Self-Identity and Everyday Life

Harvie Ferguson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780415355087
• eBook ISBN: 9781134255818
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

'Identity' and 'selfhood' are terms routinely used throughout the human sciences that seek to analyze and describe the character of everyday life and experience. Yet these terms are seldom defined or used with any precision, and scant regard is paid to the historical and cultural context in which they arose, or to which they are applied.

This innovative book provides fresh historical insights in terms of the emergence, development, and interrelationship of specific and varied notions of identity and selfhood, and outlines a new sociological framework for analyzing it.

This is the first historical/sociological framework for discussion of issues which have until now, generally been treated as 'philosophy' or 'psychology', and as such it is essential reading for those undergraduates and postgraduates of sociology, philosophy and history and cultural studies interested in the concepts of identity and self. It covers a broader range of material than is usual in this style of text, and includes a survey of relevant literature and precise analysis of key concepts written in a student-friendly style.

INTERRUPTION 1: STORY

Begin, Muse, when the two first broke and clashed,

Agamemnon lord of men and brilliant Achilles.

(Homer)

As a young person born after the war (at that time the Second World War was known simply as ‘the war’), and brought up in the protected environment of a small seaside town, the author during his teenage years felt entitled to an ‘identity crisis’.

Why not? After all, in London, or Paris, or New York a period of youthful uncertainty and personal doubt was an obligatory feature of growing up. Or so he believed. Haphazard exposure to contemporary literary works convinced him that there, at least, a self-imposed rite de passage, rich in juvenile anxiety and indecision, was no longer the privilege of a few well educated and precociously talented souls but had become essential even for those, conscious of modest gifts and faltering resolve. Unadventurous and compliant as he was, he nonetheless felt obliged to experience an identity crisis ‘of his very own’. (It was some years later before he appreciated the paradox of claiming as his ‘very own’ the absence of a definite self-identity).

Admittedly the small town in the west of Scotland where he lived offered little by way of encouragement to a nascent interest in cultural experimentation and nothing in terms of opportunity for direct contact with an existential avant garde. In fact, the breaking wave of a popular culture, which in hindsight he claimed as his inspiration, hardly registered against the background of activities and interests grown prematurely dull; no more than a vague succession of dislocated sounds and images that bore no relation to his actual or imagined life. ‘Surely’, he thought ‘there must be something more to life!’ And, sure enough, by way of uncritical reading and rejection (from timidity), of the few available forms of illicit excitement open to his acquaintances, the unremarkable difficulties of a provincial teenage life became charged with obscure metaphysical longing. Life, ‘real life’, was elsewhere and something quite different, he thought, to both the stultifying routine that his parents and teachers found so gratifying, and the mindless release in which his friends occasionally indulged. However, he could not prevent the scepticism that exposed the shallowness of life around him from applying equally to himself, and effectively undermined his own conviction of a higher destiny. He felt the weight of local expectations drawing him irresistibly into a predictable and, above all, respectable world.

The author’s half-hearted identity crisis, in other words, amounted to little more than envy of those he imagined struggling with the ‘real thing’, and self reproach for his lack of courage in failing so miserably to join them in their decisive project of liberation. Too fearful simply to set off for London or New York where, he still believed, an uncertain but brilliant future awaited him, he withdrew into himself, became bookishly clever, and went to university. This unplanned but ingenious compromise allowed him to prolong his much-loved adolescent ‘crisis’ while simultaneously giving every appearance of settling down to a mature and responsible task.

The study of sociology, which he excused on the grounds of its modernity and relevance to the future, did not offer his parents the immediate gratification and known trajectory of medicine or law but promised, nonetheless, an assured and prosperous future; a professional career in which they could take pride. This misunderstanding, and the enormous prestige in their eyes of an ancient university, allowed him painlessly to free himself of their world.

Or so he thought. He had expected a sudden transformation in himself; a veritable metamorphosis in which a wholly new person would awaken to a world altered in its innermost character. But the superficial novelties of student life quickly adapted themselves to the routines of a familiar and anxious existence. Nothing, after all, had changed. The alluring worlds opened to him in innumerable books remained stubbornly out of reach. He could not enter into and share the life he imagined they described and analyzed. Everything vital was remote and imaginary while all that was real remained dull and unexciting.

