History of the Human Sciences

http://hhs.sagepub.com/ History of the Human Sciences http://hhs.sagepub.com/content/7/2/141.citation The online version of this article can be found at: DOI: 10.1177/095269519400700208 1994 7: 141History of the Human Sciences John-Raphael Staude Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, paperback, 1992 Taylor, Sources of the Self. The Making of the Modern Identity. Self. Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1991. Charles New York: Basic Books, 1991. Anthony Paul Kerby, Narrative and the Gergen, The Saturated Self. Dilemmas of Identity in Contemporary Life. Construction. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991. Kenneth C. Fred Alford, The Self in Social Theory. A Psychoanalytic Account of its Published by: http://www.sagepublications.com can be found at:History of the Human SciencesAdditional services and information for http://hhs.sagepub.com/cgi/alertsEmail Alerts: http://hhs.sagepub.com/subscriptionsSubscriptions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.navReprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.navPermissions: What is This? - May 1, 1994Version of Record >> at FUDAN UNIV LIB on May 9, 2013hhs.sagepub.comDownloaded from Language, narration and the self JOHN-RAPHAEL STAUDE C. Fred Alford, The Self in Social Theory. A Psychoanalytic Account of its Construction. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991. Kenneth Gergen, The Saturated Self. Dilemmas of Identity in Contem- porary Life. New York: Basic Books, 1991. Anthony Paul Kerby, Narrative and the Self. Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1991. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self. The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, paperback, 1992. HISTORY OF THE HUMAN SCIENCES Vol. 7 No. 2 © 1994 SAGE (London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi) pp. 141-149 The human subject, as the existentialists have long maintained, is an ’unfinished subject’. Perhaps more than that, it is a subject that continually writes, develops and often erases its own definition, its own story. What is the relation between one’s life-story and the subject of that story? To begin with we must ask: ’Who or what is the speaking subject?’ ’Who is the author of &dquo;my&dquo; utterances?’ And what is meant or referred to by the word ’I’ that proliferates in our discourse? In short, what is the relationship between language and the self? These are the sorts of questions that must be asked with the emergence of the new linguistic and semiotic paradigm in which we now find ourselves today. To answer these questions the books here reviewed focus on a highly significant genre of language usage: narration. It is especially through the unifying action of narration that temporal expanses of all kinds, individual and collective, are given meaning. From time immemorial narrative has always been the privileged and preferred medium for understanding 141 at FUDAN UNIV LIB on May 9, 2013hhs.sagepub.comDownloaded from 142 and explaining human experience, an experience that is both a temporal and a historical reality. Isolated events need to be placed within a developing network of further acts if their broader significance is to be grasped and explained. This is what narrative discourse does at its best. The authors of the books under review all argue that it is primarily in and through various forms of narrative emplotment that our lives - and thereby our selves - attain meaning. But let us begin by putting these books in a wider context. Inspired particularly by the works of Paul Ricoeur on time and narrative, in the last few years a number of social scientists and philosophers have begun to develop an interest in the relationship between narrative and our conceptualizations of ’identity’ and ’the self’. Many of these studies, such as the books under review here, have thrown into question most of our conventional beliefs about the essence of the individual, self and identity, treating these beliefs as fictions or constructions related to linguistic and social structures. Meanwhile, anthropological and historical studies of the concept of self in other cultures and periods have further undermined our certitudes by showing us just how pliable, fragile and ephemeral most of our modern western beliefs and practices actually are. Viewed cross-culturally and comparative-historically, there is an enormous variety in what people have accepted as ’obviously true’ about themselves and the self. If there is one message writ large in the annals of history and anthropology it is that we should beware of taking for granted too readily the supposedly solid truths and values of our own culture. There is no one prevailing view of the self in the postmodern world any more, and it is doubtful that there ever was really only one. As Gergen aptly shows in his recent book, The Saturated Self, until quite recently our cultural life has