Andreea Enache

University of Bucharest, Romania

 

 

Communication and representation in the construction of the European identity

A theoretical and empirical study on the elaboration of social representations

through mass-communication processes

 

 

Abstract: Our study deals with the issue of the rapport between what is conveyed through mass media and what is represented and organized socially in the form of social reality. The first part of our study focuses on theoretical aspects of this relation, by defining and explaining concepts such as mass-communication, social reality, social representation, cognition, imaginary, and social identity, along with trying to understand the specific relation between these concepts. The second part aims to present and briefly reproduce some of the conclusions of one of our studies on European identity, in close relation with the issue of the way in which social representations are constructed from the initial message of the sender with the affective, cognitive and imaginary participation of the receiver.

Keywords: European identity, mass-communication, social representation, social reality, cognition, imagination.

 

 

1. Introduction

This study aims to deal with the process through which acts of mass-communication produce social representations and to show (based on a case study) how this process is determined by the projective involvement of the subject and the group in the construction of social objects. The implicit assumption of our work is that the fundamental function of human communication is to generate a unified, consistent and coherent social reality that can be used collectively as a mental framework for social practices[1]. Thus, we understand communication (and especially mass-communication) as a psycho-social process of construction of meaning[2], a process by which material objects are transferred into the social world and transformed into social objects that have a significance and that are able to sustain salient relationships with other objects[3]. This can never be a strictly objective process, for all meaning is a social representation that has already assimilated throughout its elaboration the cognitive schemas and phantasmatic products of the collective and individual psyche[4]. The distance between the conveyed object (that we can also call “object in communication) and the represented object (or the “object in representation”) is therefore the inescapable result of a universal projective mechanism that makes every subject attribute to the real object his/her own phantasms, desires, anxieties, as well as the idiosyncratic aspects of his/her own relationship with it. Between communication and representation, there is always the imaginary participating in the construction of a meaning that can never be wholly attributed to cognition, logic and reason. Mass-communication is the process most likely to become subject to phantasmatic activity, and its products – social meanings, generally labeled as social cognition that is organized as a hyper-complex system of social representations[5] – will always bear the mark of this sinuous path that leads alternatively to the conscious and the unconscious, to cognition and phantasm, to the real and to the imaginary.

2. Mass-communication[6] and the construction of social reality

 

Our contemporary society is fundamentally marked by an excess of differences, perspectives, opinions and orientations. Interest groups, pressure groups, political parties, civil society organizations, academic and scientific communities, union trades, international organizations, VIP’s and stars, they all try to catch the public eye by putting on a huge media show that seems to have reached a point of unprecedented variety, beyond which it is very hard to conceive any further expansion. The differentiating and, sometimes, segregating vectors acting upon the social body are nevertheless counterbalanced by a series of mechanisms specific to processes of mass communication; these processes have the quality of leveling differences, unifying opinions, enforcing the status quo and validating a consensual vision of the world[7]. The mass-media paradox is based in this specific tension between the principles that found it (the democratization of public discourse by extensive access to communication for different actors of social life and by increasing availability in relation with ever more numerous categories of publics) and the effects of its functioning (the leveling of opinions and interpretations of reality). Born out of diversity the media eventually produces uniformity, but we can, lately, notice that the media itself becomes more and more segregated, thus mirroring the groups that it specifically targets and reproducing in great detail their own radical differences.

 

The mass media and the acts of mass-communication that it initiates are beyond doubt the most powerful agents of social reality construction. The pressure the media place on the way we perceive and conceive reality, on the way we think and act is tremendous[8]; the vision according with which the media would reflect (i. e. re-produce) reality as a perfectly neutral and unbiased mirror has long ago been assigned to epistemological naivete; researchers, as well as producers, transmitters and receivers of “symbolic contents” conveyed through mass-media have all convened that none of the actors involved in these symbolic transactions is either passive, or perfectly objective[9]. Each act of human communication has a transactional character, which implies that it involves both the sender and the receiver, and allows the elaboration of a message that would never be identical to the one intentioned by the sender[10]. Therefore, social reality is structured somewhere between the sender and the receiver, in the incessant exchange of messages, through successive actions of interpretation and correction of perceptions, on the basis of coding and decoding mechanisms, and even by the means of co-evolution and mutual adjustment of significance-symbolizing systems. It is certain that models such as press agency and public information (vs. bilateral symmetrical and asymmetrical ones) are more adequate for the description and explanation of mass-communication processes[11]. However, almost all models mentioned above ignore the fact that the subject who receives the message expresses himself/herself and translates his/her own attitudes in behaviors and actions even when he/she is not explicitly or officially invited to do so by the sender. Thus, the receiver’s participation in the construction of the message is not a process that needs the sender’s approval in order to take place; human subjects are, by their very nature, interpretative, constructive and creative. Irrespective of the sender’s intentions and interests, the receiver will always have something to “say”; he/she will always react with the fibers of his/her affect to the messages that are transmitted, and his/her imagination will always complete and supplement the version of reality offered by the communicator, no matter what degree of credibility or authority this one possesses.

