ABSTRACT
Self-cutting without suicidal intention is commonly understood as a way of coping with intensive and chaotic inner experiences. This chapter explores how inner experiences of chaos can be represented and communicated. Using a semiotic analytic method, three steps for making meaning of chaos, through mediation and transmediation, is sketched out. In the chapter, Elleström’s work on signs, mediation and transmediation, is used in combination with a sociocultural understanding of mediation as an act that creates meaning. The aim is to contribute to the understanding of why people cut themselves and why they continue to do so. Formulating a logic of why individuals cut themselves is an overarching goal in the study. The reasoning takes Tomkins’s notion of affect as an intense inner experience that needs to be articulated as a point of departure – an articulation that, according sociocultural theory, is achieved through mediation and transmediations. Through these processes, knowledge is gained which makes the affective experience manageable. In the analysis, examples are given of how different modes and media, with their particular capacities, can make knowledge possible. The result of the analysis shows how the qualities of basic media, such as text and imagery, give self-cutting meaning on a rudimentary level. But to achieve meaning on a more complex level, transmediation to a qualified medium is needed. In the example presented in the chapter, this medium is an internet-based forum, which appears in a sociocultural setting, in which the act of cutting yourself is made intelligible. The act is here connected to a general notion of mental ill health, of feeling bad – a socially communicable emotion. Hence self-cutting becomes a sign, a semiotic resource, for expressing overwhelming feelings.
