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REFLECTIONS
ON THE SELF
Volume 54 No. 1 (Spring 1987) Arien Mack, Editor |
Table of Contents Notes on Contributors Ordering information
It is difficult, and perhaps unnecessary, to make out whether the contemporary burst of color surrounding the concept of the self is the glow of a rising or a setting sun. Recent popular culture has seen the appearance of a new brand of psychoanalysis called "self psychology," urgent polemics on narcissism, and a new women's magazine named Self. Academics have welcomed the self as "a respectable explanatory concept" in the human sciences or denounced it as a tune we whistle in dark times to pretend that individual experience is more orderly than it is. In any case, the visibility of the term in public and academic discussions is a sure sign that we can no longer take for granted that we all mean the same thing by the word.
When a situation like this one exists, a guest editor faces two (mostly bad) choices. On the one hand, he can opt for a well-organized presentation and risk banality. He can pick a conversation in progress that he likes, then persuade the participants to continue it in the pages of Social Research. The obvious advantage is the likelihood that the participants will have already agreed on some definitions, located the main problem areas, and settled on a few topics for dispute. One might, for example, publish the latest installment of the philosophical debate on self-identity over time (complete with its high-tech fantasies of brain bisection or matter-destroying human-transport machines) or the anthropological case for radically different species of self-consciousness in some traditional societies. A less obvious problem with this kind of a head start is that preliminary housekeeping can sweep all the tough, untidy questions under the rug. Only the most stubbornly naive observer could fail to notice how these discussions take a direction shaped by a whole host of forces that have very little to do with understanding the self, forces which serve to systematically bias what is said in the direction of some institutional, professional, or ideological end.
Unfortunately, the operation of these forces is no simple case of the participants' bad faith. Rather, the problem is more a matter of unwritten rules for public discussion that resemble the law-school rule for examining witnesses: Never ask a question unless you already know the answer. In such an atmosphere, the price extracted for decorous discussion can be timidity, hermetic triviality, and ultimately cynicism. Perhaps the best illustration of the dangers of this option is the way in which choosing a comparatively well-developed conversation smuggles in the scientistic assumption that thinking about the self need have an inherently cumulative quality, with each contribution moving us a bit closer toward the truth. It is exactly an assumption like this one that begs for scrutiny.
On the other hand, if an editor avoids the insidious decorum of a well-advanced conversation, he can choose the second option, pluralism, and risk chaos. He can sample bits and pieces from all over, cull through them to identify themes or ideas that turn up again and again, then use these inductively derived themes to organize a series of representative samples. One might, for example, feature feminist calls for self-definitions based on interpersonal connectedness, a social-science dispute over individualism as an explanatory construct, Lacanian skepticism about the ego, or a deconstructive attempt to dismantle the self.
Such an approach would seem to offer the advantage of not prematurely foreclosing discussion. But does it really? Stripped of a larger conversational context, theories and pronouncements on the self can quickly become so ambiguous that it is impossible to tell who agrees with (or criticizes) whom. The reader is then implicitly invited to evaluate the pieces on some nonrational basis, such as their theatricality or star quality. If this happens, discussion is radically foreclosed because it never gets started.
Nevertheless, a sharp eye for themes and a knack for juxtaposition might mitigate the appearance of chaos. To do so is something of a cheat, however. Lifting a crucial term (such as "ego," "the other," or "individualism") from two different discussions and carefully putting the two side by side is no way to decide whether the two have more than a verbal resemblance. Even if we (quite implausibly) accept that an unprejudiced inductivism could issue in a clever, engaging collage, this approach seems to imply that, contrary to what good sense tells us, all thoughts on the self are equally deserving of attention. In the far more likely event that some principle of selection other than mere frequency of occurrence would end up holding sway, intellectual honesty seems to demand that the editor choose an approach to the self, state it openly, and offer his reasons for it.
A third, more promising, alternative is to try to start a new conversation about an issue that has not yet figured importantly in the discussion, but one which exercises an unseen influence during these attempts to clarify the meaning of the self. I think that both the evasions and the disarray which characterize so much contemporary commentary on the self can be traced to an acute, quite fundamental, uncertainty about the value judgments that are implicit in our attempts to consider its meaning.
A good case can be made that, for some time now, the value of the self has been the last tenet common to most of the creeds of the recent Western inheritance that is still able to command much conviction. Historically, the institutions most fruitful for recent Western culture have been those able to tap into a concern for the self, drawing support from sources in aesthetic modernism, the morality of liberalism, and the romantic interest in the inner life. The spread of education, the refinement of high art, the rejection of sexual repression and inequality, even the case for many aspects of social justice within liberal capitalist society are hard to imagine without some working consensus on the value of the self. But as the cultural conversation on the self has become increasingly voluble, it has become clear that the stability of that consensus can no longer be taken for granted.
The challenge is to make this uncertainty about its value the object of the discussion, instead of a hidden cause of it. At this point, the reader may rightly ask: If the effect of value dilemmas has indeed been pronounced, why has it remained out of sight? If I may borrow a comparison used by the anthropologist Mary Douglas when discussing another matter, I think the problem lies in the fact that, for us, the self is like the ivy-covered wall of a new university: recently erected, but designed to fade into the landscape. To be valuable, the self must be venerable, a moral landmark as ancient, unchanging, and familiar as a piece of nature entwined with our institutions. This means forgetting that workmen stacked the stones and planted the vines. The resulting fantasy says that however the link between value and the self may be conceived, it must not only precede any decision we make about it but any thought we think about it. Consequently, our attention is directed away from the fact that the values the self embodies are the products of collective decisions and thoughts by those no more able than ourselves. Once it is clear that the connection between value and the self is wrought, not given, reflection on it becomes a matter of moral choice.