3. The structure of social reality: social representations

Denise Jodelet[12] systematically exposes the fundamental theses over which there is a widely distributed consensus between researchers in the field of social representations and we will further on reproduce these postulates, as they will also be the postulates of our study:

a) social representations are a form of knowledge, socially elaborated and shared, having a practical function and concurring to the construction of a common reality for a given social entity;

b) as systems of interpretation governing out relation with the world, social representations orient and organize our social behaviors and communications;

c) social representations intervene in processes such as spreading and assimilation of knowledge, individual and collective development, personal and social identity defining, group expression and social change;

d) social representations involve the social belonging of individuals, with its affective and normative implications, with the internalization of experiences, of practices, of models of action and thought, socially determined or transmitted through social communication;

e) social representations are at the same time products and processes of a social activity of reality comprehension;

f) there is no (social) representations without an object of representation;

g) social representations replace the object, make it present when this one is absent, substitute it and symbolize it;

h) social representations have a constructive and creative character, having a part of subject-expression and one of object-interpretation;

i) social representations are based on the correspondence between the forms of social organization and communication and the types of social thinking, with their categories, operations and logic.

 

These postulates outline a theoretical and conceptual framework that we broadly accept and agree with; however, this does not exclude our separation from or doubt on some of the ideas expressed above. For example, we think that the concept of social cognition needs reinterpreting and a more intense capitalization on the role that the social imaginary plays in its structure and dynamics. Thus, we consider that, first of all, knowledge is not obtained exclusively by means of perception and thinking, but also through imagination (with all its forms), which calls for a redefinition of knowledge and cognition, based on a more phenomenological approach rather than on a positivistic one. Considering all this, we give the following definition: “Social representations are systems of knowledge achieved and constructed through reflection, interpretation and imagination of reality, shared by a social group and elaborated in the act of social communication by its members. In other words, they are ways of structuring, organizing, processing and communicating the social knowledge that contributes to and conditions the definition of social reality and each human subject’s access to it” (Enache, A., in press). Social representations are not only social-cognitive constructions and cannot be limited to the study of “social thinking”[13]. Through system of knowledge we understand a system through which the social group produces information. The species of information production (reflection, interpretation, imagination) can be rational, as well as irrational, conscious, as well as unconscious, governed by thinking or by intuition, based on reproduction of reality or on the re-creation/imagination/anticipation of it. Therefore, cognition[14] and phantasm[15] will be the two most likely and also most contradictory ways of information production in relation with a social object; their part in the construction of social representations can, of course, vary with individuals and groups, depending mostly on cultural aspects, but they will never act entirely alone.

