The Presence of Self

The Presence of Self

R. S. Perinbanayagam
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Perinbanayagam, R. S., 1934–
The presence of self / R. S. Perinbanayagam.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN: 978-0-8476-9385-6

1. Self (Philosophy) I. Title.

BD438.5.P47 2000 99-35069
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 I dedicate this work to the memory of Kenneth Burke,
whom I almost met once, in the hope that his magisterial
thought will be more widely appreciated.
 It acts not from a centre to
Its object as remote,
But present is, when it doth view,
Being with the being it doth note.
Whatever it doth do,
It doth not by another engine work,
But by itself: which in the act doth lurk.
Its essence is transform’d into a true
And perfect act.
Thomas Traherne
 Contents

Preface
Acknowledgments
I
Dialogic Processes
1 Dialogic Acts
2 Rhetoric and the Self
II
Identificatory Processes

3 Identity: The Continuity and Differentiation of Self

4 The Poetics of Identity
III
The Self in Action

5 Speaking of the Self

6 The Plays of the Self
Epilogue
References
Index
About the Author
 Preface

One of the most frequently debated issues in contemporary sociological theory is

the nature and form of the agent, of the human being as an actor in his or her
own right. Many recent works have sought to provide theories of the agent as a
social and socialized actor. The sociology and social psychology that is derived
from the work of American pragmatism did not, however, have to self-
consciously and deliberatively concoct a theory of the agent. It was, from the
beginning itself, a theory of the agent, conceiving him or her as both a voluntary
actor and, the rumors to the contrary notwithstanding, as a structurally defined
and interactionally sensitive one, a minded organism and a self. The theory is not
only a symbolic interactionism but also a structuralist interactionism.
In these pages I develop this pragmatic theory of the agent further, contrast it
with certain other theories of the agent and agency and then examine the
implications of such a theory to selected areas of sociological interest. I begin
with a discussion of the concept of the act, drawing mainly from the work of G.
H. Mead and Susanne Langer, and proceed to use it to examine various
perspectives on the human actor that are current in the social sciences. This
examination yields a view of the individual as, inescapably and irrefutably, a
discursive actor with a discursive mind, who engages in richly textured acts that
dialogically involve the other and resist him or her at the same time. Actions,
then, occurring as they do in terms of the other, and of the environment as an
other too, are dialectical adjustments to both. The product of these discursive and
adjustive processes is the self. Such a self is present in all acts undertaken by a
human being; conversely all acts present a self. Acts and selves become, then,
ongoing accomplishments that incorporate the acts and selves of others.
These encounters between a self and the other are in fact conducted, I argue
further, drawing from the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and Kenneth Burke, by
deploying language in varying rhetorical modes and reaping the fruits thereof.
With these means a self is given a distinct identity. Identity then becomes a
rhetorical achievement, one supported by a logic of signs. Further, insofar as
identity is achieved through the use of language, a poetic of identity becomes
impossible to avoid. To use signs to construct identity is in fact a poetic
enterprise, and I delineate a few strategic examples of such a poetics of identity.
The last two chapters treat the activities of the self in various social
encounters. In the first of these, a number of conversational interactions are
analyzed to display the nature of the rhetorical processes involved in the
constitution and presentation of self. Besides the work of Bakhtin and Burke I
use various ideas from Paul Ricoeur and Paul Grice as resources for this
discussion.
In the final chapter I argue that selves are not only experienced, felt, and
presented but are also put into play by a cognitive and sentient and reflexive
actor with varying intentions and are also watched as the play is conducted and
consummated. It is possible, I think, for a symbolic and imaginative creature to
feel the world and act in it directly or vicariously.
In any case, here it is—a dialogue with various thinkers, often with their own
words—the final essay in a quest to understand the relationship between
language and existence. Issues raised in my earlier works are given further
discussion and elaboration and amendment just as new issues are presented.
Those who liked my earlier work may find this, too, of interest. As for the
others . . . well, the caravan moves on.
 Acknowledgments

In the production of this work, I have incurred several debts. Professor Doyle
McCarthy read several chapters and gave me valuable advice. I am also
extremely grateful to members of the East Side Book Club for allowing me to
record their proceedings for use in this work. It needed a special kind of
openness and generosity to allow a comparative stranger to listen to their
dialogue on matters profound and frivolous. I am grateful to my friend Anne
Snow for introducing me to the Book Club and helping me to transcribe the
tapes. I was also able to obtain the taped records of conversations in an office.
These two records of conversational interactions are cited in the text as “Book
Club Transcripts” and “Office Transcripts,” respectively.
Nalayini Fernando typed the manuscript from my handwritten version and, as
usual, did a splendid job. Veronica Manlow gave me exemplary editorial and
typographical assistance. I am truly grateful for this. Various skillful editors have
worked on this manuscript too and they deserve my thanks. Without their patient
and understanding work, the publishing of a book would be more troublesome
than it is.
Finally, I must thank the staff at the Hunter College library for the unfailing
courtesy and despatch with which they obtained books and articles for me.

CREDITS

Lines from “Many Happy returns” from W. H. Auden: Collected Poems by W. H.

Auden. Copyright © 1945 and renewed 1973. Reprinted by permission of
Random House, Inc.
Passages from The Philosophy of the Act by G. H. Mead. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, Ltd. Copyright 1938.
Lines from The Bald Soprano by Eugene Ionesco. Grove/Atlantic Inc.
Copyright 1958.
 Lines from The Geographical History of America or the Relation of Human
Nature to the Human Mind by Gerturde Stein. Vintage Books: New York.
Copyright 1976.
Lines from The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. Random House: New York.
Copyright 1952.
Passages from The Grammar of Motives by Kenneth Burke. Berkeley:
University of California Press. Copyright 1969.
 I

Dialogic Processes
 Chapter 1

Dialogic Acts

First Gentleman: Our deeds are fetters that we forge ourselves

Second Gentleman: Ay, truly: but I think it is the world that brings the iron.

George Eliot, Middlemarch

Acts or actions are the basic units with which living phenomena manifest their
presence in nature. Suzanne Langer has reviewed the relevant literature and has
argued for the centrality of the “act concept” in understanding the behavior of all
organisms. To begin with, she notes that “the difficulty of drawing a sharp line
between animate and inanimate things reflects a principle which runs through
the whole domain of biology; namely, that all categories tend to have imperfect
boundaries” (1967: 259). Organisms and plants for Langer have this “imperfect
boundary” between them to the extent that they both can be said to be able to
act. She describes these acts as follows:
It is with the concept of act that I am approaching living form in nature, only to find it exemplified
there at all levels of simplicity or complexity. . . . The act concept is a fecund and elastic concept. It
applies to natural events, of a special form which is very widely represented on the surface of the
earth . . . a form characteristic of living things, though not absolutely peculiar to them. . . . An act may
subsume another act, or even many other acts. It may also span other acts which go on during its rise
and consummation and cadence without becoming part of it. Two acts of separate inception may
merge so that they jointly engender a subsequent act. These and many other relations among acts form
the intricate dynamism of life which becomes more and more articulated, more and more concentrated
and intense, until some of its elements attain the phase of being felt, which I have termed “psychical,”
and the domain of psychology develops within the wider realm of biology, especially zoology. (1967:
261)

The “act concept” unifies the study of “living forms,” argues Langer, and
becomes the root of psychology as well. The “act concept” may unify living
form in one encompassing category but within it Langer accepts the existence of
simple acts and complex acts, or rather, acts of varying degrees of simplicity and
complexity, degrees that set apart human acts from those of amoebas or even rats
and fruit flies.
G. H. Mead, too, had given primacy to the act and he too included animals
and human beings in the same category as acting entities but went on to discuss
the special qualities that human acts bear. “The unit of existence,” Mead
observed,
is the act, not the moment. And the act stretches beyond the stimulus to the response. While most of
our acts stretch into the world that does not yet exist, they inevitably include immediate steps which
lie within the existent world, and the synchronizing, with recorded elements in some uniform process
of change, of attitudes in the act by means of the indication of these to the self, affords the only
approach to the definition of the span of existence. (1938: 65–66)

Mead comes to this conclusion after an exposition of the various “stages of

the act” in a rather abstract and at times obscure manner. Nevertheless, it is
possible to see a thread running through it connecting the voluntary moves that
an organism makes in various sequential stages in the world in which it finds
itself.
For Mead the act consists of four stages: impulse, perception, manipulation,
and consummation. To begin with, the impulses of the organism lead to the
“perception” of the objects in its environment. With this perceptual act, the
organism recognizes its color, shape, likely weight, and so on. The organism,
that is, takes the role of the object in perception and organizes his or her act
accordingly. This idea is further advanced by Mead’s claim that the reality of the
object in perception is a “distant” one, and it invites us to “action with reference
to it” (1938: 12). Once again Mead stresses the relation between the actor and
the object. The object is perceived and defined by a series of moves, its character
and qualities apprehended and the possibility of acting with reference to it
considered.
These various moves in the activity of perception are followed by what Mead
calls manipulation. Discussing the manipulative phase of the act, Mead
introduces the notion of the social self:
The “what” of the object is, then, the expression of the whole of which both the environment and
organism are essential parts. If the function of perception in its immediacy were that of knowledge, it
would be necessary to add to this object as it exists for the organism a capacity for awareness located
in the organism. There seem to be two reasons for the assumption of this awareness. One is found in
the reflective process in which knowing the perceptual object becomes a definite part of conduct, and
the other is found in the identification of the organism with the social self. (1938: 16–17)

In prosecuting an act then, once it reaches the manipulative phase, both a

reflective process and a social self become influential in the action that an
organism is intending to take toward an object. “Thus,” Mead notes, “the object
of immediate perception has been placed in consciousness, as the experience of
this social self, while the real object is placed outside experience, revealed only
by thought” (1938: 17). The object—that is, whatever is seen, heard, or touched
—becomes an element of the reflective consciousness and is refracted through
the socially constituted self. Mead goes on to say, “We approach the distant
stimulus with the manipulatory processes already excited. We are ready to grasp
the hammer before we reach it, and the attitude of manipulatory response directs
the approach” (1938: 24).
The “directionality” of the steps to the act leads Mead to claim that the acts
contains a “future.” “It is not until this initiated response is carried out [in the
manipulatory phase] that its reality is assured. The experimental method is
imbedded in the simplest process of perception of a physical thing. In this sense
the future is already in the act” (1938: 25). But that is not all that is in the act as
it is consummated: “And the past is also in the act, for facility and familiarity are
products of past reactions” (1938: 25). The consummation of an act also brings
in its own dynamism and perhaps pathos. “Every act,” Mead writes,
however, is moving on from its physical objects to some consummation. Within the field of
consummation all the adjectives of value obtain immediately. There objects are possessed, are good,
bad, and indifferent, beautiful or ugly, and lovable or noxious. In the physical things these characters
are only mediately present.” (1938: 25)

The act at this stage becomes not only a social act but one capable of
introducing an ethical dimension into it. The bland “good” or “bad” of Mead’s
formulation is really an allusion to the capacity of a human to introduce
judgments based on abstract values and ethics into the prosecution and
consummation of an act. Acts are then moves in which an individual delays his
or her responses, takes the role of the objects in the situation, as of the others in
it, and makes a selection of the act he or she is going to present: Whatever other
promptings may manifest themselves, at the moment of the act, typically, it is the
social one that dominates it. In the manipulatory and consummatory phase of the
act, it becomes a social act, and subsumes a reflective social self. In these
phases, an individual is able to incorporate his or her knowledge of the world,
his or her values and verities, into the act and convert it into a meaningful act. In
these “phases of the act” the individual marshals, minimally or maximally, the
knowledge that he or she possesses and uses it to construct not only an act that is
pragmatic but also expressive. Furthermore, insofar as he or she is able to
remember a past and anticipate a future, that also plays a part in the expression
of the act. These pasts and futures are assembled as symbols and leaked into the
act—or even flooded into it.
The knowledge that the individual uses to construct a social act includes
whatever knowledge he or she has acquired as a member of a historically
antecedent community. This community, through its various and multitudinous
agencies, has provided the individual with what Alfred Schutz calls “recipes”
(1964: 73) and “stocks of knowledge” (1964: 29) with which to navigate through
the daily grind. They become the stock from which an individual selects various
elements that are relevant to the situation to prosecute his or her act, define his or
her self. This knowledge and its manifestation in self and act impact on the
others with whom he or she has to deal, just as their knowledge impacts on the
individual in question. These stocks of knowledge, to the extent that they reach
the individual and become accessible to him or her through various
intermediaries, will bear their influences and angulations.
Insofar as the knowledge that an individual uses to construct an act and define
his or her self is so mediated, it will always be partial knowledge. The individual
will not be able to have all the facets of knowledge or even a small segment of it
at his or her disposal. The self is no doubt constituted by language, and the
“languages” in which the knowledge, the “discursive formations,” are
manifested to the individual will thus be partial, incomplete, and given to
featuring one theme rather than another. For all that, however, the languages are
received and interpreted by an active and functioning intelligence, subject to
either habitual or delayed responses, and incorporated into the acts by the
individual. The individual, subject though he or she may have been in the
socialization processes to these same discursive formations, nevertheless has
enough independence from them to be able to view them critically and
analytically, compare them with other discursive formations and select one over
the other or select elements from each and form one’s own discursive formation
and a discursive self with it. It is this capacity to be socially formed and
discursively constituted, and be subject to cultural and historical processes, and
at the same time to be a conscious and deliberate agent with the ability to devise
new discursive formations, challenge the relevant cultural and historical forces,
and reconstitute the self and the world, that is the central paradox of the human
condition. Having acquired a more or less steady state of competence, a finite set
of items and instrumentations, the human organism is able to generate an infinite
number of acts—or is at least capable of doing so—acts which have a
connection to earlier acts of others or itself.
An act is a singular and voluntary move made by a conscious agent
accountable for the move—at least, it can be attributed to him or her. Such an
accountability and attributiveness of the act can be accomplished by the agent
himself or herself as well as by others. The act has further consequences for the
actor: it activates a completion in the respective responses of the actor as well as
in those of others and becomes meaningful to both. The responses of the other or
others defines the act for the initiator and gives the act a new character. It is no
longer a private event but a public one, its character and quality being subject to
evaluation, judgment, and further acts from the initiator and the respondent, each
of whom is now encapsulated, to varying degrees, in the act. It is, in other words,
a dialogic act. They are addressed to other and self simultaneously and answered
by self and other as well. Such acts are produced by deliberative and purposeful
agents who orient their acts to others, as well as to the self as an other, and to
inanimate objects. Acts are the means by which an individual seeks to influence
the world around him or her as well as announce his or her own presence in the
world. Acts are the conditionals of an individual as an existent in the
phenomenal world of multiple existents and the relationship between such
existents is both pragmatic and dialogical. These acts are pragmatic, because
they involve the mutual adjustment of each to the other; and dialogical, because
they involve the mutual orientations of each existent to the other. An act is
undertaken, indeed is possible, only on the basis of conceiving and incorporating
the otherness of the world into it. Such a dialogism views the subject-object
dualism as a convenient fiction rather than a description of a separateness. The
subject of an act performs an act and conceives its subjecthood in terms of the
otherness of the world in which it finds itself. In Michael Holquist’s description
of Mikhail Bakhtin’s work,
In dialogism, the very capacity to have consciousness is based on otherness. This otherness is not
merely a dialectical alienation on its way to a sublation that will endow it with a unifying identity in
higher consciousness. On the contrary: in dialogism consciousness is otherness. (1990: 18)

Mead’s conception of mind, self, and act is along similar lines: Mind and
world, act and other, self and other are not connected after an initial separation
but exist simultaneously in dialogic unity. Mead in fact observes, “The self is not
something that exists first and then enters into relationship with others, but it is,
so to speak, an eddy in the social current and so still a part of the current” (1934:
182).
These dialogues are conducted mainly by constituting and managing
discursive acts. Human individuals are inescapably discursive creatures. To
begin with, as minded organisms they engage in discursive activity in their inner
forums (Mead, 1964: 243). Further, as social organisms they engage in
discursive interaction with others, usually real ones, but often with imaginary
and fantastic ones. Indeed, whenever one speaks of a human being, he or she is
describing an entity that is dialogically situated and discursively active.
The self is not so much immanent in consciousness as it is present, overtly or
covertly, in the acts that the individual prosecutes in what may be termed his or
her self-otherness. The acts that humans prosecute have this quality to them:
they occur as discrete events, often with vague and uncertain boundaries, but are
events that are nevertheless connected to other such acts. As Sandra Rosenthal
puts it in an analysis of Charles Sanders Peirce’s views on time, presence, and
continuity,
The aspects of discreteness and continuity combined allow for the emergence of the present and, with
it, the possibility of the emergence of semiotic and temporal creativity; but this is the case only
because of the way in which continuity allows for traces of the past as possibilities for present
creativity, possibilities that are “there in the present and stretch into the future. (1996: 25–26)

