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http://cap.sagepub.com/content/9/4/449The online version of this article can be found at:

 DOI: 10.1177/1354067X0394007

2003 9: 449Culture PsychologyLÌvia Mathias Sim'o

Alterity−−Disquiet; Beyond the Other−−Beside Rupture  

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Abstract In this commentary, I analyze Zittoun and hercollaborators’ idea of symbolic resources as mediators of the

representational work demanded by ruptures or discontinuities inthe experience of ordinary life (Zittoun, Duveen, Gillespie,

Ivinson, & Psaltis, 2003). These remarks are mainly centered onthe ideas of disquieting experience and alterity, approached from the

lens of semiotic-cultural constructivism, which seems to allow amore in-depth discussion of the I–world relationship suggested

by the authors.

Key Words alterity, dialogical relationship, disquietingexperience, psychological differentiation, subjectivity

Lívia Mathias SimãoUniversity of São Paulo, Brazil

Beside Rupture—Disquiet; Beyondthe Other—Alterity

Help me get my feet back on the ground(‘Help!’, Lennon and McCartney)

Zittoun and her colleagues’ article (Zittoun, Duveen, Gillespie, Ivinson,& Psaltis, 2003) represents a substantive contribution to enlarging anddeepening our comprehension of the human experience of theunwonted1 within a framework of semiotic-cultural constructivism.

By semiotic-cultural constructivism, I mean the developing contem-porary theoretical-methodological perspective in psychology that isbased mainly on the perspectives of Lev Vygotsky, Mikhail Bakhtin,George Mead, Pierre Janet, Jean Piaget and, more contemporarily, ErnstBoesch and Jaan Valsiner, among others. Its focus turns especially tothe process of individual development, where a prime role is accordedto the I–Other interactions unfolding from, as well as forming, socio-cultural space.2

My comments will be centered on two axes that I see as convergentwith the authors’ perspective, but that also keep, so to speak, somechallenging distance: the ideas of disquieting experience and alterity.

As I understand it, Zittoun and her collaborators’ theoretical con-struction of symbolic resources as mediators of the work that is calledforth by ruptures in the life experience, in order to (re)signify it, largelyrests on the concepts of constraint and transition. The notion of

Culture & Psychology Copyright © 2003 SAGE Publications(London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) www.sagepublications.com

Vol. 9(4): 449–459 [1354–067X(200312) 9:4; 449–459; 038826]

Commentary

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constraint, borrowed from Kurt Lewin, has mainly been charted byValsiner (1997, 1998).

The value of this concept for psychological comprehension of thehuman experience is that constraint captures the dimension of thepossible, which emerges from the field of the indeterminate. The notionof constraint touches upon the philosophical issue of the inescapableconcomitancy of determinism and free will in human action in general,and in human symbolic action in particular. As such, the conceptallows—and even demands—a focus on the permanent tensionbetween the possible (now) and the not possible (now or not yet), betweenwhat can be and what exceeds meaning in current human experience.

Zittoun and her colleagues come to complete this conceptual poten-tial of the concept of constraint with the related notion of transitions:‘Transitions always involve constructions of meaning, and where thereis construction there are also constraints’ (p. 421). The notion of tran-sitions is, in the last resort, concerned with the relationship betweenrupture and (re)continuity:

Transitions involve sequences of problem/rupture, the engagement of repre-sentational labour leading to some resolution/outcome such that action cancontinue . . . a transition is an ‘occasion’ for development—that is, a newsymbolic formation that provides a better adjustment to a given social andmaterial situation while protecting one’s sense of self. (p. 417)

The restructured meanings allow for adjustment and self protection tooccur in the field of the bi-directionality of I–other relations:3

Such forms of symbolic activity, while being personal and connected to one’ssense of self, always take place in the ‘shadow’ of real or imaginary others(people, institutions, traditions), a shadow that is always projected upon thehere-and-now situation, constituting part of its socio-cultural frame. (p. 418)

So settled, constraints and transitions are necessarily related to conti-nuities and ruptures, as well as to I–other relationships. For this reason,I will follow with some explanation about the notions of disquietingexperience and alterity, as they have emerged from our research, becausethese notions seem essential in order to explore further the reflectionsabout human development triggered by the concepts of constraint andtransitions.