been dominated by at least tzvo basic vocabularies of the self. On the one hand we have inherited from the early 19th century a romantic view of the self that attributes to each person such qualities of personal depth as passion, soul, creativity and moral fiber. This vocabulary of motives, Gergen maintains, has played a major role in the formation of our most deeply committed relationships and our sense of vocation or life-purpose. On the other hand, in the early 20th century this romantic vocabulary was challenged by what Gergen calls ’the modernist world-view’, which, he argues, values rational choice (sic) of marriage partners, moral training and a stable family life. Such modernists expect persons to be ’predictable, honest and sincere’, he says. ’For modernists the chief character- istics of the self reside not in the domain of depth, but rather in our ability to reason - in our beliefs, opinions and conscious intentions’. Unfortunately, he does not give any examples of these ’modernists’ and I find it difficult to fit this description with the writers and thinkers usually so classified, such as D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, or Virginia Woolf, none exactly exponents of rational choice theory. Today, however, both of these idioms are falling into disuse, Gergen tells us, as a result of the postmodern forces of what he calls ’social saturation’. He equates at FUDAN UNIV LIB on May 9, 2013hhs.sagepub.comDownloaded from 143 the saturating of self with the condition of postmodernism, which, he believes, throws the very concept of personal essences into doubt: ’Selves as possessers of real and identifiable characteristics - such as rationality, emotion, inspiration and will - are dismantled’. The postmodern condition is marked by a plurality of voices vying for the right to reality. As the voices expand, all that seemed true and good in the past is subverted. In the postmodem world, he says, we become increasingly aware that the objects about which we speak are not so much ’in the world’ as they are products of perspective. As a result of the spread of worldwide communications, made possible by modem technologies, we are becoming ’saturated with the voices of humankind - both harmonious and alien’. ’As we absorb their varied rhymes and reasons, they become part of us and we of them’. For everything we know to be true about ourselves other voices within respond with doubt and even derision. This fragmentation of self-conceptions corresponds to a multiplicity of incoherent and disconnected relationships which pull us in myriad directions, inviting us to play such a variety of roles that the very concept of an ’authentic self’ with ’ knowable characteristics recedes from view. ’Social saturation furnishes us with a multiplicity of incoherent and unrelated languages of the self.’ As a result, Gergen concludes, ’the fully saturated self becomes no self at all’ (7). Gergen shows how this eroding of the identifiable self is supported by - and manifest in - a wide range of beliefs and practices. Thus, today expressions of emotion and reason, valued by romantics or modernists, have ceased to be viewed as real and significant qualities of persons. In the light of postmodem pluralism, we perceive them to be fictions, the outcome of our ways of conceptualizing or constructing them. In such a pluralistic universe, we find that the only truth we can really rely on is narrative truth, that is, the stories that we tell ourselves and others about ourselves. In fact, says Gergen, ’under postmodem conditions persons exist in a state of continuous construction and reconstruction; it is a world where anything goes that can be negotiated. Each and every reality of self gives way to reflexive questioning, irony, and ultimately the playful probing of yet another reality. The center fails to hold’ (7). Although naturally there are some differences amongst them, all the other authors under review here approach the conceptualization of the self from a more phenomenological and/or a psychoanalytically informed perspective than the postmodern constructionist position Gergen espouses. However, they would all agree with Gergen about the importance of narrative as a primary function and embodiment of our understanding of the world, of experience, and ultimately of ourselves. Alford’s purpose in his recent book The Self in Social Theory is not so much to deconstruct the self, as so many contemporary thinkers are busy doing, as to reconstruct it. Whereas Lacanian psychoanalytical deconstructionists transform the unconscious into a type of text, arguing that it is not the case that the self uses language but rather that language uses the self, Alford seeks ’to uncover claims at FUDAN UNIV LIB on May 9, 2013hhs.sagepub.comDownloaded from 144 about real selves in political philosophy’. Drawing on the self-psychology of Heinz Kohut, as well as on Lacan, Alford develops a sophisticated, psychoana- lytically