semiology’, and so on differ when used by different scholars, for example, de Saussure, Peirce, Barthes, and others. Moreover, scholars may use these terms in different ways at specific stages of their career. For example, Charles Sanders Peirce continued to develop his theory of the sign throughout his life and his models could be misunderstood if it were not specified to which period of his work one referred. Therefore, I shall clarify in whose sense I use semiotic terms in this book. In declaring his ambition to show the power of his theory in pursuing symbolic activities of humans when constructing their social reality, Moscovici was aware that the idea of social or collective representation as a symbolic phenomenon was already fertile in other social sciences (e.g., Moscovici, , ) including Ferdinand de Saussure’s linguistics. He appreciated de Saussure’s perspective that ‘A science that studies the life of signs within society is therefore conceivable; it would be part of social psychology, and consequently, of general psychology; I shall call it semiology’ (de Saussure, /, p. , de Saussure’s emphasis). Moscovici’s appeal to Peirce’s semiosis (see note ) was even stronger than that to de Saussure’s semiology. Peirce’s holistic perspective was vital in Moscovici’s formulation of his triadic model of the Ego–Alter–Object (Chapters , , and ), which became known as the model of the theory of social knowledge. Despite that, although Moscovici (c) acknowledged that he derived this model from Charles Sanders Peirce, he referred to Peirce very rarely, making it hard for readers to understand, without much explanation, his abstract texts on semiotics in social representations.
Let us remind ourselves, in the most elementary way, of the four concepts that are used in this section. Semantics is the study of meaning as it is theorised about and practised in various disciplines, for example, linguistics, philosophy, psychology, computing science, and otherwise. Semiotics is the study of signs. In his book A Theory of Semiotics, Umberto Eco (, p. ) stated that ‘semiotics is concerned with everything that can be taken as a sign. A sign is everything which can be taken as significantly substituting for something else’. Semiology, according to Ferdinand de Saussure, is a science ‘that studies the life of signs’. Semiosis, according to Charles Sanders Peirce, is a triadic process that unites the sign, object, and interpretant in a dynamic and infinite relationship. I suggested to Moscovici many years ago that his triadic model is like that of Carl Bu¨hler (Marková, ). He responded that Carl Graumann had also made the same observation but that, in fact, Moscovici’s triadic model was derived from Charles Sanders Peirce. Jesuino reminded me that Moscovici referred to Peirce with respect to the triadic model for the first time in (Moscovici, c). He also remarked that Moscovici’s early ideas on semiotics could stem from Piaget’s thoughts on signs. The studies of signs and of developmental semiotics by Piaget were surely inspired by de Saussure and Peirce and these connections were explored by many scholars (see also Smith, ).
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. Figurative Schema and Figurative Equation Since Moscovici’s ideas on the symbolic nature of social representations can be traced back to Psychoanalysis () through to Psychoanalysis () and beyond, let us follow the development of Moscovici’s ideas on semiotics because this is important for understanding his formulations of meaning-making and knowledge. In the first edition of Psychoanalysis, Moscovici explored participants’ meanings of psychoanalysis, their metamorphoses, patterns, the construction of semantic barriers, their functions, and distortions. He explained that the individual agent (the knower) selected elements of relevant objects from the external world and assembled them into meaningful patterns. Moscovici called such selected elements a ‘figurative schema’; they formed a dynamic structure and were linked with one another through agreement or conflict (see Chapter for details). The dynamic structure of the figurative schema lay in the transformations of newly selected, deselected, or reselected elements. Although this was the product of an individual’s activity, the figurative schema was underlain by images, judgements, and values of social groups or communities that had been established previously, sometimes over generations. Considering that the figurative schema (selected elements from the outside object) is the product of an individual’s (Ego) activity underlain by socially (Alter) shared values and images, we can read the development process of the figurative schema as an implicit expression of a triangular model, which Moscovici explicitly formulated in and as the Ego–Alter–Object (see Chapter , Section ., and Chapter ). The figurative schema provided Moscovici with theoretical ideas about psychoanalysis as a modality of socially shared knowledge. In the second edition of Psychoanalysis, Moscovici preserved his ideas about the formation of social knowledge. However, some differences between the first and the second editions were evident. Jodelet observed that, in the second edition, Moscovici treated representations as meanings (Jodelet, , p. ). She pointed out (Jodelet, , p. .) that the ‘distinction between knowledge and meaning, which is crucial in the psychosociology of knowledge . . . [is] less obvious for the readers, probably because of the difficulty of its analysis’ (Chapter ). I suggest that Jodelet’s observation is related to the fact that, in the second edition, alongside the figurative schema which is concerned with knowledge-making processes, Moscovici introduced the concept of the ‘figurative equation’, which refers to meaning-making processes (Moscovici,
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Meanings and Knowledge as Semiotic Processes
/, pp. –). He formulated the figurative equation as ‘representation = figure/signification’, that is, as meaning-making processes that form the dynamic component of social representations as a theory of social knowledge. If they are accepted by the relevant community, meanings turn into symbolic and socially shared knowledge, which gives the theory an air of something relatively stable or temporarily semi-permanent. Thus, I hypothesise that the two concepts, that is, ‘figurative equation’ and ‘figurative schema’, refer to two semiotic processes, that is, to the dynamic meaning-making process and to the construction of temporarily stabilised social knowledge, respectively. I consider these two processes as complementary. Which of them is foregrounded depends on which question the researcher addresses: does he/she define the question about social representations in terms of meaning-making processes or as a modality of temporarily stabilised socially shared knowledge? Moscovici presented both formulations of the model, that is, the meaning-making process (‘representation = figure/signification’) and the knowledge-making process (the Ego–Alter–Object), in abstract forms without elaborating on their significance. Due to this, their semiotic understandings remained largely unrecognised and both formulations still await proper acknowledgement and further development as well as critiques. Although, chronologically, Moscovici developed the figurative equation only in the second edition of Psychoanalysis in , I propose to start with this concept because it is concerned with meaning-making processes which may or may not lead to acquisition of knowledge. Humans search for meanings of phenomena by objectification to satisfy their need for understanding before they transform (or fail to transform) their meanings by anchoring them into socially accepted symbols of their social reality and into social knowledge. Therefore, in this chapter, I shall turn to meaningmaking processes (‘representation = figure/signification’). In the next chapter, I shall discuss the triadic model formulated as the Ego–Alter– Object, referring to the theory of social knowledge. I have discussed this latter formulation of the model extensively in my previous work (e.g., Marková, , , ) but, in Chapter , I develop it beyond my earlier versions.
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The Infinite Meaning-Making Processes
I suggest that Moscovici derived his figurative equation of social representations and communication, which he presented in the second edition of
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Psychoanalysis (Moscovici, /, p. ), from the basic structure of the Charles Sanders Peirce (–) triadic model of the sign, which consists of representation, object, and interpretant. I further propose that, in presenting the figurative equation ‘representation = figure/signification’, Moscovici adopted not only Peirce’s triangular model but also its logic and terminology. In view of this, we can interpret Moscovici’s figurative equation as infinite meaning-making processes, that is, as a never-ending chain of signs in the sense of Peirce. As far as I am aware, it was only Jorge Correia Jesuino (, , , , ) who not only referred to this equation but has been developing it for several decades, and he interpreted it in terms of Peirce’s semiosis. The importance of this semiotic conception of social representations is vital for an explanation of objectification as a meaningmaking process. Let us view Moscovici’s figurative equation graphically next to Peirce’s triadic model (Figure .). In both cases, the triad is a whole. The elements in the triad form an indivisible relation and make sense only in relation to one another. In Peirce’s triad, a sign (anything that can be interpreted) consists of three elements: representation, interpretant, and object. In Moscovici’s triadic figurative equation, again we have three elements: representation, signification, and figure. Therefore, in Moscovici’s figurative equation and in Peirce’s sign model, each of the three components has a corresponding expression: figure = object, signification = interpretant, and representation = representation (in some translations, Peirce’s ‘representation’ stands for ‘representamen’). The most important common feature in Peirce’s and Moscovici’s models is their dynamics. In Peirce’s model, the interpretant is generative. It is dynamic in the sense that it functions as a sign of another interpretant leading to a never-ending chain of signs (Atkin, ). Peirce called this dynamic role an infinite semiosis. Equally, we find this dynamic feature in Moscovici’s triadic model. Social representations are phenomena in movement: ‘I focused on their genesis, on representations in the making, not as
We do not need to discuss Peirce’s transformations, over years, of this basic structure, or subdivisions of the interpretant, and the object. An interested reader will find these issues easily either in Peirce’s (–) collected works or in abundant secondary literature (e.g., Short, ; Atkin, ). Jesuino () brought these to attention in his lecture at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Paris and my discussion of this point was inspired by this. For a very clear exposition of Peirce’s triadic model focusing on the interpretant as an infinite meaning-making process, see Gillespie and Zittoun ().
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Meanings and Knowledge as Semiotic Processes
Triadic model Charles Sanders Peirce
Serge Moscovici
representation
representation
Sign
Figurative equation
interpretant
object
Figure .
signification
figure
Peirce’s and Moscovici’s triadic models
something already made’ (Moscovici and Marková, , p. ). The process is continuously evolving as meanings change due to the dynamic interdependence between outside situations and individuals’ rethinking and re-presenting of the phenomena in question. Without going into any detail of Peirce’s concept of semiosis, let us note why it was so important for Moscovici’s theory. Peirce’s semiosis was fully compatible with Moscovici’s views about the nature of symbolic knowledge and language. While de Saussure postulated a static and dyadic unit of the sign as an unbreakable relation between elements in language, consisting of a signifier (e.g., sound, image) and the signified (a thing to which a signifier refers), Peirce proposed a dynamic triadic model of the sign. The third element that Peirce included in his theory of the sign was the interpretant. The interpretant is the effect that the relation between a representation (sign) and an object has on someone. Gillespie and Zittoun (, p. ) explain that the interpretant is in the mind of the Self and Others and is related ‘to the person’s previous knowledge of a social and cultural world and to their interests which in turn give the sign human significance’. Peirce insisted that the relation between these three elements is indivisible: they all exist only in relation to each other as a whole. Let us consider Moscovici’s figurative equation more closely. Although he did not present it graphically as a triangle but as an equation, the three components in this equation make sense only as a unit. The ‘figure’ in the figurative equation contains elements that subjects choose from the outside
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Dialogical Perspective
world in the process of objectification. For example, the figure for an imagined social representation of Brexit could have been constructed by choosing one element of possible alternatives such as: immigration versus no immigration; the UK taking control back versus being European; contributing payments to Europe versus supporting the British National Health Service; Britishness versus European identity; and so on. The figure would include elements that the interested individuals or groups would consider as important. These would be disputed, argued about, negotiated, or rejected in the context of what Brexit meant for these individuals or groups. Signification (or interpretant) would become signs for other significations (interpretants), for example, economic considerations, control of the law, and so on, and their dynamics would be infinite. Elements of the figure would have different values and relevance for different communities and so they would contribute to the heterogeneous qualities of the figure. Moscovici (/, pp. –) expressed the dynamic process of the formation of a representation in the following way: Here is the source of tension which lies at the heart of any representation, between the facet oriented towards the object – the figure – and the meaning chosen and given to it by the subject . . . as a way of indicating that any figure has an aura of meaning and that any meaning appears in a figurative or iconic pattern . . . In reality every representation appears to us double. Its two sides can no more be dissociated than the recto and verso of a sheet of paper: a figurative side and a symbolic side . . . The function of the processes at work is both to outline a figure and to give it a meaning, to inscribe the object in our world, or in other words, naturalize it, and to provide it with an intelligible context, or in other words, to interpret it.
I read these difficult extracts as confirming that objectification and anchoring are co-present in meaning-making and in the construction of socially shared knowledge. Here, objectification refers to ‘the facet oriented towards the object – the figure – and the meaning chosen and given to it by the subject’. Through anchoring, the object is naturalised, provided ‘with an intelligible context’, and interpreted. These back-and-forth movements create tension, which is at the heart of social representations. However, Moscovici’s schema is incomplete in presenting the equation ‘representation = figure/signification’, which refers to a ‘subject’ and an ‘object’ at an abstract level. It is not the abstract ‘subject’ but the concrete subject jointly with other concrete subjects who construct the signification. Let us repeat that signification is a meaning-making process through the interaction between the Self and Others. A representation becomes
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Meanings and Knowledge as Semiotic Processes
symbolic only if it is constructed and accepted jointly by the relevant subjects and groups. This, however, is not explicitly stated in the figurative equation and, therefore, although the equation could potentially advance the theory of social representations, it has been rarely referred to and has remained undeveloped. I pointed out earlier (Chapter ) that Moscovici (a) admitted that he would not dare to consider how objectification and anchoring are connected. However, when he explicitly adopted the Peirce triadic model, it became clear how the relation between objectification and anchoring could take place. In referring to Moscovici’s (/, pp. –) quotation, Jesuino () emphasises the irreducibility of the psychological value of representation. He underscores that to represent a phenomenon does not mean to duplicate, translate, or create a metaphor. Instead, the process of semiosis could be viewed as a Möbius strip trajectory that links anchoring and objectifying (Jesuino, ). In focusing on social representations as structured semiotic mediators, Valsiner () explores objectification and anchoring as complex meaning-making and knowledge-making processes. These are coordinated through communication and play a crucial role in cultural transitions from present to future events. Objectification starts as the personal process of diverse individuals and of unpredictable and strange phenomena (Valsiner, , p. .). Individuals select elements to construct a meaningful world that is continuously verified and made ready for new uses in the future. In other words, humans ‘create semiotic mediators that set the range and direction for further expectation of to-be-livedthrough experience’. Valsiner emphasises that, through objectification as a meaning-making process, Moscovici captures the back-and-forth movement between representing and experiencing: ‘representing is needed for experiencing, while experiencing leads to new forms of representing’ (Valsiner, , p. .). This movement is actualised in thinking, feeling, and acting involving collaboration, tension, and conflict, for example, in influence processes between majorities and minorities (Moscovici and Marková, , p. ff.). In this process, the objectified meaning is anchored into a network of relevant systems of thought; thus, the newly
Let me emphasise that Moscovici did not conceive ‘experiencing’ in the sense of Husserl’s life-world (Lebenswelt) and of Schu¨tz’s phenomenology, which he considered ‘too static’ (Moscovici and Marková, , p. ). Experiencing referred to action, taking decisions, and plunging into uncertainty: ‘As Napoleon said: “One improvises and then one sees”’ (Moscovici and Marková, , p. ). Equally, ‘meaning-making’ for him did not refer to the comprehension of something but to creating meaning or to the transformation of thought.
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objectified meaning complexes become anchored in other, already existing, complexes. These complexes can have a long history in societies, as Valsiner comments: For example, the notion of CONSPIRACY exists in societies in a generic pivotal form, to be filled in at different historical periods with different particulars (Moscovici, ). When a goal is set to create uncertainty within the existing social order, for example, some unexplainable or negatively valued events may be explained by anchoring these within a notion of conspiracy. Meaning complexes are organised in ways that link abstracted nuclei of meanings with the wider fields of experience – in ways that entail multiplicity of and so a variety of meanings set up in relation to one another within the flow of experience (Valsiner, , p. .).
Valsiner’s emphasis on multiplicity and variety of meaning-making and knowledge-making processes draws attention to the importance of different roles of objectification and anchoring in the formation of social representations. While objectification and anchoring are meaning- and knowledge-making processes, respectively, this does not suggest that meaning-making processes always lead to the construction of social knowledge. In the remainder of this chapter, we shall see examples of situations in which meanings are constructed but not accepted as symbols (e.g., words, images) by others (groups, societies) and, therefore, do not lead to the formation of socially shared knowledge. Meaning-making processes originate from wide fields of experience: they may be drawn from conscious or unconscious occurrences; they may occupy diverse roles due to the level of their importance, their relevance to local or global issues, and otherwise. They may appear and disappear instantly alongside changes in sociohistorical and cultural conditions or may play a relatively extended role through infinite chains of events. For all these reasons, the terms ‘meaning’ and ‘knowledge’ must not be arbitrarily exchanged one for the other.
. Symbolic Relations in Meaning-Making Processes ..
Rise and Fall of Meaning
The first example is documented in the chapter by Alex Gillespie and Tania Zittoun () on the gift of a rock, which is not concerned with social representations but with the emergence and decline of meaning. The authors adopt the dialogical perspective of George
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Meanings and Knowledge as Semiotic Processes
Herbert Mead () and Peirce’s triadic model of the sign. According to Mead’s perspective, meanings originate from the response of Others to the Self. Through the response, the meaning is transformed into a novel meaning when new significant Others become associated with the event in question. The authors argue that the Other is central to the formation of meaning in terms of social relations between people engaged in a joint project. Following the perspective of George Herbert Mead, Gillespie and Zittoun emphasise that responses from Others co-determine meanings, actions, and words. In such cases, the deeply intersubjective conception of meaning (Gillespie, ) is irreducibly triadic (Zittoun et al., ) involving Self–Sign–Other. Gillespie and Zittoun () analyse the case of the collapse of the San José mine in Chile in August , during which thirty-three miners were trapped underground. After sixty-nine days, all the miners were saved. This incredible achievement by the rescuers and a happy end to the suffering of the miners and their families was celebrated not only in Chile but all over the world. When the Chilean president, Sebastián Piñera, toured Europe in late , he brought with him pieces of rock taken from where the miners had been trapped as gifts to European political leaders and monarchs. Rocks without any value became, due to this important historical event, a symbol of heroism and gratitude. Among the receivers of the gift were the British prime minister, Cameron, the British Queen, Elizabeth II, the French president, Sarkozy, the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, as well as others. The authors show that the process of meaning-making, that is, of semiosis, is unending, with each new meaning potentially becoming the object of a subsequent interpretant. This process involves the mutuality of gift-giving and the acknowledgement of a gift. Through the process of giving and receiving, the value of the rocks diminished. Each gift was a repetition of a previous event and the process became trivialised, eroding the value of the rock. When Piñera visited the Pope in March , he did not give him a rock or anything as a reminder of the miners’ rescue but a silver censer to signify the Catholic religion. As others stopped responding to the rocks as meaningful reminders of a historical event, the rocks also ceased to be significant in human relations. This case is instructive in showing that meanings are in unique relations between Selves, Others, and circumstances. Once these relations changed, the meaning of the event diminished and finally disappeared. The growth of a meaningless object into a valued and meaningful one due to its acceptance by others has been shown previously. One is
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reminded of Kojève’s () interpretations of Hegel referring to meaningless objects which, if called medals, become a subject of desire when valued by others (Marková, ). In the previous case, rocks as gifts signified simultaneously gratitude for the rescue, the suffering of the miners, dangers of working in mines, and so on. This process showed semiosis as an infinite process in which, in addition to intended meanings, new and unintended meanings were created and so transformed the meaning-making process (Gillespie and Zittoun, , p. ). ..
Signs and Symbols as Meaning-Making Processes
The second example of a meaning-making process is taken from Tillich’s () book Theology of Culture. While in Peirce’s theory of signs a single sign is a combination of icon, index, and symbol, Tillich strictly separates sign from symbol. His analyses of religious symbols show the transformation of signs into symbols that participate in the power of what they represent. To that extent, Tillich’s analyses illustrate not only ‘sign’ and ‘symbol’ as concepts different from those of Peirce but also different processes of meaning- and knowledge-making. Let me explain. A sign, for example, a red traffic light, signifies ‘stop’. The choice of a red light is arbitrary; it is a matter of convention and, if need be, it can be substituted by other signs. In the case of traffic lights, a different colour or a different sign would fulfil the same role as a red light. One must respond to signs as requested by an authority in order not to cause offence. In contrast, symbols participate in the meaning and in the power of what they represent. For example, the flag or the national anthem are symbols that participate in the power of national institutions. These symbols cannot be arbitrarily exchanged for other symbols because they are part of the national identity of their bearers. Punishment for not obeying the authority of symbols is of a different kind to not responding to signs. Ignoring signs is an offence against law and order. A non-response to symbols is an offence against a high authority, for example, the state. Let us recall an event in when some American athletes protested against racism and brutality of the police through the symbolic gesture of kneeling on one knee during the US national anthem. This caused either sympathy or outrage depending on how this behaviour involving the national anthem was interpreted. The protests continued in the years to come. President Donald Trump stated that such athletes should be fired because their protest was a total disrespect of American heritage.
