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The semiotic predicament of developmental psychology

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Abstract

This article critically assesses various proposals for a cultural semiotics of maturity and developmental stages. Semiotic theories consider developmental subjectivity as a function of a person's progressive immersion into sign systems, and are key to a denaturalization and contextualization of the life-staged subject. A semiotic understanding of maturity inspired by the post-Marxist work of Jean Baudrillard suggests that neo-Marxist indictments of consumer society as alienating individuals either by ‘hurrying’ or infantilizing them, is complicit with a more profound and ambient naturalization of life stages. However, a look at Japan's ‘cute culture’ (kawaî karucha) is taken to suggest that both developmental psychology and its critique, may be, importantly sidetracked by late capitalist mass production and circulation of maturational markers. Various implications of this case study for developmental psychology are discussed.

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Notes

  1. Kawaî is a central feature of Takashi Murakami's post-modern art movement and theory called Superflat (for example, Uchino, 2006), which assumes the flattening out of the distinction between expression of identity and commercial appropriation.

  2. Baudrillard's image of the radicalization of theory by the scene of the object, in other words, is circumscribed by dependencies of the semiotic instance on its capitalist consumption and production. The argument is fully ethnographic, not philosophical.

  3. See Jones (2006) and Nikander (2000) for comparable approaches to ‘age’.

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    Diederik F Janssen

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Janssen, D. The semiotic predicament of developmental psychology. Subjectivity 3, 382–402 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2010.21

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