informed perspective on the self, which he then applies to the accounts of the self given by Plato, Hobbes, Locke, Rawls and Rousseau. To discuss his analyses in detail goes beyond the limits of this review, but it must be said that his brilliant applications of self-psychology to the writings of Plato and Rousseau alone make this book worth reading. Alford draws his insights not only from psychoanalysis but also from the brilliant work of Charles Taylor, particularly Sources of the Self. Taylor aims to show the genesis and genealogy of our modem conceptions of identity and its values. His account of selfhood differs from many other modem theories of the self through his emphasis on the cardinal importance of moral values to self-identity. In fact, in his view, moral values must be considered as the most fundamental factor in the identity of persons. There are deep-seated values or ethos structures, claims Taylor, in agreement with Max Scheler, that operate on an intuitive level in our lives, whether we are aware of them or acknowledge them or not. Values arise in the drama of our life, especially in the choices this life involves. Taylor believes that dramatization is the form of expression most adequate to the direct disclosure of human action in its social and moral significance, and hence for disclosing individuals in their characteristic and valorized traits and identities: as villainous, heroic, vain, humble, etc. In the relating of actual human lives, of course, narration must occur after the fact. As Arendt has written, the ’unchangeable identity of a person, though disclosing itself intangibly in act and speech becomes tangible only in the story of the actor’s and speaker’s life’. There seems to be much truth in saying, as Max Scheler did, that ’the whole person is contained in every fully concrete act’, but we should keep in mind that this is true only for someone who can interpret those acts into meaningful sequences, and can see or imagine the broader story. For Taylor the significance of human action is understood in and through the reflection that acts give rise to, and that forms the context or the framing story in which they fit. According to Taylor, on the personal level our identity is tied to our sense of what is morally good: but what is identity? On the one hand Taylor views it as being in constant flux, a Protean entity, ever-changing, in continual movement, like Bergson’s 61an vital. Yet on the other hand Taylor seems to believe that there is something like an essential self behind this ephemeral identity, a self which he says may be ’defined by the commitments and identifications which provide the frame or horizon within which I can try to determine from case to case what is good, or valuable, or what ought to be done, or what I endorse or oppose’. To conduct one’s life without such a framework, as many contemporary people do, is, in Taylor’s view, to approach a pathological condition. Thus, ’to define my self is thus to inquire into and become conversant with the values I operate by at FUDAN UNIV LIB on May 9, 2013hhs.sagepub.comDownloaded from 145 and am oriented toward in my ongoing actions and choices’. In short, my self is revealed through my choices, commitments and actions. As for Gergen, for Taylor the crisis of our postmodem identity is intimately linked to ’the loss of a unifying framework or grand narrative, rooted in stable, even universal, values and commitments through which we make sense of our lives and, concomitant with this, the inability to see our lives as an evolving temporal whole and on the model of a quest’. The difference between them is that whereas Gergen sees this postmodem saturated self as a challenging opportunity, Taylor (and Kerby, as will be seen below) view this tendency with alarm, and seem to hanker after a return to the lost and irrecoverable securities of traditional western Christian values. Values that were taken for granted in Great Britain and the United States until recently, such as respect for others, and tolerance of difference of beliefs and opinions, values which may be said to underlie our modern culture, have now become subject to question by diverse dispossessed or dissatisfied groups. Taylor believes that we must question and rethink our fundamental (formerly taken-for-granted) beliefs and values today, in order to defend them and to make them more appealing and relevant to contemporary audiences. ’They require explicit articulation and narrative expression’, he says, ’if we are to extricate ourselves from the more superficial and fragmentary world-views we currently operate with and within’. In Narrative and the Self, Kerby argues, with Taylor, that attaining self-understanding is necessarily an interpretive or hermeneutic endeavor involving both our situatedness in language and the selves of our lives as an ongoing project or developing story: ’we see that the sense of the good has to be woven into my understanding of my life