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Meanings and Knowledge as Semiotic Processes
In Tillich’s words, the national anthem or the national flag participate as symbols in the power of what they symbolise. However, relations between symbols and the power of the state are not universally valid. In the UK, some men’s underwear or swimming trunks depict the British flag; one can hardly assume that men’s swimming trunks and underwear symbolise men’s respect or disrespect for the UK. On another occasion, the flag becomes once again a symbol when it covers the coffin of an unknown soldier carried through the streets of London. Different audiences, locations, and social contexts define what is accepted as appropriate; what in one case can be viewed as a fashion joke in another could represent an offence to the state. Symbols are perpetuated unconsciously and remain symbols as long as they continue to participate in the power of what they symbolise. When the circumstances in which they were created no longer exist, the symbol loses its power. Although social realities in which signs and symbols operate are different, signs and symbols can be linked through their origins. While signs are originally invented with some intention, for example, to give orders or to preclude behaviour, they may penetrate the public unconscious and turn into symbols. Tillich (, p. ) observed: ‘Many things – like special parts of the church building, like the candles, like the water at the entrance of the Roman Church, like the cross in all churches, especially Protestant churches – were originally only signs, but in use became symbols; call them sign-symbols, signs which have become symbols.’ Signs and symbols are expressed through various means, such as actions, gestures, and words. Although words function both as signs (e.g., ‘turn left’, ‘no smoking’) and as symbols (e.g., singing the ‘national anthem’, reading the ‘Bible’), they are most strongly expressed as names. Moscovici had been attentive to name-giving already in the first edition of Psychoanalysis (Chapter ). In attaining a name, an object is given its identity. When a word becomes the name, it means that it is recognised not only by the namer but also by Others and it then obtains its symbolic quality. Naming may express pride or impose limits, properties, and characteristics of the named object, person, or phenomenon. To amplify the impact of names, we use them as metaphors to objectify ideas and turn them into reality (Sontag, , ). Changing the name implies a symbolic effort to change the identity of the bearer of that name. Immigrants to Europe and North America with Jewish, Arabic, and other foreign-sounding surnames change them into names easily recognisable in local languages to avoid discrimination. Changing names is, therefore, not just for the Self but for Others and also signifies the Self’s attempt to
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Dialogical Perspective
belong to a group or to specific Others. Names of important national figures are printed on banknotes and disputes over who should be represented on these notes is not only a cultural but a political question. Changing names is heightened during specific political crises and revolutions when names and visible symbols become cultural symbols and are politicised and accompanied by feelings of injustice (Kalampalikis, ). The removal of names and symbols follows emotional upheavals in relation to historical events and is done in the name of justice, for example, removal of statues of alleged supporters of slavery that had taken place long before the contemporary self-appointed judges of history were born. Using and misusing language for political purposes is a well-known phenomenon and has already been mentioned (Chapter ). The latest example is President Putin’s war in Ukraine. As Putin and his disciples insist, the Russian interference in Ukraine is a ‘special military operation’ and not a ‘war’ or ‘invasion’. Anybody who calls this special military operation a war will be punished by imprisonment for up to fifteen years. .. Symbolic Meanings in Social Representations of Marxism Artistic products, for example, poems, music, paintings, and posters, are symbolic creations that express not only aesthetic qualities but also religious beliefs, national identities, and deep passions. They are frequently used for political purposes and mixed with religious or consumerist propaganda. When their aesthetic, cultural, or political intentions become interiorised by the public, such products influence the human mind at an unconscious level. This well-known phenomenon helps to clarify meaning-making processes in the formation of socially shared beliefs and knowledge. Attempts to replace religious symbols with political symbols were successful in the past Soviet Union in abusing a historically powerful religious and visual tradition of Russian people. Political art created a special semantics in which a mixture of words and images aimed to have a strong impact on the masses (Bonnell, ). Propaganda produced images representing political leaders as having the qualities of saints, prophets, or martyrs. For example, pictures of leaders of the Communist Party, such as Lenin, Stalin, or Mao Tse-Tung, on political posters were presented in circular or oval frames reminiscent of religious icons (Marková, ). Explicitly religious or symbolic meanings became incorporated into the terminology of the Party, for example, the Communist Party was a sort of ‘Order of Knights of the Sword’ within the Soviet State
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Meanings and Knowledge as Semiotic Processes
(Stalin, –/, , p. ). Lenin was the ‘apostle of world communism’ and ‘the leader by the Grace of God’ (Tumarkin, ). The sacralisation of Nazi art was like that in Soviet art and in both cases, religious images were abundant. For example, Steigmann-Gall (, p. ) recalls Hitler’s public speech: ‘I say my Christian feelings point me to my Lord and Saviour as a fighter’. Symbols and the semantic significance of images kept changing throughout the history of both regimes and this corresponded to their changing ideologies (see Antonova and Merkvert, ). Both regimes fused cultural products and arts with politics: ‘This is the situation of politics in which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art’ (Benjamin, /, p. ). Since his publication of Psychoanalysis (), Moscovici was interested in exploring the symbolic and pragmatic significance of social representations of Marxism in France. At the time, he was very sympathetic to Marxism and his colleague Jean-Claude Faucheux encouraged him to design such a study (Chapter ). Moscovici finally embarked on the project in the s and carried out interviews with past members of the Party and previous functionaries. The participants consisted of fiftyfive men and forty-five women who came either from Paris or from the countryside. With his collaborators, Moscovici undertook a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the corpus to identify the categories, values, and styles of arguments that his participants used to validate or invalidate the theoretical and practical latitude of Marxism. He explored themes such as Marxism as a theory, as a trend of thinking, its relation to economy, and the personality of Marx and of other Marxist figures. However, the study was not completed because Moscovici did not find social representations of Marxism in France during the s, although only three decades earlier, Marxism had been a very powerful ideology, one that was widely discussed by the public and by the influential Communist Party. As far as I am aware, this study is mentioned in only one published paper (Kalampalikis and Moscovici, ), in which it was noted only as an illustration of the use of the computer program Alceste. By the s, the power of the Communist Party in France had dissolved and Marxist symbols, images, and their semantic significance were no longer relevant either to past members of the Party or to ordinary citizens. Marxism was not in the
Integration of religious beliefs and politics is a well-established phenomenon in the American presidential oath of office. The US president often swears his oath on the Bible or even on two Bibles.
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Dialogical Perspective
public discourse and neither ordinary citizens nor past Party members and ideological associates read Marx, finding his writings dry and difficult to understand. They did not believe in Marxism and could not answer questions in relation to social representations. Instead, there were memories of the Soviet regime that had crushed the Hungarian uprising in and invaded Czechoslovakia in . Moscovici thought that Marxism, in contrast to religion, was unable to create and maintain a system of beliefs that would capture the public. It was apparent that Marxism brought people together by power, control, and coercion. These events contributed to the collapse of the Communist Party in France and, in the s, there was nothing to hold members of the Party together. Just as with the earlier example of the rise and fall of the meaning of the rocks, meaningmaking processes of Marxism in France in the s were determined holistically by triadic processes involving relations among humans in their changing socio-cultural-political situations. ..
More Questions about Meaning-Making Processes and the Search for Knowledge
The perspective on meaning- and knowledge-making semiotic processes as conceived in the theory of social representations and communication is no more than one possible outlook on these fundamental human activities. Throughout the history of philosophy (ontology, epistemology), religions, sciences (natural, social, and human), and professional and lay perspectives, we can discern interests and disputes in relation to different activities of the mind. Since Aristotle, a distinction has been made between theoretical reasoning and wisdom on the one hand and practical reasoning as a guide for daily living and ethical action on the other. As an example of one specific perspective, let us turn our attention to Hannah Arendt’s () insistence on vital differences between the search for meaning and the search for knowledge (truth). Immanuel Kant (/ , B ) made a distinction between intellect (Verstand), by means of which humans aim at grasping what is given to senses and to intelligence and so to establish what is true, and reason (Vernunft), by means of which they try to understand the meaning of what is grasped by senses and intelligence. Arendt was critical of Kant in that, while he made this important distinction, he was struggling with the problem of knowledge
Some perspectives on truth and certainty (Descartes, Vico), and on living in truth (Lévinas, Patočka, Havel), are discussed in Marková ().
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Meanings and Knowledge as Semiotic Processes
and he did not develop implications of the separation of these two capacities of the mind (Arendt, , I, p. ). In view of Kant’s problems, Arendt established her own position, insisting that ‘[T]he need of reason is not inspired by the quest for truth but by the quest for meaning. And truth and meaning are not the same. The basic fallacy, taking precedence over all specific metaphysical fallacies, is to interpret meaning on the model of truth’ (Arendt, , I, p. , Arendt’s italics). The search for knowledge (or for truth) has its own rules and criteria for certainty while the search for meaning (or thinking) presupposes different criteria: it refers to life experiences of individuals. Something can be meaningful for the individual because he/she can make sense of the event in question as a recurrence of past events, emotions, and expectations, yet that may have nothing to do with the truth. For example, a family devastated by a genetic disorder might attribute the meaning of their misfortune to God’s punishment for the sins of previous generations. The fact that there are clear genetic factors leading to the illness may not change the family’s beliefs. In other words, meaning and truth may remain apart despite the biological evidence explaining the occurrence of the disease in the family. Although Arendt () insisted on drawing a line between meaning and knowledge, she did not deny that they are connected. On the one hand, humans pose themselves unanswerable questions about meaning, for example, about the meaning of life or of suffering, and they attempt to self-examine and to capture their understanding of personal experiences. On the other hand, the search for knowledge is underlain by thinking; therefore, there could be no science without thinking. However, Arendt did not explain the nature of such a connection and in what ways she went beyond Kant’s problem of knowledge.
. Conclusion From early formulations of this theory, Moscovici viewed ‘meaning’ and ‘knowledge’ as semiotic processes and expressed them as a triadic model in two formulations. These formulations are complementary. They also underlie the significance of Moscovici’s insistence that the theory of social representations and communication is concerned with the study of phenomena in movement. First, in the figurative equation ‘representation = figure/signification’, Moscovici foregrounded the infinite meaning- and knowledge-making processes of social representations through objectification and anchoring. The figurative equation can be represented as a triad
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Dialogical Perspective
involving representation, figure, and signification and appears to be derived from Peirce’s triadic model of signs involving interpretant, object, and representation. Both Peirce’s and Moscovici’s triadic models form wholes in which their elements are linked in and through indivisible relations. Meanings become embodied in socially shared knowledge (social representations) only if they are accepted as symbols by other groups or societies. Signs and symbols are expressed through various means, among which name-giving is particularly notable. Changing the name implies a symbolic effort to change the identity of the bearer of that name and signifies the Self’s attempt to belong to a group or to specific Others. When specific symbols get interiorised, they function at an unconscious level and may be manipulated for political purposes, creating a special semantics in which a mixture of words and images aims to create a strong impact on the masses. The second formulation of the triadic model is expressed in the Ego– Alter–Object, which refers to the theory of social representations and communication as the theory of social knowledge. The discussion of this model is the subject matter of the next chapter.
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They ‘Made Flowers Grow Where It Seemed Impossible’
We start with the concept of the whole . . . But the truth of the whole can always only be grasped in a particular ‘aspect’. This is ‘knowledge’ in the broadest sense – ‘seeing’ the whole ‘in’ an aspect, through the medium of this aspect. The problem of representations becomes the central problem of knowledge.
(Cassirer, , p. )
. Moscovici’s Triadic Model the Self–Other–Object I suggested in Chapter that the relations in the Self–Other–Object or the Ego–Alter–Object were already inherent in Psychoanalysis () as a theory of social knowledge. There, Moscovici described the relations between the three components by showing that ‘the individual Selves (the Ego) were confronted with Others (the Alter, e.g., other people, the Church, the Communist Party, journalists, politicians). The two such parties discussed, rejected, negotiated, and argued about psychoanalysis (the Object)’ (Chapter , p. ). Some years later, Moscovici (, c) explicitly formulated the triadic model the Self–Other–Object as a semiotic and symbolic process generating social representations and communication and confirmed its association with Peirce’s tripartite sign model. .. Why Is the Triadic Model the Core Unit of the Theory of Social Representations and Communication? In explaining the value of his triadic model, Moscovici stated: ‘The triangular model calls into question the dualism. The emphasis is on relationships, on interaction . . . What matters is the relation and interaction’ (Moscovici, , p. ). According to dualism, the Self alone constructs the knowledge of a social Object. Having rejected this position,
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Dialogical Perspective
Moscovici argued that social knowledge is constructed jointly by the Self in interaction with Others. The interactive construction of knowledge is more than integrating ‘my truth’ and ‘your truth’ because the interacting humans are not bound together by logical and formal rationality but by dialogical rationality (Marková, ). If social representations as modalities of socially shared knowledge are jointly constructed by the Self and Others, this implies the involvement not only of their cognitive, intellectual, and reasoning capacities but, most importantly, also of their mutual relations. Humans are ethically engaged, they have aesthetic feelings, and they take, or reject, responsibility for each other. More generally, dialogical rationality presupposes that, in the process of construction of daily knowledge, humans also evaluate each other’s trustworthiness, show concern, have emotions and passions for one another, and disrespect and have aversion and antipathy for one another. In other words, in addition to characteristics that bind people together, there are also features that separate them. Humans may act both on impulsive intuition and on ‘cold rationality’, whether in saving someone’s life and even sacrificing one’s own life to save others or in using physical and verbal violence to destroy the other (Ichheiser, ). These relations, capacities, and faculties of the mind participate in daily life both in the search for meanings and for knowledge. All this is fundamental to the understanding of the model Ego–Alter– Object. Despite explaining the holistic and dynamic nature of the triadic model as a core of the construction of social knowledge, Moscovici left the model largely as an abstract schema without any further development. The complex dialogical relations within the model and their rich potentialities remained mostly hidden in his original formulation. The only way he indicated the complex relations within the triadic model concerned the asymmetries between the search for knowledge and trust relations between the Self and Others (Moscovici, /), as shown in Figure .. .. Knowledge and Belief as Asymmetric Relations within the Ego–Alter–Object Moscovici referred to the relations within the Ego–Alter–Object in terms of two kinds of asymmetries (Moscovici, /). Figure . shows that the Ego (the Self, the knower) could be more committed to the search for true knowledge of the Object than to trusting what Others might believe about the Object. Alternatively, the Ego might trust the Alter’s
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They ‘Made Flowers Grow Where It Seemed Impossible’
Dialogical triangle strong commitment to The Alter
Object
Object
tru th
Object of knowledge
Ego
Alter
Ego
trust
Alter
Figure . Knowledge and beliefs are jointly and asymmetrically constructed by the knower and Others (in Marková, )
beliefs about the Object without searching for the truth about the Object (Moscovici, /). In other words, the Object of knowledge could be in the foreground or in the background depending on the Ego’s and Alter’s focus of attention. Many examples throughout history document such asymmetries. The cases of scientists, as well as of lay persons and dissidents, who were persecuted because of their search for truth despite threats to their lives are well known. In contrast, individuals or groups may be devoted to religious or political beliefs of Others without considering the veracity of such beliefs. Implications of this model concerning the social construction of knowledge, beliefs and their distortions, and asymmetries are considerable and have been discussed in detail elsewhere (Marková, ). Contemporary changes in technology, in societal preferences (e.g., social values, ethics), and in forms of communication (e.g., social media, the Internet) destabilise and transform asymmetries in the dialogical triad even further. In addition to exploring the ‘social construction of knowledge’, social scientists are turning their attention to the ‘social construction of ignorance or lying’ (or agnotology, e.g., Proctor and Schiebinger, ) through the inauthentic communication that takes place both at microand macro-levels. At a micro-level, for example, in interpersonal ‘learning’, the tutor may intentionally give false information to the student for career advantages or for personal reasons. An educator and student may even get
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Dialogical Perspective
involved in a mutually acknowledged pretend communication: both the educator and student may play the servile game of lauding the importance of journals with ‘high impact factors or of quoting pieces of work they do not respect, but which will keep them in the club playing these games. At worst, they might even interiorise these games and believe their own inauthentic communication rather than admit the incoherence of their communication and activities’ (Marková, , p. ). At a macro-level (e.g., Jenkins and Delbridge, ), inauthentic communication may give rise to conspiracy theories (Chapter ), particularly during political and health crises including pandemics. Although the social construction of lying and ignorance has been known for centuries, it has been revolutionised by the advances in internet communication and its instant capacity to present simplified forms of knowledge, which encourage shallow reasoning of the phenomena in question. The dissemination of knowledge, the creation of images and their manipulation, and the emergence of ‘alternative truths’ have given rise to new kinds of dialogues and pseudo-dialogues between theories and audiences. Having a strong educational and persuasive impact, the contemporary era of the continued focus on information provided by the Internet encourages viewers to accept theories and ideas through superficial understanding rather than inquiring into the veracity and details of knowledge. The power of the word in contemporary speedy communication shapes the vision of the public and creates imagined realities. These prompt influences present challenges to the public’s reasoning and judgements. Moreover, questions such as who has the right to knowledge (Harré, ) and who is left deliberately in confusion and deceit deserve consideration. Culturally, economically, and politically induced ignorance (e.g., Proctor and Schiebinger, ) is achieved by numerous means, for example, by presenting selected information, persuading, using threats, suppressing knowledge, among others. Indeed, one could argue that the suppression or the prohibition of knowledge (Chapter ), which, too, is socially constructed, appeals to the masses more than true knowledge due to its captivating power of mystery and secrecy (Moscovici, ). Both the social construction of knowledge and of deceit and ignorance are features of the dialogical mind arising from the reflexive capacity of humans.
. The Ego–Alter–Object through Dialogical Rationality In daily life, dialogical rationality underlies relations between the Self and Others in the processes of reasoning, communicating, and acting that
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They ‘Made Flowers Grow Where It Seemed Impossible’
involve aesthetics, ethics, commitment, responsibility, engagement, and otherwise, as well as their opposites. ..
Aesthetics and Ethics in Humanising Actions
Aesthetic relations between the Self and Object were formulated in Hegel’s (/) argument that individuals recognise themselves through humanising action. In and through the struggle with things, humans not only transform objects and achieve mastery over them but, in that process, also change themselves and achieve self-knowledge. For Mikhail Bakhtin, aesthetics was not a relation between the Self and an artistic product but a dialogical process between the Self and Others. Although Bakhtin originally developed his dialogical perspective of aesthetics very early in his career (Bakhtin, /), let us consider the exposition that he provided much later in a brief essay evaluating literary scholarship (Bakhtin, /). He emphasised the close relationship between culture and literary production. Literature can be understood only in the total context of a given epoch, including politics, socio-economic status, and historical specificities. Individuals can properly appreciate a cultural product if and only if they comprehend it on its own premises in its time and space. This is because the aesthetic event must be comprehended as ‘a meeting of two consciousnesses which are in principle distinct from each other’ but which relate to each other in living together (Bakhtin, –/, p. , Bakhtin’s emphasis). In aesthetic relationships, a cultural product is appreciated by the Self and the Other, whether an individual or a group, in and through recognising and respecting one another and, at the same time, by recognising the Otherness of one another. A foreign culture reveals itself fully and profoundly only in the eyes of another culture: ‘Such a dialogic encounter of two cultures does not result in merging or mixing. Each retains its own unity and open totality, but they are mutually enriched’ (Bakhtin, /, p. , Bakhtin’s emphasis). Bakhtin referred to William Shakespeare to explain this point. The Elizabethan epoch could not anticipate how greatly appreciated Shakespeare would be in current times. The Shakespeare of today (Shakespeare as an Object) has been enriched by ideas in his work of which his contemporaries (the Selves), and perhaps Shakespeare himself, could not be aware. They could not perceive and evaluate his ideas in their own culture (Bakhtin, /, p. ). In other words, we (i.e., Others) can appreciate the work or art, as well as the action, of another person if we understand it through its own nature but also by enriching it through our
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own experience here and now. It is in this sense that the Self and the Other recognise and respect one another (ethical consideration) while recognising the Otherness of one another (aesthetic relation). This explains that ethics and aesthetics are interlinked and coincide. They became the central features of Bakhtin’s dialogical ontology and epistemology of the Self and Other. Both the Self’s daily activities and artistic creations are dialogically directed towards Others (Tarkovsky, ). Humans invent tools and machines because they are guided by the necessity of making living easier for themselves and others. Concerning art, the artists’ efforts, equally, ‘are directed towards making life better, more perfect, making it easier for people to understand one another’ (Tarkovsky, , p. ). The work of art is a communicative activity: because it is directed at the Other, it expects a response. It is not only self-expression but communication. It aims at imparting knowledge, assimilating the experience of Others, and creating a spiritual bond with them. The self-expression would be meaningless without having a response from Others. Most importantly, communication is not a transmission of information: it always demands exertion; it requires the passionate commitment to make oneself understandable for the Other. In this sense, art is born from pain and expresses the necessity to search for harmony in communication. Tarkovsky insisted on the point that art and humanity can exist only because there are pressures and tensions in living. Tarkovsky emphasised this very strongly in saying that ‘masterpieces are born of the artist’s struggle to express his ethical ideals. Indeed, his concepts and his sensibilities are informed by those ideals’ (Tarkovsky, , p. ). Commitment or responsibility in art become particularly visible in the lives of artists who are deprived of freedom to express themselves and to communicate freely. The artists struggle for freedom and, at the same time, they need to create in their own culture. This was well recognised by the Soviet totalitarian regime. The regime made an all-out effort to deprive artists and writers of their interdependence with their culture by forcing them to emigrate. The regime managed to displace the writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to West Germany; despite its efforts, the totalitarian regime failed to emigrate the Czech dissident writer Václav Havel.
The writer and film director Andrei Tarkovsky lived in the coercive regime of the Soviet Union that struggled to deprive him of polyphonic and free artistic dialogues and to substitute his concept of dialogue with monological voices dictated by the Party line. One can suggest that this kind of coercive experience in the Soviet regime contributed to developing Bakhtin’s and Tarkovsky’s deeply grounded philosophical, aesthetic, and ethical ideas.
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While art is born from the commitment of humans to improve their lives, Tarkovsky referred to the ill-conceived direction of many contemporary creations. The aspirations of artists cannot be fulfilled by purely utilitarian and pragmatic objectives, namely, today’s preoccupation with money and technology. Many contemporary artists are indifferent to their audience and money has become their goal. This contributes to turning contemporary civilised society into an aggregate of masses without faith whose minds are spiritually empty. Tarkovsky () thought it was one of the great tragedies of contemporary culture that moral and ethical concerns were ignored. For Tarkovsky, ethical and aesthetic ideals coincide in humans searching for happiness in life but, in his mind, people forget two things. First, it is vital to aim at a balance between the effort for material achievements and spiritual progress. Second, the illusory attainment of happiness would leave them in a state in which nothing more happens, where time is nonexistent. There would be no art if humans were born into and lived in a perfect and happy world. ..
Commitment and Responsibility
John Dewey (/) emphasised that aesthetic, intellectual, ethical, and practical action is part of one whole. A practical action must be a committed action. If it is performed automatically, it has no aesthetic quality. Equally, for Mikhail Bakhtin, life is a continuous and open-ended dialogue. He emphasised that aesthetic and ethical actions are bound together by commitment and responsibility and that these are wholly revealed by individuals’ minds, bodies, actions, and interactions. Commitment as a driving power of action is linked to responsibility. The strength of responsibility becomes evident in one’s commitment or engagement to sacrifice oneself for a cause. Commitment steers humans throughout history and culture in their attempts to realise their desires and dreams. We can find it already in ancient Greek mythology as well as in the philosophy of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. For example, commitment characterised the ethical concern of Socrates in his quest for how humans should live and this concern guided him throughout his life and directed his death. We may infer from Plato’s dialogues that Socrates saw the accusations of the Court in ancient Athens as an opportunity to express his commitment to the truth of his philosophy. The forms of communication between the Self and Others may be performed as a superficial activity without commitment or it may follow
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half-heartedly as some kind of duty. In such cases, ethics is separated from aesthetics and is likely to get fixed solely on the Self’s desires, whether attempting to obtain political power, material objects, status, or otherwise, at the expense of Others and of communal life itself. While the indifference to the Other, and disengagement from ethics, aesthetics, and responsibility, may be a personality feature, it could also arise from mental health problems and might be a way of coping with helplessness. The Self may try to escape dialogical responsibility such as pretending or simulating non-responsibility and excusing oneself for actions or for inauthentic communication. Bakhtin’s () term ‘non-alibi in being’ refers to an individual’s attempt to escape responsibility for acting by pretending not to be present or by creating ambiguity around oneself. In contrast, an individual may claim his/her entitlement to take a high degree of responsibility in directing others towards specific political or religious goals. For example, he/she may assume the principal role in performing rituals and using symbolism in political or religious events. The cult of such personalities, who are enthralled by their own power and self-promotion, is then voluntarily followed by masses. A self-appointed leader will employ coercive propaganda, ceremonies, public gatherings, songs, threats, and marches to intensify the emotions of crowds. Andrei Tarkovsky () observed that, throughout the history of civilisation, ideologues and politicians have attempted to take upon themselves the responsibility for common welfare and happiness. They defined the correct way of improving the position of humans and offering them salvation. They justified their convictions by referring to science and the proven historical necessity. The idea of the so conceived ‘progress’ caught masses in irreconcilable conflicts throughout history. It forced individuals to adopt ideologies that discredited their own conscience in the name of an illusory progress (e.g., Nazism, the Soviet form of Communism). The Self may create images and a world of fantasies about oneself, totally ignoring that living in the real world means living with Others. The creation of a false image of the Self can have a tremendous influence on the masses of people who are misled due to their misunderstanding of economic and political phenomena and of the intentions of a self-made leader. As an example, consider the contemporary phenomenon of the rise of a strong leader, or a ‘strongman’ (Mounk, ), who does not come from totalitarian regimes but from liberal democracies where he/she leads a populist party. Since a great proportion of the public distrusts politicians and institutions, newly appearing leaders who challenge existing systems and make promises of change gain an unprecedented influence.
