The saturated self: Dilemmas of identity in contemporary life; Kenneth J. Gergen, Pt. 4

Pg 165 – Talking about University of Massachusetts psychologist James Averill, “He concludes that what we call emotions are essentially cultural performances, learned and enacted on appropriate occasions. We are not drive by forces bottled up within us, rather, we perform emotions much as we would act a part on stage.”

~ If emotions are cultural performances, it is because we learn how to express emotions through our cultural connections and, in turn, decide which emotions are appropriate also through our cultural connections. Therefore, when we show emotions we are really showing our connection to certain cultures.

Pg 166 – “If we recognize that cultural rules govern when and where an emotional performance can occur, as well as others’ reactions to these performances, the expresser’s responses to these reactions, and so on, we can begin to see emotional performances as single movements within an elaborate dance or emotional scenario.”

~ Technically, if we can relate emotions back to culture we could almost trace one’s cultural background and personal heritage through one’s emotional displays. The more emotions we see and the more we see others interact with the person the better we would understand their background.

Pg 170 – “We realize increasingly that who and what we are is not so much the result of our “personal essence” (real feelings, deep beliefs, and the like), but of how we are constructed in various social groups.

~ We are social creatures and our selves are all based and formed and redistributed, etc. off of our social relationships with others.

Pg 170 – “Relationships make possible the concept of the self. Previous possessions of the individual self – autobiography, emotions, and morality – become possessions of relationships. We appear to stand alone, but we are manifestations of relatedness.”

~ What we think of as being related to individuals is actually part of the relationships one has with others. All of our identity-related possessions are really socially related possessions.

Pg 173 – “…Because each fragment we incorporate from others is also an acquisition of value (a small voice of “ought”), the “we” may indeed seek the inchoate any stabilized pattern of being treads on the sensibilities of myriad ghosts within.”

~ I feel like this is important, and I looked up the word inchoate, because I’ve never heard of it before, and I just can’t seem to make this sentence make sense.

Pg 177 – “One pays the price of self-population, for each new fragment of the self has the capacity to generate a self-debilitating array of judgmental criteria. With each attempt “to be,” one finds another voice within that is scornful. This same multiplicity in evaluative criteria affects one’s perception of others…Each aspect of self raises new hurdles of acceptability for the other. The likelihood of a fully successful leap, at least for anyone of human scale, is small. And the result is an inevitable leadenness of “just settling,” compromising for the sake of a commitment in name alone.”

~ The more selves one has the more one can judge situations and the more that happens the greater the doubt that can cripple one’s ability to make decisions.

Pg 178 – “In effect, with the disappearance of the true self, the stage is set for the fractional relationship, a relationship built around a limited aspect of one’s being.” Goes on to say that the technology that helps populate the self also helps create fractured relationships.

~ So by breaking into so many identities one opens him or herself up to the world of relationships and social situations that limit one to only being part of themselves at once (working self-concept).

Pg 183 – “In this sophistication in forms of relatedness that sets the stage for ersatz being, that is, the capacity for entering immediately into identities or relationships of widely varying forms. In ersatz being, the traditional forms are sustained; in the postmodern world, however, such forms may be ripped out of customary contexts and played out wherever time and circumstance permit.”

~ Not really sure where to go with this, it just seemed kind of interesting.

Pg 184 – “…Because no concept of fixed or deep identity anchors one’s choice, there is no powerful necessity to select on form of pursuit over another. And if identities are essentially forms of social construction, then one can be anything at any time so long as the roles, costumes, and settings have been commodiously arranged.”

~ With the onslaught of media showing people more possible selves that they could be, it allows them to change roles and shape and reshape self-representations quickly and easily.

Pg 184 – “The possibility of ersatz being has also encouraged the development of industries for identity production.”

~ I am in the career field of identity production. But, this is where people see an end goal possible self and try to generate the relationships necessary to be that self. They go to tennis lessons to be a tennis player, etc.

Pg 212 – “Perhaps the most common form of deterioration may be characterized as the collage community, a community in which homogeneity in life patterns gives way to a multiplicity of disjunctive modes of living.”

~ This is where a community is no longer people all pretty much in the same cultures, but people with extremely different cultures living in the same area. This leads to greater interaction with others and, in turn, creates more possible selves and gives more information to the working self-concept on how to act and react in various situations.

Pg 214 – “Finally, the deterioration of the traditional community is hastened by the emergence of symbolic community. Symbolic communities are linked primarily by the capacity of their members for symbolic exchange – of words, images, information – mostly through electronic means. Physical immediacy and geographic closeness disappear as criteria of community.”

~ Symbolic community is kind of like a collective group that shares ideas and ideals, but not space. Like an internet group of people who have the same experience of being online and reading the same information, but no actual space to have relationships in.

Pg 228 – “The social saturations brought about by the technologies of the twentieth century, and the accompanying immersion in multiple perspectives, have brought about a new consciousness: postmodern.”

~ Kind of good summary of the postmodern perspective.

Pg 241 – “Others write of how individualism lends itself to a sense of isolation, loneliness, and anomie; promotes forms of economic exploitation; champions a competitive as opposed to a cooperative view of international relations; and leads to a relentless plundering of natural resources in the service of competition and self-gratification. As individualism gains ascendance, social life begins to approximate a Hobbesian condition of all against all.”

~ Another explanations of the downside of individualism.

Pg 249 – “The protean style is characterized by a continuous flow of being, without obvious coherence through time.” Goes into more detail.

~ So the individual constantly is changing without regard to having a coordinating self over time. Interesting, but not exactly the way I think.

Pg 253 – “The present pluralism of expression seems most appropriately attributed to the century’s explosion of the technologies of social saturation. As these technologies have seeped into the practices of everyday life, patterns of information exchange have become relatively uncontrollable. Citizens exposed to an ever-expanding array of perspectives may on short notice join in symbolic communities with others from around the globe…”

~ Why people join symbolic communities and how the technologies we have can change the way we are. This happens because the technologies change our patterns of life, and therefore change our habits, thoughts, and actions about those patterns.

The saturated self: Dilemmas of identity in contemporary life; Kenneth J. Gergen, Pt. 3

Pg 128 – “If any act, situation, or object is subject to multiple descriptions or perspectives, any given perspective can only be validated by reverting to still other perspectives. Not only does this undermine a rational foundation for any single position, but it suggests that the term rationality is a rhetorical device for the valorization of one’s favored position. A statement or a behavior is “rational” if it is favored by “our kind.” Such terms as unreasonable and irrational thus become means of social control and possible oppression.”

~ We need many perspectives just to understand a single perspective. This means that doing the rational thing only comes after thinking through other rational things to do, making the entire process slightly irrational. Therefore, calling something unreasonable or irrational is just for social control of other groups.

Pg 133 – “With the demise of rational coherence, a longstanding demarcation of self-identity also recedes from view. For it is the sense of continuity – that I know I am I by virtue of my sense of continuous sameness – that for centuries has served as the chief criterion by which a self is to be identified.”

~ So without rational thought self-identity is hard to have because nothing remains the same. This is what I am trying to solve.

Pg 137 – “More important here, however, is the effect of reflexivity on the traditional commitment to individual selves. If one lives within the confines of a single reality – coherent through time and space – the objectivity of self seem unassailable. Yet when lived reality is continuously punctuated by consciousness of its limitations and artifice, commitment becomes arduous. When one’s being as a professional, a spouse, or an American for example, is constantly being doubted – its constructed and contingent character made evident through other standpoints – then daily existence as an objectively given self is threatened.”

~ With doubt comes the self’s inability to remain objective. Instead it must become irrational to maintain its self-hood.

Pg 140 – “Objectivity about such matters was replaced by a perspectivism; the concept of “individual persons” could not be a single reflection of what there is, but a communal creation – derived from discourse, objectified within relationships, and serving to rationalize certain institutions while prohibiting others…To appreciate the possibility, two preliminary steps are useful: first bid adieu to the concrete entity of the self, and then to trace the reconstruction of self as relationship.”