Disquieting Experience

By disquieting experience, I mean experience that hurts our expectances,prodding the subject cognitively as well as affectively to feel, think andact. The affected person may be the actor who lives the experience

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itself, or another person who co-experiences the actor’s disquietthrough verbal dialogue or joint silence. The co-experiencer is, there-fore, displaced from his/her own previous position as the interlocutor(Simão, 2002). The key word here is expectance, and I would like toemphasize it more strongly than Zittoun and her collaborators havealready done in their article.

In fact, from the semiotic-cultural perspective, the focal point forunderstanding the role of I–world relations in the ontological con-struction of human subjectivity seems to approach the ‘gap andtension’ character of the relationship between expectance and experience.This is so because to give meaning is always to make distinctions thatare demanded by experiences that cannot fit the semantic field theactor has been developing from his/her previous personal elaborationsof I–world interactions. We have here at stake the gap and tensionbetween

what something is as it appears to us

and

what this something should be (in our thinking, liking, desiring).

In sum, we are facing here personal process of adjustment between is-value and should-value, as it was proposed by Boesch (1991).4 Thinkingfrom this general theoretical framework, a closer regard to the aspectof making distinctions in the processes linked to transitions, asproposed by Zittoun and her colleagues, can be worthwhile (p. 417).

According to the co-genetic logic of Herbst (1995), making distinc-tions generates a triadic unit, formed by three elements that come intoexistence jointly and inseparably: the inside, the outside and themargin, this last representing the distinction, strictly speaking. Fromthis point, we can say that the experience as it happened, the experience asit should have happened and the gap between them cannot form a triadicmeaningful unit because, instead of a margin giving the relationalorganization, there is a gap—some field of non-sense—which is per-ceived and felt as disquieting. The tension that is generated requiresfrom the actor new symbolic actions in order to reach some relationalreorganization of his/her experience in a new triadic unit of meaning,allowing him/her to pacify the discomfort or anguish, or even to profitfrom the amazing, aroused from the unwonted or amazing experience:a symbolic creation emerges from the integrative personal effort. Wecan think, therefore, of multiple unfolding (simultaneous as well assuccessive) triadic units that are required from the active subject by theconstraints within the I–world experience, in order that he/she can

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effectively accomplish the transitions. For future discussions, it is evenpossible to speculate about the transitions themselves as processesoccurring according to the Herbstian triadic unit.

Dialogue and Disquiet

Although personal, the construction of organizing meanings, givingmomentary coherence to the experience, occurs within the fabric5 ofsocio-cultural suggestions. According to a semiotic-cultural view, theculture is understood as a macro-dynamic semiotic field of possibilitiesand limits for the personal organization of experience lived at themicro-genetic level of I–world relations.

However, the relationship between culture and individual occursthrough the figure of the other, this other being concretely present,distant or even imaginary, but, in any case, always the figure whomakes remarks, sings praises, reproves—in sum, acts in a multiplicityof contextual ways, verbally and non-verbally, directly or indirectly,then becoming the representative of, as well as the one who rendersconcrete, in each particular moment, the possibilities and limits of agiven socio-cultural constellation (Simão, 2000).

To such an extent, a relationship of mutual constitutive interdepen-dency is configured among the subject, the interlocutor, the expectedexperiences, the experiences diverging from the expected and the rela-tional meaning among them. In this dynamic changeable field, thesubject’s and the interlocutor’s meaning-making role will occur accord-ing to the extent to which they can position themselves in respect tothe other as someone who gives opportunities to the other for con-structing new margins (meanings).

