Let us consider two examples of changes in story-telling.Ī rupture occurs during an informal meeting between colleagues who are chatting about a workplace episode. From a referential perspective (based on a static and objective “state of the world” – Bamberg, 2011), we focus on the processes of narration starting from becoming, difference-making, discontinuities and times of crises. The habitual and consolidated processes for articulating signs in our narrations are no longer available and useful for organizing and guiding our experience, agency and social relations due to the transformation of our semiotic borders. During all of these different experiences, one’s own contextual semiotic borders are changing. Let us consider the crossing of national frontiers, moving from one residence to another, changing one’s job, becoming a parent or suffering from an illness, we immediately feel and perceive our experience in various ways. Making distinctions as an act of creating borders. Telling stories regarding the expected long-term future outcomes for tellers and their listeners - such as the predictions made by fortune tellers ( Aphek & Tobin, 1990), economic experts, or believers in the coming of the “end of the world” ( Festinger, Schachter, & Riecken, 1956) involve the narration of expectancies that are at present unknown to the teller and the listeners. Yet in a similar vein people can be involved in narrative activities of expected future events even before they happen - narratives of tomorrow’s weather forecast on tonight’s television programs involve the preparation of the subjective apperception for the meaningful nature of the expected future event. This aspect is not always clear and could have deep implications, so at a common sense level it is reasonable to state that narration - talking - is the process of searching for a meaning that occurs post hoc, that is, after having lived an experience, we try to find a meaning for it. Narrating one’s own experience always happens “on-line” i. The human being is continuously engaged in organizing his/her own experiences through the process of narrating ( Brockmeier, 1995, 2009 Bruner, 1986, 1990 Polkinghorne, 1998 Sarbin, 1986 Schafer, 1992 Spence, 1982). The psychological processes that occur in liminal space are strongly affectively loaded, yet it is exactly the setting and activation of liminality processes that lead to novelty and creativity and enable the creation of new narrative forms. The peculiar dynamics and the semiotic structure of borders generate a liminal space, which is characterized by instability, by a blurred space-time distinction and by ambiguities in the semantic and syntactic processes of sensemaking. The relevant psychological aspect highlighted here is that a border is a semiotic device which is required for both maintaining stability and inducing transformation at the same time. The narrative process – as a subjective articulation of signs in a contingent social context – involves several functions of semiotic borders: separation, differentiation, distinction-making, connection, articulation and relation-enabling. Borders enable us to narratively construct one’s own experiences using three inherent processes: contextualization, intersubjective positioning and setting of pertinence. Each narration is always a contextual, situated and contingent process of sensemaking, made possible by the creation of borders, such as dynamic semiotic devices that are capable of connecting the past and the future, the inside and the outside, and the me with the non-me. In this paper we discuss the semiotic functions of the psychological borders that structure the flow of narrative processes.
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