The act then is in the present, but a present that a discursive mind constitutes,
a constitution in which the signifying traces and residues of past acts, just as the
anticipation of a future, play a part. Following St. Augustine’s statements on
time, recently examined by Paul Ricoeur, one can conceive the act as occurring
in terms of “Expectation,” “Attention,” and “Memory” (1984: 19). One attends
to the moment, anticipates a future, and remembers a past. Ricoeur quotes St.
Augustine as follows: “It might be correct say that there are three times, a
present of past things, a present of present things, and a present of future things”
(1984: 11). These three “times” are indubitably semiotically constituted
presences and not empty exercises in pure phenomenology.
The present of the act is richly textured and, to the extent that the actor is
neither amnesiac nor autistic, the act will incorporate a constructed past and a
construed future. The human typically confronts a situation and produces an act,
all the while remembering his or her own past and that of the others. To the
extent that he or she remembers the past, however incompletely and selectively,
and anticipates a future, however tentatively, a self is involved in the act.
To the extent that all humans are subject to what Charles Sanders Peirce called
the “four incapacities,” the self cannot emerge in any other way and be sustained
in any other way except by the systematic production of acts in an ongoing series
and assembling their meanings. Peirce has argued that humans “have no power
of Introspection but all knowledge of the internal world is derived by
hypothetical reasoning from our knowledge of external facts” ([1868] 1958: 41).
In the emergence of the self this Peircian maxim would mean that each
individual’s knowledge of his or her self could be achieved only by acting in the
external world and reflecting on such acting. The second incapacity was
described as follows: “We have no power of Intuition, but every cognition is
determined logically by previous cognitions” ([1868] 1958: 41). The self has a
continuity insofar as it is a cognition that is connected to earlier cognitions.
These cognitions were of course derived from our contact with the external
world as per the first maxim and no doubt it is in the form of the interpretation of
acts of the individual and others that the external world becomes available for
cognition. The third “incapacity” reads as follows: “We have no power of
thinking without signs” ([1868] 1958: 41). The acts and experiences of the
“external world” are given interpretations—that is, provided with signs and then
made into features of one’s consciousness—thematized and made into a more or
less coherent definition of the self. The final incapacity that Peirce describes is:
“We have no conception of the absolutely incognizable” ([1868] 1958: 41) and
this no doubt applies to the self as well. To exist in the world with others, in
communities and societies, is to exist as a cognizable phenomenon, to wit, a self,
which can be subject to reflection, which can be addressed and referenced with a
proper noun and a common noun and pronouns. Such references and addressings
issue from the others as well as from the individual himself or herself. It is then
not possible to talk of a human or think of him or her and claim that he or she
does not exist, that he or she is noncognizable. At a certain point in time, the
human individual was without a self (soon after birth and for a while afterwards)
and then at another point in time he or she acquired it. Such a self will continue
to exist in the interactions and relationships that the individual conducts with
others as signs so long as the organism itself and the others address it or refer to
it. These acts and the responsive acts the discursive organism mobilizes will
create a phenomenon that can be named, addressed, and described and therefore,
for all practical and social purposes, it exists; to the extent that it can name itself,
address itself, and refer to itself and describe itself, too, and even if such
exercises are achieved in culturally provided vocabularies, it too exists. This is
the self. Once a self is formulated this way, it will certainly influence any action
that issues forth.
The self, however, is never complete, never safe and intact. It is always a
tentative achievement and forever dependent on the next act or sequences of
action. To the extent that such actions and their sequences and the others to
whom they are addressed and received are relatively stable, a stable self may be
achieved—at least for the time being. Such a self considers and assembles a
variety of intentions and sensations, cognitive and emotional, into a more or less
coherent gesture, presents it to the world in anticipation of a response, and
awaits a response. In the course of the assembling process, however spontaneous
and instantaneous and habitual it may be, the author of the move is able to
observe the acts and change them. That is to say, he or she will take into account
his or her knowledge, recipes, and so on as well as the responses from others
while prosecuting an act. The resultant self then is both singular and social,
individuated and cultural. It is a feature of the minding process, of the discursive
mind, and achieves a presence in the reflexive minding of the individual as well
as in his or her interactional minding. To talk then of a self’s presence is to give
it a causal and signifying role in the acts that an individual, a discursively and
interactionally minded organism that he or she is, undertakes.

BIOLOGY AND SOCIAL ACTS

One cannot, however, say that either the paradox of being simultaneously an
individual and an other has not been denied or the mystery of the human
predicament of being caught between individuality and sociality has been
generally accepted. One of the major challenges to the claim that acts undertaken
by humans are subject to the selection and control by a social self comes from
biology and its offshoot, sociobiology. For sociobiologists there are other
whisperings and promptings, or even louder and more insistent noises, that
govern the human actor in the prosecution of his or her acts. Describing the
nature of sociobiological explanations David Barash notes that there are four
basic ways of employing evolution to study behavior: historical, evaluative, co-
relational and predictive. The historical
involves the attempted reconstruction of behavioral phylogenies. . . . Typically, studies of this sort
proceed by describing the behavior of numerous closely related species; historical insight is then
gained by assuming that the ancestral condition is most closely reflected in behavior shared by the
largest number of extant species, as well as in the simplest and least specialized behaviors. (Barash
1978: 20)

This method, Barash continues has resulted in “excellent and convincing

results . . . notably with studies of empid flies (Kessel 1955), sand wasps (Evans
1966), and fiddler crabs (Crane 1943) among invertebrates; and gulls (Tinbergen
1959) and ducks (Lorenz 1958) among vertebrates” (Barash 1978: 20).
This may well be true but its relevance to an explanation of human conduct is
somewhat remote. It is no doubt the case that humans evolved from earlier forms
into present forms and natural selection played a role in the constitution of the
present formation and therefore the human’s present condition has an
evolutionary history. But at some point in the past the human evolved into a
symbolic creature and henceforth, instead of just behaving in accordance with
some biological propensity, he or she uses this symbolic capacity and acts in full
cognizance of self, other, and world in undertaking his or her respective acts.
Barash goes on,
Instead of asking “What is the history of behavior in a population” . . . we can ask, “What is its
adaptive significance?” This approach seeks to evaluate a behavior by how it contributes to the fitness
of animals performing it; that is, for any phenotype (behavior included) to be positively selected, it
must carry with it more advantages than disadvantages—or else alternative behaviors, coded by
alternative alleles, would be selected. (1978: 21)

Tinbergen’s gulls serve as examples here too. This selecting of “behaviors” by

these birds may occur one way or another but among human beings such
selection occurs as an act that is circumscribed by purely social factors. To begin
with it is limited by the knowledge that the actor possesses of the consequences
of his or her action. This is not a constant or a given, but a systematic variable.
Further, the act will be determined by the rules and regulations that a culture has
provided for the behavior in question. To say that these rules and regulations
were established by the culture in accordance with biological imperatives will
not pass muster; such establishment was also made by human actors who
exercised a choice and made some rules and did not make certain others. Third,
the act will be determined by the significance that the act has for the actor: If it is
an act that is forbidden by the rules and is known to be detrimental to his or her
group of others, he or she can nevertheless decide to overcome these objections
and execute the act because it has a special significance for him or her at that
juncture of his or her life; the act has a meaning for his or her self.
Barash is, however, willing to accept the role of the “environment” in adaptive
behavior and develops a “co-relational” theory. The co-relational approach to
evolutionary explanations of behavior is undertaken by
considering the ecology of each individual and assessing the extent to which the behavior in question
contributes to fitness, given the environment in each case. If behavior is specifically adapted to
particular environments then different environments should select for different behaviors. (1978: 21)

Blackbirds, weaver-birds, and marmots have been studied to establish this

point (1978: 22). Once again, the correlations between macrovariables not
withstanding, these behaviors were indubitably behaviors undertaken by
individual birds. Translating this into the human realm, we are faced with
individual human agents selecting a series of acts that result in being detrimental
or adaptive. How could a human undertake such an act? Once again he or she is
limited by the knowledge he or she may possess at the time of the action.
Needless to say, unless he or she reads the extensive work on weaver birds and is
willing to accept the relevance of these findings to his or her own life and
circumstance, there is no guaranteeing that his or her conduct would be adaptive.
In other words, his or her action to be undertaken in a direction adaptive to his or
her group can be undertaken only as a self-conscious and knowledgeable act.
Such knowledgeability is, however, a variable and all human actors do not have
access to the same knowledge. Furthermore, even with the possession of the
knowledge that certain acts or series of acts may damage the self, or its group or
community, adaptive behavior is not guaranteed; too many humans in the history
of the species have undertaken too many acts that were destructive to themselves
as well as to the groups of which the actors were members.
The final approach to the study of evolutionary factors in the study of
behavior, according to Barash, is the predictive one. The application of this
method relies on what Barash calls “the central theorem of sociobiology.” This is
said to be: “Insofar as the behavior in question is genetically influenced, animals
ought to behave so as to maximize their inclusive fitness. Predictive tests of the
central theorem have been successfully employed in studies of the chronology of
nest defense in alpine accentors . . . variations in paternal behavior in hoary
marmots . . . and the male response to apparent female adultery among mountain
bluebirds (Barash 1978: 22). The question of whether the male bluebird
considers it “adultery,” as obviously Barash does, I will leave unasked. These
behaviors listed here are described by Barash as “defense,” “paternal behavior,”
and “response,” respectively, and in the human realm these behaviors will be
considered and thought-full acts, considerations, and thought-fullness that take
into account the powers, limitation, and knowledge systems of the actor. The
particular others involved in the activities and the specific rules and regulations
that govern the conduct in question will also play a crucial role in the execution
of the relevant acts. In other words the behaviors would be conscious and
situated activities. For example, it is the case that humans defend their “nests”—
home, land, and country—but they are defended as culturally and socially
defined phenomena. Furthermore, there will be numerous occasions when they
are not defended. The “nest” may be gifted to somebody else, abandoned,
destroyed, betrayed, or sabotaged by the actor—be it home, homeland, or
country. Similarly, while many could view adultery as unacceptable, there are
those who participate in adulterous relationships that are consensual.
The conduct in question, in each case, is an act that an individual, choosing
one set of rules or another, produces to meet the demands of a life or a situation.
These would be acts that an individual undertakes in order to adjust, not to the
biological imperatives, but to the socially and culturally defined meanings of
situations. In the final analysis an individual organism has to produce a series of
moves, more or less in full cognizance of his or her history, experience,
strengths, and limitations—in short, an awareness of self. Defending one’s nest,
appropriate paternal and maternal behavior, and responses to adultery are all
made up of acts in which a self is present. Whatever he or she decides to do will
certainly not be determined by a biological imperative but by a judgment made
on the basis of all the available information and the estimation of the
consequences of one line of action rather than another. Even the most ardent
proponent of the biological imperative cannot deny that in the final analysis an
individual organism has to produce a series of particularized moves that provide
particularized solutions to particularized problems. In other words the organism
has to act and, if it is a human organism, it has to produce a social and self-
conscious act: It has to give expression to his or her intentions, in a defined
situation, and to the extent that these moves are subject to delayed action, or the
possibility of such action, the social and situational imperative will play an
important part.
Barash’s inclusion of “environment” as a factor in the evolution of selected
“behaviors” is taken one step further by William Durham. He is willing to
accommodate culture into the evolutionary-behavioral paradigm and consider
human behavior as a function of both genes and culture, of “co-evolution.” In a
comprehensive work, Durham advances the thesis of coevolution of culture and
genes. He recognizes that the fundamental issue to be resolved here is the nature
and degree of independence that social scientists can reasonably claim for
culture—independence from genetic influence, if not determination. Durham
puts it very succinctly and follows it with a number of what seem to be rhetorical
questions:
Is cultural evolution also an autonomous force in the shaping of human diversity? The question is all
the more necessary because we know that the structures and functions of our “capacity for
culture” . . . particularly those of the brain and vocal tract are themselves products of organic
evolution. How much freedom from the genes can one expect from such a “derived” information
system, that is to say, one whose existence depends so directly upon the products of organic evolution?
(1991: 34)

Durham answers this question with statements from Edward Wilson, who
asked,
Can the cultural evolution of higher ethical values gain a direction and momentum of its own and
completely replace genetic evolution? I think not. The genes hold culture on a leash. The leash is very
long, but inevitably values will be constrained in accordance with their effects on the human gene
pool. (1978: 167, quoted in Durham 1991: 34)

Durham comments,
Contained within the image of genes holding culture on a leash are a number of important questions or
 groups of questions like: (1) Is the leash of the same length at all times and all places? Why or why
not? (2) Are there ever instances when the chain of command is reversed, and culture “drags along”
the leash bearers? When does that occur, if ever? (3) Is the leash ever so long as to be ineffective,
allowing the “domesticated pet” to run free, in effect? When does this happen? (Durham 1991: 35)

After reviewing a great deal of literature Durham arrives at the conclusion that
both cultural and natural selection—that is, genes—influence the emergence of
“human diversity.” He calls this “the theory of coevolution.” He summarizes his
position as follows:
(1) that both systems, separately or in combination, are capable of causing heritable change in the
nature of phenotypes; and (2) that neither system exerts its influence in a way that could accurately be
described as “deterministic.” In both cases, environment and chance effects . . . are also intimately
involved. (1991: 420)

This position, actually a compromise, is so general a one that, using one of

Durham’s expressions, it is, shall I say, “functionally ineffective.” No one in the
social science community would deny that human beings are biological creatures
with an evolutionary history and that they have genes that define their biological
natures. The issue that the theory of coevolution evades is the specific nature of
the relationship between the biological elements of the human and his or her
behavior. And this evasion is accomplished by a holistic sleight of hand. By
employing “culture” as an explanatory variable, the issue of human action,
which is accomplished by an individual actor in a dialogic process with himself
or herself as well as with others, is subject to an epistemological evasion.
Culture, a holistic category that describes a multitudinous variety of events and
processes, does not do anything. Rather, culture is present in the actions of
individuals who live in interactions and communities. To show that genes
influence or determine human conduct, it is necessary to go one step further and
show how genes control actual instances of human conduct, to wit, the acts of
given individuals. The issue is not really how genes and “culture” influence each
other, but what are the specific modalities by which actors, in concert of one
kind or another with each other, make the judgments, decisions and
accompanying programs, accounts, and motives that guide and accompany their
actions. In other words, the issue is the process by which genes enter the
construction and presentation of a social act and not whether genes influence
“culture”—as Durham asks. It is surely beyond debate that if one accepts that
“culture” is capable of causing heritable change in human populations, one can
actually find it in the moment when an individual is reaching a decision to select
one line of conduct against another. This is not a matter of a philosophical
preference for reductionism as opposed to holism, but a stubborn empirical fact
that, though indubitably culture affects individual conduct, it does not do so in a
mechanistic way; it enables discursively minded organisms to select one line of
activity over another. If then culture and genes “co-evolve,” how do they
manifest themselves in the conduct of an individual at the moment of the making
of the social act?
One can use Paul Weiss’s defense of the holistic position to show what is lost
when holism is in fact adopted for explanatory purposes. He writes:
(1) That as our brain scans features of the universe we shift range and jolt back and forth between
telescopic and microscopic vision, as it were; (2) that as we move downward on this scale, we mostly
gain precision and lose perspective; (3) that as we move upward, new and relevant features, formally
unrecognizable and unsuspected, come into view; (4) that this emerging novelty pertains to macro-
samples of nature—that is, reflects the properties of collectives—of groups, assemblies, systems and
populations composed of micro-samples; (5) that the required additional terms to characterize such
collectives must come from rigorous scientific procedures rather than from anthropomorphic and
allegorical allusions to mythology. (1967: 802)

