Concepts of the Self

Anthony Elliott

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781509538805, 9781509538799
• eBook ISBN: 9781509538812
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Discrimination & Race Relations
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

1
Self, Society and Everyday Life

Overlooking the garden of their suburban house on a lovely summer’s day, a man and woman talk quietly. Both regularly look over to where their children, a girl and a boy, play in the sunshine. The children are busy making mud pies, and their laughter reassures the man and woman that their children are content entertaining themselves. As the couple look away from their children, they return to a conversation about plans for a forthcoming holiday. There are flight reservations and hotel bookings to be made; discussing these plans, the woman makes notes on an iPad about the intended weeks away from the routines of family life, commenting that she must check with her parents to see that they can look after the children. Their conversation is briefly disturbed when the man takes a call on his smartphone; it is a business matter, and he quickly switches conversation from that of family to finance. Meanwhile, the woman briefly glances across at her children; reassuring herself that all is well, she returns to making plans for the holiday.

This might well be regarded as a typical scene in the life of an economically secure family in contemporary Western society. But what is going on here at the level of social interaction? In particular, what might this episode have to tell us about the nature of the self? The study of the minutiae of social interaction in everyday life is treated as of major importance by many sociologists, in part because it is at the level of human interaction and interpersonal relationships that the fabrication of the self arises. There are several traditions of sociological thought that study the self in the context of social interaction and daily life, and these traditions can be used to develop interesting interpretations of self, society and their mutual interaction. In the situation of the family sketched in the foregoing paragraph, we might, for example, focus on what sociologists term the ‘contexts’ of conversations and encounters navigated by the self. This would mean looking in some detail at how the man and woman make the necessary shifts in conversational positions between their own private talk, the practical accomplishment of maintaining this conversation while monitoring the activities of their children, and the suspension of their interpersonal conversation to engage with another style of talk altogether – in this case, that of business. Alternatively, we might instead concentrate on the children rather than the adults, giving special emphasis to their play. Some sociologists argue that, in children’s play, we can detect the imitating of adult actions, and thus experimentation with different forms of self. In the making of mud pies, for instance, these children are most likely enacting their observations of adult cooking; the boy and girl might play at being father and mother, or chef and waiter. In effect, through such play-acting, these children are experimenting with different ways of being a self. Or perhaps we might look at this situation from another perspective, focusing on how a sense of self is sustained through institutional, and indeed digital, processes. Planning a holiday to some far-away country with ease, or talking on a mobile device with a business colleague on the other side of the planet: the self, from this angle, interacts with digital forces that are global in scope.

We will look in this chapter at several different sociological approaches to the self and self-identity. In the first part of the chapter we will concentrate on the symbolic dimensions of social interaction, with particular emphasis on the importance of language, communication and symbols in the constitution of the self. The theoretical tradition of symbolic interactionism will be introduced, and the writings of George Herbert Mead and Herbert Blumer will be discussed. We will then move on to analyse the importance of different forms of social interaction in everyday life for studying the self, and the work of the American sociologist Erving Goffman will be considered. After this, we shall consider more recent developments in social theory that connect self and society in the global age, giving particular attention to the writings of the British sociologist Anthony Giddens.

Self, Symbols and Others: Symbolic Interactionism

The self is often portrayed as primarily a private domain, an inner realm of personal thoughts, values, strivings, emotions and desires. Yet this view, which seems largely self-evident, is in contrast to the way sociologists study the framing of personal identity and the self. Sociology demonstrates the need to look at the impact of other people, the wider society, as well as cultural forms and moral norms, in the making of the self. Particularly for sociologists interested in the dynamics of interpersonal interaction, the self can be thought of as a central mechanism through which the individual and the social world intersect. As such, the self, along with the attendant interpretations and definitions of situation and context that individuals routinely make in daily life, must be fully taken into account for the purposes of social analysis.

George Herbert Mead (1863–1931) is widely considered the founding father of a general tradition of theoretical thinking concerned with the self: symbolic interactionism. Interestingly, Mead did not refer to himself as a symbolic interactionist; he more typically thought of himself as a philosopher or social psychologist, and spent most of his professional life teaching at the University of Chicago. Mead’s theoretical influences were wide-ranging. He had immersed himself in continental philosophy, as well as the developing American pragmatic tradition that included sociologists, psychologists and philosophers such as Charles H. Cooley (1864–1929), William I. Thomas (1863–1947), Charles S. Peirce (1839–1914), William James (1842–1910) and John Dewey (1859–1952). He drew liberally from these various authors to develop a powerful account of the emergence of a sense of self. While this in itself might sound a little daunting, it should be noted that Mead elaborated his theory of the self in a very clear style; hence his key ideas about the self can be set out without too much difficulty.