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Strongmen promise people a return to the golden old ages by formulating assurances such as ‘making America great again’, building a ‘big, beautiful wall’ between the USA and Mexico, or ‘getting control back’ in the case of Brexit. The strongmen play with desires of ordinary people and promise things that can never be fulfilled. They claim to embody the will of the people, to give them more power, and to reshape democracy according to their own images. As a result, individuals become instruments of the ambitions of politicians and ideologues who can sell their untruths. Dialogical rationality gives way to dialogical untruth. Some authors refer to the culture of growing self-centredness, self-admiration, and claims of entitlements (Twenge and Campbell, ) that dominate the public discourse and the media. Such forms of self-love are accompanied by moving away from accepting personal responsibility and by making claims for a total freedom disregarding Others. The paradox of self-centredness is that it is effective for the individual only if it is seen and acknowledged by Others. A blog about the Self would be pointless if it were not read, commented upon, and admired by Others. Just as in the example of a strongman, self-admiration on social media points to its dialogical nature, which is effective only if the Self is interconnected with Others. Heterogeneous and multifaceted forms of dialogical interactions are apparent both in modalities of socially shared knowledge and interactions in daily, real-life situations but, most importantly, in extreme situations mobilising individuals’ ethical and aesthetic motives, responsibilities, and commitments.
. The Ego–Alter–Object in Real-Life Situations Let us return, in this context, to two research teams discussed in Chapter , one led by Hélène Joffe in the UK and the other by Gail Moloney in Australia, which focus on asymmetries of the Self–Other in empirical studies of social representations in situations of high societal relevance. They emphasise that their concentration on the Self–Other is not concerned with cognitive and formal-logical decision-making. Rather, the Self and Others evaluate and attribute responsibility and blame to one another while, at the same time, they are keen to justify their own actions. Mutual evaluations form the presuppositions on which these authors build their main arguments and for which they provide numerous empirical justifications. The Self–Other relation underlies the ways in which the public confronts the risks that threaten individuals, groups, and communities.
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Smith, O’Connor, and Joffe () show ample forms of asymmetric relations between the Self and Others, both at theoretical and empirical levels. Theoretically, the authors refer to the creation of social distances by means of which the Self represents oneself more positively in contrast to the Other. Such asymmetries pertaining to social distances are sustained among individuals, groups, institutions, and even cultures. For instance, different domains of risk show that the blame, guilt, and accusations related to spreading disease and other misfortunes are all attributed to Others, that is, to individuals, governments, marginalised groups, or minorities. In such situations, the Self enhances his/her position and denigrates the Other. These social phenomena, such as Self-promotion and Other denigration, form vicious circles: in strengthening one’s own position, the Self perpetuates discrimination of marginalised groups and increases social distance from them. As the authors note, the social distancing is accompanied by other forms of distancing (e.g., spatial or temporal) and by constructing the Self as being immune to the threats of Others. Gail Moloney’s team (Moloney, Williams, and Blair, ; Moloney et al., ) views the asymmetries between the Self and Others in relation to blood donation and their effect on an individual’s disengagement or engagement. Blood donation elicits different priorities when related to the Self and to Others. In the former case, the Self prioritises pain, anxiety, and needles while in the latter case, the Self prioritizes help and saving lives of Others. These forms of salience are in tension and the direction in which a social representation is actualised depends on the relation between an individual and the social context in which the struggle for priority takes place. Moloney et al., () suggest that communications seeking to encourage the public to donate blood should be re-thematised. Rather than focusing merely on encouraging the public to donate blood, communicative strategies should not ignore issues related to the Self such as the fear of needles, blood, anxiety, and perception of pain. The authors suggest that the antinomies in a thema are interdependent and that it is the tension between antinomies that drives how blood donation is socially understood (Moloney, Williams, and Blair, ). It is here that we need to add that re-thematisation should emphasise the ethical features of the Self– Other interdependence. One can suggest that the authors’ effective analyses of asymmetric relations between the Self and Others can be extended to extreme situations of risk such as the contemporary forms of terrorism and migrant
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crises. Within these, the Self–Other interdependence takes on unparalleled forms of asymmetries that operate in the networks of thematised justice, blame, responsibility for the victim, and many others. Their forces throw away the established routines that function as norms in relatively stable situations. The triadic model encouraged the production of a long series of Masters and PhD theses as well as long-term research projects exploring social representations of complex real-life phenomena. Such studies require time and a multitude of approaches, and the projects of postgraduate students have opportunities to devote themselves to such requirements, developing concepts, advancing the theory, and showing its use in complex phenomena. Among many excellent examples, let us mention the study of social representations of poverty in India (Chauhan, ), research on the historical dispute between Greece and the Republic of Macedonia over the name Macedonia (Kalampalikis, ), of sexual and reproductive health among indigenous Mexican adolescents (Priego-Hernández, ), and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict (Nicholson, ). There are many other theses to which we could refer. In these studies, researchers provide detailed socio-historical and political backgrounds in which their empirical studies take place and emphasise their ecological validity. Importantly, these theses develop the fundamental concepts of the theory of social representations and communications in terms of the dialogical triadic model. For example, Apurv Chauhan () rejects the point of view according to which ‘poverty’ is studied as a simple, homogeneous, and uniform phenomenon across individuals, groups, institutions, and cultures. He argues that the concept of poverty is based on multi-voiced, historically and culturally embedded perspectives. His dialogical analysis of social acts in three groups, that is, in poor participants’ accounts, in elite participants’ accounts, and in news reports, shows that the Ego and Alter are interdependent actors in creating meanings of poverty. Priego-Hernández () develops the concept of cognitive polyphasia as a modified typology of knowledge encounters including coercive supplantation, resistance, dynamic knowledge co-existence, accommodation, and hybridity. She advances cognitive polyphasia as an analytical tool to explore the interaction of different perspectives. For example, at the macro-level, Priego-Hernández explores policies and practices in terms of encounters between health staff and adolescent service users. At the microlevel, she explores encounters between and within individuals in terms of local knowledge and identities. Interactions between these different levels
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provide challenging opportunities for the understanding of different kinds of cognitive polyphasia.
.
Dialogicality of the Self and Other in Extreme Situations
Established daily activities become routinised in and through repetition and, as a result, they do not usually demand much mental effort; rules and norms can be followed without reflection and commitment and can be carried out almost automatically. It is when dramatic events unfold that dialogical relations between the Self and Others become sharpened and brought into awareness. On such occasions, ethical and aesthetic features of interaction, commitments, and responsibility for acting are awoken. By extreme situations, I mean events that break down established interactions, rules, and norms and trigger the hidden features of dialogicality that suddenly appear in an intense light. Ideas that develop during dramatic events tend to focus on the fundamental problems of human existence and these bring to the forefront the Socrates question of how we should live. We observe the power of socially driven commitments in the activities of minorities struggling against the power of governments, institutions, big businesses, and money-orientated markets as well as in protests against the devastation of the environment and global warming. Extreme situations require extreme actions; they reveal much about dialogical relations and communications by drawing attention to features that are unnoticed in established and taken-for-granted situations. Among these, agency and activism, ethical, aesthetic, and emotional needs, and humans reflecting on their actions and interactions come to the fore. Extreme situations, such as wars, epidemics, and pandemics, have been part of human history since immemorial times and are richly recorded in historical and scientific literature as well as in the arts. They bring into the foreground the force of dialogical characteristics that often pass unnoticed in daily life and which also escaped the attention of the theory of social representations and communication. Consider two cases of extreme situations in which the dialogical characteristics of the Ego–Alter–Object are developed in their full power. ..
Being a Political Dissident
If an extreme situation is defined by an excessive power of the Other over the Self, the Self may mobilise his/her activities to free oneself and fellow citizens from oppressive relations. For example, through their activities in
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totalitarian regimes, political dissidents express firm commitment, responsibility for their actions, engagements in human rights, and freedom of expression. Dissidents, ‘the minorities of one’ (Moscovici, b), through their activities transform both themselves and Others. The term ‘Others’ includes several kinds of people: those living under the same oppressive regime as the dissident, representatives and leaders of the oppressive regime, and, very importantly, international audiences. In his studies of dissidents as minorities of one, Moscovici devoted most of his attention to Andrei Sakharov and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who both struggled with the Soviet totalitarian regime by creating and sustaining conflict. Dissidents display moral and intellectual strength and personality characteristics in and through their fixed and consistent behavioural styles (Moscovici, a, b, b) that make their activities highly effective. They make themselves extremely visible, repeat their actions unfailingly, and avoid compromise in and through their courageous stance. Despite their courage, the dissident (the Self ) and the totalitarian regime (the Other) that binds them together are interdependent with the relevant Object, that is, the environment within which their activities take place. Let me explain. Solzhenitsyn was imprisoned towards the end of the Second World War for writing disrespectfully about Stalin. He was sent to a detention camp for eight years and afterwards exiled in Kazakhstan. He was rehabilitated after Khrushchev’s crushing of the cult of Stalin. Nevertheless, after his rehabilitation, he was strongly critical of the political regime and had difficulties in publishing his novels and stories. Moscovici (b) described the social-psychological features and behavioural style of Solzhenitsyn during the period from when he published his novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch until when he was expelled from the Soviet Union. Moscovici analysed the tension, conflicts, open and hidden polemics, forms of language and communication between Solzhenitsyn and the Politburo, and the mutual effects these conflicts had on both opposing parties (Marková, ). In contrast, Sakharov was a Communist in his youth and became a highly distinguished and talented scientist who, after the Second World War, worked on the development of the hydrogen bomb in a top-secret scientific department. The problem for him started when he became aware of the danger of the project in which he was taking part and when he realized he no longer agreed with the Soviet ideology. He vehemently fought against the Soviet Academy that supported Lysenko’s non-scientific project in biology and rejected the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in
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. Instead, he propagated civic rights, searched for guarantees of scientific and economic progress, of co-operation, which, he believed, would become a guarantee of political progress. Such views were divergent from the technocratic and Marxist perspective which emphasised material and economic conditions as the guiding forces in the history of humankind. The relations between the dissident and the regime transformed both parties: the dissident became even more entrenched in his activities and gained self-respect while the regime did not win and kept losing its respect from Others. Let us not forget that the environment is part of the triadic whole Self– Other–Object, in this case specifically the dissident – the regime – the politics of the regime. While Stalinism was an era of invented political trials during which any protest against the regime was severely punished, the Soviet regime of Solzhenitsyn’s and Sakharov’s epoch did allow the existence of dissidents. Although it treated them harshly because their activities posed a threat to the regime, the mere fact that the regime tolerated dissidence was sufficient for the system to reward itself with benevolence. Dissidents’ visibility, consistent style, and rigidity can be effective if and only if the socio-political conditions allow for their forceful impact. While their conscience dictated that they were truthful to their mission, they had to weigh up the contrasting responsibilities of their conscience and other people who were endangered by their political commitments. From the dissidents’ point of view, their protests against the violation of human rights, their fights for freedom of personal and religious expression, and for lawful institutions, were only one kind of responsibility with which they had to struggle. Equally importantly, their activities placed at risk their families and friends. In his autobiography that featured in his lecture during the Nobel prize ceremony, Sakharov (/) described that, during his dissident activities, he was removed from top-secret work and deprived of his privileges in the Soviet system. It was relations between the Self and Others that put pressure on Sakharov’s personal responsibilities and lay claims on his physical and mental powers: ‘For me, the moral difficulties lie in the continual pressure brought to bear on my friends and immediate family, pressure which is not directed against me personally but which at the same time is all around me’ (Sakharov, /, p. ). Sakharov recalled that he had written about these issues on many occasions; they kept returning forcefully and he was obsessed with the question about the purpose of his activities as well as those of his friends.
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He concluded that ‘only moral criteria, coupled with mental objectivity, can serve as a sort of compass in the crosscurrents of these complex problems’ (Sakharov, /, p. ). ..
The Disaster of Grenfell Tower in London
The second example concerns the multiple Self–Other relations following the catastrophe of the Grenfell Tower fire on June in which seventy-two people tragically died. Taking a dialogical perspective, the researcher Flora Cornish () has undertaken an ethnographic study of this catastrophe. Her work is an excellent example of accounting for dialogical relations that take place within the Self, between the Self and members of the community, and between the Self, community, and institutions. Without referring to social scientific theories, she shows how responsibility, ethics, aesthetics, acting, and themata (hope/despair) all interrelate in ‘collective actions’. These phenomena are part of the daily actions of people who experienced the disaster and its consequences. ... Humanising Actions beyond Hope and Despair Cornish explains that, while public health literature concerned with difficulties caused by ill health usually focuses on ‘collective actions’ as being successful, the experience of activism after Grenfell has been characterised by frustrating partial wins, inertia, delays, and setbacks or what she calls ‘activism beyond hope and despair’. She describes how the affected individuals transformed into activists demanding changes in public policies to ensure that such a tragedy would never happen again. Collective actions of survivors of the catastrophe and their struggle with institutions implicated by this event recall Hegel’s concept of humanizing action (see earlier). For Hegel, a humanizing action is a feature of the struggle for social recognition, that is, for the struggle to be acknowledged as a human being by other humans. He focused on aesthetics as a concrete creative activity of humans as free beings who try to master their environment and make it part of their own nature. Cornish’s term ‘activism’ refers to ‘seeking and creating change in one’s community and nationally’ (Cornish, , p. ). She explains that she is developing a perspective on activism that is not modelled on a linear journey to succeed or fail ‘defined by milestone achievements, but a frustrating and messy journey incorporating setbacks, delays, time-wasting, and precious glimpses of worlds worth fighting for’ (Cornish, , p. ). This messy journey is accounted for in six trajectories in which agency of
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the community is beset by setbacks. The activists use these trajectories in their efforts to achieve change: a fire safety campaign, engagements with a public inquiry, campaigns to preserve community assets, community gardening, silent walks, and provision of support to children at a community centre. They fight the political unwillingness to change the structure of existing rules; they respond both to internal (weak and de-politicised attitudes) and external obstacles (e.g., structural determinants of institutions). Within this complex situation, Cornish considers failures of community activism together with the resilience of the community, focusing on hope and despair as dialogical phenomena. She treats them simultaneously as one activity transforming into the other and requiring new kinds of responsibility, engagement, ethical care, and aesthetic commitments when conditions change and develop over time. Cornish (, p. ) observes: ‘Beyond hope and despair is the staying power of communities who value human life and solidarity and keep fighting for them.’ In Bakhtin’s terms, the survivors’ humanizing actions with respect to one another are performed in the full sense of the Self and the Other recognising and respecting one another (ethical consideration) while recognising the otherness of one another (aesthetic relation). Here, we have a concrete example in which ethics and aesthetics of their activities coincide in mutual interlinking. ... They ‘Made Flowers Grow Where It Seemed Impossible’ The human being is an artistic being and although ‘art and life are not one, they become united in and through the Self’s responsibility’ (Bakhtin, /, p. ). Following the days after the disaster, post-Grenfell residents gathered in an empty space nearby. They exchanged information, spontaneously recounted their experiences, and sorted and distributed donations. Cornish (, p. ) comments: ‘Artworks produced by children in special workshops were displayed along railings; young people painted arresting murals and unanswered questions about culpability on the walls. One wall was painted white and marked with panels to be filled in, titled a “wall of truth” for a “people’s public inquiry”.’ Gardening in soil contaminated by toxic residue of the fire became an activity to which volunteers devoted a great deal of energy and commitment. They took some precautions with respect to safety but the beauty of their products and commitments to keep plants growing was in exact opposite to the ‘unreliability that characterised the experience of engaging
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with authorities to bring about change. A garden, obviously, depends upon continual care and “staying power”’ (Cornish, , p. ). In their struggle to achieve partial wins, each ‘win’ being laden with problems, the activists attempted to re-establish their value as humans: ‘We’ve gotta do something, you know, these kids can’t be sat in that’ (Cornish, , p. ). That ‘something’ was inspired by the image of a ‘paradise built in hell’. Cornish (, p. ) refers to the value of these visions because without visions of the future, one could not go ahead: ‘Beyond hope and despair is the staying power of communities who value human life and solidarity and keep fighting for them.’ ... Dialogical Silence Bakhtin insisted that dialogue is not just a here-and-now event or an episode or even a socio-cultural process that involves an interdependence between the Self and Others; instead, he conceived the whole authentic human life as a continuous and open-ended dialogue: ‘Life by its very nature is dialogic. To live means to participate in dialogue: to ask questions, to heed, to respond, to agree and so forth. In this dialogue a person participates wholly and throughout his whole life: with his eyes, lips, hands, soul, spirit, with his whole body and deeds’ (Bakhtin, , p. ). Dialogue does not need words and, indeed, under certain circumstances, words may become offensive. Cornish (, p. ) explains that ‘Since the fire, on the th day of every month, in respect, memory, solidarity and for some, silent protest, hundreds, often thousands of people have gathered for an hour-long silent procession along the streets of Kensington, ending with a -second silence facing the Tower, in memory of the lives lost.’ The organisers of silent walks called for quiet: ‘the gathering shuffles into the road and silence descends, with the bereaved and survivors at the front, everyone else filing in behind. We walk slowly, filling up the street, requiring traffic to wait, with regular halts slowing our progress, filling the street with a sombre silence’. Daniel Renwick powerfully expresses the intense significance of the silence with his poem ‘We Walk in Silence’: We walk in silence because words so often offend. [. . .] We walk in silence because we cannot say a word that the events of the th June don’t speak for us (Renwick, ). (Cornish, , pp. –)
Cornish emphasises that the silence is crucial in this activity: ‘The walk is an expression of agency without a specified demand, goal, or end-point,
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and this openness has allowed the creation of a sustained, diverse community of people who might well argue if they were in a room discussing tactics and plans together. Staying power is also intrinsic to the walk’ (Cornish, , p. ). I have re-described Cornish’s compelling ethnographic study in detail because it is hardly possible to refer to it without losing the impact that her exposé has on the reader. Cornish does not use any social scientific terminology and does not explicitly refer to any theory. Despite that, she forcefully accounts for interdependencies between Selves, Others, and Objects in their strongest dialogical relations of ethics, aesthetics, responsibility, and commitment and their dynamic transformations.
. Conclusion Moscovici insisted that the triadic Ego–Alter–Object model forms the core of the theory of social representations and communication: most importantly, it involves not only intellectual qualities but relationships and interaction of participants in their mutual construction of social representations and of processes of influence. The model has the capacity to show how knowledge is organised in society, how language is used, how social movements develop, and how social change is achieved. In this chapter, I have drawn attention to the rich potentialities of the triadic model in relation to dialogical intellectual interactions, ethics, aesthetics, responsibility, and engagement on the one hand and to populism and distortion of the model on the other. Interdependencies between intellectual, interactional, and relational qualities within the Ego–Alter– Object are particularly apparent in difficult life situations that mobilise human capacities to act. They can be grasped through their specific aspects (Cassirer, , p. ) which, however, must be conceived as parts of the whole phenomenon. For example, a piece of rock (Gillespie and Zittoun, ) could be a gift; or artists could appreciate effects of light when the rock is seen in the sun; the rock could be thrown to hurt someone; it could be used for chemical analysis. In each case, it is viewed by the communicative participants according to their projects which view that object in a specific way. Consequently, in each such representation, humans may create an infinite chain of meanings that continuously change due to the significance of an event in which the object takes part.
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Social Representations as Unique Phenomena: Dynamics and Complexity
I shall now highlight two features of the dialogical approach to the theory of social representations and communication. First, I shall reiterate and expand on my proposal that each phenomenon of social representations and communication is unique and that, therefore, it must be studied as a dialogical single case revolving around the Ego–Alter–Object. Second, from the very beginning, Serge Moscovici conceived social representations as complex and dynamic phenomena. Let us recall that Norbert Wiener’s ideas on cybernetics, system theories, information, and communication were among the important intellectual resources which inspired Moscovici’s thoughts about the theory of social representations and communication (Chapter ). Even before Moscovici published Psychoanalysis in , he had acknowledged that the dynamics and complexity of social representations barred their treatment as single and static independent or dependent variables. These two features, the uniqueness of the triadic model Ego–Alter–Object and the dynamic and complex nature of social representations, raise unresolved theoretical and methodological questions that require consideration even if solutions cannot be readily provided.
. Dialogical Single Cases The present preoccupation of psychology with repeatability and reproducibility of findings necessarily challenges the assumption of the triadic model, which emphasises its uniqueness, dynamics, and complexity. If something is unique and dynamic, this implies that it is not repeatable and reproducible. Many researchers adopt Popper’s classic claim that ‘nonreproducible single occurrences are of no significance to science’ (Popper, /, p. ). In view of this claim, let us insist that the problem of
A growing number of publications, academic meetings, and conferences shows the alleged importance of this problem. Psychologists who wish to claim the scientific status of their
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non-reproducibility cannot be properly understood without turning our attention to at least two epistemological issues. First, studies of humans as symbolic agents whose activities are interdependent with their societal, cultural, and historical environments are not comparable with analyses of biological and physical entities. Analyses of human, biological, and physical phenomena are of different kinds. Therefore, the problem of non-reproducibility that makes sense in the natural sciences, and which could possibly be resolved in methodological and statistical ways, is not applicable in the study of humans as symbolic agents. Consequently, studies of humans as symbolic agents must contribute to the advancement of knowledge in ways other than attempts to obtain the same results when ‘repeated’ in different conditions. The second epistemological issue concerning non-repeatability refers to questioning of the accepted way of doing science. European intellect and its conception of science committed itself to the power of ancient Greek rationality (e.g., Crombie, ). This kind of rationality determined the ways in which scientific inquiries were subsequently endorsed or sanctioned and influenced how technologies and practical skills were carried out. It developed a standard by means of which humans make judgements about ‘correct’, ‘incorrect’, ‘subjective’, and ‘objective’ phenomena. It proposed the ways in which phenomena are classified and subdivided into categories and directed decisions concerning what is and what is not meaningful. Crombie () analysed the Greek perspective of causality, verification, and proof that underlay their arguments and decisions in the studies of nature and emphasised that the Greek concept of rationality was quite specific. He observed that this rationality, which became the driving force of Western scientific thought, did not exist anywhere else in ancient civilisations, for example, in Babylonia, Egypt, China, India, or Maya. Although these civilisations developed sophisticated theorising and explanations of nature, they were based on different principles to those proposed by the Greeks. Various cultures developed their own specific styles, techniques, expectations, abstract mathematical systems, taxonomies, and astronomical and medical speculations by means of which they observed discipline search for causes of the lack of repeatability in statistical inaccuracies and in methodological errors; others propose that the transparency of replications should be improved or they propose other remedies, for example, different types of replications. Still others observe that the problem of repeatability is smaller in the areas of psychology concerned with universal phenomena that are not dependent on social, cultural, and historical contexts such as cognitive psychology (Baucal et al., ).
