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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Key Concepts
- Sprache: Englisch
This new, updated edition provides a lively, lucid and compelling introduction to contemporary controversies over the self and self-identity in the social sciences and humanities. In an accessible and concise format, the book ranges from classical intellectual traditions of symbolic interactionism, psychoanalysis and Foucauldian theory, through feminism and postfeminism, to postmodernism and the mobilities paradigm. With characteristic verve and clarity, Anthony Elliott explores the relationship between power, identity and personhood, connecting varied theoretical debates directly to matters of contemporary relevance and urgency, such as identity politics, the sociology of personal relationships and intimacy, and the politics of sexuality. This edition also includes a new chapter on the digital revolution, which situates the self and work/life transformations within the context of AI, Industry 4.0, advanced robotics and accelerating automation. Offering thoughtful entry points to a rich and complex literature, along with robust critical responses to each theory, Concepts of the Self will continue to be an invaluable text for students of social and political theory, sociology, social psychology, cultural studies, and gender studies.
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Seitenzahl: 408
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
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Contents
Series title
Title page
Copyright page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Introduction
The Arts of Self
Concepts of the Self
The Structure of the Book
1 Self, Society and Everyday Life
Self, Symbols and Others: Symbolic Interactionism
Presentations of Self: Goffman
Reflexivity and the Self: Giddens
Further Reading
2 The Repression of Self
Psychoanalysis and the Self
Culture and Repression
Further Reading
3 Technologies of the Self
Technologies of the Self: Foucault
Governmentality: New Technologies, New Selves
Further Reading
4 Self, Sexuality and Gender
Feminism and Psychoanalysis: Two Recent Views
The Politics of Gender Performance: Butler
Queer Theory: Contesting Self, Defying Gender
Further Reading
5 The Postmodern Self
All that is Modern Melts into Postmodern?
Strategies of the Self: Modern and Postmodern
Further Reading
6 The Algorithmic Self
The Brave New World of AI
Chatbots, Talk and the Self
Algorithmic Surveillance and the Self
Further Reading
Note
7 The Individualized Self: From Reinvention to Mobile Lives
Individualization of the Self
Self-Reinvention: The New Individualism
Reinvention
Instant change
Speed
Short-termism
The Mobile Self
Further Reading
Conclusion
Inner Depth, or Inside Out
Identity Politics, or Critique of Self
Afterword: Global Identities, the Rise of Anti-Self Theories and New Horizons
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Contents
1 Self, Society and Everyday Life
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Series title
Key Concepts Series
Barbara Adam,
Time
Alan Aldridge,
Consumption
Alan Aldridge,
The Market
Jakob Arnoldi,
Risk
Will Atkinson,
Class
Colin Barnes and Geof Mercer,
Disability
Darin Barney,
The Network Society
Mildred Blaxter,
Health 2nd edition
Harriet Bradley,
Gender 2nd edition
Harry Brighouse,
Justice
Mónica Brito Vieira and David Runciman,
Representation
Steve Bruce,
Fundamentalism 2nd edition
Joan Busfield,
Mental Illness
Damien Cahill and Martijn Konings,
Neoliberalism
Margaret Canovan,
The People
Andrew Jason Cohen,
Toleration
Alejandro Colás,
Empire
Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge,
Intersectionality 2nd edition
Mary Daly,
Welfare
Anthony Elliott,
Concepts of the Self 4th edition
Steve Fenton,
Ethnicity 2nd edition
Katrin Flikschuh,
Freedom
Michael Freeman,
Human Rights 3rd edition
Russell Hardin,
Trust
Geoffrey Ingham,
Capitalism
Fred Inglis,
Culture
Robert H. Jackson,
Sovereignty
Jennifer Jackson Preece,
Minority Rights
Gill Jones,
Youth
Paul Kelly,
Liberalism
Anne Mette Kjær,
Governance
Ruth Lister,
Poverty
Jon Mandle,
Global Justice
Cillian McBride,
Recognition
Anthony Payne and Nicola Phillips,
Development
Judith Phillips,
Care
Chris Phillipson,
Ageing
Robert Reiner,
Crime
Michael Saward,
Democracy
William E. Scheuerman,
Civil Disobedience
John Scott,
Power
Timothy J. Sinclair,
Global Governance
Anthony D. Smith,
Nationalism 2nd edition
Joonmo Son,
Social Capital
Deborah Stevenson,
The City
Leslie Paul Thiele,
Sustainability 2nd edition
Steven Peter Vallas,
Work
Stuart White,
Equality
Michael Wyness,
Childhood
Concepts of the Self
4th edition
Anthony Elliott
polity
Copyright page
Copyright © Anthony Elliott 2020
The right of Anthony Elliott to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First edition published in 2001 by Polity Press
This fourth edition first published in 2020 by Polity Press
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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3879-9
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3880-5(pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Elliott, Anthony, 1964- author.