These are undoubtedly sound propositions—but the question for my purposes

here is that when and under what circumstances is it appropriate to “gain
precision and lose perspective,” and when is it mandatory to “lose precision and
gain perspective?” Weiss defends the holistic position by claiming that often
“one plus one does not equal two.” Yet, often one plus one does equal two. I
hold that in the social sciences, it is appropriate when answering certain
questions to sacrifice precision for perspective and when answering certain other
questions it is necessary to sacrifice perspective and gain precision. When
seeking to explain behavior, conduct, and action it is imperative that a
commitment to precision be maintained. To use Weiss’s own concept, one plus
one does not equal two under one set of circumstances: When two humans
forgather, for example, they are not just bodies, or for that matter two minds;
rather they become a social dyad with emergent properties. They also have a
different mass and can collectively achieve something that cannot be done by the
mere adaptivity of the two. If, however, one is purchasing two items in a store
and each costs a dollar, the total amount that must be surrendered to the
storekeeper is one dollar plus another which is two; here precision becomes
imperative. In seeking to explain why when John hit Mary and why Mary hit
John back, neither a holistically conceived “culture” nor “genes” will prove
adequate. The respective assaults were situated, personalized, and interactive
events, acts in fact, and this must be taken into account. The particular
socialization that Mary underwent that bound her to hit back and the specialized
training she received in assertiveness and self-expression should be considered
in explaining Mary’s moves.
 A commitment to precision will lead to an examination, not of the near end of
the Wilson’s leash but the far end, where someone undertakes an act or series of
acts with varying degrees of awareness and deliberation. Such a human is
equipped with a brain that is no doubt subject to an “evolutionary morphology”
and is able to engage in complex functions—the most crucial of which is the
ability to use symbols and syntax. Undoubtedly, this ability leads to the
emergence of what Mead called the capacity to produce “delayed reaction”
(1934: 99). Such a capacity enables a human actor at the moment of conduct—at
the edge of producing an act—to consider alternative possibilities, evaluate
possible long-term or short-term consequences, examine the ethical, moral, and
legal aspects of the act and then produce an act or refrain from producing the act,
which is also an act. To be able to claim then that culture and genes “coevolve”
to create adaptive behavior it is necessary to show how they both enter the
production of a social act in its expressive moments. This is not even minimally
done by any of the proponents of either the sociobiological thesis or the cultural-
sociobiological thesis. Even a cursory glance at the history of the human species
would indicate that individuals engage in maladaptive social acts as frequently
as adaptive social acts. They are able to resist not only the whisperings of the
gene but often also the promptings of a culture to undertake conduct that is
destructive to self, society, and culture.
In other words, the significant feature of human conduct is not only the
numerous acts that he or she prosecutes that increase, arguably, his or her
“inclusive fitness,” activate his or her “selfish gene,” and so on, but the
numerous occasions in which he or she prosecutes acts that are either irrelevant
or decidedly detrimental to such fitnesses and selfishnesses. He or she seems to
be obedient to the promptings of genetic forces as much as he or she is rebellious
of them. Furthermore, even when individuals give expression to “inclusive
fitness” in their conduct, it appears that every human act is always more than
what is biologically warranted; it is ceremonialized, ritualized, embellished,
subject to certain political and social economies, and usually expanded to meet
the standards imposed by particular cultures. These processes cannot have any
direct relevance to either genetic forces or to biological adaptations. Rather, they
are symbolic constructions and reconstructions designed for cultural expressivity
and the construction of social structures. Every act that an individual produces is
produced at the far end of Wilson’s leash and is inexorably subject to the
processes that Suzanne Langer called “symbolic transformation” (Langer [1942]
1970, 44).
Nevertheless, in many ways, Wilson’s metaphor of the leash and the questions
that Durham poses are brilliant counters to the cultural argument. The answer to
his questions, rhetorical though they may be, can be given directly and simply. If
we must use the metaphor of the leash, the answer is that indeed the leash is so
long and flexible that for all practical human purposes it doesn’t make a
difference whether genes hold culture in their grip or not. Consider this: The
culturally constituted minds of humans like Wilson and Durham are able to
conceive and present their thesis about evolution and behavior, theories that are
distinct from the theories of others, in a style and a language that is different
from those of the others, and bring a vigor and a flair that is also different from
those of the others. The theories, moreover, are identifiably theirs, theories that
they will claim and defend as their own. Insofar as neither they, nor any other
sociobiologists, claim that there is a specific connection between a particular
gene or gene-complex that will lead to the construction of the particular theories
of Wilson and Durham, it is surely right to insist that the leash from gene to
behavior is so long that no meaningful causal connection can be made between
them. It is therefore far-fetched to claim that the genes cause the behavior. Along
the evolutionary process, the leash became longer and slacker as humans
evolved as symbolic and syntactic creatures and learned to act from other such
humans as well as to create actions of their own, which they in turn passed along
to others.
The positing of a genetic basis of behavior, an “innate” propensity, is a futile
move if the goal is an explanatory thesis about behavior, if one is also willing to
concede that other factors, i.e., social ones, also influence behavior. The genes, it
is clear, cannot explain the specific acts of humans insofar as the social and the
psychological influence them sufficiently to change their character and course.
The specificity of acts are controlled by the symbolicity of the mind and the
evolved brain that, once it reached the stage of symbolicity, became different
from the brains of other species. The position taken here is well described by
Terrence Deacon’s recent work. He summarized his project as
a detailed reappraisal of human brain and language evolution that emphasizes the unbroken continuity
between human and non-human brains, and yet, at the same time, describes a singular discontinuity
between human and non-human minds, or to be more precise, between brains that use this form in the
communication and brains that do not. (1977: 13, my emphasis)

Once the evolutionary change into symbolicity and syntacticity occurred, it

was possible for humans to develop conscious knowledge and capacity for a
conception of self which will make all the difference. As Mead argued, “The
biologic individual lives in an undifferentiated now; the social reflective
individual takes this up into a flow of experience within which stands a fixed
past and a more or less uncertain future” (1934: 351). Whatever the biological
forces may dictate, and however strong the pull on Wilson’s leash, at the
moment of action it is the presence of a self that will determine the action. This
presence will control the action that is to follow. It is then not a denial that
humans are biological creatures and subject to an evolutionary process that is
claimed by cultural theorists; rather that the quality, quantity, and power of the
influence that biology exerts on human action and existence is always shaped by
the human’s symbolicity. This claim is as true for other gene-based theories of
human action as for ones based on “temperament” and “personality structure”
and so on that posit an invariant continuity over time of a particular disposition
to act. Whatever the glands may dictate or temperament and personality may
demand, at the moment of the act, at the fulcrum of action, a human individual
refers his or her act to a conception of self and produces a delayed move to meet
the exigencies of the exact situation.

THE CONSTITUTION OF ACTS

At the moment of action then, the indubitably biological human and, equally
indubitably, a being with a brain whose morphology has been subject to
evolutionary processes, is nevertheless, in Mead’s phrase, a “social reflective
individual” who is able to remember a past and anticipate a future. This is the
presence of self in an act and in a situation, in the moments in which conduct is
selected and articulated. For example, a man’s territory is invaded by another
and his response to this will be made not on the dictates of the gene, but by his
knowledge of his capacities as a fighter, his understanding of his physical
strength, his awareness of his social and political rights and powers vis-à-vis his
culturally defined role—all in relation to the one who has invaded his territory.
All this is subsumed under what Mead discussed as the “past” (1964: 345–354)
that influences his action in the nowness of the moment. In addition, an actor
will have to estimate the likely consequences of his action for the future of the
individual and his relationship with the one who had insulted him by invading
his territory. This estimation will include his conception of his own esteem and
reputation, as well as his claim to certain expectations that accompany his
assumption of the role of manhood as defined in given cultures. For all anyone
knows, the genes may play a part in all this, but it is a self, based on the
knowledge of a past and an anticipation of the future, that will parsimoniously
describe the variable acts that are produced to meet the situation. In fact, this
action cannot be predicted on the basis of the genes that the individual may
possess. The action and the situation are themselves indeterminate and even the
minimum predictability they may possess is based on the knowledge we can
garner about the selves, society, and culture of the individuals in question. It is
imperative that we recognize this self as an agent in all its richness, variety, and
complexity, and posit him or her as the alternative to a biologistic entity.
These variations in acting are possible only because the human mind is able to
undertake various subtle and exquisite maneuvers. Mead writes, “The essence of
the self . . . is cognitive: it lies in the internalized conversation of gestures which
constitutes thinking, or in terms of which thought or reflection proceeds” (1934:
173). This conversation occurs between what Mead calls the “I” and “me”
aspects of the self. The “I” and “me” as aspects of the self is at the center of the
social act for Mead. It is in their interrelationship and in their “conversation” that
Mead locates the impulse to action. As Mead writes,
This process of relating one’s own organism to the others in the interactions that are going on, insofar
as it is imported into the conduct of the individual with the conversation of the “I” and the “me,”
constitutes the self. (1934: 179)

It is this conceptualization that gives Mead’s approach its dialogical cast: the
interplay between the “I” and “me” in the consciousness of an individual is
conducted as if they were separate persons having a conversation. It is the locus
of what Mead calls the “importation of the social process” (1934: 186). The
imported social process is a conversation between “I” and “me” in the mind of
the acting individual and, as in ordinary conversations, sometimes one and
sometimes the other gains the upper hand. Mead, conscious of the pitfalls of
solipsism that was facing him in dealing with the notion of “I,” writes, “I do not
mean to raise the metaphysical question of how a person can be both ‘I’ and
‘me,’ but to ask for the significance of this distinction from the point of view of
conduct itself” (1934: 173). It is then not a metaphysical problem at all but a
practical one and seeks an answer to the question: How to explain the complex
dialogical process by which an act is produced by an individual?
The simplest way of handling the problem would be in terms of memory. I talk to myself, and I
remember what I said and perhaps the emotional content that went with it. The “I” of this moment is
present in the “me” of the next moment. There again I cannot turn around quick enough to catch
myself. I become a “me” insofar as I remember what I said. . . . It is as we act that we are aware of
ourselves . . . the “I” in memory is there as the spokesman of the self of the second, or minute, or day
ago. (1934: 174, my emphasis)

In the execution of an act, then, the “I” and “me” are both involved in a
dialogical and temporal interaction. The “I” and “me” participate in defining
each other as well as in controlling the act that issues forth from the individual,
just as one follows the other at a point and then is followed by the other at
another point. Neither is given an a priori sovereignty or dominance. In the
terminology of quantum physics, “I” and “me” are commuting variables, or in
the terminology of Chinese cosmology they are yang and yin, forever in a
moving relationship with each other. Nevertheless, in given moments of a life
one can be more dominant than the other. The relationship between “I” and “me”
can be diagrammed as follows:
In the first case there is a balance between “I” and “me” with neither
achieving dominance and having a commensurate effect on conduct. The second
case represents a state in which “I” is dominant and the acts of the individual
will be more creative, spontaneous, less sensitive to the influence and demands
of the other, society, culture. The third case is the reverse of this; creativity and
spontaneity are suppressed and a very rigid conformity to social and cultural
standards is maintained.

Conduct, Mead shows, is never the easy production of responses; rather it is a

consequence of convoluted conversational processes. It is the conversation
between “I” and “me” that enables an “organism” to be both individuated and
social. For centuries, these have been held to be opposed concepts captured in
various antinomial codings: individual versus society, self versus collectivity,
microsociology versus macrosociology, and so on. The possibility of
simultaneity has escaped many, but not Mead. The self is simultaneously
individual and social, private and public, closed and open, finished and
expectant, oriented to a past and a presumptive future. To the extent that such
acts are simultaneously objective and subjective, I-centric and me-centric, it
takes into account relevant features of “social structure,” “history,” “economy,”
and “politics” and the capacity for agency. In undertaking an act, in organizing
its contours and parameters, an individual, then, to begin with, takes his or her
own role: He or she intimates in such a taking his or her own understanding of
his or her value in a hierarchy of class, one’s place in a structure of power, in a
system of divided labor, in a framework of signs, privileges, and obligations, all
of them socially defined and learned. Once having taken his or her own role, he
or she takes the role of the other and incorporates into such a taking the class,
gender and race, power, place and rights, privileges and obligations of the other.
In the dialogue that begins this way and ensures, these factors of the self and
others function to define the further development of the respective selves of the
participants. It is in these continuing dialogical processes that an action occurs
and a presence of self is realized. The grammar of the self, for Mead, is the
grammar of interrelating an objective and subjective sense of being. Such an
interrelating marshals the creative capacities of the “I,” the memories from past
experiences, the “me” and the situation in which it finds itself and expresses a
complex act.
It is possible then to talk of I-centric selves, me-centric selves, and the
balanced styling of selves. The actions of Dylan Thomas in the later years of his
life may be cited as an example of an I-centric self. The details of his moves are
reported by John Malcolm Brinnin’s work on Thomas’s sojourn in the United
States. Nearly everywhere he went he violated one social convention or another
and had to have his conduct forgiven by indulgent friends and hosts. He meets
Shelley Winters, who was familiar with Thomas’s poetry and was keen to
discuss it with him. Yet they talked about baseball and the, Brinnin writes, “The
conversation changed, becoming centered on Dylan’s appreciation of Miss
Winters’ more obvious physical attractions which he had wanted to measure for
himself” (Brinnin 1955: 53). Here is another description of Thomas’s moves:
As the evening wore on, Dylan returned to unabashed dalliance with his hostess while, sprawling on
the floor, he spilled liquor over himself and seemed to have retreated into a state of loud drunkenness
in which his boyish self-indulgence overtook all his lovable qualities and left him a figure of ridicule
to strangers and a figure of despair to friends. (1955: 261)

Lest this behavior be attributed to mere drunkenness, it must be noted that

soon after this incident he was able to stop this line of action, get up from the
floor, pick up his briefcase and leave the party with Brinnin and his friend.
However, there is no doubt that alcohol must be considered the great leveler of
the “me” and the liberator of the springs of the “I.” Indeed it could be said that
one consumes alcohol in order to open the embankment in which “I” is kept and
release it to act, sometimes tentatively and at other times more vigorously.
A perfect example of a me-centric self can be found in Robert Merton’s
description of the “bureaucratic personality.” He argues that such a personality
displays in Thorstein Veblen’s phrase a “trained incapacity” to adjust his or her
actions to changing circumstances (Merton 1968: 249–260).
A balanced self, a self in which the I and the me are in control of each other,
can be discovered in the actions of most ordinary human beings. They are
spontaneous and creative when the situation warrants it and controlled and
disciplined when such is the situational exigency.
In Mead’s discussion of the phases of the act he assumes the presence of a
social self to which the act is referred in its later phases. What in fact is the
relationship between the social self and the act in the primary processes by
which the social self is constituted? A social self, Mead argues, is constituted
through acts in what he terms “general stages.” For the early stages of the
emergence of the self, Mead argues that “play” and “game” could be used as
convenient descriptions. In the play stage children play at various roles. The
fundamental feature of these stages is that they are constituted by very
particularized acts and they develop in the individual the capacity to construct
social acts. Mead describes the process of such playing in a way that calls
attention to the process by which a child objectifies himself or herself and
develops the capacity to act on the basis of such objectification.
He plays that he is, for instance, offering himself something, and he buys it; he gives a letter to himself
and takes it away; he addresses himself as a parent, as a teacher; he arrests himself as a policeman. He
has a set of stimuli which call out in himself the sort of responses they call out in others. He takes this
group of responses and organizes them into a certain whole. (1934: 150–151)

These moves by the one who is engaged in play—“offering,” “buying,”

“giving,” “addressing,” “arresting”—are systematized social acts, and it is in the
course of such acting that the self is said to emerge. Das and McCarthy put this
very well; “In the acts of children at play one can observe the initial stages in the
‘genesis of self.’ The self is built up, so to speak, over the course of an
individual’s life through its engagement in act” (1986: 37).
Once he or she is able to engage in these acts, it is possible to say he or she
begins to form a certain rudimentary self. He or she still needs to develop a
social self and this is accomplished in the next stage where he or she seeks to
play roles vis-à vis others in rather restricted circles—what Mead calls the
“game stage.” This is followed by learning the roles and expectations that are
appropriate to larger social groups. He summarizes this as follows:
The individual’s self is constituted simply by the organization of the particular attitudes of other
individuals toward himself and toward one another in the specific social acts in which he participates
with them. But at the second stage in the full development of the individual’s self that the self is
constituted not only by an organization of these particular individual attitudes, but also by an
organization of the social attitudes of the generalized other or the social group as a whole to which he
belongs. (1934: 158)