~ Interesting to think that there is no point to mention the concrete self because the self is based entirely on relationships. This is kind of what I am currently writing about, though. The self is not concrete, but constantly changing through social situations and cultural affiliations.

Pg 140 – “Under modernism, the individual seemed an isolated, machinelike entity – reliable, predictable, and authentic, propelled by a core mechanism embedded not too deeply within the interior.”

~ Good explanation of the modernist view of the self.

Pg 145 – “Gender is but one of the traditional categories of self-identification that now deteriorates. Categories of race, age, religion, and nationality are similarly suspect. As the boundaries of definition give way, so does the assumption of self-identity.”

~ It is hard to relate/self-identify if the category is disintegrating. But, the disintegrating category could be a redistribution of the gender culture.

Pg 145 – “Although it grows increasingly difficult to be certain of who or what one is, social life proceeds. And in one’s interactions one continues to identify oneself as this or that sort of person…As these public characterizations of self are found effective in meeting the challenges of a complex social world, a new consciousness begins to develop. This is the consciousness of construction…For what is true of a culture’s history (chapter 4) and of the national reality (chapter 5) is no less true of persons’. That is (146) attempts to define or describe oneself inevitably proceed from a perspective, and different perspectives have different implications for how a person is treated.”

~ Again talking about how we view ourselves in certain perspectives because we are inherently social beings. I really like the part that culture, national reality, and personal identity basically function in the same manner.

Pg 146 – “For good or ill, it is the individual as socially constructed that finally informs people’s patterns of action. And in the end, there is no means of moving past the constructions to locate the real.”

~ Social construction shapes our actions through our working self-concepts. We are nothing without his, therefore the “real” is the social.

Pg 147 – “In the traditional community, where relationships were reliable, continuous, and face-to-face, a firm sense of self was favored. One’s sense of identity was broadly and continuously supported. Further, there was strong agreement on patterns of “right” and “wrong” behavior. One could simply and unself-consciously be, for there was little question of being otherwise. With social saturation, the traditional pattern is distrupted. One is increasingly thrust into new and different relationships – as the network of associates expands in the workplace, the neighborhood is suffused with new and different voices, one visits and receives visitors from abroad, organizations spread across geographical locales, and so on. The result is that one cannot depend on a solid confirmation of identity, nor on a comfortable patterns of authentic action. One confronts scores of new and different demands.

~ Good explanation of traditional community versus new way of looking at community as socially built.

Pg 148 – “…Social saturation also multiplies the standards available for self-comparison. As one interacts with persons from diverse backgrounds, and is exposed to various media representations of “good persons,” the range of self-evaluative criteria expands manifold. It is not simply the local community that dictates the nature of the good, but virtually any visible community.”

~ The social environment we live in as it relates to social saturation really consists of any visible/reachable community.

Pg 150 – “The pastiche personality is a social chameleon, constantly borrowing bits and pieces of identity from whatever sources are available and constructing them as useful or desirable in a given situation. If one’s identity is properly managed, the rewards can be substantial…”

~ So this is kind of like the working self-concept using various info and then piecing all of the self-representations together in different circumstances. It creates the pastiche personality.

Pg 151 – “…Self-monitoring – masters at self-presentation, sensitive to their public image and to situational cues of appropriateness, who are able to control or modify their appearance – with a contrasting group who are much less concerned or capable in these respects. The differences between the high and low self-monitoring individuals recall David Riesman’s celebrated distinction between inner-directed (or self-determining) and other-directed (or socially malleable) personality types…”

~ Good information on those who can monitor their working self-concept better than others. Continues with more information on other studies that might come in handy.

Pg 156 – In describing the final change of the self in the saturated social world says, “…Self is replaced by the reality of relatedness – or the transformation of “you” and “I” to “us.””

~ So as one realizes that oneself is completely interconnected there becomes no individual, just an intravidiual who shares everything with others.

Pg 157 – “And because there is no self outside of a system of meaning, it may be said that relations precede and are more fundamental then self. Without relationship there is no language with which to conceptualize the emotions, thoughts, or intentions of the self.”

~ There is no self without relationships, therefore relationships are more important than the actual self. Without our social relationships we would have no language, and therefore no way in which to create self-knowledge and self-definition.

Pg 163 – “Yet one’s personal history is not a cultural possession only in the sense of story forms. Indeed, the very content of such stories also depends on social relationships.”

~ So, technically personal history is partially cultural due to the connection of everyone having been through the same experience, the only thing that keeps it from becoming completely cultural is the individual story form that an event takes place in.

Pg 163 – “…Scholars have coined the term communal memory to refer to the process of social negotiation that occurs among persons in deciding “what happened.” Thus family members may discuss at length what counts as an accurate memory of family history; vacationing friends will energetically negotiate over the “right way” to report their adventures. Memory, then, becomes a social possession.”

~ Memory as a social possession relates back to how personal identity and cultural identity are formed and function in extremely similar ways. Just as an individual has a personal heritage/history, so too does a culture have heritage and history that it draw information from. Cultural memories are a social process because it takes many people to work out the details of cultural experience.

The saturated self: Dilemmas of identity in contemporary life; Kenneth J. Gergen, Pt. 2

Pg 73 – Has a little anecdote of feeling overwhelmed because there are too many things to do and not enough time to do them. “This syndrome may be termed multiphrenia, generally referring to the splitting (74) of the individual into a multiplicity of self-investments. This condition is partly an outcome of self-population, but partly a result of the populated self’s efforts to exploit the potentials of the technologies of relationship. In this sense, there is a cyclical spiraling toward a state of multiphrenia. As one’s potentials are expanded by the technologies, so one increasingly employs the technologies for self-expression; yet, as the technologies are further utilized, so do they add to the repertoire of potentials. It would be a mistake to view this multiphrenic condition as a form of illness, for it is often suffused with a sense of expansiveness and adventure. Someday there may indeed be nothing to distinguish multiphrenia from simply “normal living.”

~ So multiphrenia is the name for the condition of having many possible selves and self-representations that conflict. So, basically, everyone has multiphrenia to some degree, some just have more of it. If it becomes too overwhelming that is when people have mental breakdowns and succumb to it. I think the day of not distinguishing multiphrenia from “normal living” has come.

Pg 76 – “Normal development leaves most people with a rich range of “goals for a good life,” and with sufficient resources to achieve a sense of personal well-being by fulfilling these goals.” Goes on to talk about how social saturation affects this by giving us too many goals that conflict and cause us stress. “Each moment is enveloped in the guilt born of all that was possible but now foreclosed.”

~ I’m beginning to think of social saturation and the possible self saturation. If one has too many possible selves it creates an inflow of cognitive dissonance that cannot be managed and causes the individual to be overwhelmed with too much to do and not enough left to understand or choose what to do. I think this is the point one reaches before they redistribute of deconstruct an identity(s). IMPORTANT!

Pg 79 – “Increasingly the criteria of rationality does not, then, move one to a clear and univocal judgment of candidates. Rather, the degree of complexity is increased until a rationally coherent stand is impossible. In effect, as social saturation steadily expands the population of the self, a choice of candidates approaches the arbitrary…We approach a condition in which the very idea of “rational choice” becomes meaningless.”

~ If we have too much to judge we can no longer be rational, because there are too many rational choices to make a truly rational choice. Instead, we do the irrational by picking one rational option over another rational option.

Pg 79 – “So we find a profound sea change taking place in the character of social life during the twentieth century. Through an array of newly emerging technologies the world of relationships becomes increasingly saturated. We engage in greater numbers of relationships, in a greater variety of forms, and with greater intensities than ever before. With the multiplication of relationships also comes a transformation in the social capacities of the individual – both in knowing how and knowing that. The relatively coherent and unified sense of self inherent in a traditional culture gives way to manifold and competing potentials. A multiphrenic condition emerges in which one swims in ever-shifting, concatenating, and contentious currents of being. One bears the burden of an increasing array of oughts, of self-doubts and irrationalities. The possibility for committed romanticism or strong and single-minded modernism recedes, and the way is opened for the postmodern being.”