Title: Concepts of the self / Anthony Elliott.
Description: 4th edition. | Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA, USA : Polity Press, 2020. | Series: Key concepts series | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Smart guide to a wide range of theories of the social self”-- Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019050975 (print) | LCCN 2019050976 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509538799 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509538805 (paperback) | ISBN 9781509538812 (epub)
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Dedication
For Caoimhe
Acknowledgements
When this book was initially published, some twenty years ago, the topic of the self was considered relatively marginal in mainstream social science. Since that time, the intellectual stock-market ratings of identity and the self have moved increasingly centre-stage, and it has been my good fortune to receive many comments from students and lecturers – in fields such as sociology, political science, cultural and media studies – who have studied this book in order to better grapple with our lives in these times. As I try to demonstrate throughout the book, there is no one disciplinary approach for adequately grasping the complexities of self in the global digital age; on the contrary, only an interdisciplinary approach – the standpoint of social theory – can sufficiently scoop up the complex array of theoretical standpoints (from structuralism to psychoanalysis, feminism to postmodernism) in order to engage concepts of the self that are so fundamental to both public political life and the social sciences and humanities. In this new edition, I have made updates that, wherever possible, report on the latest research advances and political developments. There is also a new chapter on technological innovations in artificial intelligence, robotics and accelerating automation, one of the biggest transformations in the world impacting the self and personal life.
My thanks, as ever, to everyone at Polity Press, in particular John Thompson and especially Jonathan Skerrett for assistance in preparing this fourth edition.
The following people provided invaluable support as I was working on this edition: Anthony Giddens, Gerhard Boomgaarden, Masataka Katagiri, Ralf Blomqvist, Eric Hsu, Ross Boyd, Louis Everuss, Judy Wajcman, John Cash, Atsushi Sawai, Anthony Moran, Carmel Meiklejohn, Kriss McKie, Rina Yamamoto, Takeshi Deguchi, Hideki Endo and Nick Stevenson. I should like to thank Nicola Geraghty, who supported my work on this book across all editions. The book originally appeared around the time of the birth of our daughter Caoimhe, and it always was her book: as I watch her navigate the rich territories of her world, I realize that the book remains hers, more than ever.
Anthony Elliott
Adelaide
Introduction
With the soothing sound of the BBC sounding from her alarm clock at 6.00 am, Ronda wakes – like many the world over living in expensive cities of the West – to the latest news bulletin streamed on the Internet. Listening to the morning headlines, she asks Siri to check any overnight emails. A high-flying lawyer based in London, Ronda is working at present on a corporate takeover involving both British and American companies – and later in the day will fly to New York for further discussions on the deal. But it’s coffee she needs first. Heading downstairs, she flicks on the LCD TV inbuilt on the smart fridge in her minimalist kitchen and checks the international weather on ITV. Sitting down to coffee and a bagel, she scans social media not only to see what’s going on in ‘her’ world, but also to check comment on the latest financial developments. All of this has taken about fifteen minutes. The city is London, but it might just as easily be Los Angeles, Sydney, Singapore, Athens or Auckland.
Ronda’s morning routine tells us a good deal about our changing world in these early decades of the twenty-first century. Certainly, it tells us about the rise of digital technology in recent times, but also about the changing nature of the self. For the global digital revolution has impacted profoundly on modern societies, and perhaps nowhere more so than in the everyday routines through which individuals forge and sustain a sense of self. Clearly, those like Ronda living in information-rich societies have an enormous degree of choice in accessing news and entertainment through the mass media. This explosion of global communications is crucial to the transformed nature of the self in various ways. First, an individual’s use of mass media – from the digitalization of news and streaming services to social media and virtual personal assistants – is not simply about the gathering of information, however important that might be. It informs – in a deeply symbolic way – our everyday activities and connections with others. What one gleans from the morning news, for example, provides fertile subject matter for various routine interactions in which the self is implicated – from discussions with friends in cafés to dialogue with fellow workers at the office.
Second, an individual who engages with digital media is also caught up in a complicated process of self-definition and consumer identification. Whether one chooses to read The Times, the Daily Mail or the New York Times – and indeed whether one reads the online version or requests a robo-reader to cover the headlines – says a great deal about the relation between the self and broader socioeconomic contexts. People can separate themselves from others – in actual, imagined and virtual ways – through reliance on the cultural status of media products. Consumer identification with media products often functions in a kind of make-believe way – ‘I only read the New York Times’ – but also profoundly influences the self-presentations of individuals. Indeed, for many people, this kind of brand loyalty is definitional of their ‘ideal self’ – the self that they would like to be.