He reached the obvious conclusion; or, rather, the unspectacular claims of routine obligations took hold of him and he ‘grew up’. Without reflecting or deciding upon the matter he began to recall his own past with mature condescension, and saw that it was his imagination alone that had endowed other people’s lives with the glamour he felt to be absent from his own. In reality the mundane world he was reluctant to embrace was the only reality there was. Elsewhere was no different; nothing stood out against the ubiquitous indifference of the present. And although this realization implied the abandonment of an unfulfilled wish for something (anything) more perfect, it also meant that other people’s lives, after all, were no more or less interesting, or valuable, or real than his own. He quickly learned to feign a sophisticated disdain for the identity crisis to which he had recently aspired. Adolescent angst, long before he knew the meaning of the term, was consigned to a past he claimed to have outgrown. In any event he became much too busy to worry over pointless and ultimately trivial questions. ‘Who was he?’ ‘How should he live?’ ‘To what should he devote his talents?’ These were meaningless questions that had been out of date long before they had briefly, and unwisely, been revived by Tolstoy, who should have known better (had known better!) than to take them seriously. Fashionable cynicism replaced fashionable existentialism as his ready-made account of contemporary experience.

After a period of academic research and teaching concerned primarily with historical and cultural aspects of the development of modern society the author returned, but in quite a new context, to issues of identity. His own past life, now transformed by changing interests, the accumulation of (fruitless) literary endeavour, and the work of memory offered itself as an exemplary instance of a particular social-historical type of experience rather than a personal narrative. The indeterminate and self-absorbing inward struggle that had at one time imparted a peculiar tension to every event and activity could now be viewed in a broader context as characteristic of an entire period, age cohort, and gender. And, at the same time, this typical form could be contrasted with other characteristic types of experience, each of which developed meaningfully in relation to a specific historical and social context. The differences among such typical experiences could, in turn, be grasped in relation to large-scale distinctions of nation, class, community, religion, ethnicity and so forth.

Like many academics he was readily tempted into projects made compelling by prior experience that had, in fact, done little to prepare him for the task. Intrigued and alarmed in equal measure he found himself committed to writing a book called Self-Identity and Everyday Life.

These remarks are not intended as an authorial preface. They do not fall into any of the varied paratextual conceits designed to satisfy the author’s urge to self-advertisement (Genette 1997). Nor do they bear kinship with the frequently displayed and equally superfluous photograph displayed on the back cover of many books. The intention, rather, is to raise at once and in a direct manner the central themes of the following discussion. Properly to grasp the meaning of identity and the character of selfhood in contemporary society involves a surprisingly wide-ranging exploration of many subjects that, at first, appear remote from the actual experience of contemporary life that is both its point of departure and its only justification. Thus, before embarking on these necessarily eccentric considerations, it is all the more essential to begin with reality immediately as it is; to begin, that is, with ourselves; begin.

Or, rather, it is important to begin before the beginning. Prior to identity, in the shadowy beginning that lies before the beginning, is the story. Story gives birth to identity as the distinctiveness of a beginning; the emergence, that is to say, of a ‘something’ that only in hindsight and through recollection takes on a definite form. Story is nothing but beginning; it is eternal beginning, birth. Schoolchildren are wrongly advised that all stories have a beginning, middle and end. This confuses story with plot. Story is ceaseless emergence; it is the interruption in which is put forward the possibility of experience, and it is through the repetition of stories that life takes form as reality. The story impulse ‘is inherent in the emergence of humanity’ (Crossley 2008: 11), and it is this rupture that is invoked in every bold announcement of ‘once upon a time’. The story has no antecedent. The first stories (myths), thus, tell of the inexplicable origin of the world and the differentiation of its various orders, species, forms, and relations. And modern stories, likewise, begin before the beginning of modernity by telling what does not yet exist, but which, through telling, takes shape as self-identity.

The story of self-identity, in other words, foreshadows the development of a particular kind of world and serves as an appropriate introduction to a sociological account of that world. It serves, above all, to draw attention to the equivocal character of its reality. If self-identity begins with a story (a story about itself), then the existential, as well as the logical and metaphysical, status of self-identity is called into question. Is self-identity ‘just’ a story? Or is its being a story just what gives self-identity its significance as an indubitable reality?

It is important to begin in this way because, otherwise, there seems to be little that is difficult or puzzling here. The world, including ourselves, commonly appears in a non-problematic way as a vast assembly of things that lie outside us. ‘We’ are constituted, in contrast, internally; both as the effortless stream of conscious life that is always ‘here’ and ‘now’ and as the recollected past and imagined future of an experiencing subject. ‘We’ appear with our own past; both an emerging moment of experience and as an image of that moment preserved and projected in time. We are so accustomed to experiencing reality in this way that we find it difficult to reflect upon it; indeed, we rarely feel any need to reflect upon what seems obvious, self-evident, and natural.