Moreover, when a dialogical relationship is established, the subjectswill also form a triadic unit, in the above-mentioned Herbstian sense.These units are constituted by the subject him/herself, the other andthe relational meaning of the dyad they form with one another in thatparticular situation, the latter emerging from the construction they canachieve in their negotiations in dialogue, where personal roles andspeech contents are embedded.

Taking as an illustration the first study reported by Zittoun et al.,where children of different genders are asked to collaborate in a Piaget-ian conservation task, we can see that the configuration of the Herbs-tian triadic unit present in each case is different, allowing differentdevelopmental routes. On the one hand, in the case of Mf pairs, therelational organization that emerged from the construction that M andf could achieve did not lead to a new meaning. Rather, it had a ‘double

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ratifying’ meaning: (a) of their relational personal positions, withrespect to the command and submission roles of each, respectively, and(b) of their respective expertise in the theme. From this perspective,there was no experience diverging from the expected for M or for f,either in terms of their personal positions in the relationship, or interms of the conversational content. Everything fitted to the previousexpectance. It is worth mentioning once more that the separationbetween personal position and conversational content has, of course,only a didactic value; the real matter is who (M) said what (the ‘right’or ‘best’ argument) to whom (f) and when (the constrained experimentalsituation of agreement and gender difference). This scenario withouttensions allows no opportunities for either of them to make differenti-ations from the other’s actions. Therefore, there is no field for theemergence of new triadic units (subject, other and relational meanings)in order to organize some disquieting experience, because the disquietdid not occur at all. To this extent, I would like to suggest that the no-resistance pattern pictures not only that ‘the non-conserving girl doesnot resist being positioned as the less knowledgeable tutee’ (p. 426),but also that she could not (in the sense of ‘not being developmentallyin the conditions to’) put herself in the position of being challenged inher expectances by the conserving boy. At the same time, the boy’sstarting argument (first speech turn in the first example) also meritsdiscussion in the context of the present ideas because it was an interro-gation only in its appearance. While an interrogation is usually a verbalaction that signals the doubtful, the unexpected, opening the dialogueto negotiation, his starting intervention was an explanation immedi-ately claiming its validity, from which the affective-cognitive exigencyfor negotiations is usually too demanding for the partner. In thiscontext, their relationship could not bear the dimension of alterity, asit will be designed in the next section.

The bi-modal interaction pattern in Fm pairs, on the other hand,pictures a relationship where there was space for noticing the unex-pected, as well as trying to negotiate alternative fitting views (see, forinstance, in the second example, the contextual meanings of the words‘Well’, ‘because’ and ‘but’ in F’s first speech turn, and ‘looks like’ in F’ssecond speech turn, as well as the comparisons for adjustment in m’sspeeches). As for their implications, I think it is worthwhile and suf-ficient to remember the authors’ remark that ‘[m]ost of the conversa-tions that took this form were linked to cognitive progress on thepost-test for the non-conserving boy, and post-tests were also notablefor their introduction of novel arguments’ (p. 427).

In a similar study (Oliveira & Simão, 2003), we carried out a

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microanalysis of the verbal interactions of five dyads of childrenduring the resolution of mathematics problems, aiming mainly tounderstand how they coordinated their actions, and seeking toapproximate their should-value to their is-value (Boesch, 1991). Thechildren were classmates who usually solved math problems togetherin the classroom context. Each dyad was formed by one child, S1, con-sidered as more expert in mathematics than the other, S2, according tothe teacher’s criteria. In the research set, the dyads were asked todiscuss and present some agreed solution to each problem given tothem by the researcher. Besides other results, we could recurrentlyobserve that S2, although apparently not fully understanding therationale for solving the problems, nevertheless indicated agreementwith S1 attempts, as well as emphasizing crucial aspects of the resolu-tion previously discovered by S1. This last kind of S2’s action was spe-cially intensified when S1 was facing impasses in his/her ownreasoning. The whole set of the results suggested that, at thesemoments, S2’s actions seemed to stimulate S1 to keep on trying newstrategies to solve the problem, while giving him/her emotionalsupport. In terms of the Herbstian triadic unit, we can briefly say that,facing a disquieting situation (realizing that they might not be able toaccomplish the task), the former triadic unit according to which theyhad related to one another until then (S1 in a leadership and auton-omous role; S2 in a submitted and less engaged role; the situation‘under control’ in a customary task) turned into a new triadic unit (S1in a less autonomous role and in a ‘checkmate’ with regard to his/herexpertise, demanding more active engagement from S2, because theyare in a ‘dangerous’ situation). In this situation, S2 assumed the objec-tive to make (push) S1 to try to reach a solution, in a ‘style’ that couldeven represent continuity with their school relationship history when‘facing some danger’.