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regularities in natural phenomena. Since these cultures were engaged in their own principles of thought, it would be difficult to compare them without violating those principles and without trying to reduce one cultural system into the other. Therefore, each system of thinking must be evaluated individually on its own merits (Crombie, ). The Greek concepts of universality and rationality applied not only to the sciences but also to general knowledge, the arts, and legal, moral, aesthetic, and political activities. This tradition of thinking has established itself so deeply that it became unthinkable for European scientists and scholarship to accept that there could be multiple ways of doing science. Although throughout history such suggestions that various kinds of thought must be explored in distinct ways have been raised, the concepts of universals and of principles associated with one kind of rationality still prevail. Yet, so versatile were the minds of the ancient Greeks that, while they discovered the style of rationality based on universality, they also introduced a method of scientific exploration through studying single cases. The Hippocratic case descriptions in medicine in the fourth century BC are considered as the beginnings of case recordings in Western culture (Epstein, ). While not much was added during the Middle Ages, renewed interest in Hippocratic medicine came in the Renaissance. In the seventeenth century, observation and the taking of a medical history of a single patient subsequently led to ‘the professional institutionalisation of medicine’ (Epstein, , p. ) and has become common in medical narratives (Pomata, ). Meanwhile, astronomy and physics have always progressed through the study of single cases because planets and physical phenomena have usually been discovered by the observation of unique events. In contrast, the legitimacy of case studies in social sciences is often discussed and disputed. Social scientists frequently feel obliged to defend their uses of case studies (e.g., Crasnow, , ; Gerring, ) and to justify their logic. They are compelled to respond to questions from critics such as whether single cases are methods of study, ways of thinking, or methods of discovery and learning, or whether they are communicative genres (e.g., Morgan, ; Class, ; Pomata, ). Despite that, gradually, case studies have been acknowledged as one way of doing social science. The slow recognition of the use of single case studies has led to multiple attempts to define what constitutes single cases and to review the advantages and contradictions of their use (e.g., Ragin and Becker, ; Forrester, ; Flyvbjerg, ; Gerring, ; Morgan, ). Many
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proposed definitions of single case studies overlap and researchers often borrow ideas from one another. Among these, Morgan’s () broadly based definition can be applied across different disciplines, for example, organisational, physical, medical, biological, social, and otherwise. Morgan insists on a holistic approach to the object under investigation rather than on fragmenting it into elements; she emphasises that the whole is an openended event existing in a real-life environment; the researcher must explore relations among elements using diverse methods; and different kinds of evidence concerning that case must be tied together. The fundamental features of this complex definition are not only the perspective of wholeness but, equally important, multidimensional relations among elements of the studied whole, leading to a coherent pattern of findings. While this definition of single case studies seems to be applicable across many domains, it is likely that each discipline will adapt it to its specific purposes. All features of this comprehensive definition are pertinent to Moscovici’s original study of social representations of psychoanalysis. In addition, however, as a dialogical single case study, the theory of social representations and communication focuses on the triad Ego–Alter– Object, which expresses its unique and dynamic characteristics: •
The theory of social representations of psychoanalysis studied a real-life phenomenon, which circulated in society in and through language and communication. It explored one-to-one interdependencies between participants from different professional, cultural, and political backgrounds and their environments. Moscovici also analysed how psychoanalysis was presented in newspapers and magazines of diverse ideologies and of different religious and political convictions. • The bounded whole was constituted in two ways: in Part I of Psychoanalysis, the bounded whole was circumscribed by individuals from different strata in society to explore their understanding, descriptions, and meanings of psychoanalysis; this included the role of the psychoanalyst, knowledge and comprehension of terms connected with psychoanalysis by lay people, and other issues. In Part II, the bounded whole was confined to newspapers and magazines published during the period from January to March to analyse their presentations of psychoanalysis. Moscovici observed relevant concrete social and political events and these, too, entered his writing. • Moscovici conducted his study in France in the late s. At that time, psychoanalysis was of interest to the public; it was the subject of
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conversations, arguments, and negotiations. The mass media reported political, educational, and ideological perspectives and these were apparent in participants’ responses in interviews. In , when Moscovici published the second edition of Psychoanalysis, he acknowledged that to capture the altered social representations, new data would have to be collected due to changes in the political and cultural scene. • Moscovici used numerous research methods and techniques. These included interviews, notebook questionnaires, observations, and analyses of contents and linguistic features of journals and magazines. He also made relevant ethnographic observations, noted pertinent political events, and described the ways in which the participants were involved in the study. • Moscovici published Psychoanalysis as a book. Single articles in journals would not do justice to a complex and dynamic single case study such as his, which required its holistic treatment to be fully understood. Similar cases of single case studies published either as a book or presented as a PhD thesis include, for example, Jodelet (/), Kalampalikis (), Priego-Hernández (), Chauhan (), Nicholson (), among others. To conclude, while single case studies can be carried out in any situation that involves a complex singular event, for example, a town or an industry, dialogical single case studies are confined to events that concentrate on interactions between the Self and Others in relation to some Objects in their environment. The Self and Others evaluate their mutual actions, communicative intentions, and interpret their mutual ethical and aesthetic conduct.
. Dynamics and Complexity Moscovici originally thought that cybernetics would help him to develop a theoretical basis for treating social representations as dynamic and complex phenomena. But how does one study dynamics empirically? How does one define a complex phenomenon? There are no easy answers to these questions. Dynamics are observed in changes as time passes but time can be conceived in multitudes of ways. Psychological studies of time usually define human life as a journey, passing through stages starting with birth, going through childhood, adolescence, adulthood, to old age and death. In
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this sense, time refers to a progressive succession of events which evoke the image of moving clock hands or the sequential ticking of biological or social moments. Longitudinal studies usually measure various aspects of mental and behavioural time at certain periods to grasp the relevant changes in learning, understanding, and comprehending logical rules in children or of the cognitive decline in old age. Such changes are usually expressed in a linear form as a succession of incidents over time. Time, conceived as the passing of moments, is distinguished from temporality which is described in psychological literature as a subjective experience, reflecting the uniqueness of an individual’s life. The subjective experience of time comprises the idea of the simultaneity of living events, consisting of multiple continuities and discontinuities (Zittoun et al., ; Simão, Guimarães, and Valsiner, ). Individuals and groups experience life events either as a comprehension of what happens to them, as an active involvement, or even as a mixture of comprehending and active involvement. In referring to ‘time’ and ‘temporalities’, researchers frequently use the term ‘dynamics’ to underscore changes, developments, transformations, or movements in given situations. ‘Dynamics’ of time and temporalities are pursued in many directions (e.g., linear versus non-linear time; linear as mechanical time versus fluid time; multidirectional versus unidirectional time; chronometric versus experiential time; and so on). These directions can be explored historically, culturally, or psychologically (Simão, Guimarães, and Valsiner, ). When we turn to ‘complexity’, here, again, many questions arise. How does one define a complex whole? Let us recall Cassirer’s () argument that in studying a whole, a researcher must be aware of the whole even if he/ she studies a single aspect of that whole (Chapter ). But who has the privilege of deciding what constitutes the whole? Humans live among many ‘complex wholes’ and not everything that is physically present in front of their eyes is accessible to their perception, attention, or cognition and, therefore, such missing knowledge precludes grasping the whole. Moreover, phenomena are not just things to be looked at but also to be acted upon; humans choose what is relevant for them and in what ways they wish to transform their physical, biological, and symbolic environment. For example, humans create institutions to cope with specific problems such as those in education, economy, politics, and so on. When their institutions no longer serve their needs and interests, they challenge, change, or abolish them. Dynamics and complexity, therefore, raise many problems for the theory of social representations and communication that have not been
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touched upon. However, to understand these problems, we must view dynamics and complexity not solely as social psychological phenomena but consider their interdisciplinary natures and roles in society. The concept of time is a difficult issue not only in psychology but also in the sciences, the arts, and in daily life. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, the problem of time in relation to space became of interest to many disciplines. New advances in technology, for example, aeroplanes, wireless telegraphs, X-rays, and radioactivity, among many others, continued to stimulate the imagination of professionals as well as of lay people. The notions of ‘time’ and ‘temporality’ became problematic in aesthetics and ethics (Chapter ). Before we embark on discussing dynamics and complexity in the theory of social representations and communication, we shall briefly consider them as issues of significant interest in various domains of contemporary life. This will enable us to understand that dynamics and complexity in a single social theory have their parallels in other domains, for example, in arts and sciences.
. Time and Temporality ..
The Four-Dimensional World
Problems of time in relation to space have for centuries preoccupied lay people as well as scientists and artists. Among these, ideas about the fourdimensional world came to the fore in the early years of the twentieth century. In drawing attention to these ideas, Arthur Miller () observes that the scientist Albert Einstein and the artist Pablo Picasso were exploring time and space at the same time as if by chance. Analysing this coincidence, Miller maintains that they both believed that the world could be explored beyond sensory appearances. Just as the theory of relativity overthrew the absolute status of time and space, so in painting cubism dethroned perspectivity in art. Miller also draws attention to interdependencies between disciplines. He suggests that, in Einstein’s study of time and space, it was not primarily mathematics but aesthetics that was vital to his discovery of relativity in and to his broader theory in . Picasso, Miller continues, was not interested simply in art but also in scientific developments. His famous painting Demoiselles of Avignon represents reduction of humans and of social phenomena to geometry. Picasso was also inspired by Cézanne who, too, was interested in the progress of science. Cézanne produced a spatial ambiguity by mixing foreground and
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background and by fusing objects and space in which they were placed. I have already referred to the paintings of Cézanne’s apples (Chapter ) and to the idea that such paintings might not represent a ‘still life’ but the painter’s struggle to express time and movement by means of spatial distortions. In the arts, just like in the sciences, the puzzle of time and space was widely debated in the early years of the twentieth century and questions of mutual influence among different disciplines were discussed and disputed. For example, the paintings of the melting clocks by Salvador Dalí were thought to be influenced by Einstein’s theory of relativity. As the story goes, Dalí, however, when asked about it, said that it was a piece of melting Camembert in the sun that gave him this idea. At the same time, however, Einstein’s theory of relativity penetrated the arts, literature, and organisations and inspired artists trying to represent time and movement. In his study on Einstein and Picasso, Miller () warns against superficial claims about these influences. The problem of the representation of time and space influenced both the sciences and arts in the same period as these disciplines were mutually affecting one another. Miller comments that the roots of science can never be discovered from science itself, just as the roots of art can hardly be reduced to the ideas emerging from arts alone. Due to these shared roots in a socially shared culture, boundaries between disciplines merge and may even totally disappear. A shared culture in a society leads to similar problems in different disciplines that involve forms of creativity and aesthetics. We can depict many attempts to represent the dynamism of the human body in cubism and futurism. For example, an Italian futurist painter and sculptor Umberto Boccioni represented unique forms of continuity in space. His painting Dynamism of a Cyclist inspired representations of the sense of movement and was copied and recreated many times by others. A cyclist was moving in time and space rather than being shown at a particular time. Speed, modern methods of transport, and the dynamism of modern life were represented as the bicycle and the figure of the cyclist, together with the surrounding space, were seemingly fused together in a single form. Boccioni created a whole sequence of dynamism paintings, for example, Dynamism of a Human Body, The Dynamism of a Soccer Player, and Dynamism of a Footballer. In philosophy and the social sciences in the early years of the twentieth century, inspiration about the nature of temporality came from Henri Bergson and his critique of what he called an absurd hypothesis that time is spread in space and that the succession of moments of time represents
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simultaneity (Bergson, , p. ). Bergson stated that the duration of time is not an extended succession that takes the form of a line in which individual points remain separate from each other. He explained that the idea of a line and successive points also implies that one can reverse the order and go back on that line and ‘obtain the same sensations over again in an inverse order: relations of position in space might then be defined as reversible relations of succession in time. But such a definition involves a vicious circle, or at least a very superficial idea of time’ (Bergson, , pp. –). Bergson argued that free will and the spontaneity of humans bring into conflict the two rival systems in nature, that is, dynamism and mechanism. Dynamism starts from the idea of voluntary activity guided by conscious free will. The source of human freedom is the immediate datum of consciousness that keeps it in mind. This means that simultaneity cannot be translated into succession. Instead, duration is ‘a wholly qualitative multiplicity, an absolute heterogeneity of elements which pass over into one another’ (Bergson, , p. ). Mechanisms follow the opposite course. They are concerned with facts controlled by necessary laws and causality, which translate simultaneity into succession. Dynamism and mechanism contradict one another. Bergson’s ideas of temporality were inspirational for dialogical scholars Mikhail Bakhtin and Andrei Tarkovsky who both related temporality to aesthetics and ethics (Erdinast-Vulcan, ). For Mikhail Bakhtin, human life must be primarily considered through the concept of temporality, which is a fundamental feature of his theory of dialogue and dialogicality. Dialogue does not follow any predetermined route but there are always infinite possibilities of ‘becoming’, that is, of transforming one state of discourse into another. In and through dialogue, humans create their future and destiny (Bakhtin, ). Inspired by Einstein and by Cassirer, Bakhtin developed the concept of chronotope, conceived as an individual’s experience (temporality) and location in which that experience takes place. All lived experience takes place in an indivisible unit of specific time and space, that is, in a chronotope (Bakhtin, b). Time has a specific psychological function in a particular condition (or space) and can diversify in multiple ways (Marková and Novaes, ). Chronotopes are active forms of experience and communication; they have value, are ethical, and are communicative: a chronotope provides the ground essential for action. Different chronotopes co-exist, are mutually interwoven, and they oppose and contradict one another: ‘The general characteristic of these interactions is that they are dialogical (in the broadest use of the
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Dialogical Perspective
word)’ (Bakhtin, b, p. , Bakhtin’s emphasis). Since for Bakhtin language is a concrete dialogical co-action, it is fundamentally chronotopic, that is, it is ethical, because it refers to the interdependent relations between Selves and Others. For Tarkovsky, time and temporality were fundamental to living. The word ‘time’ figures in the titles of two of his books, Sculpting in Time (Tarkovsky, ) and Time within Time (Tarkovsky, ). As he claims, time is a condition for human existence but it has meaning only when it is needed. How does one explain this? We get concerned with time when something pressurises us, that is, when we wish to realise ourselves, have desires, when we are trying to achieve happiness, have expectations for the future or are re-evaluating the past, or when we fear something or are anxious. All models of time and temporality are underlain by memory and Tarkovsky emphasises that this relation is very intimate. It underscores time as the lived experience in which ‘Time and memory merge into each other; they are like the two sides of a medal. It is obvious enough that without Time, memory cannot exist either’ (Tarkovsky, , p. ). Deprivation of memory would mean deprivation of the meaning of time; one would become ‘a prisoner of an illusory existence’; it would be like losing one’s relation to the outside world. Tarkovsky follows Bergson’s idea about the indivisibility of time into spatial moments, substituting it with the concept of duration. Duration rests within the consciousness of a person and cannot be analysed by means of the mathematical logic of sequences. States of consciousness are not successive but freely flowing and overlapping. The concept of duration is reflected in Tarkovsky’s aesthetics of ‘imprinted time’, that is, of time that can be firmly fixed. The measurement of time is a problem for psychologists because their verbal techniques, observations, and interviews cannot seize time. In contrast, cinematic techniques of the moving camera in a film aesthetically capture experienced time (temporality). In Tarkovsky’s analysis, the moving camera catches duration and merges real time and memory time. In a film as art, time is printed in its real forms and manifestations. Images of such ‘imprinted time’ in the cinema are stronger than words. By adopting this perspective, Tarkovsky departs from Bergson: Time is said to be irreversible. And this is true enough in the sense that ‘you can’t bring back the past’, as they say. But what exactly is this ‘past’? Is it what has passed? And what does ‘passed’ mean for a person when for each of us the past is the bearer of all that is constant in the reality of the present, of each current moment? In a certain sense the past is
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far more real, or at any rate more stable, more resilient than the present (Tarkovsky, , p. ).
Bergson is critical of mechanistic and one-dimensional time ordered on a line. Instead, for him, time is heterogeneous. For Tarkovsky, through a montage in cinema, time loses its irreversibility. And so in his autobiographical film The Mirror, Tarkovsky combines historical and personal time by intercutting childhood memory and political and cultural history, the Spanish Civil War, Russia–Germany in the Second World War, the Cultural Revolution, and the atomic bomb. At the same time, the entire film aspires to an indivisible time as Tarkovsky attempts to maintain the unity of time, space, and action. He collapses different temporal levels and perspectives: past and present, young and old woman, reality, memory, and dream, all of which seem to co-exist on the same material plane. Perhaps we may suggest that, just like for Bergson, these events co-exist in the same instant of consciousness. In her studies of biographies of people in extremely difficult situations, for example, experiencing war or imprisonment, Tania Zittoun explores individuals’ experience and imagination. For example, an individual imprisoned in Communist Czechoslovakia for political ‘crimes’ tried to survive extremely routinised daily life (Zittoun et al., , p. ). Zittoun refers to an interview with two historians of Hana Truncová, arrested when she was twenty-seven and condemned to thirteen years of imprisonment. She was released after nine years: I was thinking about my future life, I planned a family and was also thinking about things that happened. In my imagination I walked on trips, travelled and remembered my life. I would say that a prisoner lives again the life he has already lived. You remember everything from childhood, you remember people who were important to you. It is not that you would judge your life because you cannot change anything but in prison you appreciate the fact that you were able to live and that you enjoyed it (Zittoun et al., , p. , authors’ emphasis).
As pointed out in Chapter , extreme situations show the activity of individuals to its highest degree. Zittoun highlights the power of imagination in its ‘vital strength’. Let us return to Cornish’s () research (Chapter ) of Grenfell Tower. She emphasises that the model of activism that she presents is not a model of a linear journey to success or failure, defined by milestone achievements, but a frustrating and messy journey incorporating setbacks, delays, time-wasting, and precious glimpses of worlds worth fighting for. It
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Dialogical Perspective was the nature of activist struggles in the aftermath of Grenfell that led me to search for such a theory, not the theory that came first (Cornish, , p. ).
Cornish (, p. ) insists that notions such as ‘success’ and ‘failure’ are ‘incapable of seeing the simultaneity of the making and unmaking of a caring world’. Each of her six strategies of ‘the diverse and vibrant activisms’ (Cornish, , p. ) possesses its specific nature in which ethics and engagement with the problem dominate. This position, she emphasises, is relational (or we could say dialogical) but not relativist. Temporality appears in Cornish’s work in and through multiple actions that could not follow a linear progression. Instead, actions in her study are complex and simultaneous events, going forwards and backwards, merging the past, present, and future. Time is retrospectively re-interpreted and people construct meanings by planning new objectives and expectations. In these constructions, the past, present, and future are represented in many modalities in which temporality cannot be conceived as a linear progression. ..
Time and Temporality in Social Representations and Communication
Despite the captivating ideas about time, space, and temporalities in the sciences, arts, and daily experiences, until recently, these issues have not been dominant features of psychology, management, and organisational studies. Dawson and Sykes (, ) reviewed research in these areas and showed that theories of time have been mostly devoted to linear stories with traditional structures of storytelling with a beginning, middle, and end. They argue that, although discussions on narratives and sense-making are rapidly growing, they do not pay serious attention to temporal modalities and even if they discuss the non-linear modalities of stories, time and temporalities remain neglected. These authors underline that, in organisational studies and management, temporality as a subjective experience and moral guidance should play a crucial role. This role should come to the fore particularly during societal upheavals and disturbances. In contrast, however, these domains still use time to construct and reformulate ‘explanations’ of the past, present, and future. In the theory of social representations and communication, the inevitability of focusing on the problem of time was brought to attention by
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Bauer and Gaskell () in their construction of the Toblerone model. Having acknowledged Moscovici’s triadic model of the Ego–Alter–Object as the basic unit for the elaboration of common sense, the authors added to the model a time dimension, extending it both to the past and the future. The model, ‘objectified in the shape of the famous Swiss chocolate, serves as an image to capture the triangular relations in the context of time’ (Bauer and Gaskell, , p. ) and shows changes over time in the meaning of common sense. Since ‘Others’ refers to groups that develop and differentiate, various common senses prevail in manifold groups and produce ‘toblerones of different sizes, and twisted in elongation, and possibly with different numbers of toblerones at different times’ (Bauer and Gaskell, , p. ). In their later work, the authors acknowledged that linear models of transfer in communication have been criticised as being simplistic. Perhaps partly in view of this, they found their own model insufficient and expanded it to involve not only time but also the medium of communication (e.g., propaganda, diffusion) and the intergroup context, transforming the Toblerone model into a ‘wind rose’ (Bauer and Gaskell, ). In this multiple Toblerone model, petals of the wind rose represent different social milieus. A different approach to time is taken by Paula Castro. ‘Time’, alongside ‘institutions’, ‘conflict’, and ‘communication’, is one of the major components of Castro’s () studies of social representations focusing on the sustainability of environmental and ecological protection in climate change. She emphasises that relatively stable and continuously evolving representations are expressed in cultural and social forms in time and space. Castro presents a comprehensive review of studies that are concerned with the meaning-making of new laws and policies and their acceptance and rejection. She comments that many of these studies, while concerned with norms and changes, disregard the effect of time on these changes in focusing on individual and behavioural modifications rather than on social transformations (Batel and Castro, ). Castro () emphasises that time is not a variable to be studied on its own but must be conceived in the context of institutions and inter-group relations and of their conflicts. She also acknowledges the theoretical and practical value of research which examines change and stability in environmental laws and regulations and their impact on emotions, images, and practices. The study of time must investigate representations as linked to social, psychological, and psycho-social processes and to variations from one type of process to another.
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Dialogical Perspective .. Time and Space in Social Representations through History and Development
Not surprisingly, Moscovici was already aware in Psychoanalysis that the dynamics of time and space require historical treatment. In the second edition of Psychoanalysis, in a chapter titled ‘Fifteen years later’, Moscovici (/) explained that he had been asked by various parties to update his book and refer to changes in the views of the Communist Party’s antipsychoanalytic propaganda. Moscovici was aware that such updating would require not only collecting more data but that, given the political, cultural, and societal changes over fifteen years, it would be vital to put the new data into an updated perspective and to answer some serious questions: How was it that a Communist Party founded on the basis of a scientific doctrine rejected, at one time or another, most scientific innovations – from cybernetics to chemistry, from the Copenhagen version of quantum physics to psychoanalysis, – and accepted them only after a long delay? Why should people who, in the name of the Communist Party and Marxism, had acted as pitiless censors and exercised a sort of intellectual ‘terrorism’, either left the Party or adopted an intellectual attitude very similar to the one they once denounced so mercilessly and even pursued classic careers? (Moscovici, /, p. ).
