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