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Psychology of communication: the self
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Psychology of communication: the self
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If you have looked at the other sections on self-image, self-esteem and so on, you will be aware that underlying them all is the notion that we have a more or less stable self-concept. The idea that we have a more or less stable and coherent Self (often referred to as the 'Cartesian self' - after the 17th century French philosopher, Descartes) lies at the heart of humanistic psychology. This Cartesian, liberated and autonomous subject is in charge of him/herself and engages (or at least is capable of engaging) in rational debate with other subjects to arrive at a consensus. This conception of the self or subject is fundamental to humanism and underlies, for example, the typical understanding of liberal democracy. The Cartesian self is now said to be in crisis. This crisis is in a sense nothing new - for example, an obviously diverging point of view is Freud's division of the individual's personality into three component parts, one part of which is largely beyond the individual's control, even beyond his/her knowledge.
A rather different view of the self emerged in France, under the influence of semiology. It may not seem immediately obvious that the 'science of signs' has much to do with notions of the Self. However, if you have examined the section on semiology (especially the section on structuralism and post-structuralism) or have looked at the sections on the mass media, you will be aware that a consequence of Saussure's insistence on the arbitrariness of signs is that the world is the result of signification. Logically, therefore, it follows that the individual consciousness is also the result of signification. The language system into which we are born pre-dates us and is a system independent of us and, as we enter into language use, we enter into a system of differentiations over which we have no creative control, as well as into a repository of cultural meanings. Althusser
The French Marxist philosopher, Louis Althusser, took this up in his examination of ideology. Ideology, he pointed out is not explicit, but implicit in the structures, images, the sign-systems and discourses we take for granted. The process of signification constructs what is 'obvious'. For Althusser, the unconscious is also formed in and through ideology. One can also see the force of Althusser's arguments that, by putting economic and social relations at the centre of his theories, Marx himself displaced 'man' from the centre of his philosophy.
This has important consequences for the common notion of an individual self, especially if we think of the individual self as being somehow rooted in the unconscious. Looked at from this point of view, any sense we might have of an individual self is illusory, merely a 'subjectivity' amongst others, different in different situations.
This notion of the decentred self has been significant in the development of cultural studies:
We can no longer conceive of the 'individual' in terms of a whole, centred, stable and completed Ego or autonomous, rational 'self'. The 'self' is conceptualized as more fragmented and incomplete, composed of multiple 'selves' or identities in relation to the different social worlds we inhabit, something with a history, 'produced', in process. The 'subject' is differently placed or positioned by diifferent discourses and practices.
Hall (1996b) p. 226
If you have read any of the sections on the mass media, then you're probably familiar with Althusser's conception of the way that media messages may
'interpellate' us, constructing 'subject positions' for us. Morley's research in Family Television (1986), for example, shows how it is quite possible for viewers to adopt internally contradictory subject-positions in response to items within a TV news item. They thus inhabit a range of contradictory subjectivities. We are told by discourses and by the ideologies operating through them how we go about being a subject:
Most of individual psychology in western Europe is founded on the notion that we can speak of fixed, well recognized selves, before any of the social-cultural coordinates begin to operate. I think, though, that the boundary between a self-constituted individual self and its social coordinates is dissolved. The self is in fact part of that process of location of the individual within different coordinates and not reducible to one or another coordinate.
(1991)
The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan looks at our unconscious as another sign system ('the unconscious is articulated like a language'). The unconscious is not unique to an individual, but is produced by culture. Saussure, Barthes and other semiologists argued that our social being is produced by our language; Lacan saw our unconscious too as the construction of the language and perceptions of others, there being no subject independent of language. For Lacan there can be no separation between the subject and society, since society inhabits each individual.
This is quite a different idea from that of humanist psychologists such as Rogers, who pretty much see us as setting about constructing our own self-concept from scratch; according to Lacan's view we can only draw from the cultural repertoire available to us. Rather than our culture being produced by us, we are produced by it. From this perspective, the self is not some kind of essentialist (i.e. partaking of an essence beyond language and ideology) entity, but a complex and unstable network of differing subject positions. We are rhetorical beings.
One of the most compelling overviews of the recent crisis of the self is provided by Anthony Giddens (1991). According to him, modernity necessarily challenges the traditional order. If we think, perhaps rather crudely, of 'modernity' as beginning with the French Enlightenment in the eighteenth century, then it is clear that the modern project began with a challenge to established authority and the established social order. Placing as it does such emphasis on the value of human reason and the individual's capacity for critical enquiry, it will almost inevitably result in the undermining of settled traditional societies and the value systems which underpin them. Although many of the French philosophers held the firm belief that the application of human reason would result in agreed, generally applicable, universal pinciples, which we could rely on with certainty, it seems pretty obvious to us now that its 'methodological doubt' has in fact resulted in a bewildering range and fluidity of social roles, values, authorities and so on and none of these appears to us to have any more authority or reliability than any other. Out of this we have to make an identity for ourselves, no identity is prescribed for us any more as it might hav been in a traditional society. Also, as Giddens puts it, we are each to a greater or lesser extent involved in what he terms a 'plurality of lifeworlds'; in other words, we are increasingly required to traverse a range of different social situations, each of which has its own norms and values, and, in addition, this complexity is added to by the 'mediated experience' offered to us by the mass media which increase the range of lifeworlds presented to us.
Some of you may find the above more characteristic of postmodernity than of what Giddens terms 'the late modern age'. The terminology can be disputed, but I don't think it matters a great deal. The question is: is that a portrayal of modern society which you recognize? If it is, then you will recognize that what Giddens is describing is in fact a reversal of the hopes and intentions of liberal humanism. For liberalism, the autonomous, Cartesian self is already a given; for Giddens, in late modernity it is the self that is the problem, it has to be chosen, created, constructed, perpetually unstable, rather than being already there, waiting to be liberated.
This view appears to be supported by the work of psychologist Kenneth Gergen who claims his researches show that a person does not ordinarily develop a coherent sense of identity, indeed that where such a coherent sense is developed it may be symptomatic of emotional distress:
Taken together our experiments docuent the remarkable flexibility of the self. We are made of soft plastic, and molded by social circumstances. But we should not conclude that all of our relationships are fake: subjects in our studies generally believed in the masks they wore. Once donned, the mask becomes reality.
Gergen (1972)
Given the persistence of the Cartesian view of the self, given also that folk psychology, as well as much counselling and therapy, still rely on the idea of a 'true', 'core' self, it is not surprising that many of us may feel uncomfortable with the idea of slipping from one self to another as we move from one situation to another, threatened, frightened by the idea of letting go of the notion that we can discover an inner self in favour of the task of creating a variety of possible selves. Not so the type of person whom the philosopher Richard Rorty refers to as postmodern ironists, who are
never quite able to take themselves seriously because always aware that the terms in which they describe themselves are subject to change, always aware of the contingency and fragility of their final vocabularies
Rorty (1989): 74
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