At least that is how we talk about our experience. But this is often misleading and obscures many of the most striking characteristics of lived experience. Without any special effort of reflection and, rather, taking things as they at first appear to us, we frequently orient ourselves to the world and ourselves in a different and more equivocal fashion. Only rarely, in fact, do the objects that fill our world present themselves as uniformly remote from, or wholly exterior to, us; few things are experienced as ‘dead’ matter. Things that ‘belong’ to us share, to differing degrees, in the spontaneous stream of life that animates us. ‘My’ clothes, ‘my’ books, ‘my’ furniture, and ‘my’ car, are related to me in a special, intimate way. We recognize in a gift some aspect of the human character of the giver. And, more generally, beyond such personal relational properties, many different kinds of things possess their own ‘subjective’ characteristics. Musical instruments, for example, have a different ‘nature’ to tools, or cooking utensils; a watch or a fountain pen, in addition to its functional character, may be endowed with valued cultural qualities; toys seem to enjoy a life of their own.

Nor is experience ‘all of a piece’. While ‘I’ frequently distinguish myself from ‘we’ in an automatic and thoughtless manner, both the ‘I’ and the ‘we’ may refer to quite different realities. The ‘I’ that stumbles from bed in the morning is not the ‘I’ that delivers a lecture, or buys fish for dinner. And the ‘I’ that identifies itself as part of one group rather than another does so in a variety of continually changing ways; with deliberation, casually, hopefully, reluctantly, and so on. Equally, the ‘we’ to which ‘I’ belong, or of which I am a part, is a varied and shifting form. The ‘we’ that is my family is not just distinct in terms of its members from the ‘we’ that is my working colleagues but constitutes a different kind of relationship and a different kind of identity. The membership of either group is variable and may be more or less extended depending on the circumstances. At a funeral, for example, one comes across relatives and colleagues previously unknown or rarely encountered. My colleagues may be constituted by members of ‘my’ department in the university, or members of all the departments in the faculty, or all the academic staff of the university, or British sociologists with similar academic interests, or academics throughout the world, past and present, whose work is significant for my research, and so on, depending upon the context. We are soon led to wonder if ‘I’ and ‘we’ are nothing more than common ways of speaking that hardly bear the weight of significance thus thrust upon them.

Furthermore, we frequently experience the world as dissolving, indistinct, and indeterminate. We become fatigued and sleepy, we suffer pain, we get drunk, we fall in love, we forget; in such states and in a variety of ways the ‘ordinary’ world of objects fade and alter in the most radical fashion. These transformations of exterior reality are, simultaneously, fundamental changes within, and of, the experiencing subject. In ordinary life, that is to say, we are conscious of the most profound changes affecting not only the content of our experience but the very forms of experience itself.

Any account of ordinary experience, such as the opening story, is bound to render events, feelings, memories, and so on, in a relatively neat and comprehensible form. The original messiness of experience is tidied up in innumerable ways; much of what was lived through as a series of disjunctive and even contradictory events becomes reorganized and recollected as a single, uninterrupted story in which the ‘self’ is the central character. In retrospect, and in prospect, selfhood plays a regulative role in ordering experience. More than that, it constitutes a world as the ‘stuff’ of experience.

This is rather puzzling. Selfhood is constructed from experience while, at the same time, it gives experience its characteristic form. It is both the possibility and consequence of experience. Furthermore, selfhood is not a fixed relation or structure through which, as it were, experience passes; it is an historical form of life. Selfhood, that is to say, not only changes over time in terms of its characteristic content, it emerges as that which we experience as the ‘self’ in a particular period. Outside of a particular historical and cultural context, experience is not constituted as selfhood at all, nor, indeed, is the world constituted as experience. It seems that even if we begin with a simple story and try to stick to the bare essentials we are soon forced into a consideration of larger conceptual as well as historical issues.

Beginning with a straightforward account of normal experience, that is to say, turns out to be much more difficult than might at first be imagined. There is no way adequately to communicate the strange complexity and variable texture of immediate experience; and every attempt to do so generates a particular image of events, and tells the story in one way rather than another. In the brief opening passage, for example, much is obviously omitted. The mode of expression is oddly distancing and ironic. Why does the author refer to himself in the third person? And why does he present himself in such an unflattering light? Is the author referred to, in fact, Harvie Ferguson? Is he identical to the Harvie Ferguson whose name appears on the front of this book? And does this name refer to the same person listed in the bibliography as the author of a number of sociological works? Is he also responsible for the novel Driscoll’s Folly (2000), a story of disintegrating selfhood and failing identities?