~ Explains increasing social capacities of people. Good summary of the information up to here.

Pg 83 – “Increasingly we emerge as the possessors of many voices. Each self contains a multiplicity of others, singling different melodies, different verses, and with different rhythms. Nor do these many voices necessarily harmonize. At times they join together, at time they fail to listen one to another, and at times they creates a jarring discord.”

~ I like this metaphor of choir. I wonder if one of a band would work, too. Each area (brass, winds, etc.) would be like a culture and the various instruments in it would be the possible selves and self-representations inside that area. The audience would be like the social environment. The conductor would be the complete self. The music would be the experience, and the recording of prior experiences would be the personal heritage.

Pg 86 – Erosion of being assured of one identity breaks down due to two things in technology. 1. An increase in communication and distance due to things like telephones, internet, etc. and, 2. New voices being heard, like minorities and those who were uneducated before.

~ I think this explains why multiphrenia is more of a new phenomenon, because these things did not occur in earlier years and could not influence people as much.

Pg 97 – Talks about how Western culture typically values individual self-determination and the person who resists pressure from others and does it his or her way. The problem with this is that it makes people seem isolated from their surroundings and puts the individual before all others.

~ I think this is a good sum-up of my mention of rugged individualism where it mentions intravidualism above.

Pg 104 – “The problems with these assumptions begin with a consideration of the audience – reader or listener. To make sense of another’s words or actions, the audience must proceed form some perspective. Others’ words do not come with labels indicating how they must be interpreted, and such interpretation must thus be based ona a set of assumptions, or a perspective – concerning, for example, what people “have on their minds,” how they are motivated, and so on. The German theorist Hans-Georg Gadamer proposes that people approach a text (or any other verbal expression) with a forestructure of understandings that form the basis for interpretation. However, this forestructure is open to change through time. The horizon of understanding, as he puts it, is continuously changing over the course of history, favoring interpretations in one period that would seem woolly-minded or absurd in another.”

~ In order for us to gauge a situation and have the working self-concept make decisions on what to do we draw information from our personal heritage and similar past experiences. This would be the forestructure. The forestructure changes with time because the personal heritage changes with every new experience.

Pg  111 – “The increasing awareness of multiplicity in perspective undermines attempts to justify any transcendent criterion of the correct. Concepts of truth, honesty, and authenticity now turn strange. Not only do attempts at characterizing the actual person – the workings of the mind, the human spirit, or the biological individual – become suspect. The very concept of an internal core – an intentional, rational agent – (112) also begins to fray.”

~ I understand that it’s hard to think of anything as rational and stable if everything is constantly changing.

Pg 114 – “The emphasis on multiplicity of voice is captured for the postmodern architect by the concepts of double or multiple coding.”

~ Double/multiple coding is also how we view situations that we make sense of. We seek to understand it in forms of many self-representations and possible selves, thus it takes on many different meanings. It also takes on many different meanings for the various people involved in the same situation.

Pg 118 – “Increasingly, then, the traditional categories of cultural life become blurred, the edges indistinct.”

~ I see this being true, especially with self-representations and possible selves. We all feel connected to so many cultures that certain cultures can blend together and almost seem like the same one. In fact, sometimes we make presumptions that two different cultures are one in the same.

Pg 118 – “When the distinction between subject and object ceases to compel, and category boundaries lost their edges, we become less and less able to distinguish me and mine from you and yours.”

~ As cultures and those in cultures collide we see more similarities between people. We have to see the differences to understand our own individuality.

Pg 121 – “Deconstruction theorists propose that words gain their meaning through their reference to other words; literary works gain their significance by the way they are related to other writings. Thus language does not derive its character from reality, but form other language. Now consider the media – newspapers, television, the movies, radio. For Baudrillard, media portrayals of the world are driven not by the way the world “is,” but by the steadily emerging histories of portrayal itself. As these histories unfold, each new lamination is influenced by the preceding, accounts are layered upon accounts, and reality is transformed into a hyperreality.”

~ Nothing is important without its relation to something else. The more related it is the more “real” it becomes. Therefore, something that seems really related becomes hyperreal. This explains why certain things carry more weight in their form of possible self or self-representation or place in personal heritage. If it is an experience or situation that is hyperreal it will carry more significance than other experiences.

The saturated self: Dilemmas of identity in contemporary life; Kenneth J. Gergen, Pt. 1

Pg 8 – 1907 – Dr. Duncan McGougall weighed people right before and right after they die to prove the existence of the soul. He found that the human body weighs about 1 ounce less, therefore, the soul weighs one ounche

~ This is just kinda funny. Who would do that? How would you get people to say…sure…I’m going to die in five minutes…go ahead and weigh me now.

Pg 40 – “The immense attention devoted today to “cognitive processes” reveals a further dimension of the modernist view: man’s essence if rational.”

~ I think part of the reason why we say this is our inherent desire to categorize. It is easier to categorize our actions and say that they are rational than to come up with an explanation of why and how we are irrational. We take the easy way out…because it’s just easier.

Pg 46 – “Yet the means by which such tests demonstrate the “internal traits” of the person is as interesting as it is misleading.”

~ They are basically saying we cannot ever accurately measure any human trait because it is constantly changing and all traits are interrelated, therefore, we cannot measure one trait without measuring all of them. It relates to the ACT/SAT etc. It’s just an interesting idea that no measuring system is perfect because human’s change too much.

Pg 49 – “It is my central thesis that this immersion is propelling us toward a new self-consciousness: the postmodern. The emerging commonplaces of communication – such as those just cited – are critical to understanding the passing of both the romantic and modern views of the self. What I call the technologies of social saturation are central to the contemporary erasure of individual self.”

~ This relates back to media and the self. Media allows us more connections which makes more possible selves and causes us more cognitive dissonance to sort through the rankings of the selves.

Pg 49 – “However, we shall also see that as we become increasingly conjoined with our social surroundings, we come to reflect those surroundings. There is a populating of the self, reflecting the infusion of partial identities through social saturation. And there is the onset of a multiphrenic condition, in which one begins to experience the vertigo of unlimited multiplicity. Both the populating of the self and the multiphrenic condition are significant preludes to postmodern consciousness. To appreciate the magnitude of cultural change, and its probable intensification, attention must be directed to the emerging technologies.”

~ We reflect what we know, aka our surroundings. Populating the self relates to social saturation, when we have so many identities that we can no longer accurately reflect or portray all of them. Moreover, multiphrenicism relates to the idea that if we have too many possible selves and self-representations then we will create another form of cognitive dissonance just because we are overpopulated.

Pg 55 – “With the development of radio and film, one’s opinions, emotions, facial expressions, mannerisms, styles of relating, and the like were no longer confined to the immediate audience, but were multiplied manifold.”

~ Giving us more connections to more people creates more possible selves and self-representations because it enlarges our environment and social circle.

Pg 55 – “Television has generated an exponential increase in self-multiplication. This is true not only in terms of the increased size of television audiences and the number of hours to which they are exposed to social facsimiles, but in the extent to which self-multiplication transcends time – that is, in which one’s identity is sustained in the culture’s history. Because television channels are plentiful, popular shows are typically rebroadcast in succeeding years.The patient viewer can still resonate with Groucho Marx on You Ben Your Life or Jackie Gleason and Audrey Meadows on The Honeymooners.

~ One’s identity does not end when a show ends, it continues through television syndication and the possible selves one creates off of the television shows they love.

Pg 55 – “People can choose the actors they wish to identify with or the stories that will bring fantasies to life. Increasingly, this also means that in terms of producing a sense of social connection, any given actor may transcend his or her own death; viewers can continue their private relationships with Marilyn Monroe and James Dean long after the physical demise of the performers. With television, a personage may continue a robust life over eternity.”