The engagements in acts are pragmatic exercises; an individual acts in order to

solve various problems. It is when confronted with a problem of some sort that
an individual acts, and in the playing and gaming that Mead uses as descriptions
of the stages in the constitution of self, plays and games present problems for the
individual. In these plays the individual acts to face and solve problems, in
maximal or minimal ways, and proceeds to the next step. The problems may be
said to offer resistances that the individual handles to the best of his or her ability
and reaps the fruits of such labors.
The significant point in descriptions of the stages by which a self emerges is
Mead’s systematic avoidance of any whiff of either solipsism or mechanistic
behaviorism. It is the act and the social act, the exercise of choice and selectivity
among given alternatives, and the recognition of sociality, together that aids in
the emergence of the self. In contract to the Freudian view that a social being
(ego) emerges out of the repression of fundamental instinctual forces, Mead
develops a theory of the emergence of the human self in which expression plays
a crucial part. The child expresses itself in the play stage—at least an early
version of itself: When the child acts the role of a policeman, what does this
involve? At a minimum the child has to assume a certain posture, construct a
certain demeanor and, if the child is lucky, he or she may even have some special
clothing and props to bolster his or her acting. In these doings the child is
undoubtedly in an expressive mode and has to produce not only an act, but a
series of more or less coordinated acts. Furthermore, in such doings he or she not
only acts but responds to his or here own acts, and these responses are also acts.
In these beginnings, he or she develops the capacity to objectify himself or
herself and perhaps experience the ecstasy of imaginatively being someone other
than a mere child.
In his conceptualization of the game stage, too, Mead avoids both solipsism
and behaviorism: The individual learns to produce his or her acts in coordination
with the acts of the others. He or she does not just sit there or stand there waiting
for stimuli to hit him or her and then proceed to respond to it. Rather, he or she
actively participates in the ongoing social process. In the game stage individuals
seek to anticipate the acts of the others, stay alert and observant of the attitudes
these acts encode and display, respond to their own responses, and organize them
all into an image and a concept of the self.
What Mead proposes here is that, instead of proceeding then from inside
consciousness, positing a self and explaining it as the source of the springs of
action, we proceed from the act itself and then investigate the consequences of
the action. It is these consequences that are assembled as they become available
as sedimented meanings into a viable self.
 At the moment of the act’s realization, it can be allowed to proceed to the next
moment as defined initially or put on a different course by the responses it
mobilized. The act is dialogical then in being unfinished, capable of being
transformed as it proceeds, and eliciting a variety of responses from the
participants in its evolving moments. The individual is endowed with certain
faculties that ensure that his or her actions become indubitably dialogical
constructions.
A human, then, undertakes an act and as he or she is in the process of
initiating it, carrying it forward and consummating it, he or she is able to observe
it, i.e., “measure” it, and thereby give it an entirely different significance. This
process will be readily seen when one examines emotional acts: An individual is
made angry by the moves of another and he or she is moved to act in response
and gives violent expression to his or her anger, and then as he or she is about to
manifest the act, the individual observes that the other is a more powerful
(socially or physically) individual and suppresses his or her act, controls it or
redefines the emotion and smiles weakly and moves on to the next phase. This is
the dialectic of the act; it moves along as it is produced, is watched and
measured as it emerges, is subjected to evaluation and examination, however
momentarily, and then is allowed to proceed on its initial course or is truncated
and a new act initiated, one that is subject to the same process all over again.
Yet, all acts do not proceed along this course all the time. Some may be so
habitual that they may move without reflection and analysis; nevertheless, they,
too are potentially available for inspection and redirection.
It is in the temporal development of acts that a self emerges and manifests
itself. To recognize the relationship between acts and the self is to recognize two
dimensions of its temporality. One is to acknowledge the self’s presence as a
historical continuity, to conceive it as having had a very particular past,
remembering it and allowing such a past to influence the forthcoming acts. To do
this is to be able to also accept the self as being in a particular moment in its own
history. For example, at the moment of any act, an individual remembers his or
her past, recognizes his or her biography as it pertains to the act in question and
also understands that he or she is, shall I say, no longer as young as he or she
used to be and should not climb this mountain. The second dimension of
temporality that an actor typically recognizes is the significance of the moment
in an ongoing relationship or transaction in which an act is occurring or
forthcoming and uses such recognition perspicuously. In an ongoing relationship
there is, for example, a moment when one had just declared his undying love for
someone and the acts that succeed such a declaration will have the marks of the
declaration, at least for a while. Similarly the self that is present immediately
after one had called someone else a liar and a sneak must acknowledge such an
act and all ensuing acts must do so, too.
Acts are then dialogical in this sense too: They have a continuity to earlier acts
and still earlier acts. In their tendency to exist as an interconnected series resides
their capacity to define a self and give it not only a presence but a semblance of
continuity. The individual, in other words, remembers his or her past acts,
minimally or maximally, recollects the emotional, cognitive, and practical results
and residues from them, and organizes them into a more or less coherent
conception of his or her power, capabilities, and limitations, and so on. This is
his or her self. The acts that an individual prosecutes may be accomplished in the
here and now, and all reality may be the consequence of such acts, but for all
that, an individual—amnesiacs and others similarly impaired excepted—
remembers the consequences of his or her earlier acts, and such remembrances
of past acts will influence the selection and execution of current acts. Mead
writes,
It is just this combination of the remembered self which acts and exists over against other selves with
the inner response to his action which is essential to the self-conscious ego—the self in the full
meaning of the term. (1964 [1915]: 146, italics added)

The remembered self is really the recollected, stored, and practicalized meanings
of earlier acts—indeed, they are habits of the mind and habits of the body,
intertwined inextricably in many cases. In other words, the act is dialogical in
both the spatial and temporal dimensions: An individual interacts with the other,
particularized or generalized, with objects, environment, and ideas, as well as
with the remembrances of earlier acts and produces acts that are layered and
complexly faceted. As an individual acts he or she is, in the moment-to-moment
moves of everyday life, accomplishing interactions, constituting relationships
and groups, and realizing social structure as well as formulating a self. Such
moves, however, are part of a series that began earlier, and have roots earlier
still, a series which is retained in the mind, and according to some recent
researchers, in the very tissues of the brain. (Rose 1992; Brothers 1997). In such
a conception of the relationship between acts and memory and their
manifestation in the tissues of the brain, the self itself may have a presence in the
brain too. Insofar as such memories are as cognitive as they are emotional, the
positive and negative characteristics of both may remain and affect one’s self.
Culture, institutions, and history manifest themselves in social acts as
remembered and sedimented meanings.1
The “structures” of society—caste, class, race, ethnicity, gender, clan, family,
organizations, communities, religious orders, and nations manifest themselves as
symbolic experiences for the individual and are present in the selves of given
individuals as identities that each recognizes and are given recognition by his or
her others. Such identities manifest themselves as memories, emotional and
cognitive, and as practices, as vocabularies of motives, and as discursive
definitions and programs that an individual would use in prosecuting his or her
lines of action.
It is in the operation of these dialogical processes between an I and me on the
one hand and between an individual and the other, mediated by memory, in any
given act, that social structure enters conduct. It does this in two ways: one, as
constraints imposed by others who have the power and the inclination to exercise
control over the self; two, as meanings that the self knows and acknowledges
and accepts as constraints on his or her conduct. It is the latter that is of interest
here: Social structure in the sense of larger units of membership—ethnicity, race,
and class, religion, for example—are meaning-systems and action-systems in
which an individual participates. As such they are available as rules and
regulations, constraining principles and enabling ones, that he or she knows and
uses in prosecuting his or her acts. To know these rules, regulations, and
principles is to remember them from the past, remember them, not only as rules
and regulations and principles but as acts that were prosecuted under their aegis
and from the responses they elicited from one’s significant social circles.
Social structure, then, is known and remembered, however partially or
habitually, and it is in that form that it enters conduct. At the point of conduct the
multitudinous elements contained in a people’s culture, as well as the elements
that constitute social structure, enter the acts as unreflected memories, that is, as
habits or as conscious memories of past experiences. Indeed they cannot enter
conduct, determine its character, influence it, and guide it except as recollections
and redefinitions of acts, images, injunctions, recommendations,
commandments, stipulations, expositions, and so on to the acting self. Acts are
assembled, presented, and executed in the interaction between the situated
moment and the memories that an actor bears, and there is no telling which will
become dominant and rule the moment and its selves.
The grace and subtlety of Mead’s conceptualization of the act and the self lies
precisely in the dialectic in which it is framed. Neither the self nor the act is
given a temporal priority in the moment of conduct; they involve each other in
these moments. The individual produces an act and it bespeaks the self and the
individual responds to the act and it becomes a meaning for the self. The self
creates the act and is created by the act. The act creates the self and the self
creates the act. The self is present in the act and it is present later as a memory
that is inextricably intertwined with the act that produced it. In Mead’s words:
The self is not something that exists first and then enters into relationship with others, but it is, so to
speak, an eddy in the social current and so still a part of the current. It is a process in which the
individual is continually adjusting himself in advance to the situation to which he belongs, and
reacting back on it. (1934: 182)

ACTS AND OTHERS

The elements that function in the dialectic between the I and me, the terms of the
“inner conversation” that become the initiatives for action are themselves
“imported from the social process” (Mead 1934: 186). This social process
enables another dimension of the dialectic of the act to manifest itself. What in
detail, then, is this “social process”? It has two fundamental elements. First, the
language that an individual uses to conduct this conversation, language in the
broadest sense of the word, is such a social process; and second, the system of
others that the individual takes into account in executing a social act is another
element of the social process. In doing this an individual “orients” his or her
acts, to use Max Weber’s word, toward three types of others: interactional
others, significant others, and the generalized other. Erving Goffman’s work can
be considered as a detailed examination of the influence of the interactional
other on the conduct of an individual. The roots of his conception are
nevertheless contained in Mead’s concept of taking the role of the other:
This taking the role of the other . . . is not simply of passing importance. It is not something that just
happens as an incidental result of the gesture, but is of importance in the development of co-operative
activity. The immediate effect of such role-taking lies in the control which the individual is able to
exercise over his own response.” (Mead 1934: 254)

By taking the role of the other, one is able to assert control over his or her own
acts and thus also exert control over the other’s response by investing the right
quality in his or her acts and eliciting the response that is appropriate.
Goffman’s work is articulated squarely within these parameters. From his use
of the dramaturgical perspective in his first work to the essays on stigma and
interaction rituals, role distance, and behavior in public places, there cannot be
any doubt that Mead’s concept of taking the role of the other is the central
organizing principle. Each move, word, and gesture in these studies is organized
—in Goffman’s estimation—in such a way that it takes account of the other, its
role, its attitudes, and the likely responses of the other to whatever move, in
word or gesture, one is making at the moment or is about to make. In other
words, he or she takes the role as well as the attitude of the other, thus converting
him or her into an interactional other; this is accomplished by submitting one’s
acts to what Goffman calls the “rules of conduct”:
An act that is subject to a rule of conduct is, then, a communication, for it represents a way in which
selves are confirmed—both the self for which the rule is an obligation and the self for which it is an
expectation. (1967: 51)

In observing these rules of conduct, which insofar as they are rules are public
and shared, the participants become the interactional other of each other and
each orients his or her conduct by anticipating the responses of the other. “Thus
rules of conduct transform,” Goffman continues, “both action and inaction into
expression, and whether the individual abides by the rules or breaks them,
something significant is likely to be communicated” (1967: 51). These moves
cannot be undertaken without identifying the other and taking his or her role and
making him or her an interactional other.
Further, to the extent that the individual is a minded creature, forever using a
discursive mind, he or she is able to recall deliberately or as a habitualized
“response” the attitudes of certain others with whom one has had a particular
emotional relationship, and let such “recollections”—what Harry Stack Sullivan
called “dynamisms” (1953: 102–103)—to influence the prosecution of an act.
Such significant others were first described by Sullivan as follows:
Out of the social responsibility of the mothering one, which gets involved in the satisfaction of the
infant’s needs, there comes the organization in the infant of what might be said to be a dynamism
directed at how to live with this significant other person. The self-system is thus an organization of
educative experience called into being by the necessity to avoid or minimize incidents of anxiety.
(1953: 165)

The dynamism of the self-system is organized to forestall rejection by, and

disapproval from, significant others. It begins to be formulated in childhood and
as the individual develops, he or she keeps the original significant others and
adds new ones as his or her life circumstances change. An individual tailors his
or her acts in a way that they subjunctively meet with their approval. Sullivan
conceives a dynamism “with primary reference to the tensions which recurrently
disturb the euphoria of the living creature and manifest themselves in
interpersonal relations as integrating, disjunctive, or isolative tendencies of a
particular sort” (1953: 109).
Finally, to the extent that the acting individual is a member of a community, it
is the case that he or she would act in terms of the standards and values of the
community. As he or she is socialized in the community by various individuals,
he or she soon generalizes the values and standards and uses this generalization
to orient his or her conduct. Mead says of this,
The organized community or social group which gives to the individual his unity of self may be called
the “generalized other.” The attitude of the generalized other is the attitude of the whole community.”
(1934: 154)

In the actual prosecution of an act, then, the individual is implicated in three

“otherations” (alteration), to borrow a concept from Ortega y Gasset (1956:
165); an interactional other, a significant other, and a generalized other. The
interactional other gives immediate face-to-face control to the act, the significant
other provides the emotional basis of the act, and the generalized other guides
the act in accordance with the standards of the community. In the concrete
emergence of the act all three others may be subsumed into one process just as in
other such instances they may be separated and in conflict with each other, thus
making the individual choose one over the other and feel shame, anxiety, or
guilt. That is, one is shamed and embarrassed when he or she meets with the
disapproval of the interactional other, anxiety-ridden when he or she imagines
and anticipates rejection by the significant other, and guilty at having violated
the norms of the community.
Situating the acts that humans undertake within a dialectic of relationships
with others acknowledges the influence and power of others that are attendant
features of all interactions and relationships. These features enter into every act
and confer influences of two kinds. First, the power and influence that others
asserted at one time and were institutionalized as practices become incorporated
as constituent elements of the self. These practices, and the power they embody,
become coterminus with self-conceptions and operate implicitly in the
production of acts. They function to inhibit certain kinds of acts and allow only
certain other kinds of acts insofar as a reflexive creature one is able to monitor
his or her own acts. Second, there is the power and influence that the others, or
their agents, can direct at an actor to sanction certain acts and prohibit certain
others. The generalized other manifests itself in the form of various social
agents: parents, teachers, priests, policemen, judges, jailers, psychiatrists, and
various others—all of whom can control the acts of the individual. The
significant others, by their capacity to induce anxiety, guilt, and shame also
control the acts of an individual. Interactional others, too, can elicit desired
responses from an individual by the moral, physical, or institutional power they
embody. These responses get organized and systematized and eventually become
habitualized acts and give the self a certain stability.2
It has been easy enough to recognize that human beings are reflexive actors
without specifying what they are being reflexive about. It is of course not
possible to be just reflexive; rather, one is reflexive about self in relation to a
world of objects and a world of others—interactional, significant, and general,
which latter also includes institutions. One puts oneself into presumptive
relationships with these objects and others and defines one’s acts and self in
terms of such relationships.

