Creating Sign Hierarchies: Social Representation In Its Dynamic Context

Abstract

In this paper I complement Moscovici’s focus on the processes of social representation by

theory of personal presentation that involves construction and destruction of dynamic

hierarchies of signs. Such hierarchies enable intra-psychological dialogues about one’s

self-positioning while proceeding further in the flow of experience. Both the processes of

social representation and semiotic mediation feed into each other, creating potential for

change at both personal and societal levels. Forms of such relationships -ranging from

conflict, contradiction and opposition on the one extreme to those of oppositional coexistence,

constructed harmony, and dialectical synthesis, on the other -are multiple and

co-exist in human lives at the same time. The process of social representation -similarly to

personal presentation -is simultaneously oriented towards the not-yet-known future and

presently-reconstructed past. Such simultaneity makes the processes of representing

generative - we can view social representation as a presentation process on the border of

the Future and the Past, as the construction of self-organization takes place in the Present.