Human consciousness and the social self

Caroline Howarth

“we are incomplete or unfinished animals who complete or

finish ourselves through culture” Geertz, 1993
 The self is born in social interaction

everyday
The generalised other
culture

Dialogical self
(cross-)
cultural
differences The self in
a
globalised
world
If culture produces the self:
What happens when
culture transforms?
 Theoretical frameworks:
 Self as the outcome of social interaction
– George Herbert Mead

 The everyday drama of the self

– Goffman

 Cultural differences in the production of self

– Markus and Kitayama

 The impact of culture and late modernity

– Gergen; Giddens

 The self in an intercultural world

- Hermans; Howarth
The effects of isolation on the self

We CANNOT develop psychologically

without others – we are social beings
in a very profound sense.

Evidence from:
- primate psychology
- wild children
- Social psychology
Harlow (1958)

Zazzo (1975): Chimps and apes brought up in

isolation cannot recognise themselves in a
mirror.
Wild Child BBC documentary
 The non-social self is an ‘idiot’:
 The Greek word ‘idiot’ originally meant someone who lived by
himself and therefore was mentally incompetent.

 Feral children demonstrate the vital importance of human

relationships for the development of human psychological
capacities.

 Hence the psychological does not and cannot develop outside

of the social.
Mead: Self as product of interaction

a) Becoming self-conscious: through speech

b) Taking the role of the other: in games

c) The ‘I’ and the ‘me’: connected in dialogue

Individualisation is the outcome,

not the antithesis, of socialisation.
 a) Becoming self-conscious:
through speech
 Through speech we hear ourselves thinking – we become self
conscious. Self-consciousness is the ability to take the role of
others with respect to oneself.

 Reflexiveness is the essential condition, within the social

process, for the development of mind. (Mead, 1934, p.134)

The conversation of
gestures is the social
matrix out of which mind
and awareness of self as
an object in the social world
of others emerges both
phylogenetically and
ontogenetically.
Wild Child BBC documentary
 b) Taking the role of other:
in games
Play Games

Take on social roles of Appreciate the diverse roles of

others. many others

Dialectic of universalism and

Particularises the child’s particularism
perspective.
Develop a social (collective)
Develop a sense of self-identity.
otherness and therefore
self
 Taking on attitudes

 What goes on in the game goes on in the life of the child all the
time. He is continually taking on the attitudes of those around
him, especially the roles of those whom in some sense control
him and on whom he depends.

Mead, 1967, p. 160.

 The development of self requires

1. Taking the role of others in unstructured play

2. Participating in games

3. Developing a sense of the generalized other

Wild Child BBC documentary
 c) The ‘I’ and the ‘me’:
connected in dialogue
‘I’ ‘Me’
- is the acting body-subject - is the ‘I’s objectification

- is the spontaneous response - is the organized set of

attitudes of others

- gives the self the capacity to - is the vehicle of self-

innovate regulation and control

- becomes part of the ‘me’ - incorporates the ‘I’

 Self consciousness –
a social achievement
 “it is because of the ‘I’ that we say that we are never fully
aware of what we are, that we surprise ourselves by our own
action. It is as we act that we are aware of our selves”

Mead, 1967, p. 174

 Hence, the self…
 Is a joint accomplishment

 arises out social interaction

 is never fully ‘achieved’

 experiences itself only indirectly

 is reflexive, self-conscious and agentic

 is produced by and marked by culture

 Goffman:
The contradictions of self
1. The self is produced through our performances in
social situations. The self acts as a ‘holding company’
of multiple selves.

But …
The production of self is constrained by social norms
and expectations.

2. The self is entirely a social product, with no

underlying personal core.

But
There is an unsocialised component of the self that
drives the individual into and out social interactions and
sometimes leads the individual to react against social
norms.
 Institutionalisation and agency

 “Whenever we look at a social establishment, … we find

participants decline in some way to accept the official view of
what they should be putting into and getting out of the
organisation and, behind this, of what sort of self and world
they are to accept for themselves … We find a multiple of
homely little histories, each in its way a movement of liberty.
Whenever worlds are laid on, underlives develop.”
Goffman, 1961, p. 305
 Goffman:
the self as a performance
 The moral integrity of ‘our’ self
 Selves are created in social interaction.
 We stage manage our interactions, through scripts and masks.
 We develop ‘back regions’ and try to influence the impressions we ‘give off’.
 We adopt different ‘roles’, sometimes cynically (‘role distance’).
 Selfhood is inevitably intersubjective.

Others are ready to “pounce on

trifling flaws as a sign that the
whole show is false” and so find
“chinks in his symbolic armour”.
Goffman, 1959.
 He took care to avoid anyone’s eye. First he had to make it
clear to those potential companions of his holiday that they
were no concern to him whatsoever. He stared through them,
round them, over them – eyes lost in space. The beach might
have been empty. If by chance a ball was thrown his way, he
looked surprised: then let a smile of amusement light his face
(Kindly Preedy), looked around dazed to see that there were
people on the beach, tossed it back with a smile to himself and
not a smile at the people … (He) then gathered his beach wrap
and bag into a neat sand-resistant pile (Methodical and
Sensible Preedy), rose to stretch his huge frame (Big-Cat
Preedy), and tossed his sandals (Carefree Preedy, after all).