In sum, it is exactly this situational meaning—changeable, belongingto the relation and not to the isolated subjects, allowing their mainten-ance as inclusive separated instances6 in the interaction—that addressesus to the role of alterity in the subjective constitution of the I. The maincharacter of this dialogical experience is the self/otherness relationshipas an essential aspect of the development of human subjectivity as wellas emergent from this same process (Bakhtin, 1986; Holquist, 1990).

Dialogue and Alterity

As pointed out by Holquist (1990), borrowing from Bakhtin, we alwaysperceive reality from some existential place, which does not mean fixity

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or logocentrism, but rather a cognitive time/space localization: anymeaning of everything is formatted by the place from where it is per-ceived. At the same time, nothing can be perceived but against theperspective background of something else. This something else will benecessarily entailed by the diversity of the other´s outlook, inasmuchas, at each moment, I can only perceive an event from the positionwhere I am.7 To such an extent, the meaning of an event, which sets itas living in the phenomenological world of oneself, is, in the last resort,always given by the co-existence or co-being with the different. Dif-ferentiating becomes, then, the basic condition for living: existence isa dialogue that has the settlement of diversity as its basic condition foremergence (cf. Holquist, 1990).

The meaningfulness of the dialogue rests, therefore, in a great dealof opening opportunities for experiencing the diverse—not necessarilythe antagonistic—perspective through the other’s action directed to thesubject, either at the level of speech contents, or at the level of theposition perceived by each subject in the I–other relation itself, the twolevels being experienced always as embedded by the interlocutors intheir relation.

The other can open to the subject, therefore, a field of possibilitiesrelated to the experience of what something should not be and, neverthe-less, it seems to be, it is felt, thought, believed or desired. This experienceoccurs in the context constrained by the other’s suggestions, thenrequiring transitions and allowing the emergence of new triadic unitsof meaning (Herbst, 1995).

From this perspective, the disquiet experience will be linked to theother qua alterity for two interwoven reasons:

1. Everything that hurts my expectances hurts something co-con-structed, because in my personal culture there is always the otheras implicit; in this way, I even dare to say that the ‘shadows of theother’ (Zittoun et al., 2003, p. 418) could be referred to as the‘presence of the absent’, because they are actually psychologicallypresent as counterpoint voices in the dialogue.

2. The dialogue itself, while an experience that for its proper occur-rence and maintenance needs to be continually hurt, disrupted andreorganized by misunderstandings, as already pointed out by Linell(1995), needs the other to exert this role.

However, neither is all dialogue necessarily dialogical, nor does thedialogical relationship necessarily arise from the mere presence of theother.8 Similarly, from a philosophical perspective, not every I–otherrelationship implies alterity: alterity can be present or not, at this or

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that moment of each I–other interaction, as well as at some momentsof the I–myself interaction.

