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Anthony Elliott. Concepts of the Self
Contents
Guide
Pages
Series title. Key Concepts Series
Concepts of the Self
Copyright page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Introduction
The Arts of Self
Concepts of the Self
The Structure of the Book
1 Self, Society and Everyday Life
Self, Symbols and Others: Symbolic Interactionism
Presentations of Self: Goffman
Reflexivity and the Self: Giddens
Further Reading
2 The Repression of Self
Psychoanalysis and the Self
Culture and Repression
Further Reading
3 Technologies of the Self
Technologies of the Self: Foucault
Governmentality: New Technologies, New Selves
Further Reading
4 Self, Sexuality and Gender
Feminism and Psychoanalysis: Two Recent Views
The Politics of Gender Performance: Butler
Queer Theory: Contesting Self, Defying Gender
Further Reading
5 The Postmodern Self
All that is Modern Melts into Postmodern?
Strategies of the Self: Modern and Postmodern
Further Reading
6 The Algorithmic Self
The Brave New World of AI
Chatbots, Talk and the Self
Algorithmic Surveillance and the Self
Further Reading
Note
7 The Individualized Self: From Reinvention to Mobile Lives
Individualization of the Self
Self-Reinvention: The New Individualism
Reinvention
Instant change
Speed
Short-termism
The Mobile Self
Further Reading
Conclusion
Inner Depth, or Inside Out
Identity Politics, or Critique of Self
Afterword: Global Identities, the Rise of Anti-Self Theories and New Horizons
Index
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4th edition
Anthony Elliott
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The emerging direction of contemporary social theory is perhaps nowhere more evident than in the attention it lavishes upon the nature of the self, self-identity and individual subjectivity. Questions concerning the social construction of the self; debates pertaining to the symbolic materials through which individuals weave narratives of the self; issues relating to the role that self-formation plays in the reproduction or disruption of culture and society: such questions, debates and issues have become increasingly prominent in the social sciences in recent decades. For those working within sociology, for example, the topic of the self has provided an opportunity for re-examining the relation between the individual and society, an opportunity to detail the myriad ways in which individuals are constituted as identities or subjects who interact in a socially structured world of people, relationships and institutions. The issues at stake in the construction of the self are quite different for feminist writers, who are instead concerned with connecting processes of self-formation to distinctions of gender, sexuality and desire. The challenge for authors influenced by postmodernism, by way of further comparison, is to estimate the degree to which the self may be fragmenting or breaking down, as well as assessing the psychological and cultural contours of postmodern selfhood. In all these approaches, the turn to the self provides critical perspectives on the present age as well as an important source of understanding concerning transformations of knowledge, culture and society.
Selfhood emerges as a complex term as a result of these various theoretical interventions, and one of the central concerns of Concepts of the Self is the discrimination of different meanings relating to the self, in order to introduce the beginning reader to the contemporary debates around it. What needs to be stressed at the outset is that different social theories adopt alternative orientations to mapping the complexities of personal experience, with selfhood squarely pitched between those who deny the agency of human subjects and argue in favour of the person’s determination by social structures, on the one hand, and those who celebrate the authenticity and creativity of the self, on the other. As a result, the language used by social scientists to analyse selfhood varies considerably: sometimes theorists refer to ‘identity’, sometimes to ‘the subject’ or ‘subjectivity’, and sometimes simply to ‘the self’. These terminological differences are not always especially significant, primarily because these terms can all be said to denote a concern with the subjectivity of the individual. However, others argue that such terminological differences are worth close attention, if only because they reflect deep historical and political transitions. For example, it can plausibly be argued that the concepts of ‘the self’ and ‘identity’, though similar, are not coextensive, since there are forms of identity that are not based on the self, namely, forms of collective identity – such as those influenced by nationalism. In this reading, collective identity gains its power through the establishment and recognition of common interests, built upon forms of solidarity involving battles over, say, social exclusion, nation, class and the like. Similarly, the self is also shaped and defined against the backdrop of such political and public forces; yet the fabrication of the self, psychologically and emotionally, is rightly understood to involve something more subjective, particularly the complex ways desire, emotion and feeling influence both conscious and unconscious experience of sexuality, gender, race and ethnicity.
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