~ Ditto from above, except with actors instead of shows.

Pg 58 – “Two of the greatest impediments to communicating, and thus relating over long distances are slowness and expense.” Goes on to talk about in 1850 it was 10 mph across the country. The telegraph system sped this up, but was more costly.

~ So the creation of more possible selves and self-representations, etc. relates to an ever-enlarging social environment. The larger the environment the more that can be created. So, with the onslaught of technology we have now we have more possible selves and self representations than ever before simply because of the speed and number of new social outlets.

Pg 61 – Talks about how a century ago relationships were limited to space. If a person moved away the relationship would slowly end because there would be no way to continue communication easily.

~ So this limited possible selves and self-representations because it limited social environment.

Pg 62 – Defines perseverance of the past: Relates to communication. We no longer have to lose social connections with others when we move. We can still relate to the past and have it live on.

~ Makes good sense. So our personal heritage continues to grow faster and faster because we have more connections, at the same time it floods the self with information because it has more and more past experiences to draw knowledge from.

Pg 62 – Defines acceleration of the future: Social relationships move faster now than before because we have more ways to socially connect with people.

~ Due to our proximity with social environments we have less and less time to reflect on social relationships because we do not break from them as much. We continue on talking and take away from important self-reflection and the self-knowledge that would come from that.

Pg 66 – “Interestingly, technology also intensifies the emotional level of many relationships. People come to feel more deeply and express themselves more fully in an increasing number of relationships.”

~ So the more we connect with our social environment the more connected and emotionally attached we become to it. Where does this draw our social attachment from? What loses the emotions we gain? Or do we just, in general, become more emotional?

Pg 69 – “In each case individuals harbor a sense of coherent identity of self-sameness, only to find themselves suddenly propelled by alternative impulses. They seem securely to be one sort of person, but yet another comes bursting to the surface – in a suddenly voiced opinion, a fantasy, a turn of interests, or a private activity. Such experiences with variation and self-contradiction may be viewed as preliminary effects of social saturation. They may signal a populating of the self, the acquisition of multiple and disparate potentials for being. It is this process of self-population that begins to undermine the traditional commitments to both romanticist and modernist forms of being. It is of pivotal importance in setting the stage for the postmodern turn.”

~ More information on populating the self and social saturation. Basically, it happens when a possible self that didn’t seem very possible suddenly happens, or when a low-ranking self-representation suddenly takes center stage. Emphasis on the suddenly.

Pg 71 – “We appear to each other as single identities, unified, of whole cloth. However, with social saturation, each of us comes to harbor a vast population of hidden potentials – to be a blues singer, a gypsy, an aristocrat, a criminal. All the selves lie latent, and under the right conditions may spring to life.”

~ Hidden potential = possible self.

Pg 71 – “The populating of the self not only opens relationships to new ranges of possibility, but one’s subjective life also becomes more fully laminated. Each of the selves we acquire from others can contribute to inner dialogues, private discussions we have with ourselves about all manner of persons, events, and issues. These internal voices, these vestiges of relationships both real and imagined, have been given different names: invisible guests by Mary Watkins, social imagery by Eric Klinger, and social ghosts by Mary Gergen, who found in her research that virtually all the young people she sampled could discuss many such experiences with ease.” Goes on to mention that these guests/ghosts were often family members, close friends, religious figures or celebrities they had never met.

~ So our self-reflection takes place inside of our complete self with the help of our possible selves and self-representations. Since some of our possible selves are slightly impossible/imagined, we can have conversations with people that are no longer around or have never been around (dead parents, celebrities, Jesus).

Pg 72 – Talks about how ghosts/guests are there for conversation, contemplation, role models, standards of behavior, bolstering beliefs, and self-esteem.

~ So when we do not have actual social environments with real people to talk with we create our own social environments inside of ourselves to give us what we need. Part of the intravidual maybe? We create another self in order to help us balance all of our other selves.

Identity politics reconsidered; Dominick LaCapra (eds. Linda M. Alcoff and Satya P. Mohanty)

Pg 230 – “Let us then look to the OED’s definitions of “experience.”
OED: 1. “The action of putting to the test; trial.”

~ I love this part of the definition. To me this is the important part of experience. Having part or pieces of the self tested/threatened/put to trial so that the working self-concept might provide more information to the rest of the self as to which selves are more important and should be ranked higher and which ones are less important and should be ranked lower.

Pg 230 – “2. “Proof by actual trial; practical demonstration.” I would simply point out, in the first two definitions of experience, the role of process, specifically the process of testing – or putting to the test – self or other. I would also note the juridicial dimension of the concept, arguably related to judgment, and even the proximity of experience to the ordeal. With the notion of “practical demonstration” there is a movement or even slippage toward a meaning obsolete in English but not in French: experience as experiment, which suggests an active, indeed performative, implication or even intervention of the observer in the observed – an implication that cannot be reduced to observation alone since it also changes what is investigated.”

~ So not only is experience the actual trial of the self and its identities, it’s proving those identities to be valid or not.

Pg 230 – “3. “The actual observation of facts or events, considered as a source of knowledge.” Here I am reminded of Satya Mohanty’s oft-quoted definition of experience: “ ‘Experience’ refers very simply to the variety of ways humans process information.” I would note that this is a definition, apparently restricted to humans, that may refer to a necessary dimension of certain forms of experience, but it does not seem to get at either additional sense in the OED or still others one might offer. Thus it may have to be supplemented by other considerations before it can qualify more comprehensively as one definition of experience.”

~ Experience is the trial, proving the identities to be valid, and using the trial and proving of identities as information for to build or rebuild other selves with. It’s the personal heritage’s fount of knowledge. The personal heritage uses experience to process information because of its testing ability on other selves.

Pg 230 – “4. “The fact of being consciously the subject of a state or condition, or of being consciously affected by an event. Also an instance of this; a state or condition viewed subjectively; an event by which one is affected.” Here the OED explicitly links experience to consciousness as well as to subjectivity. The linkage with subjectivity sits somewhat uneasily with the stress on “The actually observation (231) of facts or events” which would seem aligned with objectivity. In addition, one may note the typical linkage of experience with the subject and subjectivity as well as its extremely problematic nature, indicated by the appearance of objectivity with the attendant double binds of the subject-object aporia. But one may also argue that one should not oppose subjectivity and objectivity, notably when one introduces the question of subject positions that are crucial in identity-formation and mediate the relation between the self and society, as I shall later suggest. The OED’s stress on consciousness would seem to exclude unconscious processes from experience. One may find this exclusion, frequent in phenomenology, to be definitional of a certain conception of experience. But one is then left with a limited concept of experience that ignores the problem of the unconscious and of that which impinges upon, indeed internally differentiates or even splits, et is not encompassed by the conscious control of, the presumably unified subject – a problem I shall address when I ask the question: What is not experience or at least not entirely derivable from, or reducible to, experience (or at least a certain conception of experience)?”

~ So not only is experience as test/trial, but it is also something that consciously affects us. Experiences take place in the active part of the mind, not the subconscious. Unconscious things that take place are not part of experience, they might be like a self-reflection, but not experience.

Pg 231 – “6. “What has been experienced; the events that have taken place within the knowledge of an individual, a community, mankind at large, either during a particular period or general.” This is a very expansive definition of experience, but it at least serves to bring up the question of the relation between those who have directly experienced a series of events (e.g., slavery, apartheid, or the Holocaust) and those who are related to them through memory or at times through a shared heritage or subject position (say as African-American, black South African, or Jew or as non-African-American, white South African, or German). I doubt whether knowledge in a delimited sense would be enough of a basis for arguing that a later generation’s relation to the past is in some significant sense experiential or related to complex processes of identity-formation. At least there would have to be memory not reducible to (but also excluding) objective knowledge claims, and perhaps one might also require affective response – a feeling for the history of a group and one’s (232) inherited, acquired, or earned involvement in it.””