FOUCAULT’S SELF

Michel Foucault claims that the “subject” is constituted discursively within

given historical frameworks which are realized through the relationships
between “power” and “knowledge.” He writes,
These “power-knowledge relations” are to be analysed, therefore, not on the basis of a subject of
knowledge who is or is not free in relation to the power system, but, on the contrary, the subject who
knows, the objects to be known and the modalities of knowledge must be regarded as so many effects
of these fundamental implications of power-knowledge and their historical transformations. (1979:
27–28)

This view of the “subject” has spawned a veritable industry of scholars who
have taken the Foucaldian argument, expressed here and elsewhere, and claimed
a “vanishing subject,” in Vincent Colapietro’s phrase (1990), in contemporary
social science and philosophy. Jonathan Culler has put these views very
succinctly as follows: “As the self is broken down into component systems,
deprived of its status as source and master of meaning, it comes to seem more
and more like a construct: a result of systems of convention” (1981: 33).
Foucault may be right in every particular in the statement quoted above except
for one claim he is making. The self or the subject is constituted as an object, to
be sure by the “modalities of knowledge” available to it, and is “so many
effects” of the “power-knowledge” and “their historical transformations.” The
flaw in this argument, however, is the assumption that such knowledge-systems
or discursive formations are singular and clear-cut and invariant in the
“fundamental implications” they indicate, the implications that are realized as
the subjectivity of the individual. In the semiotic processes by which these
“implications” are apprehended and made relevant in the constitution of a
subject, they can be interpreted in a variety of ways and used to construct a
subject. At any moment in the career of the individual, after his or her childhood,
as a language-speaking entity, he or she is able to choose among various
alternative “implicatons” of the available forms of discourse. The “effects” that
become the subject are themselves situational variables. These alternative
implications may be subject to the same strictures: that they, too, are effects of
the regimes of power and knowledge. There can be no doubt, however, that the
agent himself or herself, and his or her own associates, including the agents of
socialization, are able to exercise at given moments in time, indeed at the
moment of performances, a choice among the alternative “implications” of these
regimes of power, knowledge, and discourse and use it to constitute a self.
Whether they are able to make this choice in such a moment or not is dependent
on the concrete empirical circumstances in which the performance was occurring
and cannot be settled by a priori fiat from theoreticians. Once again, an analogy
suggests itself: The discourses by which the self is constituted are like language
no doubt, but once they are acquired they become a steady state of competence,
a set of instrumentations, with which the discursive organism is able to generate
a range of discursive acts and give presence in one moment or another to one
type of self or other. In the moment of acting, that is, an individual acts as an
agent who is conscious of his or her self—fashioned though it may be by various
regimes of power and knowlege.
If one were to obtain descriptions of a self by asking individuals to write
statements about themselves, it will be evident that all of them, even if they are
members of the same community or social circles, will not issue the same
language of description. One may say, “I am a born-again Christian” and may
say, second, “I am a mother.” Another may say, “I am a Methodist but I haven’t
been to church for awhile” and “I am single.” “I am a Catholic, but I believe that
a woman must have the right to choose to have an abortion.” It is undoubtedly
true that three of these statements are issued from the discourse of religion and
that the other from the discourse of marriage, social roles, and gender, but for all
practical purposes, i.e., for everyday interactional purposes they are different
descriptions and can be taken to be descriptions of different conceptions of self.
A key issue here is that given the primacy of language or discourse, a
sufficiently different description of the individual can emerge and these
descriptions are results of a choice. Insofar as we cannot say that these choices
were made, not by the “discourses,” but by sentient humans with a mind, we are
driven to conclude that the choices were made by a minded self or selved mind.
This may well elicit the rebuttal that the self making these choices was itself
constituted by an earlier regime of discourse—opening up the logical problem of
infinite regress. However, this problem is only an apparent one. The constitution
of the self, the choice among various available discourses, is not done by an
earlier or primordial self as such but by a mind, albeit a social mind, that is
capable of making choices among alternatives. In fact the mind is antecedent to
the self, and the self is to be considered a feature of the mind. The mind emerges
socially, as language emerges, before the self is constructed.
The question that arises is: when does this construction occur? And how does
this occur? At what stage in a particular human’s life is it possible to say that the
“construct” has been made? And what of the nature of the human before such a
construct is successfully completed? And what are the processes by which such a
construct is made to emerge, appear, and function successfully? Clearly these are
variables: Selves emerge at a particular moment in the life of the individual by
more or less rigorous processes of socialization and are always subject to
alteration as the individual is confronted with different experiences, varied
others. At one time an individual may be forced to submit to a particular
discourse and at other times he or she may choose the discourse to which he or
she wants to give allegiance. To dub all these complex and variable factors as
intersecting “systems of conventions,” is a sophistry that does not account
parsimoniously for the human predicament, leaves too much out, and succeeds
in only being trivially clever. To accept this as a limitation on agentic and
deliberate control over a human’s actions—i.e., self-conscious actions, is to put
the same limitation on them that Watsonian and Skinnerian behaviorism did. In
such a perspective once a newly born human is socialized into a “discourse,”
“conditioned” into it, he or she loses all his or her capacity to choose one line of
action rather than another and becomes merely a “servant of the language” as
Foucault put it, an operant machine, a printing press! Rather, when an individual
is confronted by another and has to deal with the words that he or she utters, he
or she has to deal with them as products of an agentic self. Consider this: A man
comes up to me, shows a gun and says, “Your money or your life.” This
utterance is no doubt drawn from various discourses: the discourse of capitalist
accumulation and free enterprise—make money by one means or another, on
your own effort, even if you have to hurt other people. It may have elements of
the discourse of “possessive individualism,” which C. B. MacPherson describes
as the claim that, “The human essence is freedom from dependence on the wills
of others, and freedom is a function of possession”—particularly property (1962:
3). The demand may also speak to the discourse of gun ownership as a
fundamental right guaranteed by the United States Constitution and the discourse
of “masculinity,” of the male role as one of aggrandizement, initiative,
assertiveness, courage, and so on and so forth. Nevertheless, when I hear these
words, and see the expression on the man’s face and the gun in his hand, I will
necessarily understand this to mean that the other is a self-conscious agent with
control and power over his “subjectivity” and its acts which can kill me if I did
not accede to the significance of his remarks. The key issue here is that the
words that were used as parts of a social act were chosen by an individual and
uttered in a selected situation to a particular other.
My responses to this demand from the other for my money or my life will no
doubt be based on the particular discourses with which I have already constituted
myself, been allowed to constitute myself. Yet, I have a situated choice here: I
look at the individual making the demand, see that he is a big, strong, young man
with a cocked Magnum revolver in his hand, and I weakly give him my wallet
and all the other money I can gather from my pockets. Or else, I look at the
individual, see that he is a weak-looking and emaciated youth who is shaking in
his boots and is holding what appears to be a toy gun, uncocked. I tell him “Go
to hell” and walk away. In each case, I examined my options based on my
interpretation of the environment and produced a response, even if the options
from which I am making a choice are “systems of conventions” to which I am
already subjected. However cravenly dominated by regimes of discourse a
human being may be, he or she possesses the capacity to make this situated
choice. There are neither philosophical nor practical gains to be made by
denying that acts are self-conscious and situated doings. The self may be a
servant of the language but only at the given moment of its constitution; at a
later moment, as servants are wont to do, the self learns to manage the master,
subtly or overtly.
The position I am advancing here is that between the discursive modes that
constituted the individual and the moment of action there is the interregnum of a
self-indicating and discursive mind, or in Jill McCorkel’s (1998) felicitous
wording “a critical space,” from which one is able to make choices and act. In
this interregnum the mind is able to integrate various discourses and arrive at a
synthesis which is the self. Consider here Jerry Fodor’s refutation of the claims
of “psychological darwinism.” In a review of books on the subject and
commenting on their claims of the evolution of modular structures in the brain,
Fodor wrote,
The moon looks bigger when it’s on the horizon; but I know perfectly well it’s not. My visual
perception module gets fooled, but I don’t. The question is: who is this I? And by
what . . . computational process does it use what I know about astronomical facts to correct the
misleading appearances that my visual perception module insists on computing? (1998: 12)

One can substitute the word “discourse” wherever the word “module” appears
in this passage and also ask: Who is this I that constitutes a response to the
discourses of various regimes? In the actual performance of the act the
individual believes that he or she is in charge of the act as do the others involved
with him or her in the act: He or she, as well as those others, will hold him or her
responsible for the act. No doubt the realization, of the contradictions in
Faucault’s conception of “subject,” as well as the realization, too, that perhaps it
is really not possible to deny that the self is the “source and master of
meanings,” led Foucault to recast some of his ideas on this in his later work.
Alex Callinicos (1990) has, in fact, argued that in his description of the
“technologies of the self” in the later volumes of his study of sexuality, Foucault
accepted the need for the practices of “self-constitution” and “self government.”
Callinicos quotes Foucault in support of this claim, “Couldn’t everyone’s life
become a work of art? Why should the lamp or the house be a work of art, but
not our life?” (1986a: 350) (in Callinicos 1990: 89). For one’s life to become a
work of art, for it to develop “style,” an individual must be able to take control
and fashion a self that conformed to the exacting demands of an artistry and an
aesthetic.
This commitment to understanding life as a work of art leads Foucault to
considering the self itself as a work of art—at least envisaging the possibility of
doing so. This is clearly seen in the studies that he published about the history of
sexuality (1986b; 1988). The usage of the concept of self in these works, rather
different from the one in the works of Mead, is captured in the following words
from his commentary on Artemidorus’s book on the interpretation of sexual
dreams:
The guiding thread of Artemidorus’ interpretation, insofar as it is concerned with the predictive value
of sexual dreams, implies the breaking down and ordering of such dreams into elements (personages
or acts) that are, by nature, social elements; and that it indicates a certain way of qualifying sexual acts
in terms of the manner in which the dreaming subject maintains, as the subject of the dreamed-of act,
his position as a social subject. (Foucault 1986b: 33)

If in fact one can constitute one’s self as a “social subject,” it must also be
possible for him or her to cast himself or herself as a social object. This, too, is
not outside of Foucault’s conception of the self. In another section of the same
work cited earlier he writes:
The interplay of the care of the self and the help of the other blends into preexisting relations, giving
them a new coloration and a greater warmth. The care of the self—or the attention one devotes to the
care that others should take care of themselves—appears then as an intensification of social relations.
(1986: 53)

Foucault recognizes here that a human being can cast himself or herself
simultaneously as a social subject as well as a social object. Indeed, a human
being accomplishes the objectification of his or her self by, in Foucault’s words,
testing oneself, examining oneself, monitoring oneself in a series of clearly defined exercises, makes
the question of truth—the truth concerning what one is, what one does, and what one is capable of
doing—central to the formation of the ethical subject. (1986b: 68)
 In spite of the appearance of the word “subject” in the above passage, it is
clear that the activities that Foucault is describing cannot be undertaken without
considering the self as an object. It would be “psycholinguistically” impossible
to test, examine, and monitor one’s self without converting it into an object.
Indeed this is what Foucault seems to have done with his own life. An
examination of his life would indicate that Foucault was a very self-conscious
and individuated actor: he chooses to go to the École Normale Supérieure, he
decides to do the preparatory work to ensure that he does get accepted into it,
and he chooses various steps in his career that eventually make him a professor
in the Collège de France. He may or may not have chosen his homosexuality but
he does choose to live his homosexuality in one way rather than another. For
instance, he challenges certain established ways of living his life and chooses to
live a life of defiance and to even court death by adopting a particular style
rather than another, a style with a certain congruence with his own researches
into sexuality (Miller 1993). In short, studying his biography one cannot help but
come to the conclusion that here was an individual, undertaking various acts by
making choices among a variety of available discourses, regimes of power and
authority, systems of knowledge, and thereby giving presence to his self as a
work of art. It turns out that it is the self of a world-renowned philosopher, and
perhaps a world-weary one, an author who died, but whose work can be
identified as his, can be attributed to him and will be studied for a long time. One
can indeed marvel at the boldness of his conceptualizations and at the panache
with which he related his life to his lifework.

DIFFÉRANCE AND THE SELF

The other important challenge to the presence of a self has come from another
French quarter. In his deconstructive enterprise, Jacques Derrida has indicated
the impossibility of achieving a stable and dependable self as the center of action
and meaning insofar as the symbols that are used to construct it are inherently
unstable, in a constant flux, and “play.” Coining a word, he writes:
Différance is the systematic play of differences, of the traces of differences, of the spacing by means
of which elements are related to each other. . . . The activity or productivity connoted by the a of
différance refers to the generative movement in the play of differences. The latter are neither fallen
from the sky nor inscribed once and for all in a closed system, a static structure that a synchronic and
taxonomic operation could exhaust. Differences are the effects of transformations, and from this
vantage the theme of différance is incompatible with the static, synchronic, taxonomic, ahistoric
motifs in the concept of structure. (1981: 27)
 If this is the case, no stable self nor subject, dependent as it is on stable
meanings of signs, is possible because like Heraclitus’s river, meanings become
perennially commuting variables. Each word that is used to describe and define a
self will automatically suggest an absent word or words that can undermine or
expand the meaning of the present word, thereby making a definition of self,
with the help of these very recalcitrant words, unstable. Each moment a self
conceives itself with these unstable references, it has to defer a final position
because the meaning of the conception is shifting as it speaks and conceives.
“Needless to say,” says Edward Sampson, tracing the implications of Derrida’s
work for a theory of the self, “if ‘presence’ is already inhabited by absence, then
even the apparent presence of the subject to itself becomes suspect” (1989:9).
Insofar as the information that is needed for the reflexive constitution of the
self is in one symbolic form or another (verbal, gestural, visual), it cannot have,
according to Derrida, a stability of significance: they will always be afflicted
with the “play of differences.” Indeed it may not be possible to deciper the
significance the individual is seeking to convey with his or her words—there
will always be “free play” in the interpretation of the words of the other. Jacques
Derrida puts it this way:
There are thus two interpretations of interpretation, of structure, of sign, of freeplay. The one seeks to
decipher, dreams of deciphering, a truth or an origin which is free from freeplay and the order of the
sign. . . . The other, which is no longer turned towards the origin, affirms freeplay and tries to pass
beyond man and humanism, the name man being the name of that being who, throughout the history
of metaphysics or ontotheology—in other words, through the history of all his history—had dreamed
of full presence, the reassuring foundation, the origin and end of the game. (1972: 264–265)

Novel as this approach to the analysis of meaning may appear at first, it is

nevertheless foreshadowed in the work of Charles Sanders Peirce. In his succinct
statement on the relationship among a sign, an object, and an interpretant, he
leaves open the possibility that the “interpretative structure as a whole can in
turn become a sign for a further interpretive structure” (Rosenthal 1969: 176).
This “infinite regress” needs to be arrested, however, in the practical affairs of
everyday life, and as in the problematics of quantum physics, everything must be
subject to ordinary processes of “measurement” so that some action can be
taken. John Boler and Sandra Rosenthal, along with other students of Peirce,
recognize this problem in Peirce’s theory of meaning. For Peirce, the way out of
such a pragmatically unacceptable “regress” is to posit a “logical interpretant” as
the end of one series of interpretive procedures, an interpretant that can become
a “habit of response” as George Gentry (1952) puts it in an analysis of Peirce’s
works. Rosenthal provides a more complex answer to the problem of the infinite
regress of interpretations by integrating Peirce’s ideas with those of Mead. She
writes, quoting Peirce:
The term “interpretant” refers to an effect produced in the interpreter by a sign (5: 475). Thus, an
interpretant is an effect in an interpreter. The logical interpretant is a concept (5: 486) and is the only
interpretant “properly denominated a concept” (5: 467). Furthermore, such intellectual concepts
(which are, properly speaking, the only kind of concept there is) are “those upon the structure of
which arguments concerning objective fact may hinge” (Peirce 5: 467). (Rosenthal 1969: 174–175)

In the notion of the “concept” and “the logic of concepts” as further developed
by Mead, she argues that we find an answer to the problem of an infinite
continuum of interpretations. For Rosenthal, such a logic of concepts leads to the
emergence of the “ultimate logical interpretant.” She notes,
As an intrinsic “part” of any interpretive structure or concept one finds both the logical interpretant (as
well as the emotional and energetic interpretants), which necessarily requires a further interpretant,
and the ultimate logical interpretant. (Rosenthal 1969: 176)

This ultimate interpretant makes it possible, in the form of “concepts” and

“imagery” to convert mere “collections” into a “system”—that is, an organized
or bounded set—for example, sets of meanings.
That binding element is the ultimate logical interpretant, the real and living interpretant, habit. The
emotional, energetic, and logical interpretants thus require a further interpretant in that they must be
unified or held together in a triadic relationship by the ultimate logical interpretant. (1969: 183, my
emphasis)

In the world of practical affairs the self is centered, shall I say, by making it
into a concept, an ultimate logical interpretant, that summarizes and collates the
“play” of interpretations that have gone before, a concept that is bound by
structures of habits. Even as they allow the play of differences to operate,
interpretations are, after all, acts and can occur as a series. These interpretive
acts can eventually become habitual and coalesce into a general concept that can
be understood by the individual and his or her others and used to formulate a
self. Rosenthal puts this as follows:
The human being is understood as a process through which occurs the praxis-oriented constitution of
time through acts of adjustment. Its present, as the locus of reality, is understood in terms of the
dynamics of human activity, or what Mead calls the “act,” which incorporates past and future in its
process of adjustment. (1993: 254)

The act as a unit of human experience then emerges as the “ultimate logical
interpretant” act as defined by Mead as beginning in impulses and perception,
the confrontation of a problematic situation and its development into
“manipulation” and “consummation” (1938: 3–26). In keeping with the
pragmatic program, the act may be called the practical interpretant, the
translation of a perceptual interpretive process into acts that impact the external
world. Practice settles the meaning of signs, for the time being. The “time being”
may be short or long, but it has a significant enough durée and is typically
“thick” enough to indicate to the individual himself or herself, and to his or her
others, the presence of a self. The presence of self is manifested in the durée of
the act and insofar as an individual and his or her others engage in a series of
acts the self is also present in the series.
For all the flux, for all the deferment that can be accomplished, and for all the
arbitrariness of the assembly of discrete moments into larger units, they can be
so organized by a sentient intelligence into what Rosenthal calls a “thick now”
(1993: 252). Further, if time is to be so conceived as discrete moments these
moments must still have stability to be considered at all—as Zeno pointed out
long ago. Since time, as a continuous variable and time as a discrete variable are
equally metaphysical concepts, one can conceive the self as both discrete,
manifested in acts, and as continuous, manifested in the narrative assemblage of
these acts with a name to designate it. Rosenthal further argues that Derrida’s
thesis about the “loss of the self . . . is rooted ultimately in his inadequate
understanding of time” (1993: 250). She concludes her study with the
observation that the powerful views of time and the self found in Mead can be
used to “solve issues, problems, and dilemmas on the cutting edge of philosophy
today” and
to avoid the all too easy backslide into the all too treacherous, often all too elusive, terrain of
discreteness and its related self-defeating alternatives that Derrida so cleverly exploits and upon which
his own tools of deconstruction so fully depend. (1993: 263)

