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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.

One might add, though this is much debated, that the influence of traditional identity categories has dramatically loosened in our age of light mobility, liquid experiences and dispersed commitments. In present-day society, as we will examine in some detail in the Conclusion, private grievances and emotional anxieties connect less and less with the framing of collective identities; in more and more cases, private troubles remain private. Contemporary hopes and dreads, as rehearsed in popular culture, are something to be experienced by each individual alone. Thus, we witness a general shift from identity to the self as a new marker of our times – in terms of both engagement with individual experience and the wider world, but also as concerns new forms of domination and exploitation.

I shall not trace the nuances of these conceptual differences here; the philosophical history of subjectivity has been extensively discussed elsewhere. (See Anthony Elliott, Identity Troubles, London: Routledge, 2016; and the second edition of Anthony Elliott (ed.), Routledge Handbook of Identity Studies, London: Routledge, 2019.) But I do want to say something in this Introduction, however briefly, about versions of the self in current sociology and social theory.

Perhaps nothing appears as more unstable, flexible or pliable than the self in contemporary social theory. But what, exactly, is the self? We all have a sense of self-identity; we all perform ‘selves’ in the rituals of daily life; we all interact with other ‘selves’. Yet how is the self rendered identical to itself? And why does society privilege continuity at the level of the self? One influential strand of thinking – powerful in the West – holds that ‘selfhood is sameness’; there is, according to this viewpoint, a continuity to identity which stretches over time and possibly for all time. Strictly speaking, such philosophy goes back as far as Descartes: ‘I think, therefore I am’. It is here that the essence of the classical idea of consciousness of self as a sure foundation for knowledge is to be found. Confidence in some minimal degree of self-continuity – ‘I am the same self as I was yesterday’ – has been, of course, an essential precondition for all successful living. But only the very few, either because of extraordinary privilege or lack of interest in the surrounding world, could fail ever to question their own security of self. Few could avoid the interpersonal situations that arose – day-in and day-out – wherein the uncertainty of social life was disturbed. To convert the whole fabric of social relations into the engine of self-constitution is, however, a tricky business – as the nineteenth-century psychologist William James most powerfully underscored. For if the self depends for its security on its surrounding social relations, then this seems to deny to identity the certitude many thought existed. As James noted, if the individual has as many selves as there are persons who recognize him or her, then how can that self function ‘the same’ as it did yesterday? It certainly makes our selfhood appear less fixed, or more psychologically flexible, than some dominant Western worldviews seem to have assumed. From this angle, the word ‘self’ means both fixed and pliable. Hence much of the study of the self has passed through these overlapping societal strands of continuity and discontinuity.

In the forms most familiar to our own age, however, the flourishing of concepts of the self is really a product of various global transformations that unfolded from about the early 1960s through to the postmodern 1980s and 1990s. For by the 1960s – when the security and serenity of the post-Second World War economic boom that had prevailed throughout North America and across parts of the world drew to a close, replaced by the era of the Vietnam War, the emergent decolonizing and civil rights movements as well as feminist politics and the sexual revolution – identity had broken with images of sameness, continuity, regularity and repetition. Selfhood was now also coming to mean disaffection, rebellion, discontinuity and difference. Revolution was spreading throughout social life, with student rebellions on campuses across the United States and a dramatic student and worker uprising in France that came close to toppling the de Gaulle government. There were anxieties over race too, in Europe and the American South, in Africa, the Latin Americas and Asia, and a politics of cultural revolution took hold in everything from feminism to Black Power. Selfhood in the sense of excluded histories, displaced narratives, marginalized lives and oppressed identities was fundamental to the attempts of people – women, gays, blacks and subalterns of all kinds – to question the status quo and change the direction of society. This was, in short, the era of ‘identity crisis’ (as Erik Erikson described it), in which the illusion of traditional European individualism was shattered, the military and economic might of America deeply questioned, and the formerly repressed energies of new social movement activists and critics now burst into full cultural expression. In all of this – the shift from social conformity to cultural revolution – we find traces of the intellectual thought of many key theorists of the self who are examined throughout this book.

This is not to say, however, that the cultural revolts of the 1960s arose as an upshot of certain radical ideas then circulating throughout universities. Those involved in various branches of the emergent identity politics of the 1960s and 1970s, from feminism to decolonization movements, might never have done more than glance at Herbert Marcuse’s photograph on the cover of Time magazine (if indeed they did that), or might well have thought that psychoanalysis was nothing more than a variant of other psychological therapies. Radical politics, of whatever ideological kind, comes about when people are led into a new self-confrontation with their own lives. The social theories of the self that flourished during the 1960s and escalated throughout the 1970s, only to falter and mutate into a postmodern dismantling of the self in the 1980s and 1990s, were just such a challenge to the prevailing social order. Jacques Lacan’s Freudian decentring of the self, Herbert Marcuse’s suggestive twinning of sociality and the unconscious, Michel Foucault’s brilliant interrogations of technologies of lived experience, Judith Butler’s feminist redrafting of the intricate connections between gender and sexuality: all these theoretical accounts of the self, as we shall examine in this book, have promoted a suspicion of identity norms, given values, established hierarchies and traditional social practices.