~ Experience in the past can affect either the larger, cultural level or the smaller, individual level. If it is an event in the past than the experience of those who lived through it and those who are just culturally affiliated with it is significantly different.

Pg 232 – “Another experiential and existential dimension not reducible to knowledge would be bearing witness in a secondary, nonidentitarian way to that past and its primary witnesses while recognizing and respecting their difference from oneself. By circumscribing a relation to the past within delimited forms of knowledge and representation, commentators…have argued that there is nothing experiential in any relevant sense about “memory” of a past one did not personally and directly live. Indeed, for them, what is at issue in movements beyond delimited claims to knowledge is only a misguided identity or memory politics. The latter misappropriates past experience as symbolic capital in the service of current political and social self-interest.”

~ This claims that experience that is through cultural affiliation is not really experience, as much as it is the heritage of the culture. The culture’s heritage can affect the individual due to their identification as a member of the culture, but it does not affect their personal heritage because they did not live through the actual experience.

Pg 232 – “7. “Knowledge resulting form actual observation or from what one has undergone.” The OED combines two quite different definitions here. Actual observation may be that of an eye-witness who remains a bystander distanced from events. Undergoing something characterizes someone having the experience, those (perhaps unconsciously) identifying with (even being haunted or possessed by) him or her or, in distinguishable ways, those empathizing with him or her while recognizing and respecting alterity and even resisting identification. I think the process of undergoing or “going through” is crucial for an acceptable definition of experience, and it would involve an affective, not only a narrowly cognitive, response, with affectivity having a significant relation to an attempt (however cautious, constitutively limited, nonleveling, imperfect, and at times failed) at understanding the other (who may sometimes be, in the most significant respects, opaque or standoffish). It is also crucial for giving an account of the relation between one directly having the experience, belated effects of certain experiences in later life (notably traumatic experiences), and the response to the experience of various third parties, including those born later – an issue that involves the question of subject positions vis-à-vis identities.”

~ So the actual testing/trial and the information gained from the testing/trial are both known as experience. One can observe something and “experience” it or one can go through something and “experience” it. These are two very different forms of experience, but they both relay information to the personal heritage of the person. The author argues more for the going through than just observing.

Pg 232 – “8. “The state of having been occupied in any department of study or practice, in affairs generally, or in the intercourse of life; the extent to which or the length of time during which, one has been so occupied; the aptitudes, skill, judgment, etc. thereby acquired.” We here, perhaps (233) inevitably, veer once again toward the extremely general and “spongiform.” But one can give many ordinary examples of what seems to be suggested in this definition: the experience of a graduate students, and so forth. It is also common to refer to someone with much or little experience in a given activity. Fortunately, the OED stops with this definition about which there seems relatively little interest to say that has not already been said about the other definitions.”

~ So any identity that has been occupied at any point in time is experience that leads itself into the personal history of the individual

Pg 235 – “Anxiety related to trauma and the idea that at least humanistic and interpretive social-scientific disciplines should in certain significant ways always be in a state of crisis, including a kind of post-traumatic identity-crisis wherein what is open for debate bears on the identity or constitution of the discipline itself.”

~ So trauma that causes anxiety turns into identity crisis. This is not always a bad thing because identity crisis leads to a debate on the identity and the self must self-reflect and determine the value of that identity.

Pg 236 – “With respect to identity-formation, one should make special mention of the founding trauma in the life of individuals and groups. The founding trauma is the actual or imagined event (or series of extreme or limit events) that poses in accentuated fashion the very question of identity yet may paradoxically become the very basis of an individual or collective identity. It may be undergone in the form of the deconversion or the conversion experience, even the sequence or coming together of the two, and it disorients and may reorient the course of a life. It may also become the basis of a new identity.”

~ “Founding trauma” would be the actual event/experience that leads to the building of an identity. Really important for the theory. The formation/deconstruction/redistribution stages are hinge on the founding trauma.

Pg 237 – “Another major set of problems not entirely encompassed by (a certain conception of) experience is the unconscious or, more precisely, unconscious processes such as displacement, condensation, repression, denial, disavowal, and compulsive repetition (related to the acting out of trauma). These processes, to which I can only allude, have experiential effects but, insofar as they are unconscious, are in one sense not directly experienced.”

~ The unconscious’s processes can affect experience, but only indirectly.

Pg 237 – “Especially interesting in this respect is the role of belatedness or what Freud termed Nachtraglichkeit. For Freud there was a period of latency between an initial, potentially traumatizing event and a later event that in some sense recalled it and triggered a traumatic response. The trauma depended on the interval or period of latency between events 0 an interval that was not itself experienced but related to a very intense form of experience in the acting out or compulsive repetition of the past itself experienced as if it were fully present. One may also refer here to the role of belated recognitions related to a passage of time and a series of subsequent developments that enable one to see something in the past that agents in the past (including oneself) could not see in that way themselves.”

~ So sometimes the “founding trauma” or experience that creates identity crisis does not happen immediately, but follows a period of latency of the event joining into the personal heritage and some other event or reflection on the event later triggering the crisis.

Pg 238 – “One may have a subject position without experiencing it, and often one’s experience of it depends on a recognition, at times an insulting recognition, coming from others. But subject positions are crucial for both experience and identity. Identity-formation might even be defined in non-essentialized terms as a problematic attempt to configure and, in certain ways, coordinate subject positions-in-process. This attempt would involve a limited, variable, but significant role for the responsible agency of individuals and groups, with the possibility of creating new subject positions (ones not beholden to victimization, for example). With respect to subject positions and their role in social life, one may ask whether there has ever been a politics that has not in some significant sense been an identity politics and whether criticisms of certain forms of identity politics are, often implicitly, made in favor of other (often idealized past or utopian) forms of identity politics (e.g., a nostalgia for the 1960s idealized or selectively remembered as a period of universalistic values and alliance politics).”

~ So identity formation might actually just be the self trying to reflect and sole the problems of and coordinate the issues related to one’s subject experience.

Pg 238 – “I have intimated that identity-formation is a matter of recognizing and coming to terms with one’s subject positions, coordinating them, examining their compatibility, testing them, and either validating them by a process of reproduction and renewal or transforming them through questioning and related work on the self and in society. Any resultant identity would have at most an internally dialogized and self-critical coherence. Moreover, insofar as experience is a (if not the) basis of identity, the problematics of experience carry over into identity.”

~ Experience and identity are interrelated and cannot be separated. While the process involved in bringing experience to identity is long, it comes after much self-reflection and critical analysis of the experience and what it means for the self.

Pg 241 – “Objectification is a process through which the other is positioned as an object of description, analysis, commentary, critique, and experiment. It distances one from the experience of the other, notably in terms of empathic or compassionate understanding, and it restricts one’s own experience in the production of knowledge to the process of objectification itself, hence to aloofness and at times ironic or critical detachment. Objectivism carries this process to extremes and makes it the exclusive basis of valid knowledge, particularly within certain disciplinary contexts.”

~ Objectivism is taking the emotion and the self out of experience. If one objectifies a situation one might create dissonance within oneself over what happened, and what one feels like happened.

Pg 241 – “Processing information is often construed as an objectifying procedure. With respect to extreme or traumatizing events and experiences, objectification not only functions to produce knowledge but also serves as a protective shield for the investigator which may be necessary in warding off possibly disorienting types of identification.”

~ We have to objectify information on experience in order to process it. We typically choose to objectify by only processing that which we know and understand and ignoring the emotions and ideas of what others might have experienced and known.