In the fulcrum of an interaction the words that issue from the participants are
subject to “free play,” no doubt. Nevertheless for immediate purposes, and in
order to prosecute an action in response to the issued words, he or she has to
assume if not an origin, at least an originating presence, a self with which he or
she has to maintain an interaction and a relationship. In pursuing this goal, the
respondent also produces a text that is subject to the same opportunities for “free
play” as the original text. In this orgy of free playing at least a minimum of
agreement is reached, and for a given duration, by using the standard
significations of the words in question. The participants then can produce texts,
maintain interactions, conceive and define selves for themselves and for the
others in this durée. Neither will wait for an Ur-meaning, one without free play,
to emerge before dealing with the world, acting in it or on it. Rather, whatever he
or she takes to be the significance of the words that he or she receives and
completes in his or her action, whatever is conceived as the practical
consequences of such interpretations is the meaning of the words. If he or she
was to take all the free-playing significations into account before making an
interpretive response he or she would suffer what may be termed semantic
paralysis. For example, while driving, a motorist often comes across a board on
which is written the word “Stop.” Since the sign does not say “stop and then go,”
conceivably the motorist could stop there forever. He or she may or may not
interpret the sign as defined by the absent word “go.” Interpreting the sign for
purposes of practical action, however, the motorist would put a conjunction
“and” between the present word and the absent word and act on that basis.
Indeed the motorist does not wait to trace the traces of the meaning of the word,
all the absences it indicates, its deferrals and contradictions, its poetic allusions
and ambiguities, but acts on the basis of a habitual interpretation of the word and
faces the consequences. By electing to act on one of the deconstructed elements
of the word “stop” and moving forward with the vehicle an actor has defined
himself or herself as one who lives, perforce, in a situated and practical world.
Let us consider a man, one who calls himself “General Radko Mladic,
commander of the Bosnian Serbs.” He confronts a Muslim man in Srebrenica in
June 1995. There is no doubt that each of the terms of identification in this
sentence are subject to the “play of differences,” their respective significations
infinitely deferrable and unstable. Will this prevent, or should I say, did it
prevent, General Mladic from identifying himself as a Bosnian Serb general
whose task it was to kill as many Muslims as possible? David Rohde (1997), in a
painfully detailed book, has shown that it did not. General Mladic did not wait to
deconstruct himself, or the others, did not bother to check for traces of Christian
compassion in it, did not defer his action on a recollection of the United Nations’
Declaration of Human Rights, did not wait to deconstruct his enemy by
wondering about his or her real Muslimness, but acted a selected identity with
disastrous consequences to the Muslims of Srebrenica. In other words, he
already had at his disposal the material with which he could have dissolved the
Christian versus Muslim hierarchic binarism. He could, for example, have
deconstructed this religious binarism and concluded that the Christians and
Muslims were Slavs together or children of the same God of the Jews,
Christians, and Muslims together, or humans together. To believe that with the
proper deconstructionist training the result would have been different is to
commit what may well be termed the textualist fallacy—believing that changing
the structures of a text alone will change the world. The reality is rather that
though a human being experiences the world in terms of différances of a text, he
or she can nevertheless differentiate between the practical consequences of one
text and another, shift from one to the another and return to it or abandon one
text to choose another.
In these acts and in the acting process, then, the deferment of meaning is
always interrupted and moves of consequence to the self and the world made. If
one denies the possibility of these “interruptions” for object-manipulation, a
stopover for the process of meaning-organization and self-constitutions to occur,
one also has to deny the existence of anything on the basis of which any action
can be taken. From such a proposition, it is but a short step to claim that no
action should be taken since all actions are fraught with “unanticipated
consequences,” in Robert Merton’s famous phrase (1968: 73–138). Of course
there are unanticipated consequences, but there are also consequences that can
be anticipated and steps taken to create them. In fact the political implication of
the stance that meanings are indefinitely deferred is that no action can be taken
now and one always has to wait for the next moment. Conversely, if any action is
not possible since the meaning of the action to which this action is a response is
unstable and in free play, the action that is not taken, which is itself an act, will
have dangerously anticipated consequences. The cry of “fire” can, for instance,
be subject to the free play of interpretations, if one had time enough and
sufficient love of words, but in certain other moments one must act quickly and
make some moves. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that in giving a presence to a
self in interaction the “free play” of meaning provides subtle variations to the
self. The self is made available to others, not in gross and undifferentiated forms,
but as subtly shaded presences. These shadings will change as the interaction
proceeds and the significance of the situation and the quality of the interpersonal
transaction changes. These shadings are a result of the “free play” that occurs in
discourse, plays that can be undertaken by the speaker as well as by the listener.
To the extent that they can, by mutual agreement, arrive at a working definition
of what was going on, and limit the “free play” to manageable dimensions,
interactions and interlocutions can proceed, and a viable self be constituted by
the construction and presentation of acts. There is, to be sure, deconstructionist
activity occurring in a human’s response to the symbolic world but such activity
is soon, shall I say, pragmatized—that is, becomes mindful of the practical
consequences of the response—with the actor proceeding to the next step. It is
the way out for the actor from a paralytic indecisiveness just as, perhaps, it is the
means of escape for deconstructionism itself from a self-defeating and nihilistic
cul-de-sac.

THE GRAMMAR OF ACTS

Every human being, whatever other imperatives may be present, must typically
confront others in a situation and the world in its various situational
manifestations, experience their “resistances,” and produce acts that are
“adjustments” that enable the individual to proceed to the next step in the
trajectory of its life. In the course of doing this, he or she will remember his or
her own past and that of the relevant others and will exercise a choice between
alternative lines of action. He or she is not controlled by external forces
exclusively or pushed by internal forces to act in a certain way. Rather, he or she
acts by selecting the moves he or she wants to make and the ends to which they
are to be directed by taking into account whatever internal forces and external
ones may be active. These acts are used to make distinctions between the
individual producing the acts and others. They establish an identity for the actor.
The exercise of choice and the definition of an identity implies the assumption of
responsibility for them. The individual stands by the acts, acknowledges their
significance and their consequences, and holds himself or herself answerable for
them. Authority too is claimed for them—that is, both authorship and a certain
power to articulate particular significations and present specialized roles and
selected addressivities. To author a self is to selectively arrange one’s acts in all
their details and specificities to indicate not only a particular self but a
specialized quality to the self. In authoring a discursive act, for example, one
chooses the phonological, symbolic, syntactic, and structural forms in which it is
to be articulated, a selection that carries the significance and authority of the self
with it (Perinbanayagam 1991: 28–62). Acts, too, carry varying shades of
emotionality—strong, overt, weak, subdued, hysterical, controlled, subtle,
disciplined, and so forth.
Conversely, the others in one’s life—the interactional others, significant and
primary others, and the agents of the generalized other—will hold the individual
as having exercised a choice and made a distinction and that he or she is
responsible for the act in question, and in fact its author, and that the
emotionality it carries can be attributed to him or her.
Among these various features of act, the primal one, it seems to me, is the
capacity to choose from among a number of alternatives after suitable delays and
deliberations. Indeed, the other features derive from this basic capacity: That is,
from a field of alternatives he or she selects one line of action rather than another
and gives it succor and sustenance and reaps the consequences. The males
among Barash’s mountain bluebirds (1977), discussed earlier, may respond in
only one way to the “adultery” of their mates, but a human can choose to
respond in a variety of ways. He or she can pretend that he or she does not know
anything about it and continue his or her life with the mate; he or she can resent
it, upbraid his or her mate, and feel helpless to do anything else about it; he or
she may decide to confront the lover and kill him or her; he or she may
encourage it in the belief that it will help his or her career. And this does not
exhaust the alternatives that he or she may have. The self then is manifest in the
acts that an individual chooses to construct, choices that reflect further meanings
on the self and allow it to elaborate its presence. Choosing one path rather than
another, one method, one strategy, a particular vocabulary, syntax, phonology,
prosody, and imagery, and assembling them in unique ways is the strongest
manifestation of self that can be made. It denotes the absence of controls of a
biological or mechanistic sort and gives the actor sovereignty over his or her
actions.
It is not claimed, however, that the individual has an absolute choice in the
execution of acts. Free from biological or mechanistic control, the individual
nevertheless faces constraints of other kinds. These constraints include those
imposed by the memories of the past that are elements of the self of the moment
and may be available as discursive memories or as habits, constraints imposed
by others and their memories and habits and who may or may not be parties to
the acts of the individual—these latter often summarized as “institutions.” Two
quotations, one famous and the other not, capture these claims nicely. Marx
wrote,
Men make history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances
chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the
past. ([1869]1963: 15)

The other quotation comes from Thomas Szasz, who wrote, “There is, however,
an important limitation to man’s freedom—namely the freedom of other
men. . . . Often a person can enlarge his range of uncoerced choices only by
reducing that of his fellow man” (1970: 1).
Contemplating Marx’s statements leads one to wonder what he could have
meant by “circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the
past.” What are these circumstances and how do they manifest themselves?
Clearly these are “historical” circumstances that are constituted as
“institutions”—that is, patterned and repetitive series of acts that humans
undertake. This repetitiveness and patterning give to “institutions” their obdurate
character, and such obduracy is the feature that limits humans from “making
history” without being “constrained by circumstances.”
It is clear then that it is the activities of individuals that are constrained by
circumstances and these constraints are of two basic kinds: one that the
individual “contains” within his or her self and the other that is “contained” in
the selves of those whose actions impinge on the acts of the initial self. In the
first case the individual’s capacity to “make history,” that is, to act, is
constrained by his or her knowledge of what he or she can do and cannot do, by
what may be called the “habituated horizons” of his or her self and world, while
in the second case the capacity to “make history” is limited by what others, with
their own knowledge, interest, and habits permit him or her to do—provided
they have the power to do so. “History” then may be made by men and women
and they may not do it under circumstances of their own choosing, but choose
they must out of the available alternatives at the decisive fulcrums of history,
personal or societal. It is a self-conscious human that must make one choice
rather than another, including choosing not to do anything. Victims of false
consciousness will be defined as those who are considered by certain others to
be practicing a historically inappropriate universe of discourses. One must
accept that there are limits on choice just as there are certain degrees of freedom
to these limits.
For the individual, self-constraints are put into place by the circumstances of
his or her own past. How does this past manifest itself? Two candidates suggest
themselves for the locus of the presence of the past in the act of the individual:
One is the unthought-through and unreflected action that can be termed habits
and the other are the restrictions and licenses, qualifications, and modifications
that the self remembers and uses in executing its acts.
The memory of a self is then a memory of past acts of self and other, memory
that is both cognitive and emotive, and presents itself as a factor in the
prosecution of current acts. Such memories can be of acts of an immediate past
or of a series of acts from the anterior and intermediate pasts. It is in memory, it
is as a remembered phenomenon, that the self can in fact exist, and it is as
memories that a self is present and manifests itself in acts of an individual. It is
this memory that is converted into habit—habits being memory executed as
practice.
This certainly would be one circumstance from the past that would constrain
action, limit the choices, and control the making of history. Such memories are
provided, not by the actor’s earlier choices alone, though that may play a part,
but by the choices made available by the sedimented and habituated actions of
others. Ideology becomes instrumental in conduct by its presence in the memory
of the individuals and its manifestation in the acts of the individual.
The same observations apply to the others the self encounters and with whom
it lives: They too have memories which affect their acts and habits, cultivated
over the years, and these become sedimented into institutions and historical
practices shared by a large number of people. Actions, and the making of history,
proceed on the basis of the intersection of these different individuals assembled
in one social formation or another and acting collectively. Individuals act and
thereby make history, but do so under certain constraints they carry in their
selves which function to restrain themselves or to restrain others. In the event,
once the choices are made, their consummation is decided by a struggle for
power and control which can be minor or major confrontations. The self is
allowed to make choices, though under circumstances defined by a past and a
system of others—but choice does exist for it.
Acts with these features are typically elements of a series. Each act will have a
connection to earlier acts and will have consequences as well. That is, the acts
that an individual produces are never discrete and isolated happenings, but are
related to earlier acts of the individual as well as to imagined future acts. Further,
they are also connected to the acts that others in a situation are producing at the
moment and the consequences of these acts. In other words, the acts that an
individual produces are units in a plot and elements of a narrative. A narrative is
a manifestation, in orderly forms, of the interrelationship between temporality
and action. Each act, that is, occurs in a given moment, but insofar as the act was
perpetrated by a conscious and memoried agent, it would necessarily carry some
significance from earlier acts and may even have a causal relationship to it. In
addition, the current act is perpetrated in anticipation of further acts that are
causally and sequentially related to it. Together these various acts—the
retrospectively understood ones, the currently occurring ones, and the
anticipated ones—constitute a unity and confer on the acts that a human
produces an essential narrativity. That is, one can watch a play or read a novel
and participate in its narrativity just as one can watch and interpret the acts of
others and interpret their narrative logic. Similarly, one can observe one’s own
acts and both conceive its narrative logic and narratively apprehend it after the
acts have been performed.
The human understanding for which “plot” is an organizing dynamic and
which provides the logic of narrative discourse can be applied, certainly, to
novels and plays that have been deliberately constructed in accordance with this
narrative logic. To the extent, however, that such understanding is not confined
to readers of novels but can be undertaken by all and sundry, the activity of
plotting can be applied to an individual’s act by himself or herself, as well as by
others. If a novel can be read for the plot, and the narrative logic discerned, so
can the acts that humans produce: They, too, could be seen to have a narrative
logic to them, an interconnection with earlier acts and imagined later acts by the
individual and by others. Indeed, it would take a particularly idiotic individual
not to recognize the narrative implications of his or her moves. In fact a
plausible definition of idiocy could well be a state or condition in which an
individual is unable to recognize the narrative implication of his or her acts.
When one studies small bits of behavior—as in those who observe conduct in an
experimental situation, or a small strip of conversation—they are no doubt
studying acts, but they are acts that are isolates. They are not part of a plot, and
are not acts that are narratively connected to earlier acts and forthcoming acts.
They tell no real story and in fact obliterate the life of which it is a part and deny
the dialectical relations they have to earlier acts and with forthcoming acts in the
individual’s imagination. Such perspectives minimize the human being, truncate
him or her, and examine a minute segment of his or her life, a life that he or she,
without a doubt, conceives as a more or less continuous narrative of which the
experimental situation is only a very insignificant part.
The concept of narrativity has been used in a number of recent works in social
psychology in the study of the self concept and identity (Sarbin 1986;
Polkinghorne 1991, 1995, Maines 1993) and in work in psychotherapy. Russell,
citing Arthur Danto, notes, “In contrast to the rational paradigm, the narrative
paradigm assumes that to exist as a human being is to perceive one’s life as a
story to be told” (1991: 24). I am suggesting, however, that to exist as a human
being is to act in awareness that these acts are units of ongoing narratives. I am
referring here to the reflexivity that informs acts: In conducting himself or
herself through the daily routines of a life, an individual understands the
sequential significance of the moves he or she is making and their logical and
narrative connections to earlier moves and forthcoming moves. In reflexively
contemplating one’s own life an individual can comprehend the interconnection
of the various acts in it—that is, its narrative structure—and live accordingly.
The individual himself or herself is able to see the plot of his or her life,
sometimes vaguely and uncertainly, sometimes for only short durations, and at
other times vividly and with assurance, and for longer durations, thus making
acts therein fecund with the future.3
The socialization that a human child undergoes, the process by which he or
she is rendered capable of living with others in orderly communities, is not one
that makes him or her into static condition of “being” or having an identity or a
personality. Rather, socialization allows an individual to cast himself or herself
into one narrative or other, to reflexively apprehend the plot and produce acts
accordingly. Such an individual does not pass from one stage of identity into
another but learns to act in such a way that the acts that are constructed are
narratively coherent: act like a boy or girl, act like a man or act like a woman,
act like a Christian, act like a hunter, gunman, pacifist and so on and so forth.
The content of each of these action-sets or identities are, of course, cultural and
historical variables.
The narrativity of acts can occur in the short or long run, giving the selves
implicated in them a narrativity of their own. The selves of given individuals
come to be conceived with particular narrative identities. Each individual has a
conception not only of his or her self in its situated aspect but as a moment in
larger structures of time. A Christian, for example, has a conception of himself
that is no doubt derived from the attitudes directed toward him or her by the
others in his or her social circles. It is also the case that the attitudes assumed
and practiced by these circles will be drawn from the generalized other that
included the Christian narrative of identity: a human is born with a soul with a
given span of life in this world and then passes into another stage. Between these
two moments, the career of the self is punctuated by various religiously defined
and sanctioned stages—baptism, confirmation, holy matrimony, parenthood,
death. Such narratives may be supplemented or enhanced by secular narratives:
passage into adulthood from childhood, earning a living, finding a career,
developing in the career, retirement, and eventual death. An individual can
conceive his or her other with narrative identities as well: One can place the
other as a protagonist in various narrative structures and give presence to these
identities in a variety of activities. Without allowing oneself to go to the
extremes of James Thurber’s Walter Mitty, it is possible for actors to imagine
themselves in alternative careers to the ones in which they are currently
involved. In all these cases, then, identity is conceived, not as a situated
presentation of self in short durée but as extended narratives in which the self
faces successive situations and deals with them. In confronting such situations,
the individual simultaneously casts himself or herself into an unfolding story as
he or she casts the other in it and proceeds to act out the implications.
Every move an individual makes, then, is typically conceived and understood
as a unit in an unfolding series with either a definitive or flexible structure to it.
These narratives are drawn from the culture: “I am a man and a man has to do
what a man has to do.” It can also be a different story: “A man who fights and
runs away lives to fight another day.” These stories can have various sub-themes.
The former can lead to one learning to box or use a gun while the latter may
induce one to learn the skills of placation and negotiation. In either case the acts
of an individual develop an implicit narrative and give presence to a very
particularized self.
Narrativity is the instrumentation with which a discursive individual places
himself or herself in time—remembered or anticipated or attended. Time is a
construction that uses socially given vocabularies to arrive at a sense of
temporality. Time is a presence in consciousness, as in interactions, as complex
sign-systems. These sign-systems are organized in numerical forms, in linear
configurations, or circular ones, in seasonal and diurnal rhythms and so on and
so forth. Time is also apprehended in narratives in which acts and events are
constructed and presented as sequences and inter-connections that enable an
individual to decode them as representations of temporality. Narratives in the
form of myths, tales, epic poems, novels, stories etc. are sign-systems that enable
an individual to construct and deconstruct time. Before one meets with the
myths, tales and stories however he or she meets the narratives of a culture—
manhood or womanhood, Christian or Jew, Hindu or Buddhist or Moslem, etc.—
and will use them to inform his or her acts in the world and thereby constitute an
ongoing self.
The self, it turns out, is not elusive nor is it mysterious, coterminus with mind,
soul, or consciousness, and not a residual category; rather, the self is manifest in
the acts, the individuated product of a mind, that the actor and others recognize
and classify as the issue of an embodied entity. The self is not a static thought-
way but a recursive sign or system of signs, constituted by the mind, a process
with ups and downs, bumps and grinds, with starts and false starts and retreats, a
maxisign that is able to elicit both cognitive and emotional responses. It is the
mind’s way of organizing the responses it has received, and initiatives that it has
taken, into a more or less coherent system, a maxisign. Its texture is given by
signs and the structures in which these signs are embedded, signs that are able to
elicit further signs, and so on, thus constituting a self-pollinating complex. These
acts that lead to the emergence of the self at one moment in the trajectory of an
individual’s career through life, and what emerges from the self at another
moment, are ones that the individual chooses and uses to make distinctions. The
acts are ones for which the individual takes responsibility and claims authority
and displays emotionality, ones whose connections to earlier signs are
recognized and in which the emerging future signs are anticipated.4
An individual then is a self in semiotically constituted relations to others in
the world, to his or her own being, as well as in relation to the details of the
material world. The others and the world objectify the individual just as the
individual objectifies himself or herself in relation to the world. One becomes a
self as a result of acting in the world of others and one acts as a result of being a
self. As the other changes and as the varied resistance of the world changes, the
self changes too, minimally or maximally. As such it is available to the
individual, as to others, as mutable signs that the mind uses to relate to the world
in the execution of acts.
In the execution of these acts a self is given presence and, to the extent that
the acts are always circumscribed by the material and social phenomena of the
world, so is the self. The material and social phenomena of the world that
sociologists refer to as class, race, caste and gender, not to speak of nation or
civilization, with all their ideological distortions, enter into acts and selves as
various discourses within which acts are prosecuted and selves maintained and
identities presented. In the moments of the act class, race, caste and gender, etc.
are inescapably meanings derived from various discourses and assembled
variously in the act and richly articulated in the mind and memories of the self.