Moscovici referred to the political, economic, and societal changes that took place during the fifteen years between the first and the second edition of Psychoanalysis. He brought attention to the interactions between intellectual and political circumstances, the transformation of scientists into politicians, and, then again, of politicians into scientists in their attempts to save their careers, to promote themselves, or to protect their families. In the domain of a child’s construction of knowledge, Duveen and Lloyd () conceptualised the dynamics of development on three planes: sociogenetic, ontogenetic, and microgenetic. The authors showed that such dynamics are due not only to cognitive processes but also transformations of values, ideas, and practices that are always embedded in communication whether interpersonal or mass-mediated. The sociogenetic perspective of social representations (Duveen and Lloyd, , p. ) implies that the structures of social representations must be conceived as constructions and as outcomes of developmental processes. The sociogenetic process generates social representations through groups diffusing and transforming knowledge. For example, the diffusion of scientific knowledge into the community and its reconstruction
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is driven, in many ways, by the multitude of social groups, thereby engendering different social representations. Duveen (b, ) argued that even if one studies a here-and-now problem, it must be viewed as rooted in culture and history. Ontogenesis refers to the development of individuals who are born into ‘a thinking society’ (Moscovici, a) which becomes a thinking environment for a child. It not only enables a rich network of interactions and possibilities for further development but also imposes restrictions and obligations that a child interiorises. Competing influences on a child give rise to possibilities for creating multifaceted representations. Microgenesis takes place in face-to-face interactions when people exchange ideas, discuss, create, and resolve conflicts. Language is fundamental to such interactions; in and through negotiations of their positions, participants evoke their social representations and bring out their identities, which they assert through their activities. This also implies that their final positions in interactions must differ from those they held at the beginning. Such changes in positions could be transitory or they may lead to more permanent modifications of participants’ representations and social identities (Chapter ). Of the three interdependent processes, sociogenesis, ontogenesis, and microgenesis, Duveen considered microgenesis as the primary process and the driver of the genetic transformation of social representations. Microgenesis engenders ontogenesis and sociogenesis and, therefore, a person’s representations of the world. Microgenesis inspired many of Duveen’s collaborators and students who followed up and developed his ideas in their studies of interaction (e.g., Psaltis, Gillespie, and PerretClermont, ; Zadeh and Cabra, ) and the pragmatics of communication problems in educational contexts (Perret-Clermont et al., ; Schubauer-Leoni and Grossen, ; Perret-Clermont, ).
. Complexity Until the middle of the twentieth century, the goal of many sciences was to discover universal laws of natural and social phenomena. This was to be achieved by exploring their constituent elements and to aggregate them into patterns, leading to explanation of the entire phenomena. New fields, such as information theory, cybernetics, and system theories, which came to the fore during the Second World War and its immediate aftermath, were fostered by the holistic idea of gestalt, structures, and communication in their dynamics and they adopted a non-linear concept of time (Byrne,
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; Byrne and Callaghan, ). They attempted to grasp concepts of large, unpredictable, and uncertain complex domains that were mutually related (e.g., Ramage and Shipp, ) using multiple methodological approaches. Multiple approaches that emphasise the complexity of events in daily and professional lives are often carried out under the name of ‘complexity theory’. Social scientists became preoccupied with the question of how humans make sense of convoluted phenomena in daily life and in professional practices. For example, how do humans understand the unpredictability of stock markets or the risks of money in banks? More generally, how do humans make decisions about coping with hazards in society and in nature? How do they treat dangers involving technological innovation, threats in road traffic, and so on? Legal systems, the courts, legal cases, and political unpredictability were seen in their complex perspectives. It was apparent that individual sciences and their classic approaches could not cope with such broadly based problems by decomposing them into elementary categories and their combinations (Gillespie, Howarth, and Cornish, ). Moscovici’s interest in cybernetics was an important resource for his thinking about social life and about the impact of technological advancements on communication. In addition to social representations (Moscovici, a; Herzlich, /; Jodelet, /), other domains such as sociology, phenomenology (Berger and Luckmann, ; Schu¨tz, ), ethnomethodology (Garfinkel, ), and management and business studies (Weick, ) brought their own agendas to the study of complex processes. The studies of discourse, the social construction of reality, the search for meanings and for social knowledge – all these coincided with the growing interest in complicated natural and social processes and in their developments aided by technological advancements. Complex organisations, institutions of management, businesses, and markets, have attempted to develop strategies that would make sense of
Kallemeyn et al. () explain that the notion of ‘complexity theory’ does not refer to any clear set of concepts but provides an umbrella term which embraces studies of complex systems using a mixture of methods. These studies claim to provide alternative approaches to the mechanistic conception of the world. ‘Complexity theory’ appears to share parallel histories with the methodological research into the use of mixed methods. Kallemeyn et al. () comment that the volume Complexity and the Social Sciences: An Introduction (Byrne, ), the first SAGE Handbook of Mixed Methods in Social and Behavioral Research (Teddlie and Tashakkori, ), as well as an interdisciplinary journal Emergence, launched in , all appeared approximately at the same time. They all focus on the question of what ‘complexity theory’ can offer to mixedmethods researchers.
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unique situations characterised by uncertainty and multitude of internal relations. These approaches highlight their differences by proposing specific terminologies. For example, some approaches emphasise sensemaking, others speak about meaning-making, about culture as a process, about narratives, storytelling, folk stories, interpretations, discourses, dialogues, and so on. All of them are underlain by the focus on the uniqueness of human agency and they stress that such agency is interdependent with socio-cultural, political, and economic conditions. The presupposition of the dynamic interdependence between agency and the conditions in which the phenomenon takes place mitigates against the aggregation of fragments of knowledge and formalised thinking. Instead, the study of complexity required complex thinking and this could not be achieved by breaking phenomena into their constituent categories and by aggregating data. ..
Complexity Requires Complex Thinking
The interest in cybernetics, information theory, system theories, and communication led to an explosion of publications in the natural and social sciences ranging from researchers such as Bertalanffy and Prigogine to Parsons, Maturana, Varela, and many others. Moscovici was interested in these new domains not only with respect to social representations but also in his studies of intricate interactions between humans and nature. In explaining interdependencies between nature and culture, humanity and animality, as well as conceiving nature as historical and humans as natural,
Since the s, Karl Weick, in organisational psychology (e.g., Weick, , ), was one of the pioneers of these efforts. Weick’s followers insist that sense-making, together with organising and storytelling, are crucial for understanding complex, uncertain, and ambiguous situations and actions in organisation and management studies (e.g., Colville, Brown, and Pye, ). The study of relations between sense-making and culture is also one of the main features of semiotic cultural psychology theory (Cremaschi et al., ), which defines culture as the dynamics of sense-making which is enacted by a social group and its participation in a common environment. This theory considers culture as a process in which participants interpret practices of social situations by mobilising various symbolic means, for example, rhetorical, pragmatic, and otherwise, based on Peirce’s semiotics. Among these trends, the notion of a ‘narrative’ has become a new fad dominating discussions in various domains. Starting from poetics and literature, ‘narrative’ was announced as a new approach in the humanities and social sciences. ‘Introduction to Narrative Science’ can be found in the titles of many books. The Narrative Science Project at the London School of Economics and Political Science explains that it explores the philosophical, historical, social, and epistemic functions of narratives (Morgan and Wise, ) in diverse fields, for example, anthropology, biology, chemistry, and engineering. Paskins and Morgan () emphasise that the notion ‘narrative’ means many different things, for example, scientific argumentations, metaphors, stories, graphs, pictures, or diagrams. In many cases, what looks like a superficial similarity is sufficient to call it a ‘narrative’.
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Dialogical Perspective
Moscovici (/) coined the phrase ‘biunique societies’ as a new episteme. The notion of ‘biunique’ implied a one-to-one relationship or one-to one interdependence between each society or community and its specific natural environment. In these dynamic and historical processes, both humans and nature transform through their mutual influences. Alongside Moscovici, the French philosopher and sociologist Edgar Morin was developing his ideas of system theory, complexity, and communication. Morin is deeply concerned with the epistemology of dialogical thinking which he has applied to explain the principles of complex systems. Morin, just like Moscovici, was involved in the ecological movement as early as the s and s. Just like Moscovici’s new episteme, Morin’s epistemology of dialogical thinking, which he called the Dialogical Principle, was motivated by the Hegelian/Marxian ideas about the dynamic and historical interdependencies of antagonistic processes. ..
The Dialogical Principle of Edgar Morin on Thinking in Complexity
Edgar Morin (e.g., , , ) defines complexity and complex thinking through three principles: the Dialogical Principle, the Principle of Organisational Recursivity, and the Hologrammatic Principle. The Dialogical Principle, inspired by Hegelian thought, regards antagonistic processes as indissociable from one another and as being related as complements. While classic scientific thinking strictly separated order from disorder, organised from disorganised states, and rationality from irrationality, Morin (, p. ) does not view opposites as excluding one another. Instead, the logical core of dialogical complexity is to treat ‘separability–inseparability, whole–parts, effect–cause, product–producer, life–death, homo sapiens–homo demens’ as complementary. Let us recall that Moscovici, too, in Psychoanalysis (), had already argued that social representations had the characteristics of complex dialectic thinking leading to social knowledge. In introducing objectification, he considered antagonistic processes as complements. Objectification was constructed as a transposition of categories such as hidden versus apparent, involuntary versus voluntary, or inner versus outer. Individuals select relevant categories and assemble them into meaningful patterns that express their values,
In , Serge Moscovici published a paper in the Revue Communications entitled ‘Nos sociétés biuniques’. This paper was re-issued in in a Special Issue of this Revue to reflect on the rich, diverse, and provocative ideas published in the Revue over the past fifty years. Among the persons who contributed to this Special Issue were Edgar Morin, Theodor Adorno, Umberto Eco, Roland Barthes, and Serge Moscovici, among other well-known intellectuals of the time.
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images, and beliefs to enable them to understand objects in the outside world. The dynamic organisation of patterns transforms itself because of newly selected, deselected, and reselected categories (Chapter ). Morin’s Principle of Organisational Recursivity can be viewed as an extension of the Dialogical Principle. Morin argues that dependence and independence between antagonistic pairs form the basis of life. One cannot be autonomous without being dependent on one’s environment for matter, energy, knowledge, and information: ‘The more autonomy will develop, the more multiple dependencies will develop . . . the autonomy cannot be conceived without its ecology’ (Morin, , p. ). This process involves both self-generation and self-production, that is, the producer–product are in a recursive loop breaking down the classic cause–effect relationship. Society arises from interactions among humans and their products such as culture, emergencies, or language. In this way, products merge with producers. The Hologrammatic Principle, the third feature of complexity and of complex thinking, also extends the Dialogical Principle. It emphasises the special relation between the whole and its parts: the part is present in the whole and, equally important, the totality of the whole in terms of the sociogenetic heritage is part of each cell of an individual. In other words, society is present in every individual through language, social norms, and culture and, equally, every individual is present in society by being able to use language and conform to social norms and cultural standards (Morin, ). Let us recall here Cassirer’s () diction that the whole can be grasped through ‘seeing’ it in a particular ‘aspect’. This means that even if the researcher explores a very minute problem, he/she views it not as a single element but as an element embedded in the whole of which it is a part (also see Duveen, , ). But how does one define the ‘whole’? Morin is sceptical of using the concepts of ‘whole’ and ‘holism’ and, instead, he (Morin, /) speaks about the ‘system’. The ‘system’, together with ‘interaction’ and ‘organisation’, form an unbreakable unit, each concept implying the other two. In contrast, Morin insists that ‘holism’, just like reductionism, is a simplifying one-dimensional principle because it does not explain that one cannot know the parts without knowing the whole and vice versa. The interdependence between parts and the whole is not a vicious circle but the constructive circularity that had already been announced by both Blaise Pascal in the seventeenth century (Morin, , p. ) and by Hegel (/) in the nineteenth century. Morin (/) views the system as a macro-unity in which the elements are not fused but, instead,
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Dialogical Perspective
have two identities. An identity belongs to each part as an individual entity and one cannot reduce it to the system; the system consists of the internal diversity within the unity. This leads Morin (/) to conclude that the system is both greater than the sum of the parts and less than the sum of the parts. The latter component of this claim refers to the inhibited or suppressed qualities of the elements which are constrained by the way in which the system is organised and, therefore, they do not play their full role in the system (making it less than the sum of the parts). .. The Ecological Thinking of Morin’s Dialogical Principle and of Moscovici’s Biunique Societies as a New Episteme I pointed out that in the study of psychoanalysis, Moscovici paid attention both to the data collected from his participants and to the socio-cultural and political environment in which these data were collected. In other words, he adopted an ecological perspective in the study of social representations that, later, he developed in his new episteme. Equally, Morin’s Dialogical Principle is an ecological one involving the complementarity of opposing parties in their spiral development. Both Moscovici’s new episteme and Morin’s Dialogical Principle go far beyond Hegelian/Marxian dialectics. Dialectics is an interactive back-andforth process between opposing parties leading to a progression of the participating elements or of participants’ arguments in their effort to arrive at, or at least approximate, the truth. This implies the concept of stages hierarchically organised from less adequate to more adequate forms. Both Moscovici and Morin abandon ‘hierarchy’ as an organising principle of the system (Morin, , ). In rejecting hierarchy as an organising principle of the system, Morin’s Dialogical Principle () prioritised system, interaction, and organisation. Links between order and disorder, autonomy, and dependence may be both complementary and antagonistic at the same time and involve a constant transfer from elementary to global relations, from certainty to
Morin’s argument against fusing of elements, and the retaining of their own identities, recalls Bakhtin’s ideas against dialogical fusing of the Self and Other. Dialogical relations create both peace and tension, clashing with and evaluating one another (e.g., Bakhtin, a, p. ). Oppositions coincide in the world of becoming (for details, see Marková, , ). Let us note that Morin’s dialogical thinking is not derived from Bakhtin’s dialogicality but from Hegel’s thought. While Morin prioritises the dynamic interaction of opposites (system–part, order– disorder, etc.), Bakhtin prioritises complementarity and diversity between the Self and Other in dialogical communication.
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uncertainty, inseparability to separation, implosion to explosion. Through these complementary and antagonistic interdependencies, systems spontaneously self-organise and self-regulate themselves. Moscovici () rejected the concept of hierarchical stages both as a form of explanation and as one of development because they implied a predetermined hierarchical order, for example, Piagetian stages. In discarding ‘hierarchy’, Moscovici (/) stated that the alternative to ‘hierarchy’ is not anarchy, promiscuity, or randomness but ‘heterarchy’, which means that tasks between individuals and groups are distributed to coordinate their actions in co-operation. Although the whole takes precedence over parts in such relations of companionship, they are not in hierarchical relation to one another. Heterarchy presupposes a decentralised organisation which safeguards a degree of freedom and establishes a reflexive relationship between parts. Drawing on Moscovici’s emphasis of the human–nature relationship, Caillaud () views nature as a historically and culturally constructed process during which humans interact with matter. This raises ecological questions about the protection of nature and whether these or those practices are ecological. The human relationship with nature reveals a great deal about the relationships between humans and Caillaud uses a dialogical approach to explore human–nature relationships, showing that, due to these relationships, different cultures provide different perspectives on social representations. In exploring German and French Ego–Alter– Object triads, she concludes that ecological practices are anchored in time, social groups, and in their conflicts and co-operation. .. Complexity in the Studies of Social Representations and Communication Although many researchers exploring social representations of health, illness, political issues, and various events in daily life are aware of the uniqueness, dynamics, and complexity of these phenomena, it is only recently that we find their holistic treatments in situated sociocultural environments. Caillaud et al. () focus on the question of how one can capture the holistic nature of social representations methodologically. Specifically, they argue for the use of triangulation not as a method of validation but as a source of furthering knowledge. The use of different methods reflects different theoretical perspectives on the subject matter. Research methods must confront unanswered theoretical questions, for example,
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Dialogical Perspective
local versus global knowledge, the individual versus group, historical versus future visions, and otherwise. The authors show that triangulation can capture ‘objective’ culture (the press), institutional culture (history schoolbooks), and ‘subjective’ culture (e.g., interviews) in a holistic manner (Kalampalikis, ). In their study of the socio-cultural complexity in social representations of cancer in the occupied Palestinian territory, Albarghouthi and Klempe () discovered overarching themes and sub-themes ranging from participants’ views on medical interventions through to paradoxes, ambiguities, vagueness, and uncertainties to religious, symbolic, and metaphoric expressions concerning cancer. These representations included a mixture of biomedical, socio-cultural, religious, and political interpretive frames. Questions about concealing and revealing the reality of the illness penetrated the manifold of discourses within an individual, family, and society. Attempts to draw the line of what could be said and what was a taboo topic brought to attention the force of value systems, cognitive polyphasia, and the dynamic movements of oppositions such as restrictive–fluid, curable– incurable, and otherwise. Complex thinking goes far beyond the acknowledgement that behaviour must be studied using different research methods. This was well understood by Daniel Walsh () in his research on students’ representations of a mental health problem. In taking a generative approach to research, Walsh developed a multi-level design in situated and dynamic contexts that maintained an open and reflexive orientation during the process of data collection, analysis, and interpretation, all of which contributed to an understanding of the complex problem and its boundaries (Walsh and Foster, ). This multi-level research design incorporated the study of cognitive polyphasia using coding as well as in-depth thematic analysis. Such a design enabled him to explore polyphasia in each type of data collection which had its own dynamics in the formation and transformation of meanings, knowledge, and actions. Through triangulation, Walsh became aware of the latent and contextual processes that were part of meaning-making. In exploring cognitive polyphasia in three different corpora, he found that social representations of mental health and illness are characterised by ambiguity, uncertainty, pluralities, and conflict and that their contents are often expressed through icons, images, metaphors, or symbols. These examples bring into focus new ideas for the further development of research designs in the study of social representations and communication. Specifically, incorporating theoretical concepts into research designs
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during the process of data collection, analysis, and interpretation brings the theory of social representations and communication into the centre of attention in comprehending unique, complex, and dynamic real-life phenomena.
. Conclusion Although many researchers acknowledge that the theory of social representations and communications is concerned with unique, dynamic, and complex phenomena, the study of these phenomena poses exacting theoretical and methodological questions. Theoretically, the uniqueness of the triadic model Ego–Alter–Object affirms that social representations can be grasped only in their unrepeatable movements and transformations. Methodologically, social representations cannot be studied by decomposing the unique whole into elements and analysing them using traditional statistical techniques. Instead, social representations must be examined as dialogical single cases using a comprehensive approach, that is, studying them as the bounded wholes in real-life events, treating them as openended, and analysing them through multiple techniques. Although the concepts of dynamics and complexity figured very early in Moscovici’s thoughts, they are only now becoming incorporated into theoretical and empirical studies of social representations. Since the concepts of uniqueness, dynamics, and complexity are indispensable in the study of complex life events, advancements in the theory of social representations and communication may impact on human activities in many spheres of life such as sciences, arts, professions, and daily experiences.
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The Making of Dialogical Theories
we need to abandon the idea that the history of the field, or the relevant practices of the scientists in general, supports the claim that there is ‘a’, or ‘the’ theory of quantum mechanics, as a unitary and well-delineated entity, with definite identity conditions
(French, , p. )
In his critique of social psychology, Serge Moscovici used to say that our discipline tends to study simple phenomena that are already commonly known and that, therefore, it brings about boredom by postulating trivial hypotheses about familiar events. Moreover, it proposes one- or twosentence theories based on the manipulation of simple variables that are reminiscent of ‘bubba psychology’, that is, of constantly repeated ‘grandmothers’ stories’ lacking new ideas. These simplistic theories fundamentally differ from the aspirations of science, including social science, to explore strange and unknown phenomena. Hence, Moscovici characterised the theory of social representations and communication as an exploration of unfamiliar and mysterious phenomena based on an intricate range of resources. For him, the puzzling nature of complex relations between the individual and society and of ‘Otherness’ were matters of major concern. In this final chapter, I shall return to Moscovici’s questions set in the Introduction to see in what ways they have been met: first, who is the Other, that is, how does the individual create a sense of other people, and, second, who is the individual and what is society? Originally, for
‘Bubba’ means ‘grandmother’ in Yiddish. ‘Bubba psychology’, or demonstrating the obvious, was a widely discussed subject matter after the War (Moscovici and Marková, , pp. –; Kelley, ; McGuire, , among others). For example, Hovland and Weiss (), in their studies of communication and persuasion, postulated a hypothesis that a message from a scientific source was more trusted and therefore more persuasive than one from an untrustful Soviet Communist newspaper Pravda. Other examples of demonstrating obvious truths in laboratory manipulations of simple variables were noted by McGuire ().
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Moscovici, these questions were brought about by his drastic experiences of the War and antisemitism: the Other was someone who might facilitate close intersubjective relations but, equally, might be brutal and inhuman. Individuals and groups are not undefined entities without history, culture, and face but are agents who construct their social worlds whether for better or for worse. These two questions are not independent of each other. Although the Self can make sense of the Other through signs, symbols, and objects in the triadic model, it is the individual (or the Self and the Other) who lives in society and functions in his/her unique socio-cultural and political environment. With these considerations, we shall first conceive the creator of a social theory (or of other creative activities) in his/her involvement in different kinds of dialogues between the Self, Others, and their socio-cultural and political environments. Second, we shall consider the achievements of the theory of social representations and communication in relation to its aspirations.
.
