Human development begins in dialogue, children learning to organise their world through interaction with others. Children need a responsive environment in order to develop agency at different levels. Only then do they learn to become active participants in everyday life. Parenting demands both acknowledgment and restriction of the child. Child rearing is a social undertaking that depends on suitable dialogical conditions in family proximity and in the wider society. People emphasise their individuality by speaking for themselves, but at the same time bind themselves to the order of the language and the symbols they use in speech. The use of symbols enables people to create distance from reality and from bystanders, and to take a position vis-à-vis each other. They can see the past as past and project themselves into the future.
A person’s experience of reality has both cognitive and affective components that mutually act on each other. On the one hand, what a person feels about another person or situation is in part determined by prior (assumed) knowledge of that person or situation. On the other hand, people cannot know the world in an objective way because the world always primarily affects us in one way or another (Mooij, 2010). People do not look at something or somebody, but they aim for something and long for someone. How we think cannot be divorced from what we think.
To become a member of a society, one has to speak the language of the culture. Language is not just an instrument for describing reality; it is something we use to help us understand reality, to grasp it and to construct new meanings from what we see and believe to be ‘out there’ beyond ourselves. With words, people give meaning to themselves, their lives and their relationships. As soon as people talk with each other, they create and recreate a common condition. It is the exchange of meanings rather than language per se that counts. For people to understand each other and to achieve intersubjectivity, they have to transcend their personal worlds. This demands mutual presentation, an acceptance of roles (Rommetveit, 1984) and a framework. Identity, rather than having an immutable core, is a social representation that constantly changes as a result of negotiations in exchanges with other people (Grossen and Salazar Orvig, 1998). In dialogues, feelings are verbalised and identities presented to other people. The outcomes are negotiable rather than predetermined; different personal and general views are attuned in an effort to reach a common understanding about what the world is like. The rules of society that constrain and direct people in their speech and activities form the framework that makes it possible for people to understand each other. People show their acceptance of societal rules by adhering to them and as such are aware of the consequences of their behaviour (Duintjer, 1977). Each speaking person is a continuation of societal life from a unique position in time and space. In this way, the individual confirms the survival and embodiment of society.
Children become members of society when they begin to use its language and symbols. Through speech, they become subject to societal rules and regulations and acknowledge other people’s individual positions. They talk a common language rather than a private one, one that had its existence before they were born and will remain unaffected by their death. Any self-expression in language therefore has an aspect of alienation, but at the same time, it is an acknowledgement of social ties. In their use of a common language, people transcend their individual situation and share an understanding – an understanding that is, however, provisional rather than fixed, an ongoing process of generating and exchanging new meanings. In different contexts, the individual takes other positions that may be the opposite of a previous position or mutually reinforcing. Changing meta-positions rather than one central overarching position help the individual to organise the relationship between these various positions (Gergen and Gergen, 1983; Sampson, 1985; Hermans and van Kempen, 1993).
0 comments:
Post a Comment