Pg 241 – “Objectivity in a desirable sense should be seen as a process of attempting to counteract identificatory and other phantasmatic tendencies without denying, or believing one can fully transcend them. Rather, limited but significant objectification should be (242) cogently related to other discursive and signifying possibilities depending on the nature of the object of study and how one is able to negotiate one’s own subject positions. Objectification is bound up with reality-testing that does not eliminate affect or involvement in one’s responsive attempt to understand the other but may check unmediated identification and related modes of phantasmatic investment, including being haunted or possessed by the other (something I indicated may be inevitable for victims of trauma and perhaps for those empathetically unsettled by their experience). Moreover, the distance required for critical analysis becomes deceptive if it is not itself tested and contested by an empathic attempt at understanding others and their contexts of behavior.”

~More information on objectivity. Not really sure if this is important yet.

Elsewhere, USA; Dalton Conley

Pg 7 – “Changes in three areas of our lives – the economy, the family, and technology – have combined to alter the social world and give birth to this new type of American professional. This new breed – the intravidual – has multiple selves competing for attention within his/her own mind, just as, externally, she or he is bombarded by multiple stimuli simultaneously. The necessity of managing these multiple “flows” in a social world where many boundaries have fallen away forms a new ethic for American life. In short, for many of us, intravidualism has displaced – or at least competes with – indvidualism. Whereas in American individualism, the ethical imperative was to first find oneself – that is, one’s authentic inner core – and then to let that authenticity guide our choices in life, intravidualism is an ethic of managing the myriad data streams, impulses, desires, and even consciousnesses that we experience in our heads as we navigate multiple worlds.”

~ So while America was founded on rugged individualism, we now have create rugged intravidualism. In order to compete with all of the various self-representations and possible selves in the real world that have extremely high-ranking cultures and we deal with in extremely various environments we have created multiple selves more diverse than before. While we more than likely always had multiple selves they were not as noticeable as they are now because we have more ways to play out the possible selves and due to more connections and more interactions with different people we are able to generate more and more possible selves that lead us to more and more selves created. So, now, instead of managing one self to be true to we have to manage multiple selves and become intraviduals.

Pg 86 – “The essential character of positional goods in our time is that the satisfaction they provide is not intrinsic to their value to an individual – i.e., their ability to satisfy hunger, thirst, or even to express ourselves. Rather, their utility relies almost entirely on their relative social position. In this way, many of the goods we consume reflect the same interpenetration of the social into the self – colonizing, slicing, and dicing the modern notion of distinct personhood into the multiple selves (each linked to an (87) external reference group) of the intravidualistic era.” Goes on to talk about how the same product can bring different emotions depending on people and environmental issues.

~ This relates to identity-possessions. We relate certain items to certain cultural identities. To fulfill our rich identity we have to have luxurious items. The more things we have the more identities they relate to and try to fulfill. But, at the same time, no one object has an overarching meaning. To me, my tennis racket might symbolize excitement and my identity of a tennis player. To another the racket might symbolize despair and their identity of a failed tennis player.

Pg 156 – “Perhaps the most fundamental line that has been breached is that between the “self” and the “other.” The interpenetration of the social world into our daily consciousness – our orientation to elsewhere – has the ultimate effect of colonizing and fragmenting not just our attentions but our very identities. The result is often a competing cacophony of multiple selves all jostling for pole position in our mind.”

~ So, they are saying that the reason why we are fragmenting into so many multiple selves is because the self and the other no longer stand completely separate. I again relate this back to the idea that communication across the country has opened us into seeing more opportunities, creating more possible selves, and opening us up to more self-representations being created. With more self-representations comes more cultures to rank and more fighting to be ranked highly.

Pg 156 – “…Imply the fragmentation of the individual by instead using the prefix intra, meaning “within.” The irony, of course, is that the intravidual is just as much an “intervidual” (inter meaning “between”), since it is the networked nature of our new, Elsewhere economy and the penetration of others into us that shatters the individual.”

~ So the new individual is working just as much within their various selves as between their various selves. I wonder what indi- means when related to individual.

Pg 157 – “By contrast, modern society is characterized by sets of overlapping affiliations that may be unique to each person. Our town and our family may not coincide, for example, if our sister has moved to another state. Nor might our nation and our religion, if we happen to be part of a of a minority group that got “trapped” in a state that was founded on a single religion model.”

~ This is like personal heritage and culture. Our personal heritage is made of sets of overlapping affiliations that are unique to each individual. The cultures that form the affiliations form the building blocks of the personal heritage.

Pg 159 – “It is only when the groups don’t match up – when we are confronted with difference and when those differences are multifaceted – that the individual emerges. In this way, it is not a choice. It’s not all about voluntary association. It’s also about differences that are noted by others about us. We may feel like a woman inside, for example, but look like a man to everyone else – to take the case of gender. These disjunctures mean that we need to see ourselves as others see us in our social calculations – something that every kid learns to do, with the notable exception of many children on the autistic spectrum. Self-reflectiveness – and thus individualism and the social self – arises from creating an objective view of ourselves when we are forced into the exercise of seeing us as others who don’t share our identities see us.”

~ Only when conflict forms between our cultures and self-representations of these cultures that our individuality emerges. We would all be cookie cutters if it weren’t for the fact that our overlapping affiliations are all different because we all grew up with different personal heritages.

Pg 161 – “The difference is that today there is no need for anyone to reconcile the many facets of their identities. They can just create a new e-mail account for that gay affair, that membership in the online Wicca group, or that Dungeons & Dragons user group that the CEO finds too embarrassing to own up to in the presence of work colleagues.”

~ Part of the reason why no one really understands possible selves, self-representations, etc. is because we do not need to end them or change them, per se. We can have issues working out which one is dominant, but they can all co-exist within ourselves and can work between ourselves (intra and intervidual).

Pg 162 – “…For the most part the boundaries of social groups on these online networks has become so diluted as to lose all exclusivity. And with no exclusivity, there is no meaning to the group. No meaning to the group, then no identity. No identity, then no self. We can look at everyone, but we see right through them to their own “friends,” and so on, ad infinitum, in a hall of one-way social mirrors.”

~ We cannot all be in the same group, because if we were there would be no exclusivity, therefore no group, therefore no identity, therefore no self. We need to have exclusivity to have a culture.

Pg 163 – “As modernists, we don’t take well to the salience of ascriptive cate-(164)gories. They feel reductive and demeaning of our individuality.”

~ We don’t like to be assigned to cultures because then they don’t seem as much of a part of ourselves and those groups we self-identify with. But, at the same point in time, we have to have the ascribed categories to form our personal heritage when we are younger and do not fully comprehend what it means to choose various selves over other various selves.

Pg 164 – “Simmel claimed, after all, that our individuality comes from the unique intersection of groups that we embody. When it doesn’t feel so unique anymore – thanks to Amazon or Woody Allen – our very selfhood is diminished.”

~ We need to feel unique to feel like our selves are working. This is why we need to have so many possible selves, it’s a defense mechanism to make sure that our minds continue to function properly.

Pg 166 – “But I was bringing a modernist conception of privacy to the online world. Privacy as we knew it was predicated on a certain division between “front stage” and “back stage” (to use the phrases of the 1950s sociologist Erving Goffman). The front stage is where we present ourselves according to a certain script and where everyone knows and expects social life to follow a patterned structure. Back stage, in short, is where we can be ourselves, where we may let others peek in once in a while to see the “real” us – the authentic self. However, in a world where identities are not anchored within a single body – at the intersection of those group affiliation – there is no “authenticity” to act as lodestone for a private self. When we can have multiple selves with the click of a mouse and the creation of a new online identity, there is no single core to protect from public view. Self-protection is not achieved by withholding; rather, is accomplished by offering up more and more information and identities until each identity is everywhere in the social house of mirrors and we cannot know from “authentic” anymore. We hide in plain sight.”

~ So the front stage is the working self-concept in action. The back stage is the rest of the self thinking and reflecting on all of its various possible selves, self-representations, self-conceptions, etc. The front stage is just the tip of the iceberg to the back stage. Those who get to hear us verbalize our “back stage” are those who get to see more of the authentication of our selves. Ultimate protection for our selves that are back stage emerges when we bring forth all of our back-stage selves and use them all so that we no longer have to juggle which self to use or not use, we can use them all. But this really wouldn’t work in every situation.