Third, our routine engagement with the mass media implicates the self in a complex web of social, cultural and economic relationships that span the globe. Thanks to the transnational spread of digital technologies, our media-saturated society has created what the Canadian scholar Marshall McLuhan terms a ‘global village’ – people increasingly define aspects of their self-identity, as well as memories of self, with reference to global media spectacles. In a world of intensive globalization, breaking news almost anywhere in the world is relayed instantaneously by the mass media. Such developments have not only provided for a much more interconnected world, but also redefine aspects of the constitution of the self with reference to other societies and other cultures. Where were you when the news broke of Donald Trump’s election as president of the USA? What were you doing on the morning of 9/11, when news of the planes that brought down the Twin Towers spread across the globe? More and more often, people are coming to define aspects of their self-experience – and particularly memories of the self – with reference to global mega-events. While social analysts still debate the pros and cons of the globalization of the media, there is growing evidence that our televisual world of 24/7 news updates and media spectacles is reshaping the self with postnational consequences. That is to say, the self is increasingly defined with reference to global forces, flows and networks – although whether people choose to embrace or deny such worldwide social transformations on a conscious level is an altogether separate issue.
Finally, the reshaping of the self through engagement with both digital and social media moves us to reflect on contemporary debates about modernity, postmodernism and, in particular, the much contested idea of a ‘speeding-up’ of the world. Some sociologists of the media have argued that today’s quality newspapers – such as the Los Angeles Times or the Guardian – contain as much information as an individual might have encountered over the course of their entire lifetime in a premodern society. This clearly raises issues about ‘information overload’ in modern societies; but it also raises complex questions concerning the self and its navigation of the myriad narratives and kaleidoscopic perspectives available through the mass media today. How do people forge a coherent sense of self against the expansive spread of information available through the mass media? How does the society of information overload impact on processes of self-formation? These are issues that increasingly affect everyone today.
All these basic themes concerning changes affecting the self can, as I say, be inferred from the vignette of Ronda’s hi-tech morning routine. There is little doubt that Ronda can be said to live a very privileged life, but there are aspects of her self-experience as described above that are increasingly prevalent and significant for people throughout the world – certainly in the expensive cities of the West. But, increasingly, such personal and social changes also have globalizing consequences. As I try to demonstrate in this book, concepts of the self have a key role to play in the production of everyday life as well as a central place in the social sciences. Concepts of the Self is thus an attempt to make various social, cultural, political and psychological aspects of the self in our changing world intelligible to a wide readership. As we will see throughout the book, concepts of the self have been studied by philosophers and sociologists, by psychoanalysts and cultural theorists. Almost all intellectual evaluations of the self draw from, as well as feed back into, our everyday common-sense understandings of the self. This continual interchange between everyday and intellectual understandings of the self is a key theme of the book.
Increasingly, many people today reflect on their sense of self in terms of their private life – particularly as regards friends, family, intimacy and sexuality. In the contemporary world, selfhood is often experienced as a private affair – as a matter of personal choice, design or project, as a defining aspect of inner desires and dreams. Certainly, in our consumer-driven culture in these early days of the twenty-first century, identity is private and privatizing; everywhere, identity is sold as the means for personal happiness and freedom. From the Nike culture of just-do-it to Apple’s culture of innovation and injunction to ‘think differently’, selfhood is advertised, televised and talked about as the principal means for both joining and enjoying the modern world. Many of the social theories of identity that I examine in this book critically interrogate what might be termed this privatization of the self. To think about selfhood critically is to think beyond the illusions of a purely private world, supposedly unaffected or cut off from the wider social world. For we are all, no matter where we grew up or what successes or otherwise we might have achieved in our lives, exposed to cultures and structures in a profound and ongoing sense. And nowhere more so than when we think we are alone, when we think we are ‘away’ from the world, when we think we act on the basis of our own ‘private’ or unique sense of self. Yet this is not, as it may at first seem, a completely cynical view of the self. Some of the social theories that we will look at in this book do indeed analyse the riddles of self primarily in terms of wider social forces, such as long-term historical processes or social structures. But other theorists of self take perhaps a more complex view, one that critically interrogates the whole relationship between private and public life. The personal life of the self, from this angle, is embedded in powerful unconscious forces, which are in turn deeply rooted in the ways of social life.