4. The role of the imaginary in the construction of social reality

“The imaginary is a central concept for the analysis of human individual and group behavior. A poignantly intellectual philosophical tradition imposed the idea that humans are rational beings, whose actions depend on logical mechanisms that can be reduced to intelligible diagrams. Or, this myth of absolute reason does not describe reality, but rather an ideal, an anthropological utopia. In order to understand, anticipate and eventually influence and determine individual and collective conducts, one should first look closely at people’s unconscious motivations, imaginary and symbolic contents, emotional experiences and so on. The research on the imaginary thus comes to compensate this major shortage in European philosophy and psychology”[16]. This “defect” is attributed by Culianu to the major religious but also cultural processes of the Reform and the Counter-Reform; in his book Eros and Magic he shows how these ideological transformations of the Western society lead to a massive repression of phantasmatic processes and products[17]. The rigor of the Reform had a direct impact on scientific discourses and procedures, so that, if the Renaissance managed to consecrate magic and imagination as privileged means of knowledge, the Reform managed to inverse this tendency and impose the belief that these were evil and improper to be used as tools for science. In a similar way, Gilbert Durand shows how the imaginary comes to derision because of its closeness to another “disliked” concept – the one of image, that, in the context of radical iconoclastic Western ideologies (among which the Reform holds a high rank), comes to be equaled with the one of imaginary[18]. Being conceived of as a sum of images, the imaginary could never compete with the prestige and authority of rational, systematic, positivistic knowledge or with the nobility of concepts, ideas and judgements. The cognitive dimensions of social representations has thus come to enjoy great popularity among scholars and researchers who favored this culture of radical rationality and systematically discouraged all interest for other aspects of the human psyche[19]. This can also be attributed to the difficulty in studying and researching practically the phantasmatic (and mostly unconscious) dimensions of our life. Still, a major role in this is being played the prevalence of the social-cognitive psychology paradigm in the field of general contemporary social psychology. Let alone these aspects that refer to particular orientations and schools, we feel compelled to underline the fact that there is a strong need for the reassessment and the capitalization of already classical achievements of psychology; one of these (now indisputable) theoretical accomplishments is that our psychic life is double-faced – on the one hand, there is the conscious experience, and, on the other hand, the unconscious activity of our mind that we cannot deal with directly, but which is however responsible for a great part of our experience and behavior. Each representation is a mixture of image and concept, of conscious elements (prevalently cognitive) and unconscious ones (prevalently phantasmatic). However, we do not intend to suggest that there is a perfect overlapping between the conscious and the cognitive, or between the unconscious and the phantasmatic (cognitive psychology mentions unconscious dysfunctional cognitions, subliminal perception, and Freud classifies, as we have seen, phantasms in conscious, unconscious, and original; thus, we can only speak of phantasms being prevalently unconscious and cognitions – prevalently conscious, but even such claims should be made with great reserve and be submitted to scientific inquiry). We are, thus, in the apparently paradoxical situation in which the concept of social or collective imaginary knows its hay-days in social sciences, with the sad exception of psychology, the very field from which it received its first scientific arguments.

 

There are, still, some exceptions: Claire Belisle, for example, states the following: “The participation in the social life of some institutions, organizations and groups determines in the individual a (often phantasmatic) image of the world, giving birth to a thematic structure that is being “nurtured” by the motivational (instinctive and impulsive) energy of the person. This image, having many figurative elements, incorporates of course previous perceptions, but also the affective impact of the moment, the social-cultural imaginary, as well as the mirror-like reflection of present data”[20]. This type of theoretical approach mentions aspects of pulsional, affective and phantasmatic nature as elements of social representations. Similar ideas appear in the work of someone we could name an “orthodox” in the “continental” study of social representations: Adrian Neculau writes that ”the symbolic world is still little conceptualized, and especially its affective and imaginary dimensions. This world embraces phantasms, unconscious structures, and emotional emanations, inhibited conflicting pulsions, repressed desires. The imaginary is interpreted today as an alternative to the real world, a mentally constructed world that often opposes the concrete, the palpable one, thus doubling the real image. Fracturing the Ego, deriving an ideal sequence from a real one, the imaginary re-thinks, re-assembles reality, and suggests a new strategy for information treatment: through closeness and distance at the same time, and through a novel interpretation in order to access meanings”[21]. In the same text he claims that “the process of representation has two principal dimensions – an ideological and an imaginary one. The latter is the one that contributes to the stimulation of psychic energy, to the preservation of “production”, to the maintenance of desire, introducing a separation from reality or idealizing it in order to make it supportable. The social imaginary is an account of the way in which social representations are based in individual affect while working in accordance with an internal logic and observing its rules”[22]. Jodelet, when referring to the multiple domains in which the concept of social representations is used at present, as well as to all those fields of study from which it can benefit of conceptual clarifications and methodological borrowings, seems to admit that a psychoanalytical approach of the subject is also highly recommended (although, of course, not exclusively): “As Kaes, Chombart de Lauwe and Feuerhahn show, one can distinguish the play of individual phantasms and that of the social imaginary in the production of representations, which clearly leads us to psychoanalysis”[23]. Strangely enough, even the psychosocial carrier of the concept of symbol has gained in notoriety only lately, in the last decades, because of the re-launch and the explanation of the concept of social imaginary. “The imaginary, thinks the French historian Le Goff, occupies a wide portion in the space of representation, extracts its sap from the symbolic, relates closely with the ideological, but it is more than that. The imaginary includes the mental productions (mostly the productions of the collective mind), as well as the iconic and written ones, publicly expressed or internally preserved, and requires the research of the origin and the profound nature of human beings, the in-depth knowledge of social consciousness and its historic evolution”[24]. The psychoanalytical literature seems to be still the most probable domain of the recuperation of individual and group phantasmatic life (see Florence Giust-Desprairies, Didier Anzieu, Rene Kaes[25]); but these authors still ignore the fact that mental life and social dynamics cannot be wholly attributed to the unconscious, and that they heavily rely on reason and thinking capacities of human beings. Thus, these two sides of social representations call for an equal consideration: the present psychological orientations (the social cognition and the psychoanalytical one) seem however rather unprepared for such a great paradigmatic shift.