In this way, alterity is not an entity, but a particular nature of theI–other relationship, where the key aspect for its occurrence is a pre-reflective disposition of the subject to relate to someone who exceedshim/herself. This surpassing character brings up the gap and tensionbetween, for instance, how the I perceives him/herself and how he/she per-ceives the other is perceiving him/herself, where the other is reputed tohave perceptual qualities that cannot be reduced to his/hers, nor canthey be reduced to the general human qualities already known byhim/her. In sum, here we have again the constellation that requires atransition to a new triadic unit of meaning; the ongoing study on ado-lescent’s art objects as uncanny objects (Zittoun et al., 2003) is para-digmatic here. In a convergent way, when discussing the notion ofoutsideness, Holquist (1990) points to the fact that self-perception as awhole emerges from self-perception according to the spatial/temporalcategories of the other, that is, from outsideness. Still according to him,in the I–other relationship, the self as well as the word have thefunction of providing differentiation in order to organize the chaos ofliving experience.

According to Laupies (1999), alterity is a kind of relationship wherethe other is seized by the subject qua a subjectivity comparable—as sub-jectivity—to his/her own, although empirically different from it. Insuch a way, the possibility of entering in a relation of alterity involvesthe possibility of the subject recognizing him/herself in his/her ownidentity; it also involves the possibility that the subject could legitimatethe other’s identity as different from his/her own.

Also according to Laupies (1999), another relevant aspect to thephilosophical comprehension of alterity is the fact that the subject andthe other are both corporeal subjects, in the Merleau-Pontyian sense.This not only gives the subjects their sameness and differences, but alsoprevents each of them from grasping clearly and unmistakably theother, leading to unavoidable asymmetries and tensions in theirrelationships.

In our terms, the corporeality could be understood as a fundamentalconstraint, implying a kind of opacity that imposes a constant tensionbetween the explicit and the implicit in the I–other relationship. Fromthis perspective, the dialogue will emerge as an attempt, never com-pletely successful, to clarify that opacity in the I–other relationship, anattempt that requires the interlocutors to change, to try to ‘take off’ theveil of the otherness. The other is then experienced by the subject as afrontier, a notion we borrowed from Boesch (1991) and brought to the

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study of knowledge construction in verbal interactions. In a few words,the frontier metaphorically symbolizes the limits of the present situ-ation and, at the same time, the possibility of something new beyondthat limit. In the dialogue, to counter-argument with the other, forinstance, it can mean to the subject the exit from the ‘here’ of his/herown knowledge/feeling, which represents to a great extent safety andconviction, to go to a ‘there’, which needs to be structured to becometransparent and intelligible. Therefore, the interposition of the other’sverbal actions, which is viewed as a frontier, requires the subject toinvest in regulations and reflections to construct new perspectivesabout him/herself, the other, the expected, the divergent from theexpected and the relational meaning among them. In this process,when the subject tries to integrate the demand imposed to overcomethe frontier with the cognitive-emotional basis he/she has already con-structed, structural temporary changes can occur, with the emergenceof new symbolic actions. Taking what is said by the other as a frontierto be enlarged means, therefore, to recognize the other as someone whorestricts our action in that cognitive-emotional constellation withinwhich we are presently acting, but who, at the same time, stimulatesand challenges us to overcome what is said (Simão, 2000, 2001). Herewe are back again to the ground of constraints and transitions fromwhich we departed. However, as in every trip, when coming back wealways have the feeling of never having arrived at the same place. Iagree with Zittoun and her colleagues when they say that the Ladakhtourists’ own photographs perhaps ‘come some way to achieving asatisfactory meaning construction, because they might read theirmemories and feelings back into their own pictures’ (p. 441). Never-theless, I would like to suggest that the greatest value of their picturesfor themselves is not exactly the possibility the pictures allow ofreading their memories and feelings, but indeed the fact that readingmemories and feelings allows the possibility of (re)facing themselvesas other in that experience.

Notes

1. ‘Unwonted’ is an archaic English adjective whose meaning is ‘betweenunusual and surprising’; its synonyms in some Latin languages are:inusitado (Portuguese, Spanish), insolite (French) and inusitato (Italian).

2. ‘Alterity and Dialogue in Semiotic-Cultural Constructivism’, ongoingresearch by the author at the Laboratory of Verbal Interaction andKnowledge Construction of the Department of Experimental Psychology,Institute of Psychology, University of São Paulo, Brazil. Convergent ideasreferring to the cultural-semiotic tradition that are relevant for this ongoing

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research have already been stated by Ivana Marková (see, e.g., Marková,2000).

