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The Self and Culture: Identity, reflexivity and intimacy

SOC207 Lecture four

Dr Jordan McKenzie

Lecture Outline

• Beck/Giddens: Reflexive modernisation
• Giddens: The transformation of intimacy

•Jamieson’s critique

• Bauman on Liquid Modernity and the loss of intimacy
• DuBois on Double Consciousness
• Honneth and Fraser on recognition

“Moreover, any inner experiencing, through which I become aware of my own disposition, can never by itself bring me to a consciousness of my own individuality. I experience the latter only through a comparison of myself with other people; at that point alone I become aware of what distinguishes me from other” (1972: 231)

Wilhelm Dilthey

Structure

Agency

Line

Connection Line

Connection Line

“Structure refers, in social analysis, to the structuring properties allowing the ‘binding’ of time–space in social systems, the properties across varying spans of time and space and which lend them ‘systematic form’. To say that structure is a ‘virtual order’ of transformative relations means that social systems, as reproduced social practices, do not have ‘structures’ but rather exhibit ‘structural properties’” (Giddens 1984: 17)

Ulrich Beck Continued

“The ‘reflexivity’ in ‘reflexive modernization’ is often misunderstood. It is not simply a redundant way of emphasizing the self-referential quality that is a constitutive part of modernity. Instead, what ‘reflexive modernization’ refers to is a distinct second phase: the modernization of modern society. When modernization reaches a certain stage it radicalizes itself. It begins to transform, for a second time, not only the key institutions but also the very principles of society. But this time the principles and institutions being transformed are those of modern society.” (Beck 1994: 1)

Giddens: The Transformation

of Intimacy (1992)

• According to Giddens, this new reflexive era has made relationships more democratic.

•Passionate love - Universal

•Romantic love - Cultural

• Relationships no longer based on reproduction, income, or tradition.

• ‘Plastic Sexuality’

• Newfound freedoms of intimate self expression have led to new kinds of relationships.

• New negotiated roles, terms, and agreements.

Lynn Jamieson: Intimacy Transformed? (1999)

• Jamieson is not convinced, despite these changes she writes that “Much of personal life remains structured by inequalities” (1999: 477)
• Giddens is individualising intimacy, which ought to be based on connections.

•Furthermore, to say that there are no longer power dynamics in relationships is absurd.

• “While drawing on particular pieces of feminist work, there is no sustained discussion in The Transformation of Intimacy of the feminist scholarship that has subjected the interrelationships between ‘private’ and ‘public’, ‘personal’ and ‘political’ to intensive theorising and empirical exploration over the last decades” (1999: 481)
• is conclusively documented that the early sexual experiences of most young people involve neither the negotiation of mutual pleasure nor a fusion of sex and emotional intimacy” (1999: 484)

Bauman: Liquid Modernity (2000)

• Bauman is skeptical about all this new freedom.

•It seems to be making us unhappy

• are in a period of ‘Liquid Modernity’ where social structures are ‘melting’ and ‘resetting’, but this can make society a hollow and meaningless place.
• Individuals are seeking to consume relationships, rather than produce them.
• Love is irrational, not calculated or negotiated according to rules.

Simone deBeauvoir: 
The Second Sex [1949]

"Man is defined as a human being and woman as a female – whenever she behaves as a human being she is said to imitate the male."

"One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.”

“Representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with absolute truth.”

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W.E.B. Du Bois:

Double Consciousness

“The Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second sight in this American world — a world which yields him no self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness — an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.” (270)

Du Bois: The Veil

The Veil represents the distance between the experiences of whites and blacks in the work of DuBois.

The Souls of Black Folks (1903) is an attempt to allow whites to see behind the veil and into the subjective experiences of being an Other.

Why is this important?

Because for Du Bois, White people have no idea what the subjective experience of being Black involves.

It would never have occurred to them to consider it.

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The Souls of White folk (1920)

Building on the notion of double consciousness, Du Bois argues that White people have no sense of ‘Whiteness’. They do not know the extent of their own privilege and therefore, cannot grasp the depth of racism.

Yet, for Du Bois, Blacks are intimately aware of this process of ‘othering’. This leads Du Bois to claim that

• them I am singularly clairvoyant. I see in and through them. I view them from unusual points of vantage. Not as a foreigner do I come, for I am native, not foreign, bone of their thought and flesh of their language.” (285)
• know their thoughts and they know that I know. This knowledge makes them now embarrassed, now furious!” (285)

“They deny my right to live and be and call me misbirth! My word is to them mere bitterness and my soul, pessimism... [but] I see them ever stripped, – ugly, human.” (285)

Axel Honneth: The Struggle for Recognition (1992)

• Honneth argues that the self develops through experiencing recognition from others.

• Heavily influenced by Hegel - the self is intersubjective.
• calls this ‘Mutual self-realization’. This is a social process that we all experience. Not strictly individual.

• Recognition is a cultural phenomenon, but it is not ‘merely cultural’. To deny the self through a denial of recognition is a matter of civil rights.

• Therefore the symbolic denial of rights/self is an injustice on the same level as the loss of legal or political rights.

• Freedom’s Right (2014). A theory of rights based in the analysis of social life, not in universality, natural justice, subjective or objective epistemologies or ontologies.

Honneth: Disrespect (2007)

• Autonomy has become ‘decentered’ in modernity. This is largely the result of a distorted use of reason in social interaction.

• Therefore freedom is highly problematic.

• This leads to a problematic mode of self-understanding, and results in a damaging form of self limitation.
• ‘Decentered Autonomy’, is the notion that the individual can no longer be presumed to be “transparent to or in command of itself” (2007: 182)