 

A conclusion that almost imposes itself on us after the presentation of the above-mentioned theories is that the imaginary exists; in order to say something more than this, in order to speak of its nature, dynamics, structure and functions we need to study it in its phenomenological hypostases. To this aim, we will refer to a case study that takes as an object for research the European identity, its communication and its social representation.

5. European identity: a value-based definition

A vast scientific literature, but especially the public discourses of the “center”[26] accredited the idea that the most efficient, operational and accessible way to define European identity is the one based on values[27]. Far from being an achieved concept or at least one relatively exhaustible in a systematic description, the European identity is a concept in full process of being constructed and also a process that, as Wintle points it out[28], is active on the top-down process, as well as on the bottom-up one (although significantly more on the former). The stake is not at all easy to neglect: the very wide and enthusiastic objectives of the EU and the complexity of its administrative bodies meant to ensure their achievement cannot entirely rely on formal mechanisms, no matter how efficient they may be. The EU has, at present, a flag, an hymn, a Europe’s day, a project for a Constitution, a Parliament, a huge legislative literature called aquis communautaire, common objectives and strategies for all members who seem to be dedicated to the idea of turning Europe into a space of prosperity, security, peace, law, freedom, democracy and observance of human rights[29]. However, all these values will never get to be translated into concrete attitudes and behaviors unless they are to be supported by an adequate cultural infrastructure; at the same time, an identity thus defined risks to never be actually able to know its own limits – the universality of the values it rests on invalidates their use in a local or regional political discourse and makes it almost impossible to argue why these values should be European and not global. Despite all this, it seems that such a “valor-cultural” definition of European identity is (at least meanwhile) the best solution in order to sustain not only ideologically, but also practically the premises and consequences of contemporary multiculturalism.

 

6. Conveyed identity – represented identity[30]

We have seen above which are the main valor coordinates of European identity, as they are mainly communicated by the political and administrative center of the EU. Further on, we will focus on the outlining of a conceptual framework for identity construction that would permit us to explain the role the imaginary plays in the elaboration of this specific type of social representation.

 

Social identity is based on a double belonging of the individual – to the formal group and to the psychosocial one. In order to distinguish between the two we have chosen the terms of formal belonging, that depends on a process of cognitive identification, and psychosocial belonging, depending on a process of phantasmatic identification. The formal belonging can be validated or established by applying a simple formal criterion (usually the logic criterion for the categorization of different individuals into a certain group), while psychosocial belonging is “established” by each and every member of the group in their turn, for themselves and for the others. This type of belonging is strongly marked by the emotional involvement of the individuals with the group and with other members. The process of cognitive identification allows an individual to know if he belongs or not to a certain formal group (a Romanian will know he/she is a Romanian because of his/her citizenship), while the phantasmatic identification allows an individual to feel more or less as a member of a certain group, with its characteristics, and prescribed behaviors, attitudes and attributes (a Romania can, from a psycho-social point of view feel more or less Romanian, or, sometimes, even not at all). In our specific case, we can say that, formally, to be European means to inhabit one of the states historically thought to belong to Europe. Psychosocially, instead, to be European means a lot more. The characteristics and attributes specific to the members of this social group are elaborated in the form of a social representation that has, in its turn, a peripheral and a central structure. The central structure of this social representation is precisely what we have called social identity. And if we remember what we have discussed in the paragraphs dedicated to social representations, we will see that on the basis of this social identity one cannot operate radical inclusions and exclusions, for social identity does not express what is de facto European, but rather an ideal model (what it should be or what we would like it to be) of being European.

 

We could say that, if formal identity is established at the level of the Ego, the social one is decided at the level of the Ideal Ego. A major consequence of this is the fact that the process of identification will operate mainly in the sphere of formal belonging, while the psychosocial belonging will be constructed prevalently through projections (Tajfel and Taylor, instead, two of the major researchers in the field of social identity only discussed identification with the group in social identity building). This double identitary rapport that the individual has with the group he/she belongs to is the source of phantasmatic productions involved in any construction of representations of this type.

