The Unifying Aspects of Cultures

SECTION:

Societies and Cultures as Polylogues

France Govaerts (Bruxelles)
Processes of Individuation, representation of roles and polylogues

In this statement, I wish to introduce a representation of social roles as interactive and proactive processes with regard to the social individuation process and its acceleration in our type of culture.
I am not presenting a historical review of old and new processes and their conceptualization in sociology. For the present considerations on the changing processes of social integration in interindividual communication, my objective is to describe how they occur in both dialogues and polylogues and why the latter seems more valuable as a language instrument for encompassing the dialectic process of uniquesness vs multiplicity and to highlight its relation to social integration into societies and sociocultural multiple bonds.

This dialectic is regarded as a core phenomenon of what is meaningful for the representation of social exchanges through interactive roles, especially in "pluri-actor situations of polylogues" (Haselbach, 2000).

By trying to represent the ongoing interaction on the basis of the dialectic uniqueness vs multiplicity of human communication experiences, my statement (written in French, see below) reaches the conclusion that changing representations of new social roles do value multiple choice opportunities. It has an impact on what is called "crisis of values"and "crisis of meanings". It also shows how difficult social roles management has become, resulting already in a proliferation of new laws. We may observe at the same time heavy trends towards symetric places in family life and in political issues and asymetric reinforcement in management.

THE UNIFYING ASPECTS OF CULTURES