Knowledge in Context

Representations, Community and Culture

Sandra Jovchelovitch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134445448
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book explores the relationship between knowledge and context through a novel analysis of processes of representation. Sandra Jovchelovitch argues that representation, a social psychological construct relating self, other and object-world, is at the basis of all knowledge. Understanding its genesis and actualisation in individual and social life explains what ties knowledge to persons, communities and cultures. It is through representation that we can appreciate the diversity of knowledge, and it is representation that opens the epistemic function of knowing to emotional and social rationalities.

Drawing on dialogues between psychology, sociology and anthropology, Jovchelovitch explores the dominant assumptions of western conceptions of knowledge and the quest for a unitary reason free from the 'impurities' of person, community and culture. She recasts questions related to historical comparisons between the knowledge of adults and children, 'civilised' and 'primitive' peoples, scientists and lay communities and examines the ambivalence of classical theorists such as Piaget, Vygotsky, Freud, Durkheim and Lévy-Bruhl in addressing these issues.

Against this background, Jovchelovitch situates and expands Moscovici's theory of social representations, developing a framework to diagnose and understand knowledge systems, how they relate to different communities and what defines dialogical and non-dialogical encounters between knowledges in contemporary public spheres. Diversity in knowledge, she shows, is an asset of all human communities and dialogue between different forms of knowing constitutes the difficult but necessary task that can enlarge the frontiers of all knowledges.

Knowledge in context will make essential reading for all those wanting to follow debates on knowledge and representation at the cutting edge of social, cultural and developmental psychology, sociology, anthropology, development and cultural studies.

1
Knowledge, affect and interaction

Representation is a fundamental process of all human life; it underlies the development of mind, self, societies and cultures. To represent, that is, to make present what is actually absent through the use of symbols is central to the ontogenetic development of the human child, is at the basis of the construction of languages and the acquisition of speech, is crucial to the establishment of interrelations that constitute the social order and is the material through which cultures are formed and transformed across time and space. The reality of the human world is in its entirety made of representation; in fact there is no sense of reality for our human world without the work of representation. To paraphrase Roland Barthes on narrative (yet another form of representation), representation is just there, like life itself.

Perhaps it is precisely because of this ubiquitous presence that the concept of representation and the processes it describes has generated so much polemic and dispute in the social sciences and beyond. It has generated theoretical battlefields and divided streams of political organisation; it is at the basis of inclusion and exclusion—who is and who is not represented?—and it underlies the very core of our knowledge about ourselves and the world which we inhabit. How do we gain access to what is ‘out there’ in the world, how well does representation represent whatever it intends to represent? This is a perennial question behind our efforts to know and to understand the world and it becomes a crucial one whenever projects to change the world are at stake. Because the work of representation is open and most of the time an untidy entanglement of human interests and passions it can very easily become controversial. Very few representations, if any, are capable of establishing themselves as verity, as a true depiction of the world. Even when they manage to reach a high level of consensus within a culture, history shows that there will always be some level of dissent, some individual or group prepared to propose alternative representations. In the struggles over representation we can see the precarious and unstable nature of our definitions, of our knowledge, of what constitutes truth and reality.

Much of the dispute over representation can be explained by an underlying tendency to focus solely on its epistemic function, that is, the ability of representation to produce knowledge about the world. Indeed, there is a very strong tendency both in psychology and other social sciences to equate the epistemic function of representation with cognition and to erase from the representational process its connection with persons and contexts. Representation is studied as an accurate depiction of a given state of affairs in the world and disconnected from the human and social processes that make it possible in the first place. Conceived as the sole basis of cognition and knowledge, representation is reduced to a mental epistemic phenomenon, ruled by information-processing mechanisms and a modular computational system that some psychologists call mind. The multidimensional properties of representation, which are clearly visible in its social psychological genesis and societal foundations, are rendered invisible. The power of this theoretical move is such that the notion of cognition, and with it representation, has been almost incapacitated for critical usage in psychology. Much of the work that has engaged in the reconceptualisation of mind and its correlate processes has discarded both notions precisely because of the asocial connotations they have acquired in mainstream psychology: thus the need to reappropriate both phenomena and retrieve the conceptual resources that account for the social and psychological foundations of representation as a symbolic and social process.