3. On bi-directionality, cf. Valsiner (1989) and Wertsch (1991).4. This point is deeply related to the question of identity, via action potential

and futurity (Boesch, 1979, 1991). Space prevents us here from discussingthem (cf. Simão, de Souza, & Coelho, 2002).

5. I am borrowing this expression from Crossley (1996).6. On inclusive separation and complementarity in interactions, see Marková

(1997) and Valsiner (1998).7. Here I am also including the relationship between I now and I in past or

future times, that is, I as otherness.8. See, for instance, Marková (2000).

References

Bakhtin, M.M. (1986). Speech genres and other late essays. Austin: University ofTexas Press.

Boesch, E.E. (1979). Action et object—deux sources de l’ identité du moi. In P.Tap (Ed.), Identité individuelle et personalization (pp. 23–37). Toulouse: Privat.

Boesch, E.E. (1991). Symbolic action theory and cultural psychology. Berlin:Springer.

Crossley, N. (1996). Intersubjectivity: The fabric of social becoming. London: Sage.Herbst, D.P. (1995). What happens when we make a distinction: An

elementary introduction to co-genetic logic. In T. Kindermann & J. Valsiner(Eds.), Development of person–context relations (pp. 67–79). Hillsdale, NJ:Erlbaum.

Holquist, M. (1990). Dialogism: Bakhtin and his world. London/New York:Routledge.

Laupies, F. (1999). Leçon philosophique sur autrui. Paris: Presses Universitairesde France.

Linell, P. (1995). Troubles with mutualities: Towards a dialogical theory ofmisunderstanding and miscommunication. In I. Marková, C. Graumann, &K. Foppa (Eds.), Mutualities in dialogue (pp. 176–213). Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.

Marková, I. (1997). On two concepts of interaction. In M. Grossen & B. Py(Eds.), Pratiques sociales et mediations symboliques (pp. 23–44). Bem/Berlin:Lang.

Marková, I. (2000). Amédée or how to get rid of it: Social representations from adialogical perspective. Culture & Psychology, 6(4), 419–460.

Oliveira, M.S., & Simão, L.M. (2003). Construção de conhecimento em interaçõesverbais aluno–aluno durante solução de problemas matemáticos: Uma análisesemiótico-construtivista. Manuscript in preparation.

Simão, L.M. (2000). The role of the other in the process of knowledgeconstruction during interactions: Developments from the Symbolic ActionTheory of Ernst Boesch. Annals of the 3rd. Conference for SocioculturalResearch. Campinas, São Paulo, Brazil [CD-ROM].

Simão, L.M. (2001). Boesch’ s symbolic action theory in interaction. Culture &Psychology, 7(4), 485–493.

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Simão, L.M. (2002, 23–6 October). Semiose e diálogo: Para onde aponta oconstrutivismo semiótico-cultural? Paper presented at the XXXII AnnualMeeting of the Brazilian Society of Psychology, Florianópolis, SantaCatarina, Brazil.

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Biography

LÍVIA MATHIAS SIMÃO received her MA and her Ph.D. at the Institute ofPsychology of the University of São Paulo, Brazil, where she has beenAssistant Professor since 1987. She coordinates the Laboratory of VerbalInteraction and Knowledge Construction at the same Institute. Her studies, aswell as those of her research group of students and collaborators, areconcerned with issues embracing the ontological construction of humansubjectivity in I–world and I–other relationships from the perspective of thesemiotic-cultural constructivistic approach in psychology. ADDRESS: Dr LíviaMathias Simão, Instituto de Psicologia da Universidade de São Paulo, Av.Prof. Mello Moraes, 1721, Cidade Universitária Armando de Salles Oliveira,05508–020 São Paulo, SP, Brasil. [email: [email protected]]

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