In still another way, all social theories of the self turn on issues of control, capabilities and capacities. This is a more complex point, and the debate around it has involved some difficult terminology – but I think the essence of the issue can be easily summarized. Many sociologists talk about the self primarily in terms of the experience of agency – the degree of active involvement individuals have in shaping their personal and cultural experience. In everyday life, we routinely engage in social practices – checking email, posting status updates or taking the dog for an evening walk – in which, for the most part, we express agency in what we do. Self-management, self-shaping, self-stylization: this is just how we give structure to our identities. As directors of our own lives, we draw upon emotional frames of memory and desire, as well as wider cultural and social resources, in fashioning the self. Expressions of personal agency – whether of writing a letter or uttering the words ‘I love you’ – are not something that happens through our actions alone (however much we sometimes think this is so). For practices of the self can also be experienced as forces impinging upon us – through the design of other people, the impact of cultural conventions and social practices, or the force of social processes and political institutions. Society, then, might be said to discipline and regulate the self, so that our deepest feelings about ourselves, as well as our beliefs about our identities, are shaped to their roots by broader social forces and cultural sensibilities. We may, for example, go to the gym fairly regularly in order to try to attain some ideal body shape (and, by implication, an ideal self), and we may do so because this really matters to us and it is experienced as a personal decision or choice. But in the social theories of self that we will examine in this book, there are always other puzzling social forces at work. There are always cultural or commercial factors influencing the self – for example, omnipresent media delivering never-ending images of ideal body-types as well as the selling of strategies to achieve such ‘perfect bodies’.
This issue of the agency of the self is certainly a confounding puzzle, and one that often divides many of the social thinkers whom we will examine in this book. In attempting to understand the lives of individuals, and of the role that society and culture plays in their lives, should we emphasize the practical knowledge of people? If so, to what extent? But what if ‘practical knowledge’ of the self is shaped to its roots by the power of the social bond? At the heart of these questions is an intriguing division that has arisen in the social sciences over the self-shaping of creative individuals, on the one hand, and the social regulation or control of selfhood, on the other. The self has come to be viewed by some social analysts and cultural critics as an upshot of cultural constraint or social exclusion, an approach that, as we will see, focuses on the status of social forces and institutional dynamics. For other critics, the self can only be adequately understood by grasping the creativity of action, focusing in particular on personal agency and autonomy. The concept of the reflective, reasoning self has been central to many schools of thought in the social sciences, and yet an emphasis on human agency varies considerably depending on whether we are discussing sociological, psychoanalytic, poststructuralist, feminist or postmodern approaches. Sociological theories, for example, tend to emphasize how our sense of self is shaped by institutions or cultural forms in the larger society, how we build up notions of the self and other selves as social constructions, and how concepts of the self play a central role in the constitution and reproduction of social networks. Psychoanalytic theories, by contrast, put the emphasis on the organization of our internal worlds, on the emotional conflicts of identity and on the power of the individual to create, maintain and transform relations between the self and others. Concepts of the self emerging from these traditions of thought – that is, sociology and psychoanalysis – have very different ways of conceptualizing how individuals cope with the burdens of self in their day-to-day lives. Sociologists and psychoanalytic critics deal with this issue, as I shall discuss in the chapters that follow, by prioritizing either social forces or individuals in conceptualizing the self.
The relation between identity and society is therefore fundamental to thinking about the self. But there are also other themes of key significance in approaching concepts of the self. Just as social theory divides over prioritizing either social or individual experience in the constitution of the self, so too issues over unity and fragmentation, continuity and difference, rationality and passion, gender and sexuality, come strongly into focus. In the psychoanalytic reading of self and personal identity, for example, individual strivings, desires and actions are grasped as radically divided, torn between that part of the mind that is conscious, rational and reflexive, and the unconscious motivations that lurk within us, but of which we are only dimly aware. Postmodern theory shifts these conflicts of identity up a gear, arguing for the multiplication of narratives of self as a site for reconfiguring relations between society, culture and knowledge.
The Arts of Self
A radio station to which I sometimes listen recently ran a competition called ‘The New You’. The competition was designed for ‘losers’: people with recurring difficulties in their personal and intimate lives. To enter, it was necessary to describe on radio some embarrassing private situation or circumstance – for instance, something going horribly wrong on a first date, or making a disconcerting gaffe at work. The act of discussing one’s personal embarrassment on radio placed the entrant in line for a play-off with other ‘losers’. The final winner – in this case the ‘grand loser’ – took home prizes with which to ‘remake his or her identity’. The winning prize consisted of a car, clothes, holiday and cash. I mention the radio competition because it offers an interesting example, I think, of some core links between popular culture and dominant conceptions of the self. For the defining outlook pervading the competition seemed to be that individuals are relatively free to experiment with their sense of identity. The self, in this view, becomes a matter of choice and risk. If you are willing to take identity risks – in this case, to tell a wider public about some aspect of your intimate life – then you do not have to be a loser. The radio competition was conducted, of course, in a spirit of light-heartedness. Yet it remains suggestive of deep cultural assumptions governing how we see the self: namely, that it is linked to role-playing, gender, choice, risk and, above all, the realm of consumption.