Social Theories as Dialogues
The making of an exceptional dialogical theory is a process simultaneously involving multiple interactions and dialogues between the creator of a theory and numerous other factors. They provide us with rich evidence of: • struggles between creative individuals and powerful institutions dominated by political, ideological, and religious forces • general patterns of thought in specific time periods due to cultural and historical influences • dialogues between the creative individual and his/her audiences (e.g., peers, the public) • internal dialogues of the creative individual with his/her doubts, hopes, and imagined Others. Although there is nothing new about referring to the existence of these different kinds of dialogues, their roles in the making of dialogical theories have rarely been considered. The planes on which such dialogues take place are interlinked, mutually transforming one another. While bearing in mind their interlinkages, I shall present different kinds of dialogues separately to see their specific characteristics so that one can comprehend the interdependencies involved within and between these types. These dialogues have a vital effect not only on the understanding and interpretation
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of a theory by other researchers, professionals, and the public but also on its proliferation in textbooks and in education. .. Dialogues between Creative Individuals and Sociopolitical Environments Histories of the natural and social sciences and humanities reveal in considerable detail and erudition the dynamics of the emergence, maintenance, and transformation of scientific theories and non-scientific innovations. One may remind oneself not only of the abysmal fates of Giordano Bruno or Galileo Galilei, who were persecuted by the Church several hundred years ago, but also of recent examples of the denunciation of scientific discoveries due to ideological convictions. For example, Vucinich () provides a colourful history of the stages showing the acceptance and condemnation of Einstein’s theory of relativity in the Soviet Union during the period from to . These stages corresponded to internal economic and political fights and to the ways in which the Communist Party interpreted and reinterpreted science and exercised control over the country. The collapse of a political regime leads to rewriting not only the history of a country but also that of scientific theories and the arts as the new masters reinterpret the imagined past of scientific discoveries and of their creators. While this is well known in both the natural and social sciences, rewritten histories are more conspicuous in the social sciences and humanities because these disciplines are enmeshed in complex societal issues. They are more deeply entangled in ideologies and politics, such as struggles for human rights and equality of opportunities, among other things, where the interdependence between forceful external events and constraints on social thinking come to the fore. Just like the sciences, the arts, too, are subjected to ideological intimidation. Let us recall artists, such as the painters and musicians who, during the s and after, were persecuted in the USSR when accused of ‘formalism’, that is, of not painting in the realistic style or not composing music ‘for people’. For example, musicians such as Prokofiev or Shostakovich were not allowed to perform their works in the USSR because their music was not deemed melodic for the masses and, therefore, these musicians did not conform to the Party’s demand for artists to be ‘the engineers of human souls’. The example of the composer Dmitri Shostakovich, whose life during the Soviet regime and Stalinism was
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The Making of Dialogical Theories
defined by the Party’s changing responses to his work, is most telling. Sometimes he was scorned and his music forbidden; at other times, the Party awarded him the most prestigious prizes. His music was rejected because it was deemed not to be composed for the people but rather a muddle of a deliberate dissonance. Subsequently, Shostakovich repented and composed pleasing music for the people who, after listening to it, cried with deep emotion; he both hated Stalin and celebrated him as ‘a great gardener’. He struggled with fear, with his conscience, with the betrayal of his convictions, and with compromises, going to extremes in celebrating Stalin and crying with shame when he finally joined the Communist Party (e.g., Barnes, ). Dialogues between Shostakovich and Party representatives that forced the musician to shameful confessions, and subsequently to guilt feelings, illustrate the constant dilemma and psychological challenges to which he, and others, were subjected. In talking to Flora Litvinova in , Shostakovich expressed his feelings: You ask me if I would have been different without ‘Party guidance’? Yes, almost certainly. No doubt the line that I was pursuing when I wrote the Fourth Symphony would have been stronger and sharper in my work. I would have displayed more brilliance, used more sarcasm, I could have revealed my ideas openly instead of having to resort to camouflage; I would have written more pure music (Willson, , pp. –).
Shostakovich lived through the terror of the Stalinist era, which imposed a constant threat to his life and his family and affected his moral and ethical conduct. These pressures were of a different order to those imposed on Sakharov or Solzhenitsyn in a more ‘dialogical’ post-Stalinist era in which they could negotiate, at least to some extent, with the regime. Therefore, their moral and ethical values were not subjected to such extreme forces as those imposed on Shostakovich (Chapter ). Dialogues between a researcher and the socio-political and cultural environment in non-totalitarian regimes and in liberal democracies can be equally effective for determining the careers of non-conformists. For example, political and economic demands on university teachers and research institutes impose obligations to compromise with bureaucratic rules that hide under the terms of ‘science’, ‘progress’, or ‘well-being’. Implicit and explicit institutional pressures may not be life-threatening but they curtail creativity and imagination as well as deform the integrity of
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Dialogical Perspective
scholars by pushing them to study specific fashionable topics for which external grants are made available. Institutions and bureaucrats often define scientific success by the amounts of financial awards that individuals obtain for research from outside sources. These awards impose criteria for promotions and for personal financial advancements as well as for the punishment of non-conformists. Moscovici’s experience of the War, of Nazism, and the emerging Communist rule in Romania were among the decisive features affecting his thought (Chapter ). They led him to pose questions about the individual, groups, and society and about forms of Otherness. His ideas about the role of the masses, active minorities, and his queries about interactions between individuals and society figured in the theory of social representations (a) and in the study of dissidence (Moscovici, b, b, ). Later in his life, they became an explicit focus in his explorations of victims, gypsies, racism, and different forms of discrimination (e.g., Moscovici and Pérez, ; Moscovici, ). While environments or contexts on their own explain nothing about an author’s theory, they become decisive forces when an author recognises their relevance and actively selects their specific features. As Moscovici was developing his theory in France, political conditions were changing and so did his theory. In his early years in France, his unorthodox ideas mitigated against the adopted trends in the social sciences and, thus, his scientific choices were much influenced by not having French citizenship. In several of my discussions with him, he kept returning to the question of why he chose to study social representations of psychoanalysis. If he had had the courage, he would have analysed social representations of Marxism, which, besides psychoanalysis, was the other ‘religion’ that dominated French society in the s and s. He kept returning to this issue over the years but when, finally, in , he carried out the study of social representations of Marxism, it did not lead to anything. Socio-political circumstances had changed, Marxism was no longer a driver of thinking, and the public was no longer interested in it (Chapter ).
An example of the ‘scientific’ manipulation of behaviour due to allegedly positive reasons is ‘nudge theory’, which focuses on manipulating behaviour and images to induce well-being or marketing success. It is applied in the domains of economics, health, behavioural sciences, and other fields which attempt to change human behaviour by persuasion (e.g., Thaler and Sustein, ). Nudging is used in politics at national and international levels and in policy-making; its critiques question ethical grounds of its manipulative focus, lack of scientific evidence, and mechanistic aims (about the use of nudging in the time of the coronavirus, see Dudás and Szántó, ).
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The Making of Dialogical Theories
.. Dialogues between Creative Individuals and Cultural-Historical Environments: Zeitgeist Most of the previous examples of dialogues between creative individuals and various ‘Others’ refer to individuals’ awareness of the pressure imposed upon them by institutions, the state, and powerful establishments. In these cases, it is possible, though often difficult, to identify the sources of intimidation producing dialogical tensions and conflicts. However, historical and cultural environments into which humans are born express their forces largely implicitly; they form a taken-for-granted environment and resist precise descriptions in words. Despite their veiled existence, they intensely influence the thoughts and imagination of individuals and play vital roles in creative activities. These implicit, and partly explicit, historical-cultural dynamisms have been named variously as fashions, Weltanschauungs (worldviews), ideologies, paradigms, styles, fads, or the Spirit of the Times (zeitgeist). Their influence on the formation of scientific theories and on creative activities is unquestionable but because they are difficult to explain in words, they are often dismissed or referred to as nonscientific impressions. Among many kinds of implicit influences, I shall draw attention to the notion of zeitgeist, or the Spirit of the Times, because of its conceptual emphasis on temporality and cultural specificity, both issues highly relevant to the formation of dialogical theories. The concept of the Spirit of the Times came into existence in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in German philosophies and literature. It brought to attention the cultural significance of the time, conducive or not, to the acceptance of innovative processes and their products as an antidote to Platonic and Cartesian beliefs of eternal universals. History shows that the successful acceptance of a new discovery by the scientific community, or of an artistic product, is dependent on its fit into the zeitgeist. We do not need to recall the numerous and well-known examples of unacknowledged discoveries, technological inventions, and artistic and musical creations throughout history that are not tolerated or are found to be distasteful or offensive at the time of their creation. When they are later rediscovered, either in their original or an altered form, it is usually said that they were ‘ahead of their time’. Ideas rejecting timeless essences were already present in Vico’s (/ ) New Science at a time when the notions of evolution, of different cultures and languages, and of transient states and processes were emerging as the new currents of thinking in European philosophy, politics, economics, communication, and technology. The notion of the Spirit of the Times
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(zeitgeist) was probably first used by the philosopher Johann G. Herder. Herder was a follower of Immanuel Kant and articulated many of his thoughts in Kantian terms. Nevertheless, he went far beyond Kant in promoting the ideas of evolution, of the full expressive capacity of humans as unique individuals, and of the distinctiveness of cultures. For Herder, the origin of language and of self-reflection was accomplished in history as a manifestation of the inner energy of individuals and nations, leading to their self-realisation and self-unfolding (Marková, ). Zeitgeist represented for Herder a totality of sensing, thinking, and experiencing in a given time. It is expressed in and through language but, because it is implicitly (or intuitively) sensed and experienced, words and signs are insufficient means of describing its forceful dynamism. The zeitgeist is different in various parts of the world and its modifications depend on ‘whether the stream of events drives the waves slower or faster’ (Herder, /, p. ). Even in Europe, the zeitgeist is experienced distinctly in various countries and situations because it is dependent on preceding conditions and on individuals’ and communities’ meanings of contemporary situations. As a transient and temporary tendency of thought, ‘[i]t gets used and misused; it governs and serves’ (Herder, /, p. ). Herder’s formulation of zeitgeist is somewhat like Lenoble’s description of common sense (Chapter ) as a cultural and historically determined way of thinking, speaking, feeling, and acting that influenced Moscovici in developing the theory of social representations and communication. The idea of zeitgeist, as a historically and culturally motivated phenomenon, was utilised and further developed in literature, philosophy, sociology, and history and described as a concept, a phenomenon, and a pattern of practices. For instance, in literature, Johann W. von Goethe referred to zeitgeist in Faust and, more recently, Hermann Broch in his essays on Geist and Zeitgeist. In philosophy, sociology, and history, we may recall references to zeitgeist by Hegel, Mannheim, and Førland, among many others. The idea of evolution which infused the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the concept of the unconscious in the nineteenth century, the interdependence of time and space in the early twentieth century all serve as historical and cultural examples of zeitgeist. Nowadays, we can refer to the problem of ecological sustainability as the zeitgeist of our time. It does not mean that a given ‘mentality of a period’ is accepted by everybody in the community as a coherent pattern of thoughts. Zeitgeist does not exist as a holistic pattern of ideas but as ‘a living tradition in . . . [an individual’s] particular social environment’ (Mannheim, , pp. and ).
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Several intellectual currents can co-exist in specific social groups, be in clash and conflict, and overlap. The contemporary sociology of culture acknowledges zeitgeist as a tool for the sociological analysis of meaningful practices in particular historical periods, its attachment to specific social groups and to specific geographic areas (Krause, ). In her thoughtful sociological analysis as well as in reviewing the concept, Krause characterises properties of the zeitgeist in terms of duration as extension over time, scope as extension over fields, course as evolvement of zeitgeist over time, and the media and carriers of zeitgeist through history and cultures. Such carriers may involve social groups, non-human cultural objects, and technologies, all of which coherently hold the ideas of zeitgeist together. In psychology, the concept of zeitgeist, if used at all, has been applied as a rhetorical notion rather than as a cultural means in the formation, maintenance, and disappearance of social theories. It is likely that, as it resists precise expression in words, zeitgeist may not have been considered a ‘scientific’ concept in psychology. Therefore, its influence on the formation of social psychological theories usually remains unacknowledged. One can hardly claim that Moscovici’s creation of the theory of social representations and communication fitted into the zeitgeist of social psychology in the s and s. As noted in Chapter , Moscovici’s interests were remote from the major interests of social psychology after the War, which aimed to deal with psychological phenomena in a scientific manner. It was only the zeitgeist of the s that brought into focus major critiques of social psychology and proposals for alternative approaches. .. Dialogues between Creative Individuals and Audiences (Colleagues, Peers, the Public) On another plane, theories are at the mercy of the author’s colleagues and of the public who have the power to accept, reject, or ignore his/her ideas. If the author of a theory grounds his/her epistemological presuppositions about the nature of social phenomena differently to the audience, he/she must invest a great deal of effort to make himself/herself understood because audiences will attempt to understand the theory by anchoring it to what they already know. Audiences live in specific socio-historical and political conditions and these interact with their views about the theory. Spectators digest, consciously or unconsciously, the propaganda of the established institutions as well as the ‘truths’ authenticated by traditions. They may, therefore, misunderstand the creator’s ideas, contents, and
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goals of the theory. Consequently, the author may, under such pressure, justify, modify, develop, or even reject his/her ideas. Let us recall societal and personal pains of Charles Darwin who became aware of his hesitations and fights with his own ideas, ranging from his religious beliefs to anxiety of being persecuted for his unorthodox ideas, to his fears that Alfred Wallace, who independently formulated the theory of evolution, would publish before him. Social psychologist Mark James Baldwin () considered himself a theoretician of the development of self-consciousness. He was disappointed that his theory was interpreted by his colleagues as one of imitation and likened to Gabriel Tarde’s theory of imitation. Although Baldwin was interested in imitation, he viewed it only as part of his theory of the development of self-consciousness. But Gabriel Tarde (, p. xiii), too, was astonished and disappointed for being criticised for the way he used the word ‘imitation’. The critic accused Tarde of overstretching the meaning of the word by including in imitation both unconscious and conscious processes. Tarde argued that one can hardly separate unconscious, conscious, passive, and active processes and his concept of imitation included all of these. He was not prepared to create another word to cover these processes. More serious was the case of the French anthropologist Lucien LévyBruhl who was accused of racist prejudices for allegedly claiming that the thinking of primitive people is inferior, irrational, and pre-logical, just like that of children. However, although Lévy-Bruhl used the term ‘pre-logical’ with respect to thinking of primitive people, he argued that their thinking is just as rational as the logical thinking of Westerners and that it effectively copes with environmental challenges. Gustav Jahoda () maintained that the denigration of Lévy-Bruhl by many scholars was unwarranted and based on inaccurate simplifications. Jahoda emphasised that Lévy-Bruhl had attempted to explain the role of culture and its unique relations between the forms of thinking in the societies in question. With respect to the accusation of Lévy-Bruhl of comparing primitive people to children,
The terms ‘primitive people’, ‘primitive mentality’, ‘primitive society’, and otherwise were used in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to distinguish people of pre-industrialised societies from modern societies. Kuper’s () book The Invention of Primitive Society unfolds the history of anthropological thinking about this subject matter and unravels its long ancestry and transformations. Lévy-Bruhl, alongside Durkheim and many lawyers, anthropologists, and sociologists at the time, used the term ‘primitive’ to show a dichotomy of contrasting types of peoples, thought, and religions across a wide range of world cultures separating primitive and Western (Jahoda, ). The self-righteousness of our time often professes judgements of this issue without any in-depth understanding of the past scholarship and its illusions.
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Jahoda documented that Lévy-Bruhl never compared them with children and that he very rarely ever referred to children. Instead, Lévy-Bruhl credited primitive people with naturally versatile minds. Due to the pressure of numerous critiques, towards the end of his life, as evident from his Notebooks, Lévy-Bruhl (/) changed his position considerably and gave up the phrase ‘pre-logical thinking’. He was aware that his epistemology and concept of rationality differed from a great many of his contemporaries. In contrast, the historian Alistair Crombie, who studied scientific movements and their interactions in the ancient world (Chapter ), did not experience such problems in explaining the existence of different kinds of rationality. Each system of thinking must be evaluated individually on its own merits (Crombie, ). This was also the point made by Lévy-Bruhl but, in his case, it was misunderstood and comprehended as the denigration of primitive people. This example shows, nevertheless, that addressees co-determine the success or failure, as well as the continuity, discontinuity, and modification, of a theory. Even thirty years after he published the first edition of La psychanalyse, Moscovici knew that he did not convince many others about his ideas on social representations: ‘We have to make an effort at dialogue so as to grasp what everyone means. For progress in this field which is so complex and laden with historical presuppositions will come from a sustained attention to critical reflections and to all that brings us nearer to human beings’ concrete experience’ (Moscovici, b, p. ). Despite his awareness of the difficulty in grasping what ‘Others’ meant, Moscovici himself did not grasp that he, by presenting himself as a Durkheimian without showing exactly what was Durkheimian in his work, made it hard for ‘Others’ to comprehend his position. Let us recall the questions of Rom Harré, who viewed Moscovici as the most important Durkheimian scholar in social psychology, and Gustav Jahoda, who accepted Moscovici’s claim that he was Durkheim’s follower. Jahoda, however, did not understand what exactly Moscovici accepted from Durkheim and suggested that social representations should be reconstructed (Chapter ). Moscovici, rather than explaining himself, thought that his co-participants misunderstood his position and claimed that the concept of social representations did not find its place because social psychology did not recognise its historical and anthropological role. In pseudo-dialogues between Moscovici and discursive psychology and constructionism, participants did not even try to understand each other’s position and, instead, carried out monologues, each presenting their own
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perspectives. This created difficulties for Moscovici’s followers who made considerable efforts to make sense of the negative critiques of the theory. Since their knowledge of the theory of social representations and communication was limited to the second edition of Psychoanalysis and to subsequent Moscovici articles with their Durkheimian angle and mixed with some terminological vagueness (see later), they could not resolve the meanings of the negative critiques of Moscovici’s opponents. Regardless of the controversies and criticisms, over more than sixty years, the theory of social representations and communication successfully diffused all over the world resulting in many publications, research outputs, conferences, and group discussions. The followers of the theory worked very hard to spread the notion ‘social representations’ (or ‘collective representations’) in social scientific domains and in professional disciplines. For many, the diffusion of this notion has become the main goal of their efforts. Pascal Moliner () provides a graph showing the increase in publications between and with the word ‘social representations’ in their title. He raises the question of the reasons for unprecedented success of the theory and suggests several answers. Among them, he points out that the theory is easily adaptable to cognitive determinants of practical problems in the social sciences and that Moscovici developed strategies of disseminating the theory in various countries of the world. This was done through supporting and helping to develop centres studying social representations and by encouraging projects of small groups and individuals. Among them, ‘[t]he impact of social, historical and cultural contexts on the formulation of Latin American scientific problems is a major factor in this success. Researchers in social psychology have discovered creative, reflexive and critical thinking in response to political, economic and social transformations and crises’ (Moliner, , p. ). In contrast, despite considerable efforts of the supporters of the theory, the USA did not embrace social representations. However, it is Annamaria de Rosa who has devoted her energy over many years to record the diffusion of social representations theory from its beginning. She has documented references relating to the theory from , has developed meta-analyses mapping social representations all over the world, and has shown the growth of publications over the years (e.g., de Rosa, ). She has explored their dissemination in various online presentations, in specific academic social networks, for example, Academia. edu, Research Gate, and Mendeley (among many references referring to this project, see de Rosa, Drujanska, and Bocci, ; de Rosa, Fino, and Bocci, ).
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These examples show that researchers are not only dependent on the mercy of an audience but that they, and their peers, can strategically influence others about the importance and success of the theory. ..
Internal Dialogues of Creative Individuals
Humans communicate not only with external others but they also carry out internal dialogues with themselves and with their own ideas, questioning and assuring themselves about their correctness. Often, one’s scientific beliefs may contradict other beliefs that one holds simultaneously. We may remind ourselves of Kepler’s internal dialogues in which he attempted to unite his discoveries in astronomy with his deep faith in God. He commenced The Harmonies of the World (Kepler, /, p. ) with ‘a secret discourse, a most true hymn to God the Founder’. For God, the creator of geometrical celestial harmonies, the circle was the symbol of perfection. Kepler’s discovery that planets move in ellipses around the Sun was shattering because his scientific pursuits conflicted with his belief that planets should move in circles symbolising the perfection of God (Nicolson, ; Marková, ). It is instructive, again, to see how Lévy-Bruhl struggled with his ideas: ‘The starting point for a rather deeper study of participation seems to me the fact that our way of formulating it . . . falsifies it, and moreover gives it an unintelligible appearance which it does not necessarily have’ (Lévy-Bruhl, /, p. ). Marie Jahoda (Chapter ), when pointing out that personal involvement with life experiences gave rise to the topics of her study, emphasised that she was suspicious of the over-organised way of doing research, looking at problems from the outside and reducing research to a technicality. Instead, self-criticism is an excellent way of thinking, reformulating questions, and, possibly, for finding new questions. In addition to self-critical internal dialogues, researchers may retrospectively reinterpret their original motives, reasons for, and aims of their theories. They may reconstruct their initial theory in terms of new motives and new convictions that they then forcefully present to their colleagues and audiences. Such retrospective reinterpretations may happen for multiple personal and non-scientific reasons including memory problems or beliefs about oneself. In referring to such reconstructions, French () notes examples of famous scientists’ retrospective reinterpretations of their motives. Among these, he recalls Kuhn’s () merciless analysis of the Nobel Prize speech of the German physicist Max Planck in : Planck ‘could not resist
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applying to the developments the terms that were only coined subsequently, thus reconstructing his own history to suit the later narrative’ (French, , p. ). Kuhn (, p. ) attributed his own interest in historical reconstructions of scientists’ discoveries to Alexandre Koyré. In addition to Planck, he referred to similar reconstructions of their theories by Otto Stern and Niels Bohr. When Kuhn pointed out to these researchers the inconsistencies in their accounts, they spoke about their confusion at the time of discovery. One of the central problems Kuhn viewed was in the use of new vocabulary by means of which the discoverer redescribed his theory (e.g., Planck’s change of ‘resonator’ to ‘oscillator’ and of ‘element’ to ‘quantum’ (Kuhn, , p. )). The use of new vocabulary can hide implicit and explicit inconsistencies in the process of discovery as well as give an impression of linear and cumulative development (see also later). Likewise, in his autobiography, Einstein retrospectively reconstructed the development of his special theory of relativity when ‘he insisted in later life that the Michelson–Morley experiment played no role in the development of special relativity, despite earlier admissions to the contrary’ (van Dongen, , p. ; French, , p. ). In analysing Einstein’s retrospective rewriting of his work and his personal history, van Dongen (, p. ) views it as an effort to mould an ideal of a scientist. Einstein was striving for mathematical unification in physics which, for him, was underlain by Spinozist pantheistic beliefs. On the personal side, he presented the moral and epistemic virtues of a scientist. Van Dongen (, p. ) concludes that, simultaneously, ‘Einstein rewrote his own history and crafted his own version of his persona to justify and promote his unification attempts: theoretical and personal virtues here mirrored one another.’ We must recall at this stage Moscovici’s own retrospective reconstruction of his theory of social representations which he had created in his ‘age of innocence’ from the intellectual resources of Marxist, Hegelian, and Cassirer’s philosophies. Having developed his ideas, concepts, and the theory from these sources as published in , he then redescribed himself, perhaps for the first time, in the ‘Preface’ to Herzlich’s (/ ) book, and then in the second edition of Psychoanalysis in , as a follower of Emile Durkheim. And this redescription has become a textbook version generally adopted both by Moscovici’s followers and his opponents. I raised numerous possible reasons (Chapter ) for his retrospective reinterpretation that could have included a mixture of personal, political, and other motives. Whatever were Moscovici’s reasons, the
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transformation of his loyalties resulted in a misunderstanding of his theory because his original thinking based on Hegelian, Marxist, and Cassirer’s concepts could not be married with those of Durkheim even if his effort was called by many a modernisation of Durkheim (e.g., Farr, ; see Chapter ). We can only guess the kinds of internal dialogues he held with himself, with the absent followers and critics of his theory, and with institutions and ideologies. Described by journalists and interviewers as the gadfly of French psychologists, intuitive, anti-authoritarian, and argumentative, who moved from topic to topic, Moscovici struggled with complex social and personal processes, exploring them from different perspectives and turning them upside down. We need to add that the two kinds of reinterpretation of an author’s theory, that is, one resulting from a genuine development of ideas and one based on a retrospective reinterpretation of motives and goals, may be intermeshed, partly consciously and partly unconsciously, both by the author of the theory and his/her interpreters. This could be due to an author’s and others’ beliefs that the original version of the theory was ‘confused’ or that there were gaps in memory or in attempts to improve an author’s status. Nevertheless, these factors determine the fate of the theory, its ‘official’ version, and its acceptance or rejection. .. The Impact of Dialogues on Textbooks and the Diffusion of Theories What effect do these different kinds of dialogue and their intermeshed versions have on the development, maintenance, and acceptance of a theory by scientific and lay audiences? How do they influence the advancement of the discipline in question? In his book There Are No Such Things as Theories, French () describes and analyses the history of the ‘revolution’ of the quantum theory from to . French () maintains that what was called ‘the’ theory or ‘a’ theory, as a delineated entity, diversified into several approaches offered by followers of quantum theory according to their own preferences, interpretations, and specific historical conditions. This occurred even among researchers who considered themselves faithful followers of quantum mechanics. Accounting for the complexity of these approaches competing with, and contradicting, one another, French argues that we must abandon the belief in the existence of ‘the’ theory as a unified entity. In this context, researchers and historians of science wonder about the role of textbooks in the early years of a revolutionary theory. Handbooks
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and textbooks legitimise new disciplines by emphasising concepts and methods and formulating rules on which they are based (Kragh, ). In writing about textbooks in a revolutionary field such as quantum mechanics, Kragh () underscores that the first generation of textbooks plays a constitutive role in defining the field. One could say the same about the theory of social representations and communication. Textbooks and handbooks provide an educational guide and influence the way in which a new discipline is understood and further developed. Necessarily, they provide heterogeneous interpretations of ‘the’ theory (Kragh, ; French, ). Despite the diversities of approaches, of conditions in which a theory developed, of political conditions, and complexities of various kinds, French (, p. ) observes that physicists speak ‘as if there is “a” theory of quantum mechanics’ and that different formulations of that theory are nevertheless part of that theory. However, in their practices, they use different attitudes and tools ‘without thought as to whether in each case they are bringing to bear just another facet of “the same” theory or not’ (French, , p. ). Kuhn argues (, p. ) that redescribed theories ‘almost never withstand detailed comparison with documents from the period of discovery’ but, nevertheless, they enter textbooks and public accounts as the truth. He (Kuhn, , p. ) comments that textbooks, by selecting and distorting scientists’ views, present them as having consistently and implicitly worked on ‘the same set of fixed problems and in accordance with the same set of fixed canons’ leading to revolutions in scientific theory and method. This, however, reconstructs history by disguising the fact that science does not develop in a linear way. Textbooks are written after a scientific revolution or a new paradigm has been created and ‘tend to rewrite and revise’ the work of scientific leaders (Kuhn, , p. ). One can hardly claim that the theory of social representations and communication benefited from the ways it has been presented in textbooks. The textbooks of social psychology, whether American or European, have largely ignored the diversification of social representational approaches, or presented a brief and distorted position, referring mostly to the structuralist approaches. Equally, the handbooks of social representations and the books specifically devoted to social representations do not present a coherent and systematic statement of the theory or of representational approaches. Rather, they are aggregations of essays about social representations rarely accounting for, or further developing, theoretical concepts. The term ‘social representation’ is often used as a label that can be substituted with other words, for example, attitudes, discourses,
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cognitions, narratives, and otherwise, thereby routinising and trivialising the theory. We may even ask: what is left of the theory of social representations in such accounts? To paraphrase Shakespeare, we could say: ‘just the word’.