 

7. The European identitary repertoire: phantasm and cognition

Our empirical study of European identity followed a content analysis methodology applied to a verbal material that we have obtained through a free associative experiment with three words: European, Europe and European Union. The content analysis was made by placing the verbal associations thus obtained into one of the 36 categories that expressed in the form of bipolar dimensions the final and instrumental values of Rokeach for a similar population in terms of age[31]. We have thus obtained a broad image of the social representations of these three social objects, in terms that values that are salient for each of them, in terms of positiveness of the representation, prevalence of concepts vs. images and phantasms vs. cognitions, as well as in terms of central vs. peripheral elements of the representation. Our results showed that there are significant superpositions between the three social representations, but also some major discrepancies that seem to draw a separation line especially between Europe and the EU in our social representations. In this case, we could say that the issue of European identity is no longer “Does it exist?”, but “How congruent are the social representations of objects that it is founded on and which of these objects is most salient today for what we call European: Europe, the EU or Europeans themselves?”. However, our study also showed that values are very “active” in relation with these three objects (a very small percentage of words obtained through free association could not be attributed to any of the Rokeach valor categories). The differences mainly emerged on the dimensions of freedom, intellectual openness, power and civilization. Moreover, there are also differences in the degree of positiveness of these representations: the Europeans benefit from a highly positive image, Europe follows them close, but the EU seem to have something of a deficit, although we are referring to a population that is renowned for its consistent Euro-optimism. Thus we come to face a rather strange situation in which the most active vehicle of European consciousness and identity – the EU – is also the least probable to be able to sustain the assimilation of values that it claims to be at its basis and that it promotes with great impetus as the nucleus of its identity. Our results show a clear tendency to outline the EU as an economic and political entity that loses the cultural and intellectual relevance of Europe. At the same time, being a very complex and complicated administrative body, the EU also attracts negative representations strongly associated with the idea of bureaucracy, norms, rigid rules, standardization, limitations, and restrictions. On the contrary, the European is free (a central element), open to novelty, to change, modern and transforming. Europe’s position is, from this point of view, somehow strange: while being a space culturally marked by tradition and conservatism, it still manages to stay open towards the new and allows the innovative capitalization of a cultural background that it preserves fairly well. Although the stress on the past is pretty strong, Europe is perceived as an open intellectual environment and one very prone to change. However, the central element for all the three social representations is “true friendship”; a much more adequate word for this social level of analysis would probably be “solidarity” – and this value seems to be the core of all three social representations, the basis of the European construction, as well as its foremost resource. But, strangely enough, when it comes to Europeans they are not perceived as being particularly friendly! Moreover, given the fact that Rokeach’s classification of values lists “true friendship” as a final value, in the second level of associations we obtained mostly words that were connected with instrumental values of “power” and “help”; this, of course, makes us wonder what is the relation between the final and the instrumental values and, more precisely, if the final one does not play an instrumental part in relation with the other two! We have here again the emergence of material (economic) motivations in relation with the European space, a tendency that has already proved to be extremely detrimental to the European project as a whole (social support functions only as long as the financial benefits of being a member are satisfying enough, while economic crises stimulate a rapid increase in Euro-skepticism). Even in such a context, it is not without importance that the first level associations are in the zone of the final value of solidarity (true friendship).

 

Other significant aspects are connected in our opinion with the social representation of the European and the EU on the dimension “comfort”- hedonistic vs. stoical (the former being perceived as hedonistic, associated with loisir activities, travelling, comfort searching and high spirits, the latter being associated with work, effort, obligations, responsibility and tasks). Two major communication failures (considering the “ideal” European identity suggested by the official discourses) are the ones regarding the elements of peace and security. These values are either inactive or very little activated when it comes to any of the three social objects. We also noticed that religious values are almost inactive in the representation of the EU, and only slightly activated – in their “Catholic” version – when it comes to the representation of Europe.

 

Another extremely interesting aspect of our study is that it finally lead us to the conclusion that there is a certain type of role-distribution between the three social representations: the way the attributes are attached to each of the social objects investigated are very similar to the way roles and their specific characteristics are attributed to the members of the nuclear family: mother, father and child. We noticed that there is a tendency to associate the behavioral and psychological profile of the European with that of the child (by the stress placed on freedom, hedonism, openness to novelty and change); Europe is very close to a classical maternal imago, by its anchoring in the past, its indifferent relation with the issue of freedom, the powerful focus on tradition and stability; the EU takes part in this family scenario in a rather predictable way, by assuming the attributes of paternal authority, power and the economic function, traditionally associated with pater familias. However, if for a psychologist this distribution of characteristics and roles can look interesting and invite to some further (psychoanalytical or not) research, for the one who is primarily interested in the European issue, such a diagnosis is not too much of good news as long as we concede that European identity, its strength and endurance, are strictly dependent on the degree of convergence between the social representations of objects that it is founded on.

 

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