as an unfolding story. But this is to state another basic condition of making sense of ourselves, that we grasp our lives in a narrative’. Only narrative, Taylor maintains along with Alasdair MacIntyre and others, can offer a coherent answer to the persistent questions concerning our identity. The crucial role of narrative in Taylor’s view is to articulate our life as an organic whole and disclose thereby the various purposes and hence values, that both guide and define us as engaged human agents. The unchangeable identity of a person, Taylor believes, discloses itself in our speech and in our actions and this identity only becomes understandable and tangible in and through the stories we tell, ’in the story of the speaker or actor’s life’. ’Human lives need and must be narrated’, said Paul Ricoeur. Narratives reveal aspects of ’truths’ of our life that would otherwise remain obscure or simply unconstituted. This insight is the starting-point for Kerby’s careful analysis. Hardly over a hundred pages in length, Kerby’s Narrative and the Self presents a highly perceptive philosophical analysis of the role of narrative in human thought and action. His book was conceived, he says, as ’an attempt to understand the various roles that language and narration play in what we could at FUDAN UNIV LIB on May 9, 2013hhs.sagepub.comDownloaded from 146 broadly call &dquo;the life of the mind&dquo;’. His objective is to show how the self is constituted by language in the broadest sense. Language is here not simply viewed as a tool for communicating or mirroring back what we otherwise discover in our reality but is itself seen as an important formative or constitutive part of that reality. Invoking the writings of Benveniste, Ricoeur, Merleau-Ponty and Lacan as well as Taylor, Kerby argues that language and narration play a central role in major aspects of human experience and functioning, including emotion, values, recollection and a sense of history. Kerby conceives of the self metaphorically as being rather like a character we might encounter every day in novels, plays and other story media. Such a self is given content and embodied primarily in narrative constructions (stories). It arises, he maintains, out of our signifying practices. If we believe in an internal subject, it is perhaps because we have imagined such an entity to exist or we have been misled by stories into positing such fictions as being real. In Kerby’s view, ’The &dquo;I&dquo;, the self, is an effect of language, and the status and meaning of the self will thus depend on the particular &dquo;language game&dquo; in which it is invoked and in which it comes into play’. But for Kerby this does not make the self superfluous; it only problematizes it. ’Who or what the self can be is a result of the semiotic and discursive practices and techniques within which the speaking subject functions’ (113). He is not thereby devaluing the self. On the contrary, he argues that ’the development of selves (and thereby of persons) in our narratives is one of the most characteristically human acts, acts that justifiably remain of central importance to both our personal and our communal existence’. Having shifted the emphasis away from the self as an inner substantial core of personhood, Kerby maintains, one need not conclude that the human subject is an ephemeron of little significance. ’The constitution of persons through acts of predication remains the most human of acts, central to our Western thinking and world-view. The status of the subject is not necessarily demeaned because it is seen as the product of a creative act, rather than as a pregiven entity to be simply recognized and respected’ (114). What lies behind our self-conceptions is not some identical thing-in-itself, soul, or spirit, argues Kerby, but rather language as it derives from our sedimented history, especially the autobiographical language of self-narration. ’If I am a being who interprets then it is to the interpreting itself that we must turn’, Kerby maintains. ’We should not think that we can escape this circularity by recourse to a self external or transcendent to this act’ (52). The brilliant linguist Emile Benveniste discovered that ’language is ... the possibility of subjectivity because it always contains the linguistic forms appropriate to the expression of subjectivity’. In language. ’1’ am set free; but do ’I’ really speak? asks Kerby who concludes that the ’I’, the self, is an effect of language, and the status and meaning of the self depends on the particular ’language game’ in which it is invoked and in which it comes into play. In his view at FUDAN UNIV LIB on May 9, 2013hhs.sagepub.comDownloaded from 147 this does not make the self superfluous; it only problematizes it. Who or what the self (and ultimately the person) can be, he argues, is a result of the semiotic and discursive practices and techniques within which the speaking subject functions. We need language because we