There are profound connections between the cultural assumptions informing ‘The New You’ competition and concepts of the self in the social sciences and humanities today. Selfhood is flexible, fractured, fragmented, decentred and brittle: such a conception of individual identity is probably the central outlook in current social and political thought. As the pace, intensity and complexity of contemporary culture accelerate, so too does the self become increasingly dispersed. Displaced and dislocated within the wider frame of globalization, the individual self turns increasingly to consumption, leisure and travel in order to give substance to everyday life. Or so some have forcefully argued. Many other authors, for a variety of reasons that we will examine, remain sceptical of such a portrait of the self. I shall discuss shortly the complex, and often unintended, ways in which the academic study of the self can, of itself, shape the cultural know-how and resources of the broader society. At this point it is worth briefly noting some core concepts of the self, some of them social science ones, which influence our everyday understandings of personal experience and individual identity.
In day-to-day life, we implicitly assume, and act on the basis, that individuals have a ‘sense of self’. We refer to people as ‘selves’; we recognize that most people, most of the time, deploy common-sense understandings of personal and social experience in order to manage the routine nature of their social worlds. We recognize that making sense of lives is often difficult, sometimes confusing, and that we are recurrently ambivalent about the coherence of our sense of personal identity. This mysterious terrain of our social and cultural life is, sociologically speaking, at the core of the arts of self. There is very little that goes on in daily social life that is not, in some very basic sense, conditioned, structured or dependent upon such fabrications of the self. The making, remaking and transformation of self-experience is fundamental to these arts. Things change; people change. Societal ambivalence and private torment lead us to see that identity is fluid, not fixed once and for all. In the terms of a key sociological tradition that will be discussed later, the self is a symbolic project that the individual actively and creatively forges. The self can be understood as a symbolic project in the sense that people routinely refer to their sense of identity as a guiding orientation to their lives, to other people and to the broader society. In this sense, individuals can be said to use practical knowledge as a means of producing and reproducing their defining sense of self.
Some critics reject the idea that practical knowledge is an essential characteristic of the self. They argue that, as sociologists or social critics, we needn’t concern ourselves with the intricate settings and assumptions that people bring to their presentations of self. Instead, the self can be studied as an object, without reference to the interpretations that individuals make about their own lives or their views about the wider social world. This is not a view I share. Indeed, one argument I develop throughout this book is that the self cannot be adequately studied in isolation from the interpretations that individuals make about themselves, others and society. Charles Taylor develops this point in an interesting fashion:
We are selves only in that certain issues matter for us. What I am as a self, my identity, is essentially defined by the way things have significance for me. And as has been widely discussed, these things have significance for me, and the issue of my identity is worked out, only through a language of interpretation which I have come to accept as a valid articulation of these issues. To ask what a person is, in abstraction from his or her self-interpretations, is to ask a fundamentally misguided question, one to which there couldn’t in principle be an answer. … We are not selves in the way that we are organisms, or we don’t have selves in the way we have hearts and livers. We are living beings with these organs quite independently of our self-understandings or interpretations, or the meanings things have for us. But we are only selves insofar as we move in a certain space of questions. (Sources of the Self, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990, p. 34)
The self, on this view, is fashioned from individuals regularly appraising what it is they do (watching TV, going shopping, staying ‘in’) as a means of actually performing such activities. All selfhood has a ‘recursive’ or ‘reflexive’ quality to it. The self is recursive or reflexive to the degree that people constantly monitor, or watch, their own activities, thoughts or emotions as a means of generating these aspects of their identity. I will say something more about this in Chapter 1.
To emphasize the significance of an individual’s interpretations about their own sense of selfhood, however, is not to suggest that people can ever fully know all there is to know about the conditions of their lives. Many authors have argued that selfhood, in a sense, fails; such accounts emphasize that the stories we tell about ourselves fall short of the deeper truth of lived experience. The founding father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, is perhaps the central figure here. Freud’s theory of a self dislocated and fractured by repressed desire suggests that self-experience is radically divided, or split, between conscious, rational thought on the one hand and unconscious desire, fantasies and memories on the other. The Freudian conception of unconscious desire and motivation has entered sociology, political science, feminism and philosophy in important ways, principally in connection with the study of the dividing line between presentations and pathologies of the self. Psychoanalytic theories of the self are rich and challenging not only because they dethrone common-sense understandings of individual intentions and reasoning; what is valuable in psychoanalytic concepts of the self is the stress on emotional dynamics of loss, longing and mourning.