In this chapter I shall begin to explore the problem of representation by discussing in detail the representational form, its mode of constitution and its relation to the symbolic function and the production of knowledge. The approach I seek to develop is concerned both with the psychological aspects of representation and the social foundations of its process of production. On the one hand, it is important to retrieve and to consolidate the psychological insights present in the work of developmental psychologists and psychoanalysts such as Piaget, Vygotsky and Winnicott about the ontogenesis of symbolic representation and its relation to self, knowledge and other. All have shown that the ontogenesis of representation involves at once processes of individuation and socialisation that are permeated by the growth and development of knowledge. At the basis of all knowledge, be it knowledge of self or knowledge of the object-world, there is the work of representation and understanding how it becomes possible for the human child to achieve the ability to represent can teach us a great deal about the nature of the representational form and its social psychological foundations. Ontogenetic processes also make clear the link between the work of representation and the symbolic function, something that is central to the understanding of representation I seek to explore in this book. Representations are not a mirror of the world outside and are not purely the mental constructions of individual subjects. They involve a symbolic labour that springs out of the interrelations between self, other and the object-world, and as such have the power to signify, to construct meaning, to create reality.

On the other hand, it is important to understand representation as a social process embedded in institutional arrangements, in social action, in the active dynamics of social life, where social groups and communities meet,

Table 1.1 Representation and its domains

Representation and the symbolic function
(produced by and expressive of)
Self	Self-Other Relations	Object
Subjective	Intersubjective	Objective
Personal/psychological	Communicative/interactive	Epistemic/cognitive

communicate and clash. The work of representation in social fields relates to the construction of worldviews, to the establishment of systems of everyday knowledge that not only seek to propose a framework to guide communication, action coordination and interpretation of what is at stake, but also actively express projects and identities of social actors and the interrelations between them. Ignoring the social dimension of representation has allowed for the recurrent view of representational processes as purely mental cognitive phenomena, detached from the larger societal constrains that are integral to their processes of constitution. I seek to challenge this tendency by reaffirming the communicative nature of representation and its grounding in concrete contexts. Understanding that representation is social directs the analysis to the consideration of the actual social contexts where representations are formed and to the nature of communication that makes them possible in the first place. The formation of representation is a public affair, a context-dependent process that relies on the social, political and historical conditions that shape specific contexts.

My central aim in this chapter is to introduce the key issues and central problems involved in the social psychology of representations and to offer a detailed analysis of the architecture of representation. Table 1.1 provides an overview of the conceptual scheme I develop throughout the book and brings together the terms I use to discuss representation.

I shall start by outlining the central premises of the approach to representation I seek to develop and the main issues I intend to address throughout the book. After establishing the main issues circumscribing the social psychology of representations, I discuss the making of representation in Cartesian philosophy showing how it has dominated current conceptions of representation and go on to discuss the dialogical approach to the study of representation emphasising the symbolic and genetic processes involved in the development of representation. I retrieve the ontogenesis of representation in the child to show that as well as being a structure that allows the construction of knowledge about the object-world, the development of representation is entangled in the affective and social dynamics of self-other relations. This genetic account will allow a characterisation of representation as psychological, interrelational, and epistemic structures expressing subjective, intersubjective and objective dimensions. The fourth section brings together the main aspects of the architecture of representation substantiated throughout the chapter.

The social psychology of representations

Although the social psychology of representations involves the consideration of several issues, there is one dimension that is central to all others and that frames, from the outset, the organisation of this field: the problem of meaning. It is only through a consideration of meaning and the symbolic function that a truly social psychological account of representation can emerge. It is the analysis of meaning that can shed light on the fact that different people, in different contexts and different times produce different views, symbols and narratives about what is real, and it is only through an understanding of meaning that we can begin to study how these different representations relate to each other and the consequences of these relations in the social world. It is on the basis of the symbolic function of representations—the fact that representation uses symbols to signify, to make sense of the real and at the same time to establish it—that we can understand both its power to construct reality and the limitations of empiricist conceptions that assume the existence of empirical orders as an a priori to the labours of human cognition. It is on the basis of the symbolic function of representations that we can turn away from the idea of knowledge as full correspondence between representation and the outside world and start to ask questions that unsettle the old idea of representation as a copy of the world outside. It is through the analysis of meaning that we can understand that the relationship between a representing system—an intersubjective structure between self and other—and the system being represented—be it objects in the material world or other people—is not a one-to-one but a many-to-many relationship.

