Valences, Traces And New Synthesis In Social Representing. Commentary of J. Valsiner’s Creating sign hierarchies

Authors

semiotic processes, development, cultural psychology, catalysis, war, emotions, historicity, externalization

Based on a chemical metaphor, Valsiner’s (2013) model proposes to consider social

representations as semiotic processes regulating developmental dynamic. In this paper I

pursue this exploration by considering situations in which people’s trajectories lead

them to confront with conflicting social representations. Based on the two cases of

young women’s war experience, I suggest (i) that social representation have, for a given

person, different “weight” than others, because they have longer story for him or her;

(ii) that social representations might have positive or negative “valences”, due to their

emotional resonance; and that (iii) the existence of specific conditions of “natural

laboratories” might help us to account for the processes by which people nonetheless

engage into new forms of representing.