From Novelist William Sansom,

cited in Goffman (1959 – pp. 4- 5).
 Self and cultural differences
 The independent self:
– describe themselves in psychological terms
• I am sincere
– separation of self and society Markus and
– autonomous and agentic Kitayama,
European American identity projects: 2003
• Attaining personal goals
• Individualisation of the self
Triandis, 1989
 The connected self:
– describe themselves in social terms
• I am a student at the LSE
– embedded in a network of social relations
– group agency and collective change

Asian and African identity projects:

• Living in harmony in the social and environmental context
• Enhancing the collective life of the community
 Cultural selves?
 Mbiti (1970) Africa, the community and the collective self
– No concept of individual self
– Self is always collective and contextual

 Bharati (1986) Hinduism, God and the innermost self

– Indivisibility of the ‘true’ self with the one-ness of God
– Innermost self reached through mediation and self-discipline

 Devos (1985)Japan, social awareness, the relational self

– Parents ‘suffer’ their children’s actions (shared grief, social shame)
– Need to belong and maintain social balance (self can be hidden)

 Hall (1990) Multiculture, cultural change and new identities

– Meeting and merging of different cultures/ identities
– Identity, as self, as a process of becoming
 Giddens: the late modern self
 “Modern man cannot pause in his journey
for ego-identification and say confidently:
This is I’.” (Glicksberg, 1963:xi).

 “The transmutations introduced by

modern institutions interlace in a direct
way with individual life and therefore with
the self” (Giddens, 1991, p. 1).

 Modernity breaks down the protective

framework of community and of tradition –
and so threatens the unity of self.

For Foucault the self is coerced into existence, not to become

an agent but as a mechanism of control where systems of
discourse work from the inside out by creating a self-
regulating subject. (Foucault, 1988)
E.g. New communication technologies
 Expanded access to a wide range of ‘generalised others’ thus
altering “the backdrop against which identity is constructed”
(Cerulo, 1997, p. 397).

 Leads to new ‘global selves’ where the difference of culture

falls away:
– Eg. Collectivist values and practices declining in Japan
– Eg. Leadership models in the West are recognising the important of
shared values and identities

Does this:
Liberate us as we invent new aspects of our selves?
Or
Expand the technologies of surveillance and the
mechanisms of induced self-regulation?

Turkle (1996; 2011)

Gergen: impact of modernity on self

As we absorb the views, values, and visions of

others, and live out the multiple plots in
which we are enmeshed, we enter a
postmodern consciousness. It is a world in
which we no longer experience a secure
sense of self, and in which doubt is
increasingly placed on the very assumption
of a bounded identity with palpable
attributes. What are the consequences? How
are we to respond to the coming conditions?
(Gergen, 1991, p. 15 – 16).
 Polyphonic and dialogical selves
 How do we respond to the ‘vertigo of unlimited multiplicity’ (Gergen, 1991)?

• The self is therefore never completely stable

or finished, but is ‘populated’ with multiple
selves or i-positions that represent a ‘society
of mind’ (Hermans, 2002). Eg:
• I-as-British; I-as-other; I-as-mixed

• Hermans sees these as connected through an internal dialogue and so in

place of a ‘core’ or ‘real’ self there is a dialogical self made of different i-
positions.
(see also Bakhtin, 1981)

• Both Bakhtin and Mead “accommodate cultural and individual dynamics in a

self that both appropriates aspects of the culture in which it lives and reacts
to that very appropriation” (Sullivan and McCarthy, 2004, p. 292).
The inter-subjective essence of self
highlights the ideological limits
 Self is not freely constructed. It is born in dialogues ‘between’
the expectations of ‘generalised others’ and one’s
spontaneous reactions.

 “These dialogues are always in a macro context influenced by

historical and political issues of racism, gender, imperialism
and power” (Aveling and Gillespie, 2008; Bhatia, 2002).

 Dominant expectations of the generalised other filter into and

limit constructions of self (Howarth, 2002).
The inter-subjective essence of self
highlights possibilities for agency
 The self does not (should not) collapse into the generalised
other

 Dialogue promotes the possibility for difference – new ways of

thinking, acting and relating. Hence dialogue also promotes
agency.

 The conditions for agency are both cultural and psychological.

“An individual deprived of social stimulation and support would not develop agency
just as she would not develop psychological functions” (Ratner, 2000).
 Theories of self in social research
 Culture
– Understanding the psychological impact of migration and mixed identities
• Bhatia and Ram (2001); Hale and de Abreu (2010).

 Organisations
– The importance of reflexivity and taking the perspective of the other in
professional contexts
– Schon (1983); Schwartzman (1993).

 Communication
– Cross-cultural differences in communication; dialogues with virtual selves
– Banlund (1975); Turkle (1996; 2011)

 Health, community and development

– How to promote social change and conscientisation
• Campbell and Cornish (2010); Vaughan (2011)
 Eg: Intercultural relations today
 The impact of the generalised other on identity
– Growing up in a multicultural community and
the psychological violence of stigma (Howarth, 2002)

 Taking the perspective of dominant others

– Institutionalised expectations lead to cultural differences in educational
performance (Howarth, 2004)

 The on-going performance and drama of cultural identities

– Using community arts to encourage reflexive and critical dialogues on self
(Howarth, 2011)

 Multiple, dialogical selves and the psychology of agency

– Highlights the situated, relational and fundamentally political nature of
dialogical selves (Howarth et al, 2011)
 The self is born in social interaction

everyday
culture

(cross-)
cultural
differences
The self in
a
globalised
world

Limited by relations of
power and ideologies of
difference Possibilities for agency and
social change