This is not to say that the self is only fashioned, as it were, from the inside out. In forging a sense of self, individuals routinely draw from social influences, and maintain their sense of self through cultural resources. Social practices, cultural conventions and political relations are a constitutive backdrop for the staging of self-identity. But even this formulation is perhaps inadequate. The self is not simply ‘influenced’ by the external world, since the self cannot be set apart from the social, cultural, political and historical contexts in which it is embedded. Social processes in part constitute, and so in a sense are internal to, the self.
We almost never think about the critical knowledge, including that of social science, that feeds into and contributes to our practical understanding of the self. And yet the knowledge skills that inform our personal repertoires of the self are shaped to their roots by academic and social forces. The British sociologist Anthony Giddens coined the term ‘double hermeneutic’ to refer to the application of lay knowledge to the technical language of the social sciences, as well as the utility of social science findings to the reality of a person’s day-to-day life. While philosophers have largely concentrated their energies on the ways in which lay concepts necessarily intrude into the claims of science, Giddens instead focused, appropriately enough for a sociologist, on how social science concepts routinely enter our lives and help redefine them. According to Giddens, the language of economics, or political science or sociology not only provides knowledge that informs in useful and edifying ways; the language of social science also creates knowledge in a much more profound sense, as the utility of this knowledge becomes basic to the economies, polities and societies of the contemporary epoch. The discourse of economics, for example, enters constitutively into the very social world it describes: the usage of terms like ‘liquidity’ and ‘inflation’ is in some part mastered, on the level of practical consciousness, by people going about their day-to-day affairs within modern economies; even though individuals might not be able to articulate the logical principles governing liquidity or inflation discursively, those same individuals exhibit a practical knowledge of such concepts whenever the bank is visited or goods are purchased prior to a price rise. To study some aspect of social life implies for Giddens that the findings of social science can be incorporated into the social practices that they are, in a sense, about.
Giddens’s claim that the practical impact of the social sciences is inescapable carries important consequences and implications for studying the self. Because the self is not a fixed entity, but is rather actively constructed, individuals are capable of incorporating and modifying knowledge that influences their sense of personal identity. Consider, for example, the notion of lifestyles. Today, lifestyles are a crucial aspect of both self-identity and social organization. Once the preserve of the rich and famous, the mass marketing of lifestyles through advertising has increasingly opened identity out to the realms of choice, individuality, aesthetics, disposable income and consumption. Interestingly enough, however, the word ‘lifestyle’ once denoted something very different. The Oxford English Dictionary lists the psychologist Alfred Adler as coining the term in 1929. Adler used the notion to describe a person’s essential character structure as established in early childhood. More specifically, he deployed it in order to account for personal behaviour and emotional reactions throughout the life cycle. He argued that the core style of life is founded in the first four or five years of childhood, and that a fragment of memory preserves the motives of a lifestyle for an individual. In time, Adler’s notion of lifestyle became incorporated into common stocks of knowledge by which individuals in the wider society pursue their personal and practical activities. This knowledge, modified as it was by advertisers, fostered an active (and no doubt also more coercive) restructuring of self-experience in terms of lifestyle pursuits and niche subcultures. Those who have drawn from this knowledge might never have heard of Alfred Adler, but his influence over the living of ‘lifestyles’ and the construction of the self has been immense – even though it has been in a fashion that he could not have foreseen, or (one suspects) approved. The broader point to note, at this stage, is that the relationship between professional and practical concepts of the self – that is, between academic and popular understandings of personal identity – is crucial to many of the social theories I discuss. How conceptual perspectives on the self mediate our everyday understandings of personal identity is a theme I shall examine throughout the book.
Concepts of the Self
The emerging direction of contemporary social theory is perhaps nowhere more evident than in the attention it lavishes upon the nature of the self, self-identity and individual subjectivity. Questions concerning the social construction of the self; debates pertaining to the symbolic materials through which individuals weave narratives of the self; issues relating to the role that self-formation plays in the reproduction or disruption of culture and society: such questions, debates and issues have become increasingly prominent in the social sciences in recent decades. For those working within sociology, for example, the topic of the self has provided an opportunity for re-examining the relation between the individual and society, an opportunity to detail the myriad ways in which individuals are constituted as identities or subjects who interact in a socially structured world of people, relationships and institutions. The issues at stake in the construction of the self are quite different for feminist writers, who are instead concerned with connecting processes of self-formation to distinctions of gender, sexuality and desire. The challenge for authors influenced by postmodernism, by way of further comparison, is to estimate the degree to which the self may be fragmenting or breaking down, as well as assessing the psychological and cultural contours of postmodern selfhood. In all these approaches, the turn to the self provides critical perspectives on the present age as well as an important source of understanding concerning transformations of knowledge, culture and society.