. What Has the Theory of Social Representations Achieved? In his relatively unknown essay ‘Hegel at Jena’, Alexandre Koyré recalls that all historians and commentators agree that Hegel’s writing is extraordinarily difficult due to his terminology, abrupt thoughts, and moving in leaps that are hard to follow: It is this impression of magic, of mystery, that made some speak of ‘the secret of Hegel,’ that made us say that Hegel did not reveal to us the principles of his method and that, having masterfully practiced the dialectical method, he did not do anything to teach it. . . . Hegel thinks ‘in circles’ (‘en cercle’) whereas we think ‘in straight lines’ (‘en ligne droite’) (Koyré, , pp. –).
Koyré suggests that these difficulties are related to the fact that it is hard to penetrate the way Hegel’s ideas are formed as well as to understand why he chose certain directions rather than others. In many respects, one could make similar comments about Moscovici’s writing. It gives the impression of magic, of feelings of mystery, and of difficulties when his followers try to unravel this mystery. But even more so, terminological difficulties contribute to misunderstanding the theory (Chapter ) and, as suggested by many readers (Chapter ), Moscovici’s thinking gives the air that something important is indicated but is left unfinished (e.g., Howarth, ). The use of terminology without proper attention to differences between the meanings of terms as used in the established textbooks and the newly presented theory is a common problem. Consider two examples (Kuhn, ). When Copernicus in the sixteenth century placed the Sun in the centre with the Earth moving around it, it was an inconceivable proposition because the meaning of the Earth was defined by its fixed position: Copernicus’s innovation had to be understood as much more than the suggestion that the Earth moves. Rather, it was a whole new way of regarding problems in physics and astronomy, which necessarily changed the meaning of both ‘Earth’ and ‘motion’ (Kuhn, , pp. –). We may add that the art historian Panofsky () explains that, while in the Aristotelian and Scholastic view, the Earth was the centre of the
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cosmos limited by the celestial sphere, the Renaissance brought the concept of perspectivity, which viewed space as infinite and appreciated linear perspectives in terms of height, depth, and width. Panofsky (, p. ) insists that physics and the discovery of the modern perspective in paintings was not just a matter of artistic style. Rather, it should be viewed as ‘a concrete expression of a contemporary advance in epistemology of natural philosophy’. For example, Panofsky referred to the emergence of perspectivity in art in the Renaissance as a new epistemology of the natural sciences; it became the Spirit of the Times. Another of Kuhn’s examples of the terminological problem in science was Einstein’s use of the phrase ‘curved space’. The term was confusing because in common usage, ‘space’ referred to something flat and to something that was not affected by the presence of other entities when they filled the space. In the Einsteinian usage, the ‘curved space’ was part of a conceptual network in which other concepts, such as ‘time’, ‘force’, and ‘matter’, played a role and, therefore, the ‘curved space’ could be understood only as part of the network of these concepts. When we turn to the theory of social representations and communication, Moscovici’s concepts of ‘attitude’, ‘information’, and ‘representational field’ are the most telling examples of terminological problems (Chapter ). In his early research, Moscovici rejected the study of attitudes towards psychoanalysis because he wished to study the contents and dynamics of psychoanalysis as they were viewed by the participants in his studies (Chapter ). However, when Moscovici proposed ‘attitudes’, ‘information’, and ‘representational field’ as constituting the dimensions of social representations (Moscovici, a, pp. –; /, pp. –), he did not clarify what he meant by these notions. He was then puzzled by the responses of his readers who questioned attitudes and their relation to social representation (see Chapter ; also, Moscovici and Marková, , p. ). It was not apparent to his critics that, in Moscovici’s theory, ‘attitudes’ were part of the network of values and judgements and of the dynamics in natural thinking. As such, ‘attitudes’ had to be understood as having a different meaning to the one given in classic textbooks on social psychology. Equally, Moscovici’s use of the term ‘information’ was misleading. As explained earlier (Chapters and ), ‘information’ did not mean ‘information processing’ in terms of the transformation of neutral information as used in social psychology. Instead, Moscovici used it as part of a network of concepts such as the ‘transformation of value-laden knowledge’, ‘making judgements’, ‘evaluating knowledge’, ‘imagining’, and so on in the communicative contexts of
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groups and societies. As a result of terminological unclarities, some crucial ideas in the theory of social representations and communication were ignored; others were misunderstood, trivialised, and vulgarised. ..
A Metatheory or a Paradigm?
Perhaps due to misunderstandings and controversies about the theory, some researchers refer to social representations as a metatheory (see Chapter ; Doise, , , ; de Rosa, ). Others claim that the theory of social representations is a revolutionary paradigm in the Kuhnian sense (e.g., Farr, ; Wagner, b; Camargo, , ; Jodelet, , ; Sammut et al., ; Camargo, Schlösser, and Giacomozzi, ; Rubira-García, Puebla-Martínez, and Gelado-Marcos, ) or they even refer to multiple paradigmatic approaches (de Rosa, b, ). These grand epithets aim to show that the theory of social representations offers a highly original and ambitious alternative way of doing social psychology and the social sciences. As a metatheory, it turns social psychology away from narrow laboratory experiments and guides it towards intellectual breadth and novel practical applications. It is argued that, although social representations is one theory, in its status as a metatheory, its generativity inspires different schools of thought offering multiple paradigmatic approaches and using different methodologies (de Rosa, a). As a revolutionary paradigm, the theory proposes that humans construct their social reality and it orientates social psychology towards culture, history, and anthropology. Let us consider how these proposals correspond to the Kuhnian sense of paradigm. ..
Moscovici’s Critique of Kuhn
Thomas Kuhn (, p. ) proposed that the preconditions of a paradigm shift are severe and prolonged scientific anomalies. Kuhn used the term ‘anomaly’ to refer to scientists’ realisation that some phenomena could not be fitted into established scientific models. Such protracted anomalies instigate searches for solutions to puzzles, lead to proposals of new theories, and, finally, to a paradigm change. Moscovici () rejected Kuhn’s idea of anomalies or ‘deficits’ as a rather mechanistic explanation of scientific revolutions. Prompted by Koyré’s ideas of scientific revolutions, Moscovici suggested that innovation and scientific revolutions do not arise from ‘deficits’ and from anomalies but from a ‘surplus’: ‘revolutions are made not by default but by excess;
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not because there are too many unresolved “errors” as Kuhn suggested, but because there are too many new “truths”’ (Moscovici, , p. ). Carriers of these new truths are individuals, groups, or minorities who work at the margins of technology and science, and whose ‘surplus’ eventually turns into cohesive scientific theories and technologies. Moscovici implied that Kuhn’s book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is Durkheimian in the sense that Kuhn conceived paradigms as searches for equilibria. Once a paradigm becomes conventionalised, it is complete and stable; normal science turns into an imitative repetition of established truths where no novel changes take place. Therefore, paradigms presuppose science as a unity in which the community of scientists work together. However, Moscovici insisted that scientists do not form a community but are independent individuals who fight for their ideas and perspectives. Scientists do not search for equilibria and science is never an orderly system. Moreover, Moscovici rejected the idea of incommensurable paradigms. There is never a complete break between different paradigms but old and new ‘truths’ mix up. Above all, a scientific change is not a perceptual change of a pattern in a gestalt but takes place through innovation and struggle in negotiation and argument (Moscovici, ). Moscovici’s twist from anomalies to inventions, or from errors to many new and alternative truths, was not just a language game. It reorientated the focus of attention from the solution of problems to free inventions that are the driving forces of scientific revolutions. This idea has become very productive in Moscovici’s theory of innovation, in social representations, and in his studies of ecology as well as in the history and philosophy of science. Nevertheless, despite his critical comments on Kuhn, Moscovici occasionally referred to his own theory as a paradigm. In his Preface to The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn stated that during the year of –, while writing his book, he was at the Center of Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. There, he met many social scientists. He was amazed that those social scientists shared very little agreement with each other when discussing legitimate social scientific problems and methods. Kuhn explained that his effort to discover the reasons for such basic differences led him to develop the notion of ‘paradigms’ and to characterise these as ‘universally recognised scientific achievements that for a time provide
Moscovici told me that he had met Kuhn in Paris and spoke to him about his views. Kuhn discussed with him the subject of scientific revolutions but Moscovici thought that Kuhn grossly simplified the issue by treating scientific revolutions as incommensurable paradigms.
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model problems and solutions to a community of practitioners. Once that piece of my puzzle fell into place, a draft of this essay emerged rapidly’ (Kuhn, , p. viii). Kuhn’s observations concerning such disagreements did not discourage the tremendous effort of social scientists to identify the existence of paradigms in the social sciences. Soon after Kuhn published his highly acclaimed book, many publications appeared in the s and s that tried to find paradigms in sub-disciplines of social studies and in research programmes or even to justify their non-existence in suggesting that the social sciences are in a pre-paradigm stage. As more and more social theories were emerging in the second half of the twentieth century, and offering specific solutions to societal, political, and ideological problems, the focus on their coherence became vital. For example, in their major Companion to Social Science Theories, Ritzer and Goodman (, p. ) viewed metatheorising as a way of attaining a better understanding of social theories. It was thought that fragmented human and social sciences could not offer any common solution to pressing societal phenomena. In these efforts, the contributors of the Companion emphasised that systematic attempts had to be made to clarify the relations between the individual and society. Many authors drew attention to the importance of a multitude of historical, cultural, political, and other relevant issues in creating metatheories and transdisciplinary approaches in constructing allembracing and systematising strategies (e.g., Fiske and Shweder, ; Ritzer, ; Levine, , ; Ritzer and Goodman, ). .. A Surplus of New Truths in and through Interdependencies between the Self and Others The beginning of the twenty-first century shows that efforts of the social sciences to search for a common purpose have considerably diminished. The new generation of social scientists has largely abandoned calls for the Kuhnian universalistic paradigms. Novel developments have taken place through further diversification and ‘a surplus of new truths’ has become evident in the freshly established domains focusing on the unique relations between the Self and Others. These domains involve the interdisciplinary (social, psychological, historical, cultural, political) and even transdisciplinary nature of human studies. Stenner (, ) conceives the transdisciplinary psychosocial studies as integrative activities, reflections, and practices that address complexity far beyond the established boundaries of disciplines and deal with emergent phenomena and their experiences.
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Among these developments is the perspective of many contemporary social sciences to no longer adopt the idea that the epistemological relation between individuals and their social environment is conceived in terms of external environmental influences impinging on internal features of individuals (Ritzer and Goodman, ). Instead, ‘external’ and ‘internal’ relations between individuals and their social environment have been replaced by the idea of interdependencies in which both individuals and their social environment simultaneously transform one another through their mutual interactions. The epistemology of interdependencies, implying a unique relationship between an individual and his/her social environment that has slowly taken shape since the eighteenth century, has finally become recognised as a compelling voice. The perspective according to which humans create their own history through their activities, obligations, justice, and ethical dispositions, among others, makes sense only in terms of interdependent dynamic relations between the Self and the Other. For example, the Self can demand justice only to the extent that the Other understands the meaning of justice and that institutions protect it. This idea was further advanced in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (e.g., Fichte, Hegel, Mead, Cassirer) but it rarely became part of the social scientific concepts that defined the relevant disciplines. It appears that only dramatic societal events, such as technological advancements, world wars, and economic crises, make it obvious that external and internal, individual and social, and subjective and objective cannot be divided and placed into separate boxes and analysed separately but that they are interdependent phenomena. These considerations raise the question of how we can characterise the contemporary Spirit of the Times in the human and social sciences. Could we not say that, at present, the Spirit of the Times expresses societal uncertainties and rapid changes in every sphere of life and that this is mirrored in the multitude of social theories and in their extreme ranges? One may observe that at one pole of the extreme range is an explosion of efforts to bring information and certainty into complex and constantly changing social domains, for example, by studying ‘big data’. Highly advanced technology facilitates an integration of complex data in order to make predictions about outcomes of human behaviour, health, occurrence of crimes, or crashes of markets. In many respects, these efforts can be viewed as a return, though using highly developed technologies, to mechanical ways of measuring and predicting behavioural outcomes in the last century. On the other pole of the spectrum, there is a ‘surplus of new truths’ as they appear in the titles of books and journal articles such as
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‘subjective experience’, ‘the formation of and breaking down of boundaries’, ‘liminality’, ‘uncertainty’, ‘nothingness’, ‘thresholds’, ‘dreams’, and ‘phantasies’, among many others. It appears that these words mirror the insecurities of our era. But all this still leads to the same theme: the Self and the Other in relation to something that binds people together and that separates them.
. Theorising in the Stream of Worldviews ..
Momentous European Social Psychological Theories?
With the benefit of hindsight, we might suggest that the revolutionary force of the theory of social representations and communication would have been better recognised if it were understood in its original form as published in . This would have been difficult, however, because in his ‘age of innocence’, Moscovici’s way of thinking in the s and s did not fit into the zeitgeist of social psychology either in France or elsewhere. Although Moscovici successfully defended his thesis in , the dominant approaches in the social sciences in France at that time were structuralism, positivism, and materialism. These approaches were wary of Marxism, psychoanalysis, of the ‘idealistic’ ideas of Hegelianism, or of Cassirer’s symbolic forms and for ideological reasons they discouraged a wider interest in the study of psychosocial phenomena. During the s, internationally, the Cold War was an important determinant affecting the development of the social sciences in Western Europe and preventing the free exchange of ideas: ‘Part of the American effort involved reinforcing non-Marxist social science in Western Europe. Let us not forget that two countries, France and Italy, had very powerful Communist parties and Marxist groups. These countries had intelligentsia which, while, if not being fully Marxist, sympathized with Marxism’ (Moscovici and Marková, , p. ). Controversies about notions that sounded like ‘social’, ‘socialism’, or ‘Communism’ were at their height during the Cold War. In Western countries, these notions were suspect; in the countries of the Soviet bloc in Eastern Europe, they fulfilled the role of propaganda (Moscovici and Marková, ). Therefore, the quest for the meaning of ‘social’ and of an ‘individual’ in social psychology was not part of the worldview at that time. When they were building European social psychology after the War, Serge Moscovici and Henri Tajfel, among others, wanted to show the Americans that Europeans, too, could produce great theories (Moscovici
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and Marková, ). There was something deeply personal in their efforts. They had experienced the horrific tragedies of the War and their theories were born from those experiences; they wanted to do something practical to recover the world in tatters. The War showed what terrible things humans could do to one another and Moscovici and Tajfel studied this phenomenon, each in their own way. Both theories, Tajfel’s social identity and Moscovici’s social representations, had a tremendous influence on students and on the way of thinking in social psychology and beyond. Is it possible that the uncertainties of our contemporary zeitgeist will give birth to another momentous social theory? ..
A Momentous Social Theory or a Momentous Epistemology?
To reflect on this question, let us return to Moscovici and Kuhn. Although Kuhn characterised scientific revolutions as arising from crises, Moscovici () thought that, in contrast, the way that Kuhn conceived scientific revolutions was orderly. For Kuhn, scientific revolutions arise above all from the ingenious achievements of individual scientists who solve puzzles by reshaping the perceptual gestalt and who view anomalies in scientific problems differently to their competitors. For instance, while Aristotle saw a stone swinging on rope, Galileo saw a pendulum, that is, a weight suspended on a cord swinging back and forth and subjected to the laws of gravity. Galileo’s vision led to a revolution in physics. In contrast to Kuhn’s position, Moscovici, just like Koyré, viewed scientific revolutions as being part of radical transformations in society and technology. While they have internal coherence and their own growth, such changes simultaneously affect different domains of science and life in which they are argued and negotiated. The transformation of ideas from technology and the arts into science and vice versa is the fruit of freedom of thought, curiosity, imagination, and taking risks during the scientific revolution (Moscovici, , p. ). For example, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the physics of relativity and gestalt psychology were viewed as having common features, both rejecting a static perspective of reality (Miller, ). Scientific revolution changes the structure of thought and practices in many disciplines simultaneously because it changes their epistemologies. This observation is corroborated by historians referring to the interdependencies between discoveries and innovations in the sciences, technology, the arts, and non-scientific areas (e.g., Miller, ). Such mutual influences often take place implicitly. For instance, even if scientists claim that
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they have freed themselves from unscientific thinking, for example, astrology, magic, and mystery, they may be unconsciously dependent on the ideas adopted from these and other domains (Panofsky, ). Panofsky recalls Galileo’s insistence on a clear distinction between artistic imagination and science and on the separation of quantities from qualities (Panofsky, ). Despite making a sharp distinction between science and the arts, Galileo rejected Kepler’s theory of elliptic movement of planets, which contradicted Galileo’s ‘non-scientific concept’ of symmetry and beauty. Let us also recall Miller’s () analysis of the relation between time and space that, in the early years of the twentieth century, simultaneously preoccupied scientists, artists, and the public (Chapter ). The study of the relations between time and space showed the mutual influence of artistic and scientific creations. Einstein’s aesthetics and Picasso’s interests in scientific discoveries widened the horizons of both disciplines through their mutual inspiration. These examples emphasise that a paradigm shift, rather than being concerned with a single scientific theory, whether the theory of social representations and communication or another theory, marks a shift in an epistemology underlying different theories. The epistemology, in our case the epistemology of the Ego–Alter–Object, changes the structure of thought and practices simultaneously in many disciplines. Interdependencies between the Self and Others became visible through the signs, symbols, and objects that finally brought the triadic model of Peirce, Bu¨hler, Morin, Moscovici, and others into the focus of attention in the social sciences. A few examples suffice to make this point. Rom Harré’s (e.g., ) positioning theory prioritises morality; cultural psychologists prioritise semiotic mediation (e.g., Valsiner, ; Cremaschi et al., ; Salvatore et al., ); developmental psychology emphasises constructivism (e.g., Psaltis, Duveen, and Perret-Clermont, ; Psaltis, Gillespie, and Perret-Clermont, ); social psychologists focus on themata (e.g., Moloney, Williams, and Blair, ; Smith, O’Connor, and Joffe, ). These and many other approaches and theories are all based on the presupposition of the individual/social and on human agency functioning and developing in unique socio-cultural and political environments. This dramatic and revolutionary epistemological transformation from the dyadic to the triadic model led young researchers in developmental psychology to refer to it as the Kuhnian shift of paradigms (Zittoun et al., ). It replaced the relation between the knower and the object of knowledge by the relation between the knower, other knowers, and the
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object – or sign. It was this triadic relation that made the revolutionary shift. This shift, rather than being a matter of relevance only in the social and developmental sciences, also takes place in political upheavals, tragedies, and successes in world changes and in technological advancements. And ‘a surplus of new truths’, which occurs within this triadic epistemology, arises in multitudes of theories and approaches, all with different goals and all prioritising their own specific concepts. If we still insist on the term ‘paradigm shift’, the triadic model represents an epistemological revolution, although its acceptance has taken more than years. Among many social theories that adopt this epistemology is the theory of social representations and communication. It would be presumptuous to refer to a single theory as a paradigm shift. All we can say is that some theories or approaches express this epistemological revolution better than others and develop their concepts with more depth and clarity than others.
