http://hhs.sagepub.com/
History of the Human Sciences
http://hhs.sagepub.com/content/7/2/141.citation
The online version of this article can be found at:
DOI: 10.1177/095269519400700208
1994 7: 141History of the Human Sciences
John-Raphael Staude
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, paperback, 1992
Taylor, Sources of the Self. The Making of the Modern Identity.
Self. Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1991. Charles
New York: Basic Books, 1991. Anthony Paul Kerby, Narrative and the
Gergen, The Saturated Self. Dilemmas of Identity in Contemporary Life.
Construction. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991. Kenneth
C. Fred Alford, The Self in Social Theory. A Psychoanalytic Account of its
Published by:
http://www.sagepublications.com
can be found at:History of the Human SciencesAdditional services and information for
http://hhs.sagepub.com/cgi/alertsEmail Alerts:
http://hhs.sagepub.com/subscriptionsSubscriptions:
http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.navReprints:
http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.navPermissions:
What is This?
- May 1, 1994Version of Record >>
at FUDAN UNIV LIB on May 9, 2013hhs.sagepub.comDownloaded from
Language, narration and the self
JOHN-RAPHAEL STAUDE
C. Fred Alford, The Self in Social Theory. A Psychoanalytic Account of its
Construction. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991.
Kenneth Gergen, The Saturated Self. Dilemmas of Identity in Contem-
porary Life. New York: Basic Books, 1991.
Anthony Paul Kerby, Narrative and the Self. Bloomington and London:
Indiana University Press, 1991.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self. The Making of the Modern Identity.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, paperback, 1992.
HISTORY OF THE HUMAN SCIENCES Vol. 7 No. 2
© 1994 SAGE (London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi) pp. 141-149
The human subject, as the existentialists have long maintained, is an ’unfinished
subject’. Perhaps more than that, it is a subject that continually writes, develops
and often erases its own definition, its own story. What is the relation between
one’s life-story and the subject of that story? To begin with we must ask: ’Who
or what is the speaking subject?’ ’Who is the author of &dquo;my&dquo; utterances?’ And
what is meant or referred to by the word ’I’ that proliferates in our discourse? In
short, what is the relationship between language and the self? These are the sorts
of questions that must be asked with the emergence of the new linguistic and
semiotic paradigm in which we now find ourselves today. To answer these
questions the books here reviewed focus on a highly significant genre of language
usage: narration.
It is especially through the unifying action of narration that temporal expanses
of all kinds, individual and collective, are given meaning. From time immemorial
narrative has always been the privileged and preferred medium for understanding
141
at FUDAN UNIV LIB on May 9, 2013hhs.sagepub.comDownloaded from
142
and explaining human experience, an experience that is both a temporal and a
historical reality. Isolated events need to be placed within a developing network
of further acts if their broader significance is to be grasped and explained. This is
what narrative discourse does at its best. The authors of the books under review
all argue that it is primarily in and through various forms of narrative
emplotment that our lives - and thereby our selves - attain meaning.
But let us begin by putting these books in a wider context. Inspired
particularly by the works of Paul Ricoeur on time and narrative, in the last few
years a number of social scientists and philosophers have begun to develop an
interest in the relationship between narrative and our conceptualizations of
’identity’ and ’the self’. Many of these studies, such as the books under review
here, have thrown into question most of our conventional beliefs about the
essence of the individual, self and identity, treating these beliefs as fictions or
constructions related to linguistic and social structures.
Meanwhile, anthropological and historical studies of the concept of self in
other cultures and periods have further undermined our certitudes by showing
us just how pliable, fragile and ephemeral most of our modern western beliefs
and practices actually are. Viewed cross-culturally and comparative-historically,
there is an enormous variety in what people have accepted as ’obviously true’
about themselves and the self. If there is one message writ large in the annals of
history and anthropology it is that we should beware of taking for granted too
readily the supposedly solid truths and values of our own culture.
