The Discursive Format of “Social Warming”

Abstract

This chapter deals with human relationships that currently come up against increasingly overheated communication. Combining the perspective of social representations with that of discursive acts, Giuseppe Mininni relaunches his diatextual approach, placing social psychology at the meeting point between the epistemological axes of cultural, discursive, and critical psychology. Studies on mixed families illustrate the issue. Mixed families seem fundamentally diatextual because their texts are embedded within enunciative contexts animated by multifarious dynamics of perennial change. The author’s analysis shows that these families activate three kinds of social-epistemic rhetoric, focusing on distinction, mediation, and integration. The interplay between the Self and the Other is thus explained, acknowledging the vital impulse toward hybridization. The hyphenated identities produced in mixed families show the Self that the best way to save its own identity may be by strewing it in the Other’s, in an ongoing process of change.