Concepts of the Self. Anthony Elliott. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

Автор: Anthony Elliott
Издательство: John Wiley & Sons Limited
Серия:
Жанр произведения: Социология
Год издания: 0
isbn: 9781509538812
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forces and cultural sensibilities. We may, for example, go to the gym fairly regularly in order to try to attain some ideal body shape (and, by implication, an ideal self), and we may do so because this really matters to us and it is experienced as a personal decision or choice. But in the social theories of self that we will examine in this book, there are always other puzzling social forces at work. There are always cultural or commercial factors influencing the self – for example, omnipresent media delivering never-ending images of ideal body-types as well as the selling of strategies to achieve such ‘perfect bodies’.

      There are profound connections between the cultural assumptions informing ‘The New You’ competition and concepts of the self in the social sciences and humanities today. Selfhood is flexible, fractured, fragmented, decentred and brittle: such a conception of individual identity is probably the central outlook in current social and political thought. As the pace, intensity and complexity of contemporary culture accelerate, so too does the self become increasingly dispersed. Displaced and dislocated within the wider frame of globalization, the individual self turns increasingly to consumption, leisure and travel in order to give substance to everyday life. Or so some have forcefully argued. Many other authors, for a variety of reasons that we will examine, remain sceptical of such a portrait of the self. I shall discuss shortly the complex, and often unintended, ways in which the academic study of the self can, of itself, shape the cultural know-how and resources of the broader society. At this point it is worth briefly noting some core concepts of the self, some of them social science ones, which influence our everyday understandings of personal experience and individual identity.

      Some critics reject the idea that practical knowledge is an essential characteristic of the self. They argue that, as sociologists or social critics, we needn’t concern ourselves with the intricate settings and assumptions that people bring to their presentations of self. Instead, the self can be studied as an object, without reference to the interpretations that individuals make about their own lives or their views about the wider social world. This is not a view I share. Indeed, one argument I develop throughout this book is that the self cannot be adequately studied in isolation from the interpretations that individuals make about themselves, others and society. Charles Taylor develops this point in an interesting fashion:

      We are selves only in that certain issues matter for us. What I am as a self, my identity, is essentially defined by the way things have significance for me. And as has been widely discussed, these things have significance for me, and the issue of my identity is worked out, only through a language of interpretation which I have come to accept as a valid articulation of these issues. To ask what a person is, in abstraction from his or her self-interpretations,