Abstract
The paper retraces the elaboration of a model that accounts for the emergence of subjectivity—the possibility to distance self from others and oneself—if we consider people as always taken in social and cultural streams of meaning and tensions. It builds a model considering first, human experience as possible when a person takes distance from the here-and-now. Second, it suggests considering two general semiotic streams that feed in, or support, that distancing—social and cultural discourses, and personal experience. Third, a knitting model suggests the constant creation of personal patters out of these two streams. Fourth, a dynamic, star-like model is proposed to account for the actual and constant emergence of subjectivity out of such social and cultural configurations. The model is constituted by a 2, 3 or N-number of eight-shaped crossing loops, resulting in a star-like model situated in a 3 dimensional space. The proposition is to analyze a person in a specific situation: the attractors enabling these loops, or end-points of the star, are the relevant social and cultural elements: others with whom he or she interacts, specific bodies of shared knowledge, social representations, cultural elements and tools, and so on. In each situation, the relative strength of these elements, or the tension they generate, are negotiated by the person; the unique ways of dealing with that situation and inviting solutions can thus be seen as the emergent subjectivity. The model is explored to account for developmental dynamics at various scales in the lifecourse. Finally, the pragmatic interest of a model emphasizing complex configurations, not simple causalities, is recalled.
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Notes
Most concrete examples are taken from (or inspired by) the SYRES project (symbolic resources at school) (see Grossen, Zittoun & Ros, 2012; Zittoun & Grossen, 2012, as well as Ros and Grossen 2009; Zittoun et al. 2010). The project’s goal was to identify if students could use literary and philosophical texts met at school as symbolic resources, and eventually examined the roles between cultural experiences in and out of school. It included observations in 15 classes in 3 upper-secondary schools, questionnaires with 205 students on their cultural experiences, interviews with 16 teachers and 20 students on their relationship to cultural elements in and out of schools, and 6 focus groups with students about classroom situations in which engage personal matters in discussions about literary or philosophical texts. One example is taken from another project with its reference; the remaining examples are imagined on the basis of past research and indicated as such.
A problem that has similarities with the so-called uncertainty principle in quantum physics as described by Heisenberg, who showed the impossibility of measuring both current properties and momentum of a particle. It is not only a matter of combining perspectives: the very process of measure will affect in an unpredictable way the system made of very small quantities. This has been questioned over the years (for instance see Busch and Lahti 1985). To some extend, but for different reasons, the same issue appears in any social and human system under study…
In that sense, over time, significant Others, the meanings they have, or the laws that organize people’s lives regarding specific objects or activities—that is, in specific spheres of experience—are often synthesis of many encounters, or accumulated experience. One’s relationship to mathematics is not built in one day, it is a long history that can go back to childhood games, school mockery, exam failure, tax-form-filing, company management, and so on. Like Freud, writing about dream figures, suggested (2001a), these internalized others are less one specific person, than a composite, a synthesis—like when, in the early times of photography, many people’s negatives were captured on one same photographic paper, so as to produce a composite of persons, with some dominant emerging figures and erasing people’s specificities.
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Acknowledgement
I thank Maria Lyra for her thought provoking invitation to think about “subjects”, and her group of students and Jaan Valsiner for playing with the model presented here. I also wish to thank Milan Mazourek for designing figs. 3 and 5.
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Zittoun, T. On the Emergence of the Subject. Integr. psych. behav. 46, 259–273 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12124-012-9203-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12124-012-9203-1