Creating Sign Hierarchies: Social Representation In Its Dynamic Context

Jaan Valsiner Niels Bohr Professor of Cultural Psychology – Centre for Cultural Psychology, University of Aalborg, Denmark

Keywords: semiosis, hierarchy, representation process, theory

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.

Jaan Valsiner, Niels Bohr Professor of Cultural Psychology – Centre for Cultural Psychology, University of Aalborg, Denmark

JAAN VALSINER is one of the founders of contemporary cultural psychology, having

established the journal, Culture & Psychology (Sage, London) back in 1995 and working as its

Editor ever since. In 1995 he was awarded the Alexander von Humboldt Prize in Germany for his

interdisciplinary work on human development (with follow-up visits to Germany in 1999 and

2012), and Senior Fulbright Lecturing Award in Brazil 1995-1997. He has been a visiting

professor in Brazil, China, Japan, Australia, Estonia, Germany, Italy, United Kingdom, Korea,

and the Netherlands. He is currently Niels Bohr Professor of Cultural Psychology at Aalborg

University, Denmark, and Professor of Psychology and English, at Clark University, USA.