THE SATURATED SELF
Kenneth Gergen, 1991
Romanticism and the reality of the deep interior
The soul—sacred forces dwell in each person
Romantic love
Imagination
The genius
Deep emotion
Relationship as a communion of souls
The rise of modernism
Return of the Enlightenment, reason and observation
Grand narrative of progress
The question for essence
Metaphor of the machine
The production of modern man (sic)
True and accessible self
Manufacturing the individual
Personality and the autonomous individual
TECHNOLOGIES OF SOCIAL SATURATION
Low tech
- The railway
- Public postal services
- The motor car
- The telephone
- Radio
- Cinema
- Printed books
High tech
- Air transport
- Television/Video
- Electronic innovations
THE PROCESS OF SOCIAL SATURATION
"A century ago, social relationship were largely confined to the distance of an easy walk" p. 61
- Multiplying relationships:
perseverance of the past the acceleration of the future
- Bending of life-forms
- Relating in new keys:
friendly lover, microwave family
- Intensifying interchange
POPULATING THE SELF
"…the acquisition of multiple and disparate potentials for being" p. 69
"…not only opens relationships to new ranges of possibility but one’s subjective life also becomes more fully laminated" p. 71
"… this cacophony of potential is of no small consequence for either romanticist of modernist visions of the self… committed identity becomes an increasingly arduous achievement" p. 73
MUTLIPHRENIA
The splitting of the individual into a multiplicity of self-investments
- Vertigo of the valued
- Expansion of inadequacy
- Rationality in Recession
THE EMERGENCE OF POSTMODERN CULTURE
The loss of the identifiable:
with multiple perspectives things in themselves disappear from view
The social construction of reality
Authority challenged
The breakdown of rational order:
rationality as one tradition among many
Self-reflection and the intrusion of irony:
once doubt is unleashed, one confronts the awful irony that all one’s doubts are also subject to double
FROM SELF TO RELATIONSHIP
"‘Who am I?’ is a teeming world of provisional possibilities" p.
139
The Human Being in Question:
"… no voice is now trusted to rescue the ‘real person’ from the sea of portrayals" p. 140
- Gender gerrymandering:
The idea that there are two sexes, male and female—now moves slowly toward mythology p. 143
Constructed Selves
- The strategic manipulator:
as the modern self is pulled in different directions one may feel the true self is lost in the charade
- The pastiche personality:
it becomes increasingly difficult to remember to what core essence one should remain true
- The relational self:
the self is replaced by the reality of relatedness—from ‘you’ and ‘I’ to ‘us’. One’s own role becomes as participant in a social process that eclipses personal being
- The ecological self: relations among people are inseparable from the relations of people to the more than human world
A COLLAGE OF POSTMODERN LIFE
Breaking the ties that bind
- The crisis of intimacy and commitment: entering into a relationship with a multiplicity of potentials makes it enormously difficult to locate steady forms of relationship
- Fractional relationships: why not take one-eighth of me?
- Ersatz being: the capacity to enter into relationships of widely varying forms
INVITATION TO THE CARNIVAL
Seeing life and language not as truth but as forms of play
"…we might play with the truths of the day, shake them about, try them on like funny hats. Serious concerns are left at the carnival gate" p. 189
"Every ‘reality’ makes a fool of those who do not participate; every ‘valid’ and ‘true’ proposition creates a class of the deluded who do not share that language. For every ‘superior’ position, those deemed ‘inferior’ are pressed into silence. As Lyotard says, ‘The C19 and C20 have given us as much terror as we can take. We have played a high enough price for the nostalgia of the whole and the one…’" p. 189
The self as engaged in ‘serious play’