Review symposium: Encountering Objects and Others as a Means of Passage

Abstract

Zittoun's Transitions investigates how young people use cultural elements, like movies and novels, to manage ruptures as a specific moment in their life span, leading to transitions from one socio-psychological location to another. Zittoun's perspective is cultural as well as developmental, and can thus make visible the dynamicity of individual meaning-making processes, a semiosis taking place in the field of self, other, culture and objects which are used as symbolic resources in constructing identity. Zittoun proposes a three-dimensional model of the use of symbolic resources ( aboutness , time and distancing), accompanied by two theoretical constructs: the semiotic prism and the spheres of experience. This complex and transparent architecture is investigated empirically through the case studies of thirty young people whose interviews are thoughtfully analysed. Although Zittoun relates a person, others, a cultural element and the meaning of this element for the person in a dynamic semiotic movement of change, she does not elaborate on the dialogical dimension of this movement of change. It is otherness of and `in' objects which then comes to the foreground. This opened but not developed path is taken up by the reviewer, leading to the notion of dialogical objects: objects which are actually dialogical processes, developing in time within an exchange of voices and positions. Using a dialogical object as symbolic resource means activating the dialogical self; and investigating these uses gives the opportunity to observe the dialogical self in construction. Semioticity, accompanying and forming identity processes, is thus to be completed with alterity, giving these processes orientation and sociocultural value.