Concepts of the Self. Anthony Elliott

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