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.