NOTES
1. See Steven Rose (1992) for discussion of how the mere activity of moving around can create
molecular changes in the tissues of the brain of chickens. Similarly, there is abundant evidence now that
words spoken to another affect the structure of the brain of the recipient. The brain is no doubt causally
significant in the actions of an individual just as actions are consequential to the organization of the brain.
The relation between brain and environment, mind and activity, is a two-way process. See Brothers (1997)
for a close examination of the relationship between experience and the structuring of the brain. If memories
of both a cognitive and emotional kind remain as traces in the very brain of the individual and affect the
conception of his or her self, then “mental illnesses” may be reframed as behavioral manifestations of social
experience/brain interactions.
2. There is, without a doubt, an affinity between Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus and G. H. Mead’s
concept of the self. In fact, introducing Bourdieu’s theory Moishe Postone, Edward Li Puma, and Craig
Calhoun say,

Bourdieu characterizes the habitus as a system of general generative schemes that are both durable
(inscribed in the social construction of the self) and transposable (from one field to another),
function on an unconscious plane, and take place within a structured space of possibilities defined
by the intersection of material conditions and fields of operation. (1993: 4)

Vincent Colapietro has also argued against what he calls the “vanishing subject in contemporary
discourse.” He argues that such subjects are

distinguishable but inseparable aspects of those continuous, though continuously changing, centers
of experience and activity. . . . Although the context of their emergence is a social setting inclusive
of or (more accurately) constituted by discursive practices, what emerges from such settings is a
unique enduring center of action—in short an agent. (1990: 653)

Jill McCorkel (1998) has shown in an excellent study of a rehabilitation center that inmates are able to
resist official definitions of self by cultivating a “critical space” between the official versions and their own.
See also Doyle McCarthy (1996) for an analysis of the relationship between knowledge-systems and self-
conceptions and agency.
3. If one ignores the reflexive capacities of the human individual, the fact that he or she always operates
with a discursive mind, it can lead to bizarre research programs. One can see this, for example, in the work
of the “structural social psychologists.” They claim that they produce scientifically valid conclusion with
their experiments. In an article Edward Lawler, Cecilia Ridgeway, and Barry Markovsky (1993),
summarizing the claims of structural social psychology, say that it has a “pervasive concern with the
emergence and effects of social structure” (1993:269). Second, they claim, “In most approaches the
individual is portrayed in a “realistic” way—that is, as possessing a wide variety of capacities, dispositions,
opinions, behavioral proclivities, experiences, and so on” (1993:271). In contrast, the structural social
psychologists, they say, “eschew realism; they portray the actor for theoretical purposes as a relatively
simple entity exhibiting a few well-defined properties” (1993:271). In other words, the human beings are
conceived as “minimal actors” (1993:271) capable of acting in a limited way. From this conception,
experimenters are able to derive theories, i.e. “a set of logically related, abstract, general, and testable
claims about a set of phenomena” (1993:269). The methodological constraint that led the researchers to
assume “minimal actors” led them also to assume minimalist selves for them, which in fact resulted in
findings that are only minimally valuable as sociological explanations. In fact the actors that the researchers
posit are actors who have no pasts, have not lived and negotiated a relationship before, and are innocents in
the interactional situations in which experimenters chose to put them. Indeed they are actors with minimal
minds. Mead, commenting on the place of subjective experiences in Watsonian behaviorism, writes,” What
was to be done with these? John Watson’s attitude was that of the Queen in Alice in Wonderland—‘Off with
their heads’—there were no such things” (1934:2–3). The attitude of the structural social psychologists to
their subjects may be summarized as, “Lobotomise them.” Minimalizing actions and selves, it appears,
exacts a heavy price and the explanatory fruits of such practices are meager. The assumption of minimalist
definitions of self and action leads in fact to an explanatory impoverishment. The researchers claim that
they are producing explanatory theory for sociology—which is a study of maximal human beings and their
relationships—and give us essentially a miniature model more akin to blueprints in engineering and
architecture rather than an empirical social science. Searching for ways to become a rigorous science, the
structural social psychologists have become mere caricaturists. In this connection see David Maines and
Mari Moliseed (1986) for a searching examination of a related school of social psychology.
4. For a different conception of grammar of the self see Richard Brown (1987). This work is a salutary
essay that situates the self in historical and socioeconomic processes. The concept of narratives and stories
has been used very successfully by Plummer (1995) in explaining the development of sexual identities.
 Chapter 2

Rhetoric and the Self

Polonius: My lord, I will use them according to their desert.

Hamlet: God’s bodykins, man, better: use every man after his desert, And who should escape
whipping?
Use them after your own honor and dignity: the less they deserve, the more merit in your
bounty.

Shakespeare, in Hamlet

“I am I because my little dog knows me,” Gertrude Stein had a character say in
one of her plays and made the chorus respond, “That does not prove anything
about you; it only proves something about the dog” (1976). One’s dog is,
without doubt, the most unquestioned source of definition and appreciation
about one’s self that it is a human’s lot to possess. No other source of validation
can give the certainty of appreciation about one’s self that a dog’s
acknowledgment can give—not religion, not one’s kith and kin and their verbal
and gestural productions. The latter will always induce at least a modicum of
doubt and uncertainty just as they will introduce great complexity and subtlety
into their acknowledgement of one’s presence. Humans may own dogs and other
sources of simple and unambiguous validation, but they typically will also have
other humans to see them, cognize and recognize them, know them, and speak to
them, thereby enabling one to become not only a you, but an I and me and a he
or she as well.
It is by appearing and speaking to others that a self is given a presence, a
concrete and situated existence, a tangibility and a facticity. However,
appearances need to be seen and noticed, and speaking needs to be hearkened
and heard. In fact it is not only speaking that is a distinctive human act, but so is
seeing and cognizing and recognizing the other, as well as listening, and
attending to all the nuances and subtleties carried in the structures of appearance
and discourse. These acts of making oneself understood are in fact “rhetorical
devices” (Burke 1969b:65) strategies adopted “to form attitudes or to induce
action” (Burke 1969b: 41) from the other. The acts of such validation transform
the presenter from being an I into a you from the viewpoint of the audience, and
in turn into the me of the presenter.
Philosophers and psychologists have been devising methodologies and
theories that will enable an individual to know himself or herself—to find
answers to the question, “Who am I?” It is no doubt of great importance to know
who one is. However it is equally important to let others know who one is or
thinks he or she is. A sociologist should be particularly interested in discovering
the processes and methods with which one allows oneself to be known by the
other. Once such knowledge of each other is established, however, tentatively
and uncertainly, interactions can proceed. In fact it could be said that the very
emergence of relationships and “society” itself is dependent on my letting others
know who I am, and how I want to be known and discovering who the others are
by interpreting the signs they furnish. Once this is accomplished, then interaction
can proceed on the basis of what each knows about the other, or thinks he or she
knows about the other, which then permits an informed and more or less well-
founded interaction to occur. Needless to say as the interaction proceeds one or
the other individual may experience surprise or disappointment and change the
knowledge of the other that one began with and thus alter the course of the
interaction. Nevertheless there is no gainsaying the claim that one of the
irrefutable responsibilities of a social being is to let the others know who one is
so that interaction can proceed apace. An individual then appears and speaks so
that the others can understand him or her and appreciate his or her particularized
presence in the world and respond to it. In short, an individual creates a dialogic
presence for himself or herself so that others can address it and participate in the
ongoing proceedings.
To be a self, an individual has to appear well enough and speak well enough
so that he or she may be recognized and heard and the process of self-
constitution accomplished. That is to say, if there is a grammar of the act and the
self, then there should also be a rhetoric of the self and the act so that the self can
be given presence efficiently and effectively—defining efficiency here as the
parsimonious means of reaching a goal and effectiveness as the degree of
success with which these goals are reached. In other words, following Kenneth
Burke’s lead, if the self has a grammar, then it needs a rhetoric with which it can
announce its presence. Describing his work on the rhetoric of motives, Burke
writes that it “deals with the possibilities of classification in its partisan aspects;
it considers the way in which individuals are at odds with one another, or
become identified with groups more or less at odds with one another” (1969b:
22). The rhetorical processes that I propose to deal with here call for an
amendment to Burke’s statement: My essay considers the ways in which
individuals, who are always at odds with each other, nevertheless manage to
construct reciprocal selves and discursive interactions by using various
“rhetorical devices.” These “devices” that human agents use to give presence to
their selves—that is, to persuade themselves and others about the existence of
their selves, are manifest in the acts each of them produces and executes. The
social nature of the human individual derives from the exercise of rhetorical
prowess in successfully integrating with other people, or for that matter in
successfully disintegrating from them, too, when the occasion demands it. Men
and women may be “rational animals,” as it used to be said, and there may even
be merit in conceiving an “unconscious man” or an “unconscious woman” but,
above all, men and women are rhetorical animals.
One of the unique features of the human being is that at any moment of
existence he or she is aware of at least two others, generalized and significant,
and at times of a third, an interactional other. In addition, he or she is aware of
his or her own being in relation to these three others. This condition may be
termed the human’s fundamental sociality. This sociality is manifest in the
mind’s capacity to achieve in Mead’s words an “objective reality of
perspectives,” by organizing different perspectives into a coherent relationship
with each other (1932: 161–175).
What is essential to such a mind is that it should be characterized by sociality in both its dimensions,
for not only must it be determined by the different elements that go to make it up in the system to
which it belongs but it must in passage be able to occupy successive systems so that it realizes itself in
each as a member of the other or others. (Mead 1938: 609, my emphasis)

