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,