How can we gain some essential insight into the apparently shifting character of selfhood and its changing identity-relationships? And what have these various relations and misrelations to do with everyday life in contemporary society? How, in short, are we to grasp the most immediate realities of life and relate them to those large dynamic, historical processes in which they are implicated? This is the task undertaken in the following pages. The first chapter deals with major conceptual issues. What is meant by the terms identity, selfhood, and everyday life? How can they be defined and how should they be used? These and related concepts were developed and widely used throughout the modern period prior to the development of sociology as a discipline. To understand the current sociological usage of such terms, therefore, it is important to locate them in a broad interdisciplinary perspective focused on the thematic development of modernity. This will involve some discussion of philosophical, literary and scientific work, and artistic movements, but discussion of these developments will be touched upon only so far as they are helpful in gaining an adequate understanding of the sociological issues involved.

The conceptual discussion cannot be separated from substantive, historical issues of identity formation, which will be taken up in Chapter 2. Whereas most accounts of self-identity assume the context of modern western society, important insights can be gained by adopting a broader framework that allows comparisons among a number of different kinds of modern and non-modern societies.

Chapters 3 and 4 pursue central issues for any understanding of identity. How is the experience of unity and the unity of experience, constituted and how are they related to self-identity? How are unities, whatever their origin and foundation, combined and connected to form totalities? Or should totality be grasped as a reality sui generis from which unity and self-identity emerge through processes of differentiation? This discussion provides insight into the wide-ranging implications of the, often unacknowledged, social character of self-identity at every level of experience.

Chapter 5 takes up the question of everyday life in the context of contemporary society in a more critical mood, and suggests a variety of ways in which existing sociological accounts of self-identity should be revised to take account of the fragmentary character of ordinary experience.

Conventional sociological thought argues that throughout the development of modern society self, identity, and everyday life constituted an intimately interrelated structure. According to the argument advanced here, this is no longer the case; now self, identity, and everyday life are best seen as unrelated, or even antagonistic, processes. It is just the radical disconnection of what hitherto had been regarded as essentially interrelated aspects of experience that gives contemporary life its distinctive, overwhelming quality.

Parallel with the sequence of chapters, a parallel series of Interruptions present sceptical commentaries on the text, critical reflections on related issues of method, and suggest connections with a variety of contemporary issues. The result, like everyday life, makes no pretence to systematic or descriptive completeness, but aims, rather, to present a report on the confusion and incoherence as well as the dreamlike clarity of the present.

1
CONCEPTS

Each of the key terms in the title of this book is ambiguous, obscure and subject to a variety of common as well as academic usages. While it is not possible and would not be desirable, to constrain such prodigality in the use of words and although the intention of the following discussion is substantive rather than analytical, it is helpful to establish at the outset what is meant (here if nowhere else), by these central concepts. In an academic book there is nothing surprising in such an opening observation. However, for a sociological account of these matters, this is neither a preliminary nor a pedantic exercise and is worth a brief justification.

The words identity and self are part of ordinary language and, as such, seemingly refer to and communicate appropriately meaningful content without the need for further elaboration. Equally, everyday life seems so obvious and self-evident a term as hardly to require comment; it is simply the living context in which language is embedded. Academics, of course, are free to adopt these words and specify a more precise and contextually delimited meaning for them; that is, to use them as concepts. Mathematicians, for example, use the term identity, grammarians refer to self and some philosophers discuss everyday or ordinary experience, in quite particular ways. While these precise usages are (or at one time were) related to everyday language, their mathematical, grammatical, or philosophical meanings depend upon their location within a more or less extensive network of related, disciplinary concepts. A sociological understanding of identity and self, however (to say nothing of self-identity), cannot wholly free itself from the imprecision of common language. It is just the aim of sociology, in fact, to elucidate, rather than usurp, these usages and, thus, to clarify and account for the experience of everyday life. Sociologists,...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• SERIES EDITOR’S FOREWORD
• Interruption 1: Story
• 1 Concepts
• Interruption 2: Theory
• 2 Contexts
• Interruption 3: History
• 3 Unities
• Interruption 4: Memory
• 4 Totalities
• Interruption 5: Symptom
• 5 Fragments
• Interruption 6: Fiction
• REFERENCES