There is no one prevailing view of the self in the postmodern world any more,
and it is doubtful that there ever was really only one. As Gergen aptly shows in
his recent book, The Saturated Self, until quite recently our cultural life has been
dominated by at least tzvo basic vocabularies of the self. On the one hand we have
inherited from the early 19th century a romantic view of the self that attributes to
each person such qualities of personal depth as passion, soul, creativity and moral
fiber. This vocabulary of motives, Gergen maintains, has played a major role in
the formation of our most deeply committed relationships and our sense of
vocation or life-purpose. On the other hand, in the early 20th century this
romantic vocabulary was challenged by what Gergen calls ’the modernist
world-view’, which, he argues, values rational choice (sic) of marriage partners,
moral training and a stable family life. Such modernists expect persons to be
’predictable, honest and sincere’, he says. ’For modernists the chief character-
istics of the self reside not in the domain of depth, but rather in our ability to
reason - in our beliefs, opinions and conscious intentions’. Unfortunately, he
does not give any examples of these ’modernists’ and I find it difficult to fit this
description with the writers and thinkers usually so classified, such as D. H.
Lawrence, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, or Virginia Woolf, none exactly
exponents of rational choice theory.
Today, however, both of these idioms are falling into disuse, Gergen tells us, as
a result of the postmodern forces of what he calls ’social saturation’. He equates
at FUDAN UNIV LIB on May 9, 2013hhs.sagepub.comDownloaded from
143
the saturating of self with the condition of postmodernism, which, he believes,
throws the very concept of personal essences into doubt: ’Selves as possessers of
real and identifiable characteristics - such as rationality, emotion, inspiration and
will - are dismantled’. The postmodern condition is marked by a plurality of
voices vying for the right to reality. As the voices expand, all that seemed true and
good in the past is subverted. In the postmodem world, he says, we become
increasingly aware that the objects about which we speak are not so much ’in the
world’ as they are products of perspective.
As a result of the spread of worldwide communications, made possible by
modem technologies, we are becoming ’saturated with the voices of humankind
- both harmonious and alien’. ’As we absorb their varied rhymes and reasons,
they become part of us and we of them’. For everything we know to be true
about ourselves other voices within respond with doubt and even derision. This
fragmentation of self-conceptions corresponds to a multiplicity of incoherent
and disconnected relationships which pull us in myriad directions, inviting us to
play such a variety of roles that the very concept of an ’authentic self’ with ’
knowable characteristics recedes from view. ’Social saturation furnishes us with a
multiplicity of incoherent and unrelated languages of the self.’ As a result,
Gergen concludes, ’the fully saturated self becomes no self at all’ (7).
Gergen shows how this eroding of the identifiable self is supported by - and
manifest in - a wide range of beliefs and practices. Thus, today expressions of
emotion and reason, valued by romantics or modernists, have ceased to be
viewed as real and significant qualities of persons. In the light of postmodem
pluralism, we perceive them to be fictions, the outcome of our ways of
conceptualizing or constructing them. In such a pluralistic universe, we find that
the only truth we can really rely on is narrative truth, that is, the stories that we
tell ourselves and others about ourselves. In fact, says Gergen, ’under
postmodem conditions persons exist in a state of continuous construction and
reconstruction; it is a world where anything goes that can be negotiated. Each
and every reality of self gives way to reflexive questioning, irony, and ultimately
the playful probing of yet another reality. The center fails to hold’ (7).
Although naturally there are some differences amongst them, all the other
authors under review here approach the conceptualization of the self from a
more phenomenological and/or a psychoanalytically informed perspective than
the postmodern constructionist position Gergen espouses. However, they
would all agree with Gergen about the importance of narrative as a primary
function and embodiment of our understanding of the world, of experience, and
ultimately of ourselves.
Alford’s purpose in his recent book The Self in Social Theory is not so much to
deconstruct the self, as so many contemporary thinkers are busy doing, as to
reconstruct it. Whereas Lacanian psychoanalytical deconstructionists transform
the unconscious into a type of text, arguing that it is not the case that the self uses
language but rather that language uses the self, Alford seeks ’to uncover claims
at FUDAN UNIV LIB on May 9, 2013hhs.sagepub.comDownloaded from
144
about real selves in political philosophy’. Drawing on the self-psychology of
Heinz Kohut, as well as on Lacan, Alford develops a sophisticated, psychoana-
lytically informed perspective on the self, which he then applies to the accounts
of the self given by Plato, Hobbes, Locke, Rawls and Rousseau. To discuss his
analyses in detail goes beyond the limits of this review, but it must be said that his
brilliant applications of self-psychology to the writings of Plato and Rousseau
alone make this book worth reading.