.
Conclusion
Social theories develop and transform in and through dialogues that simultaneously take place in multiple interactions between the creator of a theory and numerous other factors. They provide us with rich evidence of struggles and tensions between: • • • •
creative individuals and powerful institutions dominated by political, ideological, and religious forces general patterns of thought in specific time periods due to cultural and historical influences (zeitgeist) creative individuals and audiences (peers, the public) creative individuals and their doubts, hopes, and imagined Others.
Throughout these dialogues, we have observed a response to the question ‘who is the individual and what is society’, which dominated Moscovici’s thinking throughout his life. It also answers another query that he kept raising: ‘what is “social” about social psychology?’ (Moscovici, /, p. ). To that end, the theory of social representations and communication is approaching its goal. It has shown who is the Self and who are Others and who is individual and what is society. By following this path and exploring in a holistic manner the dynamic and complex phenomena in daily practices, such as health, education, politics, and ecology, it has the potential of becoming an anthropology of modern culture.
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Afterword
My aim in this book was to highlight the interplay of numerous factors involved in the making of a dialogical social theory. Although most important among such factors is the creative mind of the author, the mutual interdependence of all contributing factors facilitates or hinders the emergence and development of a theory. One cannot make sense of the theory without understanding the multitude of resources from which it is drawn together with its evolution through societal, historical, cultural, and political events. Authors are immersed in unique dialogues between themselves and such events and many examples in this book show that these dialogues take place on different, but mutually interconnected, planes. Such planes reveal the creators’ depth of thinking, their hopes, fears, and motives in developing their ideas, resisting outside forces prohibiting free expressions and struggling to win over their audiences. The history of the sciences, the arts, and music, ranging from researchers such as Giordano Bruno, Galileo Galilei, or Albert Einstein to artists and musicians such as Dmitri Shostakovich or Marc Chagall, shows the mutual influence of such manifold forces. Consequently, in each case, a theory follows a unique path. Its impact depends both on the intellect, engagement, and imagination of the creator and on the significance of its subject matter for others; it ranges from being highly influential to being hardly noticed. A theory is formed, maintained, and transformed if it speaks to peers and the public and fades when it is no longer engaged in dialogues with others. Although these observations apply to any scientific discoveries and cultural creations, I have focused in this book on the interplay of a range of factors involved in the making of a single dialogical social theory. I thought that, by choosing a single dialogical social theory as a case study, I could find at least some answers to the complex issues surrounding the making of other such theories. In other words, by following the unique progression of dialogues between the creator of a single dialogical theory
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and various others, one can view it as an exemplar when formulating questions such as: does the theory stimulate others in resituating and generating knowledge? Does it affect humans’ experiences in new settings? Does it become part of further evolving dialogues? I explained in the Introduction that I have chosen the theory of social representations and communication as an exemplar to draw attention to such questions. Personally, I was acquainted with the theory of social representations and communication more than with any other social theory. Academically, my familiarity with the theory’s rich history, and the ways in which others had responded to the theory, enabled me to focus on the broad spectrum of its ups and downs. My choice of this exemplar must be apprehended with the caveat that the interpretation of this theory as dialogical is not a perspective taken by everybody who is familiar with Moscovici’s theory. As I explained in this book, there are different approaches to Moscovici’s theory, that is, structural, organising principles, socio-cultural/anthropological, sociogenetic, communication, and more. While some of these approaches are complementary to the dialogical approach, others are not compatible with it. Their complementarity and compatibility are given by their underlying epistemologies, by the research questions with which these approaches are concerned, as well as with their focus on the specific concepts or issues derived from Moscovici’s original theory. With this proviso, I have attempted to highlight the following matters: •
•
Complex and dynamic dialogical theories are holistic phenomena in which researchers focus on diverse interactions between the Self and Others. This observation recalls my early remark that human genius and evil are closely related. These theories reveal themselves in the various interactions between the Self and Others, in and through technological inventions, in the employment of machine guns, in the use and abuse of language, in political propaganda, among other means, all of which play crucial roles in transforming the directions in which humanity evolves. Many examples in this book show that the interpretation of a theory is largely determined by the choice of concepts and terms selected by the author and their understandings by readers, whether these are lay or professional. For example, in his earliest papers, Moscovici already had a concept of what he wanted to study but had no name for it and no method to study it. Thus, he referred to ‘social representations’ of psychoanalysis while carrying out surveys (Chapter ). A different kind
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of terminological problem arose in science when Einstein used the term ‘curved space’ (Chapter ), making it hard to understand for those who were not familiar with Einstein’s conceptual network. Other examples in this book referred to terms such as ‘attitude’, ‘information’, ‘objectification’, ‘cognitive polyphasia’ which, without explaining their meanings in their specific contexts, led to confusions. For instance, does ‘cognitive polyphasia’ refer to ‘knowledge’ or to ‘meaning’? Do phrases such as ‘common knowledge’, ‘lay knowledge’, ‘common sense knowledge’, ‘popular knowledge’, and others mean the same things? The problem of terminology is also associated with external constraints that allow and prohibit certain terms. Outside agencies may signify changes in moral values or ideologies or relate to political decisions or changing views on human rights and justice. It is often ignored that a term used during a specific historical period cannot be judged by contemporary criteria. Dictators authorise the use of terms to express their political goals. Wars show that battles are fought not only by weapons but also by using language, single words, and other symbols. Totalitarian regimes such as Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, in building on citizens’ implicit beliefs, habitually mix political and religious symbols to achieve loyalty of the masses. Even lesser figures, such as political activists, may control which words are allowed and which must be prohibited. They might have noble aims in drawing attention to injustices in history but, equally, this can lead to terrorising the public and researchers by making moralistic accusations without understanding the historical and cultural circumstances in which the terms arose. It can be a difficult task for social theories to hide and reveal a manifold of such excesses. • Comprehensions, misunderstanding, routinisations, trivialisations, as well as creative and imaginative developments enter handbooks and textbooks and play a part in determining the fate of a theory. This also draws attention to the ease with which the complex nature of a theory is forgotten. Instead, a comfortable way of using it may be chosen, one which eschews the author’s in-depth thinking and transforms it into trivial claims. • The problems of the making of a dialogical social theory is also illustrated by the context of politicised and bureaucratised academic life. Let us remind ourselves that politicians claim that doing politics is about winning, into which they put all their efforts. And many academics, too, believe that they must sell their theories in order to
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win. The abuse of language and rhetoric is enough to capture ‘Others’ without thinking about the substance of the matter in question and to accept the content of a politician’s loud voice. This idea, brilliantly conveyed by Francis Cornford (/), appears to be part of only very slowly changing human nature which contrasts with much faster changes. Cornford wrote his guide for the young academic politician at the beginning of the twentieth century when universities were still independent of state politics and bureaucracy (at least, that was the case at the University of Cambridge, Cornford’s alma mater). However, his ‘advice’ to academics on how to be influential, how to construct arguments to their own advantage, how to stick to the principle of unripe time (not to act when seemingly the right time has not yet arrived), and so on is equally powerful at present when harsh and farreaching historical changes at universities have taken place. Despite these drastic changes, we still ask: is the making of a dialogical social theory not concerned with the advancement of knowledge rather than with winning by whatever means? Do academics search for knowledge and strive to maintain the integrity of ideas, words, and actions or are they academic politicians? Although uncertainties of the contemporary zeitgeist do not make their decisions easy, it is up to academics to choose who they are. It could be argued that attempts to win by whatever means are also part of science. For many, the diffusion, rather than advancing a theory, has become the main goal of their efforts. But are they part of ethics? Do ethics matter? In this book, I have analysed, on the one hand, the incomplete and contradictory features of the theory of social representations and communication and, on the other, its forward-moving and inspirational highlights. Concerning the former, it could be suggested that the reader should be generous when faced with a remarkable theory that was created by a thinker with a great wealth of ideas. It could be argued that one should not be narrow-minded and critical of the lack of consistencies and clarities and of difficulties with interpretation. But that could also mean that the door would be left open to anything that comes and goes and to pretend that it does not matter if the theory is no more than ‘just the word’ that is spread around to ‘win’. Concerning the latter, I have suggested that the theory of social representations and communication has the potential to productively advance the dyad Self–Other as an irreducible ethical and aesthetic ontological
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unit. For Emmanuel Lévinas (/), all human thinking and acting are subordinated to ethics and the Self relates to the Other by being in dialogue. The emergence of ethics and aesthetics in sociogenesis has given direction to the human and social sciences. This brings us back to the beginning of the book and the concerns of humanity with the big problems after the Second World War: to rebuild the world. In referring to the Holocaust, Lévinas insisted that even Auschwitz did not destroy morality. For him, the problem of evil brings about the significance of justice and ethics, both of which arise from the interdependence of the Self and Other. The Self’s concern for the Other who suffers brings justice into the open. It is justice, Lévinas argues, that sets limits to the Self’s responsibility. Ethics direct the Self to the defence of the Other, which surpasses the threat that concerns the Self (Lévinas, , p. ). What are the implications of these final remarks for the future of the theory of social representations and communication? While the worldview designed by philosophy and science of the seventeenth century was based on the power of prediction, simplicity, and universal laws, contemporary life shows the power of unpredictable and ambiguous events. The terrible wars of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries with their global consequences, as well as the enormous technological and scientific advancements, have eliminated any possibilities of homogeneous thinking, universal laws, and continuous progress. Unpredictable events, such as the fall of the Soviet empire, and the subsequent attempts to restore it with the invasion of Ukraine, pandemics, and ecological disasters, have become worldwide concerns of the human mind. In human/social sciences, such complex and erratic events are reflected in a fundamental shift from the studies of single variables, the emphasis on prediction, control, and balance, to attempts to grasp the complexities of the unpredictable contemporary world. These include problems of global economics, environmental issues, health, and pandemics, and the rebuilding of the world after wars imposed by dictators such as Putin. Throughout this book, I have insisted that social representations are dialogical, dynamic, and holistic phenomena that explore processes and contents of complex problems in daily lives of individuals, groups, and institutions in their socio-historical and political contexts. In discussing complexity and complex thinking in Chapter (Morin, , , ), I referred to some studies of social representations and communication that corroborate Morin’s emphasis on ambiguity, uncertainty, and unpredictability of such convoluted phenomena. They also draw attention to the necessity to understand the constitutive relations between order and
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disorder, interaction, organisation, and self-creating open systems. Such studies, linking Morin’s concept of complexity and social representations, are in their beginnings but indicate that the theory of social representations and communication can make significant contributions in these domains. For example, theoretical advancements of themata, biunique societies as a new episteme, heterogeneous forms of thought, among many other concepts promise the development of new kinds of thinking and of new perspectives required in the social/human sciences of the changing world.
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Index
Abric, Jean-Claude core/periphery model. See also core/periphery figurative schema, Jeux, conflits et representations sociales, structural model, admiration and repression, self, anchoring as categorising and naming, Doise, Willem, – Jesuino, Jorge Correia, Jodelet, Denise, , naturalises object, as protéiforme, in Psychoanalysis , Arendt, Hannah, attitudes as dimensions of social representations, meaning in social representations, as pre-behaviour, and social representations, attitudes and opinions, , –, , Austin, John speech act theory, Bakhtin, Mikhail aesthetics as a dialogical process, chronotopes, ethics and aesthetics, – life as open-ended dialogue, non-alibi in being, Shakespeare, William, Baldwin, Mark James, Baliani, Giovanni-Battista, Bartlett, Frederic the concept of schema, conventionalisation of images, thinking, beliefs medical and traditional,
resistible and irresistible, unconscious and unspecified, variability of, Bergson, Henri common sense is a social sense, duration of time, free will, temporality, biunique societies, new episteme, Cassirer, Ernst, –, –, , , , grasping the whole, I and you, – influence on Moscovici, – objectification, –, The Philosophy of Symbolic forms, significance of language, symbolic forms, Celan, Paul poet, Cézanne, Paul capturing movement, images of apples, spatial ambiguity, Chiva, Isac anthropologist, cognitive polyphasia, , , as an expression of internal dialogue, hypothesis of, no equivalence in Durkheim, typology of knowledge, collective memories about Communism, imagination of collective future, as imaginative reconstructions, social representations and myth, common sense, guide for daily acting, heterogeneous forms, as irresistible beliefs, –
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Index
common sense (cont.) old and new, proverbs, and psychoanalysis, and scientific knowledge, and social representations, and social representations used indistinguishably, communication genres, and behaviour, conversation, diffusion, directed at different types of group, propaganda, propagation, Communist Party, , , , , , , in France, – Moscovici, Serge, propaganda, , psychoanaysis, complexity in social representations, complexity theory, and complex thinking, constructivism Moscovici, Serge, Piaget, Jean, conversation a combat between participants, importance in theory of social representations, a primary communication genre, , , rhythm of speech gestures, core/periphery Latin America, structuralism, structural model, – Cornford, Francis, Crombie, Alistair Greek rationality, rationality in different systems, cybernetics, – rejected in the USSR as pseudo-science, structuredness and formness, study of control, information, and communication, de Saussure, Ferdinand binary oppositions, linguistics as part of social psychology, semiotic theory, static and dyadic unit of the sign, development of child’s intelligence, as continuous rather than discontinuous,
as a dynamic and open system, of logical thinking, microgenetic, ontogenetic, sociogenetic, of sciences after the Second World War, of social theories, Dewey, John aesthetics and ethics, dialectics, , back-and-forth process, Hegel, Georg, W. F., Moscovici, Serge, of nature, tensions and oppositions, dialogical approach, , , dialogue does not need words, – external and internal, internal, and textbooks, discourse analysis and social representations, discursive/contructionist approach critique of representations, – Doise, Willem human rights and values, non-consensual social representations, organising principles, social representations as metasystems, sociogenetic approach, symbolic thinking and communication systems, Durkheim, Emile collective representations as almost physical entities, collective representations as reality, , common sense conceals reality, Kantian perspective of representations, little role in Psychoanalysis (), separation of psychology from sociology, social facts, sociology as a scientific discipline, Duveen, Gerard Child–Child–Task, – constructivism, co-operation and conflict, Ego–Alter–Object, gender identities, social identity, sociogenetic approach, Ehrenburg, Ilya Soviet writer, Einstein, Albert aesthetics, autobiography,
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Index condemnation of relativity in the Soviet Union, curved space, , relativity in arts, epistemology constructionist, dialectic, empiricistic, genetic of Piaget, of Gerard Duveen, of living experience, of the natural sciences, of the Self-Other-Object, , , of social cognition, , ethics, – and aesthetics, , and aesthetics interlinked, , Jodelet, Denise, Faucheux, Claude Marxism and social psychology, psychoanalysis as an anthropological study, Festinger, Leon, , , figurative equation, – concerned with meaning-making, and Peirce’s triadic model, figurative schema, , –, – unconscious–repression–conscious mind, , Fraisse, Paul,
holistic vision of nature and humanity, human activities, mystery, Herder, Johann G. von zeitgeist, heterarchy Moscovici, Serge, images contribute to reinterpretations of histories, in drawings, as a form of communication, visual, imaginary, social, historically determined, maps of Mexico, imagination defines humans as species,
gestalt, , , , Goldmann, Lucien Duveen, Gerard, genetic structuralism, identity and communication, Grenfell Tower and Cornish’s ethnographic study, Cornish, Flora, disaster, to re-establish human value, Guttman, Louis, , facet analysis, holistic, systematic and aesthetic approach, scales,
Jahoda, Gustav critique of Moscovici, cross-cultural psychology, the term of ‘social representations’ redundant, Jahoda, Marie study of practical problems, transition among cultures, – Jesuino, Jorge Correia, , figurative equation, objectification and anchoring, , Jodelet, Denise cognitive polyphasia, collective memory and myth, on differences between two editions of Psychoanalysis, first edition of Psychoanalysis better than the second, intervention practices, latency period in social representations, mental maps of Paris, structured field,
Harré, Rom critique of social representations, Moscovici as Durkheimian, positioning theory, Self and Others, speech act theory, Hegel, G. W. F., aesthetic relations, dialectics,
Kant, Immanuel, a priori knowledge, on representations, universal rationality, Koyré, Alexandre, Hegel, G. W. F., philosopher, Kravcenko, Victor political trial,
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Index
Kuhn, Thomas paradigm shift, Planck, Max, redescribed theories, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhnian shift of paradigms, Lagache, Daniel psychoanalyst, language and communication, , , , , as a concrete dialogical co-action, as cultural processes, for political purposes, between Solzhenitsyn and the Politburo, in speech act theory, veiled, Lenoble, Robert Essai sur la notion d’expérience, representation, – Lévi-Strauss, Claude did not accept social representations, entropology, Guttman’s scales, structuralism, structuralist anthropology, Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien accused of racism, contrasting types of rationalities, pre-logical thinking, – Lewin, Kurt, eating habits, the Second World War and social sciences, Lysenko, Trofim, Malrieu, Phillipe, Marxism dialectical and historical materialism, social representations of, , , , young people in France in the s, mass communication diffusion, propagation, propaganda, – irresistible beliefs, – mass psychology the unconscious, masses, , without faith, impact of images, must learn the class consciousness, and propaganda, the psychology of, meaning accepted as symbol, changes in objectification and anchoring, decline of,
and knowledge, meaningless objects, of objectification and anchoring, principle of, social representations as, symbolic, and truth, meaning-making processes, , , construction of social knowledge, of Marxism, objectification and anchoring, professional and lay, socially shared beliefs and knowledge, and symbols, Merleau-Ponty, Maurice children’s lived experience, critique of Piaget, language as action, phenomenology, Phenomenology of Perception, Morin, Edgar abandons hierarchy, complex thinking, dialogical principle, – system as a macro-unity, Moscovici, Serge, anthropology of modern culture, , autobiography, Chronique des années egarées, communication genres, conversation, critique of Durkheim in Psychoanalysis , dialogue with his theory, as Durkheimian and non-Durkheimian, – European Association of Experimental Social Psychology, heterarchy, history and philosophy of science, individual and society, , , Koyré, Alexandre, from Kuhnian anomalies to inventions, Lagache, Daniel, Lenoble, Robert, The Making of Modern Social Psychology, Marxism and social psychology, no distinction between common sense and other forms of social knowledge, political refugee in Paris, psychoanalysis, , Psychosociology of Language, reconversion of ineffective factories, rejecting attitudes, rejection of hierarchical stages,
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Index rejection of Kuhn’s idea of anomalies, representations as cultural and anthropological phenomena, – social representations of psychoanalysis, Transnational Committee of Social Psychology, triadic model Ego–Alter–Object, two editions of Psychoanalysis, – value-laden knowledge, who is the Other?, naming, as creating objects in the world, in objectification and anchoring, Moscovici, Serge, objectification as information, figurative schema, and naturalisation, scientific and rationalistic thinking, objectification and anchoring both concern the familiarisation of the strange, central concepts of the theory, as complementary processes. See also Moscovici, Serge dialectic and dialogical processes, language-based processes, , reversed order, – Oedipus complex, , , ontology, of humanity, Self–Other as a unit, oppositions, binary, dialectic, microsocial and macrosocial, Otherness, , , , , in two ways, paradigm shift Kuhn, Thomas, and the theory of social representations, triadic model as epistemological revolution, Parsons, Anne myth and belief, Oedipus complex, Peirce, Charles Sanders, , , , infinite semiosis, – triadic model of the sign, , Picasso, Pablo scientific development, Planck, Max diversified quantum theory,
Popper, Karl, science, positioning theory, , and social repesentations, values and morality, rationality of common sense, dialogical, , formal, retrospective reinterpretation of theory, – Ricoeur, Paul, phenomenology of language, Romania, , as Communist paradise, Rommetveit, Ragnar language, Sakharov, Andrei, science proletarian and bourgeois, –, scientific revolutions change of epistemologies, Self–Other, – as aesthetic ontological unit, aesthetic relationship, asymmetries, Bakhtin, Mikhail, belong together by being opposed, common sense, – derivation of other themata, dialogical process of interaction, as epistemological thema, has generative potential, as interdependent, , linked by ethical relations, Mead, George Herbert, moral order, propaganda, Sakharov, Andrei, self-centredness, unique relations, Self–Other–Object/Ego–Alter-Object asymmetric relations, , change of epistemologies in many disciplines, epistemological core of social representations, in extreme situations, implicit, political dissidents, triadic model, uniqueness of the model, semantic barriers, semiology, , ,
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009295000.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press
Index
semiosis, – Peirce, Charles Sanders, semiotics, Shostakovich, Dmitri, – single cases definitions, Hippocratic case descriptions, non-repeatibility, in physics and astronomy, in social sciences, theory of social representations and communication, social cognition, , social positioning and social representations, social psychology American influence, and anthropology and sociology, and attitudes, a discipline in movement, , as experimental science, , individualistic, , international development, normative and ethical issues, rebuilding society, redefined, after the Second World War, , , after the War, social representations as anthropological, historical, cultural phenomena, as anthropology of modern culture, , , definitions, diversification, as dynamic and complex phenomena, of environmental protection, as a Kuhnian paradigm, as a metatheory, and narratives, non-consensual, , none of principal concepts derived from Durkheim, and other social psychological theories, and positioning theory, and semiotics, as single cases, – and social cognition, , and social identity, , socio-cultural/anthropological approach, as structural phenomena, as unique phenomena, social theory and audience, dialogical, ,
as dialogues, as a unique event, Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, , , Spirit of the Times (Zeitgeist), influence on formation of theories, influence on science, – Stoetzel, Jean attitudes and opinions, Gallup methods, Gallup polls, strongman in liberal democracies, structuralism, Aix-en-Provence, binary oppositions, Tajfel, Henri, social comparison, social identity, Tarde, Gabriel, Tarkovsky, Andrei art as a communicative activity, and ideologies, imprinted time, against moral decay of artists, temporality, temporality aesthetics and ethics, in aesthetics and ethics, Bergson, Henri, as subjective experience, , underlain by memory, terminology arbitrary use, without attention to meanings, attitudes, problems in social representations, , in translations, thema/themata, change over time, dialectical oppositions, dialogical oppositions, , at heart of social representations, as simplified binary oppositions, thinking essentially a dialogue, natural, a social thinking, in oppositions, rational, in strictly separated polarities, time as passing of moments, and space, Toblerone model,
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009295000.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press
Index unconscious collective, and conscious processes, contribution to culture, masses and crowds, and non-conscious, – unconscious, repression, conscious mind, Valsiner, Jaan objectification and anchoring, semiotic mediators,
Vico, Giambattista common sense, – needs and utilities, New Science, Wallon, Henri, , , , developmental psychology, Wiener, Norbert, , , cybernetics, individual and social groups, information and communication,
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009295000.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009295000.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press