Pg 169 – “In “The Strength of Weak Ties,” Granovetter argued that, ironically, it is often relatively weak ties – connections to folks you don’t know all that well and that are no reinforced by other indirect pathway – that turn out to be quite valuable because they bring new information. The strength of weak ties has been found to be especially useful for job (and romantic) searches. In a densely connected network, the individuals probably know the same people, hear of the same job openings, have the same contacts, and so on. By contrast, once in a while when you go home to visit your parents aren’t close friends with buy think is generally a nice person, probably has a completely different set of connections. The irony is that this weak tie provides the most opportunities.”

~ We gather information from those we connect with. It is easy to gather from strong ties because we see them so often. It is much more difficult to gather from weak ties because we see them so rarely. But, what we gain from weak ties is more variety in information that keeps us creating possible selves and self-representations that keeps us constantly regenerating and reconfiguring the self. This work the self does to regulate itself keeps the rest of the individual from becoming overly passive and losing it’s individuality.

Reconstructing social identity; Kay Deaux

Pg 4 – “…Identity lends itself to a variety of interpretations. In the present analysis, identity refers to social categories in which an individual claims membership as well as the personal meaning associated with those categories.”

~ Identity is social; the self is not social. Identity relates to personal meaning and personal ownership of cultures.

Pg 4 – “Thus identity is a way that we, as cultural observers or social scientists, can describe certain aspects of individual definition and behavior.”

~ Identity helps us to self-define our own self-knowledge and actions.

Pg 4 – “The term reconstruction intentionally evokes associations with the current discourse on construction and deconstruction.”

~ I guess I’m not the first person to think of identity in terms of construction and reconstruction.

Pg 4 – “Deconstruction, as literary critics have introduced the term, argues that one must question the text – that categories must be taken apart, examined for their underlying assumptions, and considered in terms of multiple meanings.”

~ This relates to talking about all the parts of identity and not just the basic word identity. Like how I’m going back and describing the self and culture and personal history.

Pg 4 – “Ascribed categories such as gender, race, and ethnicity are forms of identity that provide a basis for self-definition. So, too, are groups that evolve to provide support or political clout to those who identify with them, such as Gray Panthers or associations of family members of people with Alzheimer’s disease.”

~ Self-definition comes from self-knowledge and cultural affiliations.

Pg 5 – Speaking of Turner (1987) His analysis refers to three levels of abstraction in self-categorization, which constitute human identity, social identity, and personal identity.”

~ Hmm, interesting the three forms of identity. Personal identity = self; social identity = identity; human identity = combo of the two?

Pg 5 – “Erikson describes the resolution of identity crises as a major stage of development (though one that can be revisited), and Marcia and his followers measure identity integration as a stable personality disposition.”

~ I agree, being about to get through an identity crisis leads to a maturation and development.

Pg 5 – “Although I agree with Hogg and Abrams in viewing identities in terms of stable and definable entities, I see the distinction between personal and social as somewhat arbitrary and misleading. Rather than being cleanly separable, social and personal identity are fundamentally interrelated. Personal identity is defined, at least in part, by group memberships, and social categories are infused with personal meaning.”

~ I like the concept of personal and social identities being interrelated and unable to be completely separated. We are social beings, therefore, even things that are entirely personal and internal are still effected by external things.

Pg 6 – “…Identity is represented by clusters of identities and related clusters of traits” (citing other source)

~ I like this, I think it might work well while trying to draw out my idea on paper.

Pg 6 – “The identities at the lower level…are more specific and distinct from one another. Identities at higher levels share attributes with one or more of the lower categories while including other attributes, as well.”

~ The more you break down attributes the more they will be shared with other identities, another good thing for drawing out idea on paper.

Pg 6 – “Social identities are those roles or membership categories that a person claims as representative.”

~ So really, social identities are the ones someone claims membership to. Would personal identities be the one the person does not claim but is in anyways?

Pg 6 – “Personal identity refers to those traits and behaviors that the person finds self-descriptive, characteristics that are typically linked to one or more of the identity categories.”

~ Apparently, not. But good definition anyways.

Pg 6 – “The general framework for identity that I propose considers identity in terms of reasonably stable categories of membership to which a person claims to belong, together with sets of personal meanings and experiences linked to the identities.”

~ Amen to that! Great definition of identity and how it relates to other things.

Pg 6 – “The position of an identity within the overall structure is more than mere description. Particular positions may have important affective and behavioral correlates, as a recent study of women with lupus suggests…”

~ So identity can influence behavior, too.

Pg 8 – “A major function of group identification, according to Tajfel, is the enhancement of self-esteem. In social identity theory, self-esteem is enhanced through favorable comparisons between one’s own group and an outgroup.”

~ Why we need culture and group identification.

Pg 8 – “Social identity theory has tended to treat various categories of membership as theoretically equivalent, in keeping with the inclination of social psychology to deal with variables at a generic, rather than a specific, level of analysis.”

~ I disagree, as think various categories of membership are not equivalent. They are ranked differently than one another.

Pg 9 – “In social psychology, an interesting case for this debate is the discipline’s relative emphasis on internal versus external validity.”

~ Hmm, validity of an identity, this is important. It doesn’t matter if an identity is challenged, what really matters is how much validity you put towards that identity. If you think it is very valid then it can withstand more challenges/threats than those identities with lesser validity (both internal and external).

Pg 9 – “Role theory, of course, embedded self-categorizations in terms of relationships with others and a structural setting in which those relationships were carried out.”

~ Semi-definition of role theory.

Pg 11 – “Social identities, as conceptualized here, have stability, duration, and permanence. Although their expression may fluctuate with situation, the basic structure is relatively stable. Against the background of stability, however, important changes occur, precipitated either by a reshuffling of internal priorities or by alterations in the external environment. Longitudinal analysis enables us to look at these changing patterns and consequences.”

~ So the general social identity is stable, just various smaller bits change (like the self). Even with the stability, though, changes happen due to internal ranking changes or the external environment changing drastically.

Pg 11 – “There are many forms that change can take (Deaux, 1991). Identities can change in their evaluative aspect, as this study showed. Identity categories themselves can be added or deleted. Or, more simply, the characteristics associated with an identity can shift.”

~ Love this, describes identity changing.

Identification as the basis for a theory of motivation; Nelson Foote

Pg 14 – “…A person learns to recognize standard situations and to play expected roles in them according to the status defined for him in each.”

~ Role theory; personal history combined with cultures makes self-conceptions that turn into roles that dominate how the working-self-concept function. Basically, creates identities.

Pg 14 – “Lindesmith and Strauss are far more daring in describing motives, like Mills, as rationalizations of acts, whereby one relates his acts to previous experience and to the values of the groups to which one feels he must justify his behavior.”

~ Personal history combines with cultures to create values/rank identities & roles.

Pg 15 – “So that we may ignore non-motivated behavior, motivation or motivated behavior has to be defined.”

~ Have to define things to be able to understand them completely.

Pg 15 – “To generalize, motivated behavior is distinguished by its prospective reference to ends in view, by being more or less subject to conscious control through choice among alternative ends and means.”

~ Motivation is the driving force in what makes us make decisions. Without motivation we would not be able to function.

Pg 15 – “In a sentence, we take motivation to refer to the degree to which a human being as a participant in the ongoing social process in which he necessarily finds himself, defines a problematic situation as calling for performance of a particular act, with more or less anticipated consummations and consequences, and thereby his organism releases the energy appropriate to performing it.”

~ In other words, motivation is the amount of self-definition, energy and action on uses in situation.

Pg 16 – “It is in the fact that the empty bottle of role and status suddenly has a content. That content is not drives, tensions, or needs; it is identity.”

~ Role + status = identity. Therefore, self-conception + ranked culture = identity.