Alford draws his insights not only from psychoanalysis but also from the
brilliant work of Charles Taylor, particularly Sources of the Self. Taylor aims to
show the genesis and genealogy of our modem conceptions of identity and its
values. His account of selfhood differs from many other modem theories of the
self through his emphasis on the cardinal importance of moral values to
self-identity. In fact, in his view, moral values must be considered as the most
fundamental factor in the identity of persons. There are deep-seated values or
ethos structures, claims Taylor, in agreement with Max Scheler, that operate on
an intuitive level in our lives, whether we are aware of them or acknowledge them
or not.
Values arise in the drama of our life, especially in the choices this life involves.
Taylor believes that dramatization is the form of expression most adequate to the
direct disclosure of human action in its social and moral significance, and hence
for disclosing individuals in their characteristic and valorized traits and identities:
as villainous, heroic, vain, humble, etc.
In the relating of actual human lives, of course, narration must occur after the
fact. As Arendt has written, the ’unchangeable identity of a person, though
disclosing itself intangibly in act and speech becomes tangible only in the story of
the actor’s and speaker’s life’. There seems to be much truth in saying, as Max
Scheler did, that ’the whole person is contained in every fully concrete act’, but
we should keep in mind that this is true only for someone who can interpret those
acts into meaningful sequences, and can see or imagine the broader story. For
Taylor the significance of human action is understood in and through the
reflection that acts give rise to, and that forms the context or the framing story in
which they fit.
According to Taylor, on the personal level our identity is tied to our sense of
what is morally good: but what is identity? On the one hand Taylor views it as
being in constant flux, a Protean entity, ever-changing, in continual movement,
like Bergson’s 61an vital. Yet on the other hand Taylor seems to believe that there
is something like an essential self behind this ephemeral identity, a self which he
says may be ’defined by the commitments and identifications which provide the
frame or horizon within which I can try to determine from case to case what is
good, or valuable, or what ought to be done, or what I endorse or oppose’. To
conduct one’s life without such a framework, as many contemporary people do,
is, in Taylor’s view, to approach a pathological condition. Thus, ’to define my
self is thus to inquire into and become conversant with the values I operate by
at FUDAN UNIV LIB on May 9, 2013hhs.sagepub.comDownloaded from
145
and am oriented toward in my ongoing actions and choices’. In short, my self is
revealed through my choices, commitments and actions.
As for Gergen, for Taylor the crisis of our postmodem identity is intimately
linked to ’the loss of a unifying framework or grand narrative, rooted in stable,
even universal, values and commitments through which we make sense of our
lives and, concomitant with this, the inability to see our lives as an evolving
temporal whole and on the model of a quest’. The difference between them is that
whereas Gergen sees this postmodem saturated self as a challenging opportunity,
Taylor (and Kerby, as will be seen below) view this tendency with alarm, and
seem to hanker after a return to the lost and irrecoverable securities of traditional
western Christian values.
Values that were taken for granted in Great Britain and the United States until
recently, such as respect for others, and tolerance of difference of beliefs and
opinions, values which may be said to underlie our modern culture, have now
become subject to question by diverse dispossessed or dissatisfied groups. Taylor
believes that we must question and rethink our fundamental (formerly
taken-for-granted) beliefs and values today, in order to defend them and to make
them more appealing and relevant to contemporary audiences. ’They require
explicit articulation and narrative expression’, he says, ’if we are to extricate
ourselves from the more superficial and fragmentary world-views we currently
operate with and within’.
In Narrative and the Self, Kerby argues, with Taylor, that attaining
self-understanding is necessarily an interpretive or hermeneutic endeavor
involving both our situatedness in language and the selves of our lives as an
ongoing project or developing story: ’we see that the sense of the good has to be
woven into my understanding of my life as an unfolding story. But this is to state
another basic condition of making sense of ourselves, that we grasp our lives in a
narrative’.
