Concepts of the Self. Anthony Elliott

Concepts of the Self - Anthony  Elliott


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determination by social structures, on the one hand, and those who celebrate the authenticity and creativity of the self, on the other. As a result, the language used by social scientists to analyse selfhood varies considerably: sometimes theorists refer to ‘identity’, sometimes to ‘the subject’ or ‘subjectivity’, and sometimes simply to ‘the self’. These terminological differences are not always especially significant, primarily because these terms can all be said to denote a concern with the subjectivity of the individual. However, others argue that such terminological differences are worth close attention, if only because they reflect deep historical and political transitions. For example, it can plausibly be argued that the concepts of ‘the self’ and ‘identity’, though similar, are not coextensive, since there are forms of identity that are not based on the self, namely, forms of collective identity – such as those influenced by nationalism. In this reading, collective identity gains its power through the establishment and recognition of common interests, built upon forms of solidarity involving battles over, say, social exclusion, nation, class and the like. Similarly, the self is also shaped and defined against the backdrop of such political and public forces; yet the fabrication of the self, psychologically and emotionally, is rightly understood to involve something more subjective, particularly the complex ways desire, emotion and feeling influence both conscious and unconscious experience of sexuality, gender, race and ethnicity.

      One might add, though this is much debated, that the influence of traditional identity categories has dramatically loosened in our age of light mobility, liquid experiences and dispersed commitments. In present-day society, as we will examine in some detail in the Conclusion, private grievances and emotional anxieties connect less and less with the framing of collective identities; in more and more cases, private troubles remain private. Contemporary hopes and dreads, as rehearsed in popular culture, are something to be experienced by each individual alone. Thus, we witness a general shift from identity to the self as a new marker of our times – in terms of both engagement with individual experience and the wider world, but also as concerns new forms of domination and exploitation.

      I shall not trace the nuances of these conceptual differences here; the philosophical history of subjectivity has been extensively discussed elsewhere. (See Anthony Elliott, Identity Troubles, London: Routledge, 2016; and the second edition of Anthony Elliott (ed.), Routledge Handbook of Identity Studies, London: Routledge, 2019.) But I do want to say something in this Introduction, however briefly, about versions of the self in current sociology and social theory.


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