Pg 16 – “And as the analogy suggests, the process of analyzing the self into its parts may go on indefinitely.”

~ Haha, good thing I stopped before I went too far.

Pg 16 – “Just this wrapping of all the particular constituents of a person’s identity into one round bundle and labeling it “the self” have long delayed the analysis of the self and of identity.”

~ The self and identity are separate, but they do not always get defined separately and they need to be to be able to understand both.

Pg 17 – “We mean by identification appropriation of and commitment to a particular identity or series of identities. As a process, it proceeds by naming; its products are ever-evolving self-conceptions – with the emphasis on the con-, that is, upon ratification by significant other.”

~ Self-identification is the self-concept committing to identities, which creates self-conceptions. Outsider-identification is when others identify us. Basically, self-conceptions are the way we see our identities. We can have multiple self-conceptions for the same identity, though. For instance, I am a tennis player (identity) but my self-conception of myself playing tennis when I was in high school is completely different than my self-conception of me as a tennis player now. Therefore, the identity has remained, but the self-conception has changed.

Pg 17 – “Every man must categorize his fellows in order to interact with them. We never approach another person purely as a human being or purely as an individual. If a being is human, it shares characteristics with a class of human beings which distinguish them from the non-human.”

~ Categorization is what defines us and how we define. It is crucial to us understanding the world around us. We can never completely uncategorized, so we must understand why we categorize to understand ourselves.

Pg 17-18 – “The common man is always classifying thus. And to make things harder for the social psychologist, his classifications vary with time and place, as identities are elaborated and re-determined. Moreover, the common man assumes that categories applied to his fellows immediately indicate the motives to be imputed to them. “I dislike Communists because I am a Catholic and they are atheistic” is an example of such common-sense behavior.”

~ Thoughts change so quickly that it is hard to study and understand them.

Pg 18 – “Likewise, his identities give common meaning, stability and predictability to his own behavior as long as he clings to them.”

~ Identity, such as my tennis player identity, stabilizes the variety of self-conceptions and possible selves that come from one identity.

Pg 18 – “If the regularities in human behavior are organized responses to situations which have been classified more or less in common by the actors in them, then names motivate behavior.”

~ Having roles and identities motivate our actions because they tell us what to do to keep the status quo.

Pg 18 – “Establishment of one’s own identity to oneself is as important in interaction as to establish it for the other. One’s own identity in a situation is not absolutely given but is more or less problematic.”

~ Not only is self-definition important to identity, but outsider-definition is just as important. One’s self-definition is not a given, but can cause problems with outsider-definitions.

Pg 18 – “Social situations always contain standard elements, and always some unique elements, if only a different position in time and space. When one enters a new situation, he attempts to relate it to old ones by familiar sigs, and his response may be automatic. Or the preponderance of new elements may make the situation too problematic for a habitual response to be appropriate. For its definition, nonetheless, he must approach it from some fixed point of reference. He must start from what is most definite, find some given elements in it. His capacities are given, but they constitute only inert limits to his potential behavior, so they are not definitive enough. Although some pressing organic irritation may be quite definite, again his physical condition helps create the situation he confronts, but does not alone dictate what his response will be. The identity of the others involved is dependent upon his own in the familiar reciprocal manner. So inevitably the elements which have to be “taken as given” are his identities or, more exactly, his special pattern of identity.”

~ Every social situation is different. We deal with the change by relating new things to old things, new situations to old situations. We always start with what we already know and have defined. Experience limits potential selves and potential behavior. Other’s identities relate to ours because they judge off of our responses and their own personal history.

Pg 18 – “When doubt of identity creeps in, action is paralyzed. Only full commitment to one’s identity permits a full picture of motivation.”

~ If you reach a moratorium, you cannot do anything. You must be fully committed to have full motivation. This is why rnnking selves is so important. The more commitment you have to a self or identity, the more motivation you have to fulfill that self or identity.

Pg 19 – “Doubt of identity, or confusion, where it does not cause complete disorientation, certainly drains action of meaning, and thus limits mobilization of the organic correlates of emotion, drive and energy which constitute the introspectively-sensed “push” of motivated action.”

~ Doubt of identity leads to a lack of motivation, and a lack of action. Therefore, this limits the ability of the person to function in social settings.

Pg 19 – “We are limited to the experience available to us from birth, although these limitations become more flexible as we gain in variety of experience.”

~ We are limited to our own personal histories; we cannot have others. Although, as we grow older and gain experiences our personal history grows and lessens our limitations accordingly.

Pg 19 – “Primarily then the compulsive effect of identification upon behavior must arise from absence of alternatives, from unquestioned acceptance of the identities case upon one by circumstances beyond his control (or thought to be).”

~ Unquestioned acceptance of identities only happens when no other identity alternatives are there (rare).

Pg 19 – “His accruing conceptions of who he is are usually taken as something verging upon ultimate reality rather than as ultimately arbitrarily ascriptions by others.”

~ As one gain more and more self-conceptions the person gets closer and closer to complete self-actualization, not closer and closer to having the self be completely outsider-defined.

Pg 19 – “Thenceforth his identities accrue from more conscious choice and pursuit of the values he has discovered in his experience.”

~ Identities grow in size due to the choices and actions of a person due to their own unique personal history.

Pg 19 – “Value, we would insist, is discovered in experience, not conferred upon it from without.”

~ Ranking comes from within, not from outsider-definition.

Pg 19 – “While we can only mobilize for our next act when it or its elements can be construed as similar to acts which have gone before, the determination of the appropriate act is made in the situation, not prior to it.”

~ We cannot predecide motivation, it happens in the moment with the working self-concept and identity all working together.

Pg 19-20 – “Experience is continually being recombined in new patterns; and even the most habitual act must be defined as appropriate to its immediate context to be launched overtly.”

~ Personal history constantly changes because the present is constantly becoming the past. Even habits we form can change if our present changes.

Pg 20 – “Because we have the capacity through language for conceptualizing these remembered goods as values, and the ingenuity to devise new schemes ofrelations under which they may be revived in the same or fuller measure, we can invent new roles or deviate from conventional ones. Also, we simultaneously inherit thereby the constant possibility of conflict – both internal and external – which characterizes members of human society.”

~We have the ability to change or create new roles and identities because of our ability to rank our own selves and cultures. Therefore, we constantly have dissonance through internal and external changes and developments going on.

Pg 20 – “Without the binding thread of identity, one could not evaluate the succession of situations. Literally, one could say there would be no value in living, since value only exists or occurs relative to particular identities – at least value as experienced by organisms which do not live in the mere present…”

~ Without identity we would have nothing ranked or valued. Therefore, we would not know what motivations we have, therefore we wouldn’t really exist because we would never take action.

Pg 20 – “Moreover, it is only through identification as the sharing of identity that individual motives become social values and social values, individual motives.”

~ Identification leads to culture. Culture is the sharing of identity. Identity is the outward sharing of internal self-conceptions.

Pg 20 – “It is only because one conceives of himself, via a certain identity, as a member of a class which includes certain others, that he can enjoy or suffer the successes and failures of a group.”

~ Can only enjoy or suffer with culture if one has an identity of that culture.

Pg 21 – “…(3) identification is the process whereby individuals are effectively linked with their fellows in groups…”

~ Classification and identification are inherently linked. Identity leads to classification, but need identity to self-define and be motivated.

Pg 21 – “…(5) these categorizations of experience motivate behavior through the necessary commitment of individuals to particular concatenations of identity in all situations…”

~ Says what I say above about motivation.

Pg 21 – “…(6) commitment to particular identities arises through a limiting and discovering process of acquiring conceptions of self, which are confirmed, revised or elaborated partly by instruction from significant others and partly through direct experience…”

~ Ranking of selves comes from working self-conceptions which stay the same, change, or end due to social interaction and experience.

Pg 21 – “One has no identity apart from society; one has no individuality apart from identity”

~ Need others to form identity; need identity to form self. Therefore, need others to form self.