Only narrative, Taylor maintains along with Alasdair MacIntyre and others,
can offer a coherent answer to the persistent questions concerning our identity.
The crucial role of narrative in Taylor’s view is to articulate our life as an organic
whole and disclose thereby the various purposes and hence values, that both
guide and define us as engaged human agents. The unchangeable identity of a
person, Taylor believes, discloses itself in our speech and in our actions and this
identity only becomes understandable and tangible in and through the stories we
tell, ’in the story of the speaker or actor’s life’.
’Human lives need and must be narrated’, said Paul Ricoeur. Narratives reveal
aspects of ’truths’ of our life that would otherwise remain obscure or simply
unconstituted. This insight is the starting-point for Kerby’s careful analysis.
Hardly over a hundred pages in length, Kerby’s Narrative and the Self presents a
highly perceptive philosophical analysis of the role of narrative in human
thought and action. His book was conceived, he says, as ’an attempt to
understand the various roles that language and narration play in what we could
at FUDAN UNIV LIB on May 9, 2013hhs.sagepub.comDownloaded from
146
broadly call &dquo;the life of the mind&dquo;’. His objective is to show how the self is
constituted by language in the broadest sense. Language is here not simply
viewed as a tool for communicating or mirroring back what we otherwise
discover in our reality but is itself seen as an important formative or constitutive
part of that reality. Invoking the writings of Benveniste, Ricoeur, Merleau-Ponty
and Lacan as well as Taylor, Kerby argues that language and narration play a
central role in major aspects of human experience and functioning, including
emotion, values, recollection and a sense of history.
Kerby conceives of the self metaphorically as being rather like a character we
might encounter every day in novels, plays and other story media. Such a self is
given content and embodied primarily in narrative constructions (stories). It
arises, he maintains, out of our signifying practices. If we believe in an internal
subject, it is perhaps because we have imagined such an entity to exist or we have
been misled by stories into positing such fictions as being real.
In Kerby’s view, ’The &dquo;I&dquo;, the self, is an effect of language, and the status and
meaning of the self will thus depend on the particular &dquo;language game&dquo; in which
it is invoked and in which it comes into play’. But for Kerby this does not make
the self superfluous; it only problematizes it. ’Who or what the self can be is a
result of the semiotic and discursive practices and techniques within which the
speaking subject functions’ (113). He is not thereby devaluing the self. On the
contrary, he argues that ’the development of selves (and thereby of persons) in
our narratives is one of the most characteristically human acts, acts that
justifiably remain of central importance to both our personal and our communal
existence’.
Having shifted the emphasis away from the self as an inner substantial core of
personhood, Kerby maintains, one need not conclude that the human subject is
an ephemeron of little significance. ’The constitution of persons through acts of
predication remains the most human of acts, central to our Western thinking and
world-view. The status of the subject is not necessarily demeaned because it is
seen as the product of a creative act, rather than as a pregiven entity to be simply
recognized and respected’ (114).
What lies behind our self-conceptions is not some identical thing-in-itself,
soul, or spirit, argues Kerby, but rather language as it derives from our
sedimented history, especially the autobiographical language of self-narration. ’If
I am a being who interprets then it is to the interpreting itself that we must turn’,
Kerby maintains. ’We should not think that we can escape this circularity by
recourse to a self external or transcendent to this act’ (52).
The brilliant linguist Emile Benveniste discovered that ’language is ... the
possibility of subjectivity because it always contains the linguistic forms
appropriate to the expression of subjectivity’. In language. ’1’ am set free; but do
’I’ really speak? asks Kerby who concludes that the ’I’, the self, is an effect of
language, and the status and meaning of the self depends on the particular
’language game’ in which it is invoked and in which it comes into play. In his view
at FUDAN UNIV LIB on May 9, 2013hhs.sagepub.comDownloaded from
147
this does not make the self superfluous; it only problematizes it. Who or what the
self (and ultimately the person) can be, he argues, is a result of the semiotic and
discursive practices and techniques within which the speaking subject functions.
We need language because we