Lecture 4 Handout

Lecture 4: Self-Identity and Social Change: The Making of the Modern Individual

Now moving into the next phase of the module. How have changing social conditions altered people’s sense of self? What are the consequences of recent social changes? How to interpret, for example, the growing preoccupation with Self-knowledge, development and fulfilment?

Following weeks considering recent developments but begin by looking at – in admittedly very general terms – how at the on-set of modernity we can see the making of the modern individual. It is here that we can see the beginnings of a long-running process:

INDIVIDUALISATION – increasingly in modernity people came to make sense of the world as individuals and to value their individuality.

Modernity and Self-Identity

What was the psychological impact of the Great Transformation? Pioneering work on this issue done by George Simmel around the turn of the C20th century,

“In modernity individuals move between a great number of social circles each of which only involves part of his personality. This segmentation of associations provides us with a greater sense of uniqueness and freedom - a consciousness of the self which encourages individualism.”

Simmel in his essay ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’ described the emergence of a distinctive urban personality. He argued that the pace, complexity and segmentation of modern life increased the number of non-intimate, standard relationships such as ones based on legal rules or the exchange of money. They also fostered a more calculating and self-conscious state of mind, with city dwellers often adopting a blasé attitude to the multiplicity of sights and people they encountered. In other words, city life produced a greater sense of individuality and detachment.

Simmel along with many of the key sociological thinkers of the C19th and C20th is arguing at heart that the modern social environment presented people with novel problems and opportunities as they attempted to do two fundamental things - interact with others and maintain an identity. The following have all contributed to a transformation in the ways in which people understand themselves and relate to other people:

1) Change of experience and the experience of change = detraditionalisation.
2) Relationships in premodern times took place in comparatively small-scale and stable contexts and rested on clear notions of social position, grounded, for example, in kinship or feudal hierarchies. Modern social environments are more fluid.
3) Many social practices in premodern societies rested on the relative similarity of background and outlook of all participants. Modern societies far more diverse.
4) In comparison with earlier social forms, there is a greater level of complexity and specialization in modern societies. The range of social roles has grown rapidly. Increasing fragmentation of society and of individual experience.
5) Greater range of social interactions. In premodern societies ‘others’ could be clearly categorized either as familiar or as strangers. Living in modernity requires a more subtle range of stances towards the many people we come across.
6) The fluid, large-scale and often impersonal character of modern societies make impression management - how we present ourselves to others - a highly significant but problematic endeavour. Difficulties arise out of "the pluralization of lifeworlds" - a diversification of both the contexts of social interaction and the types of encounter that can take place.(Peter Berger) This puts strain on our skills of ‘self-presentation’. Erving Goffman argues that acting is an appropriate metaphor for the conduct of modern life since this requires that we play a variety of roles each with a different stage and script. For Berger it also makes the decline of shared overarching symbols to provide the world with meaning.
7) Split between impersonal and personal worlds.
8) Role of mass media in providing interpretations and models of behaviour and experience.

To sum up this list of long-term developments - in different ways contributed to a modern experience of self, heightened awareness of individuality – of being an individual separate from the social contexts in which one operates - increased conscious reflection on self, behaviour and relationships. Paradox that it made a stable identity both more difficult and more important.

“... the deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of the individual to preserve the autonomy and individuality of his existence in the face of overwhelming social forces...” [Simmel]

Individualisation: unanswered questions

1) A single experience of modernity or many?

2) Heightened individuality but what kind of individuality?

3) Another side of modernity. Environments and institutions which are designed to dehumanise us and to rob us of individuality and autonomy.

In the sessions that follow we will be analysing the continuation of these processes of individualisation. Have they advanced to such a stage that people are no longer able to appreciate the social constraint, interconnections and interdependency?

“ There have always been individuals with problems, but once these would have been seen as moral choices in the context of the community or as struggles with the forces of destiny; the change has been towards seeing them in terms of individual morality with individual solutions and in terms of mental illness, psychological problems.” [Ian Craib, The Importance of Disappointment (1994) p98]

“ If they fall ill, it is because they were not resolute and industrious enough in following the health regime. If they stay unemployed, it is because they failed to learn the skills of winning an interview or because they did not try hard enough to find a job or because they are, purely and simply, work-shy. If they are not sure about their career prospects and agonise about their future, it is because they are not good enough at winning friends and influencing people and have failed to learn as they should the arts of self-expression and impressing the others. This is, at any rate, what they are told – and what they have come to believe, so they behave ‘as if’ this was, indeed, the truth of the matter. As Beck aptly and poignantly puts it, ‘how one lives becomes a biographical solution to systematic contradictions.’ Risks and contradictions go on being socially produced; it is just the duty and the necessity of coping with them that has been individualized.” [Zygmunt Bauman, Individualized Society (2001) p47]