Selfhood emerges as a complex term as a result of these various theoretical interventions, and one of the central concerns of Concepts of the Self is the discrimination of different meanings relating to the self, in order to introduce the beginning reader to the contemporary debates around it. What needs to be stressed at the outset is that different social theories adopt alternative orientations to mapping the complexities of personal experience, with selfhood squarely pitched between those who deny the agency of human subjects and argue in favour of the person’s determination by social structures, on the one hand, and those who celebrate the authenticity and creativity of the self, on the other. As a result, the language used by social scientists to analyse selfhood varies considerably: sometimes theorists refer to ‘identity’, sometimes to ‘the subject’ or ‘subjectivity’, and sometimes simply to ‘the self’. These terminological differences are not always especially significant, primarily because these terms can all be said to denote a concern with the subjectivity of the individual. However, others argue that such terminological differences are worth close attention, if only because they reflect deep historical and political transitions. For example, it can plausibly be argued that the concepts of ‘the self’ and ‘identity’, though similar, are not coextensive, since there are forms of identity that are not based on the self, namely, forms of collective identity – such as those influenced by nationalism. In this reading, collective identity gains its power through the establishment and recognition of common interests, built upon forms of solidarity involving battles over, say, social exclusion, nation, class and the like. Similarly, the self is also shaped and defined against the backdrop of such political and public forces; yet the fabrication of the self, psychologically and emotionally, is rightly understood to involve something more subjective, particularly the complex ways desire, emotion and feeling influence both conscious and unconscious experience of sexuality, gender, race and ethnicity.
One might add, though this is much debated, that the influence of traditional identity categories has dramatically loosened in our age of light mobility, liquid experiences and dispersed commitments. In present-day society, as we will examine in some detail in the Conclusion, private grievances and emotional anxieties connect less and less with the framing of collective identities; in more and more cases, private troubles remain private. Contemporary hopes and dreads, as rehearsed in popular culture, are something to be experienced by each individual alone. Thus, we witness a general shift from identity to the self as a new marker of our times – in terms of both engagement with individual experience and the wider world, but also as concerns new forms of domination and exploitation.
I shall not trace the nuances of these conceptual differences here; the philosophical history of subjectivity has been extensively discussed elsewhere. (See Anthony Elliott, Identity Troubles, London: Routledge, 2016; and the second edition of Anthony Elliott (ed.), Routledge Handbook of Identity Studies, London: Routledge, 2019.) But I do want to say something in this Introduction, however briefly, about versions of the self in current sociology and social theory.
Perhaps nothing appears as more unstable, flexible or pliable than the self in contemporary social theory. But what, exactly, is the self? We all have a sense of self-identity; we all perform ‘selves’ in the rituals of daily life; we all interact with other ‘selves’. Yet how is the self rendered identical to itself? And why does society privilege continuity at the level of the self? One influential strand of thinking – powerful in the West – holds that ‘selfhood is sameness’; there is, according to this viewpoint, a continuity to identity which stretches over time and possibly for all time. Strictly speaking, such philosophy goes back as far as Descartes: ‘I think, therefore I am’. It is here that the essence of the classical idea of consciousness of self as a sure foundation for knowledge is to be found. Confidence in some minimal degree of self-continuity – ‘I am the same self as I was yesterday’ – has been, of course, an essential precondition for all successful living. But only the very few, either because of extraordinary privilege or lack of interest in the surrounding world, could fail ever to question their own security of self. Few could avoid the interpersonal situations that arose – day-in and day-out – wherein the uncertainty of social life was disturbed. To convert the whole fabric of social relations into the engine of self-constitution is, however, a tricky business – as the nineteenth-century psychologist William James most powerfully underscored. For if the self depends for its security on its surrounding social relations, then this seems to deny to identity the certitude many thought existed. As James noted, if the individual has as many selves as there are persons who recognize him or her, then how can that self function ‘the same’ as it did yesterday? It certainly makes our selfhood appear less fixed, or more psychologically flexible, than some dominant Western worldviews seem to have assumed. From this angle, the word ‘self’ means both fixed and pliable. Hence much of the study of the self has passed through these overlapping societal strands of continuity and discontinuity.