Recognizing the tell-tale signs of human fabrication in what had seemed natural is by now a critical routine so familiar that, on its own, it does little to guarantee a genuinely fresh look. Rather, breaking the link between the self's "venerability" and its value produces an effect like the one Wittgenstein once attributed to psychoanalysis: It "is like eating from the tree of knowledge. The knowledge acquired sets us [new] ethical problems; but contributes nothing to their solution." Of course, in this context his words are an overstatement because seeing the problem as ethical is itself a kind of contribution. It suggests that the present confusion about what to think about the self is more directly approached as an uncertainty about what to do about it: how, whether, and in what form it is to be enacted, represented, displayed. And since the self is realized in activity, self-knowledge becomes a weighing of value, a guide for action.
In the papers which follow, this question has been approached through what we may call "practices of the self." Several times, notice is taken of the hyphenated words in which the self appears. Even when "self-" is followed by a noun, a transformation of the second word into a verb usually reveals that it is pictured as the object of an activity. In two cases, an explicit question about this process organizes an entire presentation: How is the self portrayed when we see it as subjecting itself to self-criticism (Walzer) or self-deception (Polonoff)? Both authors find that the self's curious capacity to divide itself, to be both subject and object, poses problems of self-definition that are at least as much moral as they are conceptual. And in both cases, a representational quandary is central. To picture self-criticism, Walzer at one point asks us to imagine it as a kind of especially complicated version of social criticism. To picture self-deception, Polonoff initially offers an image that sounds like a scientific activity, self-deception as a "guilty, failed verification of a version of myself." In neither case, however, does the author find his analogy entirely satisfactory, and the working out of its strengths and weaknesses becomes an important part of the expository agenda. Hypenated words also figure in other essays--self-expression and a special sense of self-portraiture in Eisler and Gilman, self-consciousness in Sass--but do not function as the announced topic.
Two authors focus on an activity explicitly devoted to the task of self-representation. Bruner deals with informal autobiographies, Sass with the autobiography of the psychotic Daniel Schreber, which he treats as an important corrective to the use which has been made of Schreber by Freud and generations of psychiatry textbooks. And both Bruner and Sass conclude that the mode of representing the self is so intimately bound up with the self that is represented that the epistemologocial and ontological issues cannot be neatly untangled. Both further suggest that the activity of representing may causally affect the structure of that which is represented. For Sass, Schreber's "relentless self-monitoring," with which he ferrets out and concentrates upon the usually taken for granted aspects of self-experience, is less a symptom than part of the deep structure of his disturbance. For Bruner, "in the end, we become the autobiographical narratives by which we `tell about' our lives." In Bruner's next sentence, he adds that this process takes place under the sway of culture; it is a shaping by which " we also become variants of the culture's canonical forms." Here, too, Sass could easily agree, though the message comes bordered in black: the form of Schreber's madness is the extreme inner expression of a disciplinary surveillance at the heart of modern society.
Gilman detects, in a detail of a visual image, the force exercised by "society's construction of the other" on the self-understanding of the homosexual. To imagine what he is like, the homosexual is obliged to draw on the storehouse of available images of sexuality that he is offered by his circumstances.
Rorty takes cultural variability as her central topic, though she is less concerned to relate the outside form to the inner experience than she is to demonstrate how the demands we make on various concepts of the self exceed what they are able to supply. The resources of a concept such as "person," she reminds us, can best be understood by the institutional practices which give rise to it.
Eisler expresses astonishment (and dismay) at the contemporary severing of interest in art from interest in the artist. How is it, he asks, that a kind of artifact which was once an ideal of self-expression is now widely viewed with complete disregard for its creator? He finds, in the critical and art-historical community, a swaggering but brittle dogmatism which fears that an interest in biographical issues and self-expression will undermine an ideal of rigor Eisler finds pointless and narrow.
What, if anything, is to be gained by this turn to "practices of the self"? Partly, the answer must come from these articles themselves. Partly, I believe, a more general answer can be given. The first, chief benefit, at least in principle, is that the question asker is pushed to take responsibility for his or her own reply. The individual must ask: Where do the practices offered by my culture fit into the life I want to live? Worded as a question about "my culture," it brings a second benefit, a reminder that not everything about the self is under the individual's power. Emerson to the contrary, there are limits to self-reliance, limits to its imaginability, its prudence, and its moral good faith. For this reason, the individual question must also be posed in a more directly social mode: Where do the practices of the self which seem possible for us fit into the collective life we find worth living? Together, perhaps these two new questions may nudge the conversation toward a more morally realistic discussion of the self.
James Walkup
Guest Editor
Table of Contents
Notes on Contributors
(at time of publication)
Jerome Bruner is George Herbert Mean University Professor in the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research. His most recent book is Actual Minds, Possible Worlds (1986).
Colin Eisler Robert Lehman Professor of Fine Arts at Columbia Univeristy, is working on a book on Jacopo Bellini.
Sander L. Gilman is Professor of Humane Studies at Cornell University and Professor of Psychiatry (History) at Cornell Medical Center. His most recent book is Difference and Pathology (1986).
David Polonoff is a freelance writer living in New York City. He has a master's degree in philosophy from New York Univeristy and has worked as a researcher on the Spencer Foundation Grant.
Amelie Oksenberg Rorty is the Matina Horner Distinguished Visiting Professor at Radcliffe College and Visiting Professor at Brandeis University. She edited Essays on Descartes' Meditations.
Louis A. Sass is Assistant Professor of Clinical Psychology at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, and a Fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities. His book on madness and modernism will be published next year.
James Walkup is an editorial associate at Social Research. he has published articles on semantics, psychoanalysis and culture, and the impact of technology on values.
Michael Walzer is Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Stduy in Princeton, New Jersey. His most recent book is Interpretation and Social Criticism (1987).