In Mind, Self and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934 [1974]), published after his death and constructed from the lecture notes of his students, Mead develops an interpretation of the social nature of the constitution of self. Broadly speaking, he places great emphasis upon the social self; each of us, as individuals, fashions a sense of our own selfhood through engagement with other selves. No clear dividing line can be drawn between our own sense of self and the selves of others, according to Mead, ‘since our own selves exist and enter as such into our experience only in so far as the selves of others exist and enter as such into our experience also’ (p. 164).

According to Mead, language is at the heart of the constitution of the self. Human beings, unlike the animal kingdom, communicate through symbols – hence the subsequent use of the term ‘symbolic interaction’. Symbols represent objects in our own minds and in the minds of others; when we learn, in childhood, to think of an object symbolically – whether the object is a parent, sibling or doll – we are making an initial step on the road to reflective thinking and autonomous agency. Language is pivotal in this connection. Without access to language there is no access to the symbols necessary for thinking and acting as a self in a structured world of symbolic meaning. Symbols, says Mead, have a universal quality for the social groups in which they are meaningful; symbols are a common currency through which individuals forge a sense of self and interact with other people. There is thus a certain commonality to being a self, which means that, by looking at our own thoughts, feelings and attitudes, we can interpret the actions of others. To take the attitude of another is, in a sense, to identify with the other’s viewpoint, position or feelings. A death in the family of a friend, for instance, will elicit feelings of sadness and sympathy, as we try to ‘look at’ our friend’s situation by imagining how we might feel. We feel we know, almost exactly, the way that our friend feels, and the different ways he or she might react, partly because we try to imagine ourselves ‘in their shoes’. The poet, Mead points out, relies on such commonalities when creating a pattern of words to evoke in others an experience of intense emotion.

The self for Mead is at once individuality and generality, agent and recipient, sameness and difference. Bluntly put, what this means is that the self is an agency through which individuals experience themselves in relation to others, but also an object or fact which individuals have to cope with as best they can. We routinely construct our experience of daily life in exactly this manner: prodding, pushing, suggesting, advising, admonishing, criticizing and praising as we create the flow of our actions in the social world. ‘Well done!’, or, just as easily, ‘You idiot!’, we might say to ourselves when surveying the results of our actions; the crucial point for Mead is that such surveying of the territory of the self is always carried out with reference to the reactions of others. To possess a ‘self’ then necessarily implies an ability to take one’s actions, emotions and beliefs as a unified structure, viewed from the perspective of significant others, as others would view and interpret actions of the self. Seen from this angle, the self is a social product through and through, an outcome of social symbolic interaction – of emergent, ongoing creation, thinking, feeling, the building of attitude structures, the taking on of roles, all in a quest for coherence and orientated to the social world.

Anyone who reflects on the dynamics of conversation and dialogue will know that ideas, attitudes, dispositions, tacit understandings and emotions cross and tangle between discussants, such that we manage to take away from a ‘good conversation’ something of the other person’s concrete understanding of his or her identity and relationship to others, as well as the wider world. This is what Mead was underscoring when he noted that the individual self is peopled with ‘the attitude of others’. Across the entire spectrum of social life, we learn to view ourselves as other people see us, adjusting and transforming our self-understanding in the light of ongoing social interaction and dialogue. This ongoing dialogue between the self and others is what Mead termed ‘the conversation of gestures’, involving the exchange of symbols and the monitoring of interpretation and definition in all interaction. Social interaction is organized around such conversational gestures, as the individual travels along a biographical trajectory from a preliminary or rudimentary sense of self in childhood to an adult identity, one geared to the values and moral dispositions of culture.

Child development in particular is central to Mead’s understanding of the self. Mead places considerable emphasis on the play of infants and young children in conceptualizing the emergence of a sense of self. For it is through play, he notes, that the small child learns about the social world and about interacting with it. Play tends to be at once rebellious and structured. It is rebellious in the sense that it drifts without apparent structure or order, especially among very young children. It is structured in the sense that the child adopts a series of symbolically defined social roles. Consider, once more, the boy and girl playing in the garden as their parents look on. In the making of mud pies, the boy and girl might be trying on the hats of father and mother one moment, and then shopkeeper and customer the next; in doing so, the children have all the attitudes and responses, more or less adequately defined, worked out. They are able to manipulate a series of characters, imitating what they have seen their parents do, or similarly what they have seen actors do on television. This is what Mead termed ‘taking the role of the other’, a key way in which the self becomes attuned to the demands and pressures of society. In fact, Mead thought that, in the play of children, one could glimpse the rudiments of a differentiated social order: different roles interact, complement and reciprocate responsibilities and duties. And this pattern becomes part of the self.