In terms of political transformations and cultural shifts, whether we are considering the heady days of cultural revolution from the 1960s, postmodern subversions of identity during the 1980s and 1990s, or the neoliberal privatization of the self in the 2000s and 2010s, there are various sociological consequences that have followed from these deconstructions and reconstructions of the self in social theory. What gradually took place from the late 1960s onwards, when identity politics defined itself increasingly as a mass political movement, partly as a result of novel theoretical departures and innovations and partly as a consequence of new forms of political action, was a radical shift in our whole cultural vocabulary for understanding the inner world of the self, individual experience and personal identity. That is to say, changing conceptions of the self at the level of the academy and the public sphere inevitably intruded into the realms of daily life and culture. Some have argued, for example, that the women’s movement in its contemporary forms would not have had the same impact without a body of sophisticated feminist theory that arose out of the political upheavals and cultural turmoil of the 1960s and 1970s – a body of thought that, in turn, was indebted to changing conceptions of the individual subject and personal identity in the social sciences and humanities. Certainly, the heavily politicized culture of the 1960s and early 1970s, in which a new stress on personal renewal, self-transformation, lifestyle and identity politics emerged, penetrated deeply into the tissues of cultural practice and everyday life. Politics, as a result, revolved more and more around the personal; the personal, having been previously cast off to the realm of the ‘private’, in other words, was now to be reinserted into the political. This was obviously true of feminism, and especially so in the works of various feminist theorists we consider later in this book, such as Simone de Beauvoir, Nancy Chodorow, Julia Kristeva and Judith Butler. But it was also true of other forms of identity politics, from the civil rights movement to queer theory. Not all were convinced, however, by such attempts to deepen and enrich politics through an engagement with the personal. Some critics argued, for example, that the whole concept of the self had become overinflated – so much so that issues of human agency and radical politics were, in turn, cut loose from social and historical forces altogether. This is not a view I share, for reasons that will become apparent throughout this book. At any rate, to emphasize the active, creative character of the self is not to imply that identity is culturally or politically unconditioned. On the contrary, the turn to the self in social theory has powerfully underscored that racialized, hybridized, sexualized and gendered productions of identity are intimately interwoven with complex forces of economic disadvantage, social marginalization and political exclusion.

Meanwhile, the arrival of the postmodern 1980s and 1990s brought with it a further shift in concepts of the self. As globalization assumed a central place in the transformation of modern societies, especially in the areas of economics, politics, culture and communication, it became increasingly evident that a liberationist identity politics – where the recovery of excluded sexual, racial or other subaltern identities would mysteriously permit the flourishing of some previously repressed, fully formed self – contained various theoretical ambiguities and some full-blown political contradictions. The marginalized, volatile, constructed identities championed by the advocates of 1970s identity politics now appeared as more in harmony or collusion with market forces and the consumerist imperatives of advanced capitalism than as a discordant or oppositional social force. Meanwhile, new pressing political issues, including mass migration, multiculturalism, cultural Americanization and rampant consumerism, forced their way onto the political agenda, which in turn bred new social theories of the relation between self and society. At the political level, new forms of political resistance – from peace and ecology movements to human rights and citizenship campaigns – raised anew the question of human agency and the creative dimension of social action. At the theoretical level, this led to the in-depth critique of the more negative or pessimistic elements of theories of identity formation in European social theory and philosophy. In particular, questions concerning the individual’s capabilities for autonomous thought, independent reflection and transformative social practices emerged as politically important. In the face of these changes, another terminological shift occurred, one from the analysis of subjectivity and individual subjection to the study of the creative dimensions of the self.

The self, therefore, becomes a vital preoccupation of the contemporary age for a whole series of practical, political reasons. The impact of identity politics looms large in this context. Struggles over the politics of identity have intensified dramatically in recent decades, with issues concerning gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, multiculturalism, class and cultural style moving to the fore in public and intellectual debate. The sociocultural horizon of identity politics – premised upon new conceptual strategies for both the theorization and the transformation of self – has provided important understandings of particular forms of oppression and domination suffered by specific groups, including women, lesbians and gay men, African-Americans and other stigmatized identities. Identity politics has produced cultural and strategic perspectives, concerned with the development of alternative concepts of the self, different narratives of identity and emancipatory strategies for mobilizing individuals and groups against oppressive practices, cultures and institutions. Questioning the universal categories that have long been deployed to unite identities in the name of liberation (such as truth, equality and justice), the struggle over identity politics has instead focused on the creation of the self, the articulation of cultural style and the production of fluid alliances for specific political interventions in concrete social processes.