It is only through the symbolic function that we can grasp the work of representation as going beyond purely epistemic aims to also encompass expressive aims, which link up the representational form to the logic of self, self-other relations and contexts. Through representation individuals and communities not only represent a given object and a state of affairs in the world, but also disclose who they are and the issues that matter to them, the interrelations in which they are involved and the nature of the social worlds they inhabit. Thus it is meaning, its production and transformation by individuals and communities that occupies central stage in the social psychology of representations and provides the conceptual foundation for an understanding of representation as both psychological and social.

Understood in this way, the social psychology of representations considers meaning and social context as foundational dimensions of all representational phenomena. Both—meaning and social context—offer the theoretical lenses through which the field poses and tries to answer questions related to the production and transformation of knowledge, its relationship to social and cultural contexts and the diversity of forms it assumes in contemporary public spheres. They also frame our understanding of old and new issues that are linked to the construction of representation and knowledge, from the old and still unresolved problem of subject-object relations to problems related to the social psychology of knowledge and the rationality and/or rationalities that pertain to different knowledge systems. Each one of these dimensions refers back to some of the central problems of psychological science in particular and to the social sciences in general. At the same time, they offer a route for an engagement with issues that, despite being with us for a long time, are still important today and indeed have acquired renewed prominence in our contemporary world. Let me consider each of them in turn.

The relationship between subject-object

This has been a central problem in psychology, it underlies the object of social psychology, i.e. the individual-society relationship, and it is an old problem of the social sciences. How do we, as subjects, relate to the object-world outside ourselves? How do we know it, how do we define it, what is the nature of our engagement with it? Throughout the history of psychology answers to these questions have defined different streams of theoretical elaboration and empirical research. All the classical bodies of knowledge that constitute psychology, ranging from its early formulations in introspectionism and behaviourism, to gestalt and psychoanalysis, through to the cognitive revolution of the 1970s, have sought to elaborate a response to the problem of subject-object relations (Brunswik 1952; Wolman 1960; Farr 1996). In all of these responses, with more or less intensity, there has been a tendency to separate too sharply subject and object, a tendency that carries the danger of constructing a full dichotomy between subject and object-world.

In general terms, this tendency can be systematised into two kinds of psychology, which I describe as the ‘psychology of the pure subject’ and the ‘psychology of the pure object’. Both have overly separated the experience of the psychological subject from the reality of the world. The former has taken the subject as the measure of all things and considered the human mind and its activity the full source of what is known, what is done and how engagement with the world takes place. The latter, on the other hand, has given priority to world, conceived as a set of empirical regularities that exists independently of human action and intentionality. Both psychologies rely on the purity of a subject that is seen from its own self-enclosed universe, or on the purity of a world that is seen as devoid of human input. Introspectionism, behaviourism, cognitivism, and the form postmodernism took in psychology all belong to one or the other side of this divide. Consider behaviourism, for instance. Its denial of mind, its concern with manifest behaviour and its dependence on the stimulus-response paradigm make it a clear example of an objectifying model that precludes the consideration of subjective structures. The cognitive revolution that followed, while being a forceful response to behaviourism and its denial of the subject, soon developed into a psychology exclusively centred on the subject, considered as the bearer of cognitive processes qua mental functions and studied independently of the social and historical contexts in which persons exist (Bruner 1990). Postmodern forms of psychology have displayed features of both objectivism/behaviourism and subjectivism/cognitivism, as when denying ontological status to the mind and its process or when conferring full subjective independence to processes of meaning production, as if the reality of the world was made of a game of errant signifiers.

Underlying all is a dualist conception of subject-object relations and a failure to apprehend spaces of mediation that constitute the inbetween of intersubjective and interobjective relations. The origins of these conceptions, as I suggest in subsequent pages, are to be found in Cartesian philosophy and its sharp divisions between person and world, ...

Table of contents

• Contents
• List of tables and figures
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Knowledge, affect and interaction
• 2 Social representations and the diversity of knowledge
• 3 Knowledge, community and public spheres
• 4 The forms and functions of knowledge
• 5 Encountering the knowledge of others
• 6 Studying knowledge in everyday life
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index