In the forms most familiar to our own age, however, the flourishing of concepts of the self is really a product of various global transformations that unfolded from about the early 1960s through to the postmodern 1980s and 1990s. For by the 1960s – when the security and serenity of the post-Second World War economic boom that had prevailed throughout North America and across parts of the world drew to a close, replaced by the era of the Vietnam War, the emergent decolonizing and civil rights movements as well as feminist politics and the sexual revolution – identity had broken with images of sameness, continuity, regularity and repetition. Selfhood was now also coming to mean disaffection, rebellion, discontinuity and difference. Revolution was spreading throughout social life, with student rebellions on campuses across the United States and a dramatic student and worker uprising in France that came close to toppling the de Gaulle government. There were anxieties over race too, in Europe and the American South, in Africa, the Latin Americas and Asia, and a politics of cultural revolution took hold in everything from feminism to Black Power. Selfhood in the sense of excluded histories, displaced narratives, marginalized lives and oppressed identities was fundamental to the attempts of people – women, gays, blacks and subalterns of all kinds – to question the status quo and change the direction of society. This was, in short, the era of ‘identity crisis’ (as Erik Erikson described it), in which the illusion of traditional European individualism was shattered, the military and economic might of America deeply questioned, and the formerly repressed energies of new social movement activists and critics now burst into full cultural expression. In all of this – the shift from social conformity to cultural revolution – we find traces of the intellectual thought of many key theorists of the self who are examined throughout this book.
This is not to say, however, that the cultural revolts of the 1960s arose as an upshot of certain radical ideas then circulating throughout universities. Those involved in various branches of the emergent identity politics of the 1960s and 1970s, from feminism to decolonization movements, might never have done more than glance at Herbert Marcuse’s photograph on the cover of Time magazine (if indeed they did that), or might well have thought that psychoanalysis was nothing more than a variant of other psychological therapies. Radical politics, of whatever ideological kind, comes about when people are led into a new self-confrontation with their own lives. The social theories of the self that flourished during the 1960s and escalated throughout the 1970s, only to falter and mutate into a postmodern dismantling of the self in the 1980s and 1990s, were just such a challenge to the prevailing social order. Jacques Lacan’s Freudian decentring of the self, Herbert Marcuse’s suggestive twinning of sociality and the unconscious, Michel Foucault’s brilliant interrogations of technologies of lived experience, Judith Butler’s feminist redrafting of the intricate connections between gender and sexuality: all these theoretical accounts of the self, as we shall examine in this book, have promoted a suspicion of identity norms, given values, established hierarchies and traditional social practices.
In terms of political transformations and cultural shifts, whether we are considering the heady days of cultural revolution from the 1960s, postmodern subversions of identity during the 1980s and 1990s, or the neoliberal privatization of the self in the 2000s and 2010s, there are various sociological consequences that have followed from these deconstructions and reconstructions of the self in social theory. What gradually took place from the late 1960s onwards, when identity politics defined itself increasingly as a mass political movement, partly as a result of novel theoretical departures and innovations and partly as a consequence of new forms of political action, was a radical shift in our whole cultural vocabulary for understanding the inner world of the self, individual experience and personal identity. That is to say, changing conceptions of the self at the level of the academy and the public sphere inevitably intruded into the realms of daily life and culture. Some have argued, for example, that the women’s movement in its contemporary forms would not have had the same impact without a body of sophisticated feminist theory that arose out of the political upheavals and cultural turmoil of the 1960s and 1970s – a body of thought that, in turn, was indebted to changing conceptions of the individual subject and personal identity in the social sciences and humanities. Certainly, the heavily politicized culture of the 1960s and early 1970s, in which a new stress on personal renewal, self-transformation, lifestyle and identity politics emerged, penetrated deeply into the tissues of cultural practice and everyday life. Politics, as a result, revolved more and more around the personal; the personal, having been previously cast off to the realm of the ‘private’, in other words, was now to be reinserted into the political. This was obviously true of feminism, and especially so in the works of various feminist theorists we consider later in this book, such as Simone de Beauvoir, Nancy Chodorow, Julia Kristeva and Judith Butler. But it was also true of other forms of identity politics, from the civil rights movement to queer theory. Not all were convinced, however, by such attempts to deepen and enrich politics through an engagement with the personal. Some critics argued, for example, that the whole concept of the self had become overinflated – so much so that issues of human agency and radical politics were, in turn, cut loose from social and historical forces altogether. This is not a view I share, for reasons that will become apparent throughout this book. At any rate, to emphasize the active, creative character of the self is not to imply that identity is culturally or politically unconditioned. On the contrary, the turn to the self in social theory has powerfully underscored that racialized, hybridized, sexualized and gendered productions of identity are intimately interwoven with complex forces of economic disadvantage, social marginalization and political exclusion.