Over the past several decades, what highlighted the topic of identity more than any other theoretical and political current, at least in terms of placing it most centrally on the agenda for cultural politics, was feminism. In advancing the slogan that the personal is always political, feminism inaugurated a switch from institutional politics to cultural politics. Recasting everyday life as a terrain of struggle in the reproduction of unequal power relations, feminists focused on the historical interplay of sexuality, sex and gender in analysing constructions and contradictions of personal identity and the self. Since the eruption of women’s liberation and the sexual revolution at the close of the 1960s, the conceptual and political strategies of feminism have shifted from the analysis of male domination, understood in terms of patriarchy, to the study of more localized forces for grasping divisions and differences across sexual life. Most recently, key global issues have emerged, including sexual harassment and the #MeToo movement. Today, in an age that is supposedly post-political, feminism has thrived (or so some have argued) on the demise of universalist arguments for the political and economic transformation of gender relations in favour of lifestyle and identity politics, with the stress on prioritizing multiple selves, cultural differences and gender instability. Alongside the rise of various new feminisms (including black and Third World women’s groups), the period has also witnessed other forms of broadly transformative identity politics, from ecology and peace movements to forums for the survivors of domestic and sexual violence, from postcolonialist identities to the creation of transnational human rights organizations. In the process, the analysis of the self has been recast, from derivative of political structures or social practices towards identity, information and images as sites of possible restructuring for interpersonal relations and public life.

Identity politics is thus enormously wide-ranging in scope, and has bred a multitude of cultural forms and theoretical systems. This book discusses the provocative dialogue between identity politics scholarship and cultural activism, though the main focus concerns discriminating between different concepts of self that have entered popular and political discourse. The attempt to theorize explicitly the place of selfhood and identity within politics and culture has deepened in recent times, as social theorists and cultural analysts have turned to Freud, Marcuse, Lacan, Foucault, Kristeva, Butler and others in order to develop a more sophisticated understanding of individual subjectivity in an age of pervasive globalization. In contemporary social theory, the cultures and conflicts of identity loom large, with the fragilities of personal experience and the self viewed as central to critical conversation concerning social practice and political transformation.

As a result of these conceptual developments and transformations, a number of social issues relating to identity politics arise. For many commentators, identity politics is valuable precisely because it draws attention to new cultural forms of social integration and conflict experienced at the level of the self – such as the search for cultural style and personal identity in consumerism, new information technologies, or alternative subcultures and movements. The importance of concepts of self and identity to critical discourse, according to these commentators, is deeply bound up with politics in the widest sense. That is to say, identity politics reflects not a turning away from public life, but rather expresses genuine global reach in inspiring progressive and transformative politics. For other critics, however, identity politics is hardly energizing at all. According to this critique, identity politics deflects attention from the core political and institutional issues of the times, reducing politics to a solitary, individualistic search for personal identity. Politics in the sense of identity preoccupations leads to the elevation of individual choice over collective action, and prioritizes individualism over traditional collective means of political activity. The result is a kind of anti-political politics, one that promotes the privatization of public concerns. This leads modern women and men to imagine that problems of identity are, first and foremost, matters for individual attention and personal solution; the culture of identity politics is increasingly made up of isolated and isolating voices, with few cultural resources available for connecting personal troubles to public issues. In short, some worry that identity politics is too closed in on itself, unconcerned with wider political solidarity, and too intolerant and defensive properly to grasp how political demands for recognition and respect relate to oppressions of the wider political system. While it may be the case that questions concerning the constitution of the self have been linked to radical politics (as in, say, sexual politics or postcolonialism), it is much less clear that attention to the subjective aspects of social experience is always inherently subversive. Indeed, the opposite might be true. Some critics argue that the advanced capitalist order is so drenched with consumerist signs, codes and messages that the self is now, in effect, fully regulated by dominant corporate interests in advance. From this angle, concentration upon the self is part of the political problem, not the solution.

Important differences regarding the nature of the self and self-experience are at stake in such evaluations of identity politics, and I shall look at the cultural gains and losses of contemporary debates around the paradoxes of self. In using conflicts over the self as my central reference point, I shall examine a range of cultural anxieties that have informed the language of self in sociological theories, in psychoanalytic readings, in recent poststructuralist (especially Foucauldian) theory and in feminist and postmodern critiques. This is a book about such social theories and their impact upon how we see the self.