I said before that the self from the perspective of symbolic interactionism is a social product, but this now needs to be qualified somewhat. Mead makes a crucial distinction between the ‘I’ and the ‘me’ in conceptualizing the self. The ‘me’ is the socialized self, made up of the internalized attitudes of others as experienced in the early years of life. The ‘I’, as Mead uses the term, is the unsocialized self, an assortment of personal desires, needs and dispositions. These more spontaneous wants and wishes of the ‘I’ serve to distinguish the self from others, and can be said to inject something new, creative and innovative into the social process. The achievement of self-awareness, says Mead, arises when the self is able to distinguish the ‘me’ from the ‘I’, and hence attain a level of reflective distance from the demands of society and culture. This conceptual move also allows Mead to avoid the charge that his theory of the self is deterministic – that is, that the self is a mere reflection of the attitudes of general society, or an internalization of social structure. Mead’s theory of the self is at some considerable distance from such determinism, since he holds that each individual responds to social relations in a particularistic or unique fashion. ‘The attitudes involved’, he writes (Mind, Self and Society, p. 198), ‘are gathered from the group, but the individual in whom they are organized has the opportunity of giving them an expression which perhaps has never taken place before.’ Mead’s distinction between ‘me’ and ‘I’ thus introduces a level of contingency and ambivalence to each social encounter: the ‘I’ reacts to the ‘me’ in a social context, but we cannot be sure exactly how that ‘I’ will react. Accordingly, the ‘I’ in interaction with the ‘me’ plays a role in the transformation of social structure.

Another significant figure in symbolic interactionism is Herbert Blumer (1900–87). A pupil of Mead, Blumer sought to explicate the implications of Mead’s theories for the analysis of the self in the social sciences. Blumer argued that what was peculiar to the social sciences was that human agents interpret and define their own action, as well as the action of others, instead of merely reacting to human behaviour in a mechanical fashion. This meant that those sociologists (and there were many at the time) who believed that the logic of social science was the same as those of natural science were in error; the study of human conduct is, in fact, considerably different from the analysis of the movement of objects and events in nature. According to Blumer, a naturalistic perspective in social science can have no proper grasp of the distinctive symbolic qualities of the self. Human interaction, says Blumer, is ‘mediated by the use of symbols, by interpretation, or by ascertaining the meaning of one another’s actions’ (‘Society as Symbolic Interaction’, in A. Rose (ed.), Human Behaviour and Social Process, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962, p. 180). To raise the issue of interpretation here is to question the process by which selves attach meaning to human experience. Objects, according to Blumer, are not simply stimuli for action; they are rather perceived through a process of ‘making indications to the self’ (p. 181). Conscious life, the life of the self, is an ongoing process of self-indication. What this means, in effect, is that everything perceived in social life refers back to the self, and is given meaning by self-interpretation. Individual action, says Blumer, is thus ‘a construction and not a release’ (p. 184), developed in an ongoing process through constant monitoring and interpretation of self-indications, of what others are intending and doing, of the roles they are taking on, and the like.

For symbolic interactionists, therefore, the study of social life is closely interwoven with the analysis of the meaning of human action that individuals actively construct and interpret. Such an understanding of the creative involvement of the self has led to a sensitivity, on the part of some sociologists, to the complexity of social interaction – to the context in which individuals communicate, including the interpretations such individuals have of that context, and of the identities of those involved. Sociological interactionists pay close attention to the explanations, tacit understandings and meanings that individuals give to their own actions, as well as to the actions of others.

However, symbolic interactionism has several weaknesses, which limits its attraction as a general theoretical framework for the study of the self. One major criticism is that the model of the self outlined by Mead and his followers is too rationalistic, conscious and cognitive. For many critics, the self painted by symbolic interactionists is primarily a matter of thinking, not of emotion or passion. Now, Mead tended to associate ‘feeling’ with the physiological realm, a realm that he separated off from the self. Accordingly, his account of the self sometimes appears as peculiarly disembodied, something that many influenced by the writings of recent feminists and postmodernists would consider inadequate for developing a critical theory of the self.

Similarly, the emphasis on the cognitive at the expense of the emotional realm in symbolic interactionism has been criticized as inadequate by authors influenced by the insights of Freud into unconscious elemen...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Series title
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Self, Society and Everyday Life
• 2 The Repression of Self
• 3 Technologies of the Self
• 4 Self, Sexuality and Gender
• 5 The Postmodern Self
• 6 The Algorithmic Self
• 7 The Individualized Self: From Reinvention to Mobile Lives
• Conclusion
• Index
• End User License Agreement