To be oneself he or she must be another. In relating to the three others, a human

deals with two “systems,” his or her own being and that of the objective others,
and this confers on the individual one dimension of sociality. As Mead put it,
“The self exists over against other selves. The relation of the individual to the
community is one which involves the distinction of the one from the other. The
self is defined in terms of the others” (1938: 654). The second dimension of
sociality, for Mead, is the capacity to achieve “passage” from one system to
another so that it realizes itself in each and prosecutes acts “as a member of the
other or others” (1938: 609). Sociality then is the imaginative construction and
reconstruction of one’s own presence in the minds of others as well as of others
in one’s own mind.
 How does a minded organism achieve this feat of being in different “systems”
and passing among them and acting in reference to them? Mead answers: “The
social organization of perspectives arises through the individual’s taking the role
of the other within a social act whose varied phases are in some sense present in
his organism” (1938: 610). This taking of the role of the other occurs in an
individual’s relationship to all three types of others, interactional, significant,
and generalized, and such “taking”—that is, interpreting the other’s words and
gestures, conferring a particular significance on them, and gauging the unspoken
and implicit significations contained in them—is typically achieved visually and
discursively. The individual looks but above all listens and speaks and it is
through these activities that the taking of the role of the others proceeds initially.
This is not all, however. The individual also remembers the others from past
encounters and relationships, the particular social and emotional impact that they
had, and he or she takes the roles of these others, general and significant, absent
though they may be, and acts on the basis of the memory of these others and
their attitudes. “Mind, in short, is persistence of past experience, but as the sense
of meanings that appear in the social structure, or mental characters in relation to
certain things. It is thus a statement of relationships” (Mead 1938: 658).
A human being, then, lives simultaneously in two “socialities.” First, he or she
is “determined, by different elements”; that is, constituted, by various social
elements; second, one is determined by the various relationships that he or she
takes into account in conducting himself or herself through life. These
relationships, the attitudes and emotions they are able to indicate, present in the
remembrances of the individual producing an act and present in the
remembrances of the interactional others, if there are any, receive attention in the
organization of the act and its performance. Such exercises in sociality are made
possible by the structures of linguistic communication. It is this faculty that
enables human beings to be “determined” by the various social elements on the
one hand and to “move” from one perspective another. Indeed, the very
structures of linguistic communication in which all humans become embedded
makes it impossible for him or her to escape the conditions of sociality. The
language faculty may have a genetic basis and may well be an “organ” of the
brain as Steven Pinker has argued (1994). It, however, needs social stimulation
from infancy to manifest itself, and its very occurrence as instances of behavior,
even in infancy, and its effective functioning, inextricably imbricates humans
with each other.
It has been customary to trace the interdependent nature of human existence to
the fact that the human infant is born in such a way that it is totally dependent on
adult care for its mere survival. The infant as it is fed, fondled, and nurtured
learns to depend on others just as those who do the nurturing develop
attachments and loyalties to the infant. The sociability and group-centeredness of
humans no doubt arise from this early experience. Nevertheless, there is another
feature of human existence that contributes mightily to the sociality of the
human and its dependence on others. Such sociality is in fact practiced and
achieved by using, interpretively, the rhetorical capacities of the language.
Language exists as a living reality only insofar as it is addressed to others and is
able to elicit a response from them (Bakhtin 1984:181–194). By the nature of the
case a human being, insofar as he or she speaks, speaks in order to be heard,
thereby connecting him or her to others and, equally, if he or she thinks, it is
presumptively, to address others. The very uses of language inevitably posit a
human subject in an addressive and interactional mode, a mode from which the
only escape is madness or death.
In fact the very possession of linguisticity as a species characteristic of the
human being demands that humans interact with each other and maintain at least
a minimum of solidaristic relationships. Linguists have identified many features
that are definitional to language as such—grammaticality, structurality,
phoneticity—but its fundamental feature is its social nature: Language has to be
addressed. Human beings do not just “speak,” or produce “utterances” or
“process” sentences, but speak to others and produce utterances and process
sentences so that they may receive commensurate responses. It is as it is spoken
to an other, as to the self, that it gains its standing, presence, and evolutionary
value. Furthermore, once it is addressed, the very fact of its addressivity
demands an answer. Language, for it to have presence, then, must be addressed
and elicit an answer. It is in this circumstance that the social nature of the human
resides. Humans, insofar as they are linguistically competent, must perform this
competence in interactions for both the language itself and the practitioners of
the language to achieve presence. In short, there is a dialogic imperative to the
existence of the human species. The social nature of humans and their
linguisticity are inseparable features: To be human is to talk (not merely to
“have” a language) and to talk is to draw the other into one’s own life just as the
other faces the same predicament. A selfish gene there may well be, and it may
control the life of a human for all anyone knows, but for all that, even one driven
by it must talk to the other, and talk to him or her in such a way that he or she
responds, and the moment both partners do this, sociality is created and
selfishness is diminished. Each party must control his or her selfishness, tailor
his or her attitudes, manage his or her emotions, control his or her ambitions and
aspirations in order to constitute a dialogue. The interaction order that Goffman
described in his many works is achieved dialogically by observing, as faithfully
and frequently as possible, various rules and specifications. Saving face, one’s
own as well as that of the other, maintaining demeanor and observing deference,
cooling the mark out when necessary, and behaving decorously and with
mandatory civil inattention, or for that matter, civil attention, are really
prescriptions for maintaining dialogic interactions and cultivating interactional
solidarity. And it is in addressing the other and answering him or her that such
solidarity is achieved.
One speaks, then, and addresses another, and this is done in such a way that it
may be answered and typically does elicit an answer. Addressivity and
answerability are in fact the central motifs in Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogic theory
(1981; 1986). In addition to these processes a human being also makes
references to others and thereby gives them a presence in the discourse and in
the world. Paul Ricoeur has recently developed this idea of referentiality and has
written that, “It is along this path of identifying reference that we encounter the
person for the first time, considering this term in an equally modest sense as
globally distinguishing this entity from physical bodies” (1992: 27). Further, the
individual is able to address himself or herself, answer himself or herself, and
even refer to himself or herself. This faculty has been called reflexivity. Mead
makes reflexivity the central process in the constitution of meaning and self.
I will call these four the rhetorical modes of self-constitution and presencing.
It is in such rhetorical encounters that the individual as a self can exist: He or she
is reflexively present to himself or herself and in such a reflexivity his or her
three others find a presence too. As the individual addresses others, and in such
addresses he or she takes account of his or her presence and that of the others he
or she is addressing. Similarly in referencing others the same socialities are
involved: In being answerable to one’s presence in the social world, he or she is,
to begin with, answerable to himself or herself, just as he or she is answerable to
the three others. The discursive mind that Harre and Gillett (1994) describe is
one that functions to define an “individual” self, but one that is inextricably
intertwined with the others through reflexivity, addressivity, referentiality, and
answerability. In fact, the answers to the question, “What is an individual?” is
that he or she is one who is able to engage in various processes to achieve a
presence for a self by reflexive and referential acts, on the one hand, and
addressive and answerable ones, on the other.
The self then is not so much owned or possessed as articulated in relation to
others and remembered as the articulations and the responses they elicited. In
such articulations an individual uses a shared vocabulary and a culture; to the
extent that he or she does that and keeps speaking and presenting a self, the traps
of solipsism and the travails of social and emotional isolation are avoided. The
articulations posit the individual syntactically with others and enable the
responsiveness of the external world and the reflexivities of the mind to
constitute a self. These articulations—visual, tactile, and verbal—can be said to
address an external world, particularly the world of other individuals in
anticipation of responses from it and reflecting on it as the interaction with it
proceeds. Once the self is articulated in this way and the responses are
forthcoming, it is necessary to listen to the responses, take account of them one
way or another, and orient the self accordingly. To the extent that the listening is
inattentive and inadequate, the resulting presence of the self and the acts that are
issued would be to that extent wanting and incomplete. The typical moment,
then, in which selves are present is in the conversions between people, between
an I and you, reciprocally changing places as the conversation proceeds and
moments when there is both speaking and listening.
While the four rhetorical modes of the self occur together in varying
permutations and combinations in actual discursive acts, I will discuss them in
detail separately in order to achieve clarity of communication—indeed, to
achieve a certain rhetorical efficiency. Insofar as the primary point of the
dialogic processes is the individual actor I will begin with the reflexive
processes.

THE REFLEXIVE PROCESS

G. H. Mead makes “reflexivity” a central process in the doing of an act and in

the emergence of the self. For him it meant that the individual is able to examine
himself or herself from the standpoint of others. Mead writes, “The self has the
characteristic that it is an object to itself, and that characteristic distinguishes it
from other objects and from the body” (1934: 136). He also asks how can an
individual get outside himself experientially in such a way as to become an
object to himself and answered by giving primacy to the act: “This is the
essential psychological problem of selfhood or of self-consciousness; and its
solution is to be found by referring to the process of social conduct or activity in
which the given person or individual is implicated” (1934: 138). That is, even
the reflexive activity of minding is not a solipsistic exercise: It occurs in a social
field in which the individual has been implicated since birth. Mead expands on
this argument further and notes:
For he enters his own experience as a self or individual, not directly or immediately, not by becoming
 a subject to himself, but only insofar as he first becomes an object to himself just as other individuals
are objects to him or in his experience; and he becomes an object to himself only by taking the
attitudes of other individuals toward himself within a social environment or context of experience and
behavior in which both he and they are involved. (1934: 138)

How does the individual come to know the attitudes of the other members of
the social group? Or to put it in terms that originated out of another tradition of
philosophy, how does the individual gain “knowledge of other minds”?
Wittgenstein observes that an individual uses one criterion or another to come to
conclusions about the mind of the other. “An ‘inner’ process stands in need of
outward criteria,” he says (Wittgenstein 1958: epigram 580). Commenting on
this, Norman Malcolm writes,
When [someone’s] thinking is freed of the illusion of the priority of his own case, when he is able to
look at the familiar facts and to acknowledge that the circumstances, behavior and utterances of others
actually are his criteria . . . for the existence of their mental states.” (1966: 380–381)

It is not the case then that one reads the “mind” of the other as such or that one
“enters” the mind of the other in some magical or mysterious way. Rather, it is
that one takes their acts as expressions and indices of the other’s attitudes in
order to organize one’s own self. To do this, however, the other must act and
produce the “circumstances, behavior and utterances” that the individual can use
as “criteria” for the “inner process” of the other. Conversely, the individual must
also produce his or her own “circumstances, behavior, utterances” to give the
other the criteria for his or her own uses. Each participant, that is, produces his
or her own “criteria,” which also function to elicit “criteria” from the other. It is
in the intertwining of these mutual acts, it is the responses—that is, meanings—
elicited by these acts, which each other is able to use in order to develop a self
and keep it going. In developing and presenting these acts each individual is able
to reflexively cognize the significations of these acts and their probable
consequences and produce them accordingly and then, as a second step, interpret
the acts of the other and use them to constitute his or her self.
On this process Mead writes, “The importance of what we term
‘communication’ lies in the fact that it provides a form of behavior in which the
organism or the individual may become an object to himself” (1938: 138).
Having said this, Mead describes the process of such communication in such a
way that puts conversations as the major instrument of such communication:
Of course, one may hear without listening; one may see things that he does not realize; do things that
he is not really aware of. But it is where one does respond to that which he addresses to another and
where that response of his own becomes a part of his conduct, where he not only hears himself but
responds to himself, talks and replies to himself as truly as the other person replies to him, that we
have behavior in which the individuals become objects to themselves. (1934: 139)
 This is a description of an individual’s conversation with himself or herself
and it is seen as a continuation of the conversation that the individual has or has
had with others. There is no essentialist interiority to either Mead’s theory of the
self or the mind. Reflexivity is not a private and individuated process but the
processing of attitudes derived from the external world. As an act it may be
private and even secretive, but it perforce will use a shared and public language,
indeed signs from the external world. Nevertheless, there is no claim here that
these signs are absorbed into the self in a mechanical manner; rather, they are
subject to examination and analysis, distortion and exaggeration, deflection and
even rejection and are used rhetorically to constitute a self—at least, once
infancy and early childhood are transcended satisfactorily.
The reflexive process can be recognized most clearly in the acts of speech
produced by each participant in an interaction. While speaking, an individual
posits an I at the center of the act, an I that is typically visible in the very
structure of the sentence—though sometimes remains implicit. Various
structures follow the presentation of this I and carry the features of the self that
are relevant to the occasion in which the presentation is made. In making this
presentation the individual typically addresses another: The presentation is made
to another, a you, and must ensure that the remarks that issue forth are
intelligible to the other on the one hand, and take into account all about the other
that is relevant on the other hand. One’s remarks, as they are spoken, take into
account a priori the relevant qualities of the other and incorporate them into the
very form and substance of the remark. Conversely, the other receiving and
interpreting these same remarks acknowledges the relevant qualities of the initial
speaker and uses them for his or her own purposes, and this is true of speaking
as of all other performances. The individual then is speaking as a self and
listening as an other to the very speech itself and simultaneously listening to the
other as a self speaking to him or her. The individual addresses himself or
herself, addresses the other, and listens as well even if no one is physically
present. Indeed this facility seems to develop very early in life. Consider the
following excerpts from the monologue of a two-year-old child reported in a
remarkable study (Nelson 1989). A small microphone was attached to the crib of
the child, Emily, and recorded both her dialogues with her parents and the talk
she produced when she was alone. Here is an example of the latter:
Emily: Maybe when my go—come
maybe my go in Daddy’s blue big car
maybe maybe when Carl come (again)
then go to back home
go Peabody
 Carl sleeping
not right now—the baby coming
and Carl coming
my house
Aaaaaaaaaand Emmy Emmy ((everything)) (???) coming
after my nap
not right now—cause the baby coming now (Gerhardt 1989: 219).

The child is able to use the pronoun “my” often and use the proper noun
Emmy as well to refer to herself. Further, she is also able to formulate a number
of substantive relationships of herself to events of the world: going in daddy’s
car, car coming again, Carl going home to Peabody, Carl sleeping, and the
coming of a new baby; and to objects: car, with allusions to size and color,
home, and Peabody. These are reflexive activities with which the child Emily is
able to place her self in relation to these events and objects and thereby give her
same self the semblance of a definition, a place, and a presence. Furthermore,
Emily’s articulations are couched in such a way that, though they are
monologues with no one there to listen to them, they are intelligible to others.
Talking to herself, Emily is implicitly talking to others as well and is making
herself understood by others by using words, phrases, and syntactic structures
that are common to the community.
These acts of speaking by Emily contain what Ricoeur had called “the
reflexivity of the utterance” (1992: 44). In speaking, one listens closely and
anticipates the other’s listening. To do this satisfactorily the speaker must
anticipate the other’s responses to one’s speech and tailor it accordingly. And as
he or she speaks, the other is able to simultaneously situate the speaker as the
one who is speaking and listen to him or her, thereby giving him or her, or rather
this self, a presence. In speaking to the other, moreover, one is able to indicate
the attitudes and intentions that one has to the other, just as he or she is able to
discern them in the speech. Conversely, by responding to the original speech, the
other is able to indicate his or her intentions and attitudes—however imperfectly,
and at times erroneously.1
Ricoeur refers to verbal exchanges as “interlocutions” in which “an exchange
of intentionalities, reciprocally aiming at one another” occurs. This circularity of
intentions demands that the reflexivity of utterance and otherness implied in the
dialogic structure of the intentional exchange be placed on the same level (1992:
44). That is, the interchanges that occur in the reflexive process should be given
the same standing as those that occur between two sentient beings. The “inner
forum,” as Mead (1964: 288) calls it, is very much like the “outer forum.”
The I that occurs in such interlocutions, and the me too, are indices of
reflexivity and a double consciousness, and they occur readily in utterances. The
I, then, that is present in the discourse is presented to the other, the you. During
an interaction the I is not a mere reference to the nowness of the speaker and not
just a shifter that changes as the interaction changes. Rather, as a pronoun it
stands for a noun, not only in the simple grammatical sense but also in a
substantive sense. For example, when Hamlet says “It is I, Hamlet, the Dane,” it
is clear what the I stands for. Very conveniently, and for effective dramatic
purposes, he is spelling out all that the I stands for. It stands here for Hamlet, the
prince, and for one who is unquestionably Danish with all that these identities
represented in terms of rights and privileges and perquisites. As such Hamlet
will speak and claim also his love for Ophelia, who was being buried when he
made this declaration. The various significations of the I are then established by
the speaker knowing them, signifying them, and the respondent’s recognizing
them and giving legitimacy to the claims by accepting them, by not challenging
them or refuting them. Typically, one does not have to spell it out in such detail;
a simple I would be enough.
In ordinary conversations, an individual uses the I in a similar fashion but the
details of the noun and the adjectives that go with it are typically left unspecified
and implicit. A voice on the telephone says, “I am coming home on Saturday.”
The moment a mother hears these words and the opening “I” of the utterance,
she identifies him as her son James who has been away at college and is coming
home because his Christmas vacation is beginning. This “I,” which she identifies
as a “you,” of course, is a pronoun that stands for nouns such as James and noun-
phrases such as “James my son” or “Jimmy-boy,” and it also stands for rights
that the son enjoys vis-à-vis his mother, his father, his home, his siblings.
Conversely when James made the call he was aware of these rights and claims of
love and was able to say “I” to a you, the mother, in full cognizance that this you
is his mother with whom he has a special relationship as a son and to whom he
can address this remark. Such reflexive moves are undertaken, in other words,
by incorporating the perspectives of the other and that of the self into them.
The assertion of an I occurs in real or presumptive interactional moments and
are simultaneously reflexive and addressive procedures that elicit interpretants
from a real or presumptive other, thereby defining the presence of a self. This
argument applies to all I-you relationships: The I and you are representamen of a
gamut of identities and relationships, one of which becomes tangible in selves
that are present in discursive interactions. The “I” and “you” are rhetorical
devices, used to summarize claims, and are indices of the presence of selves. As
the “I” is asserted and used in an utterance, it reflects the user as it reflects the
user’s relationship to the one addressed. The use of these signs makes claims
about its right to use not only the signs but to everything that follows them—the
rest of the utterance, its contents, their subtleties and nuances, their shape and
form. The reflexive “I” colors the rest of the speech, adds new qualifications to
it, and certainly does not stand alone. Similarly, the “you” also is a rhetorical
device that summarizes the attributes of the other, his or her various identities for
use in discursive interactions. It is then not merely an I and me that are involved
in the presences of the self, but I as a you to the other and the other as a you to
the I, thereby giving the selves of both participants a dialogic dynamic.
This reflexive rhetoric is defined by the nature of the relationship in which it
occurs. It is not everyone who can say, “I order you to shoot the prisoner.” The
entity that says “I” here is a self that has a history, a history that it remembers
and uses to claim the right to say “I” in this context and to append the verb
phrase to it. Not only does the self know it and remember it, but it expects the
other to know it and remember it and acknowledge it. In the event that the other
does not know it, he or she will have to be provided with the knowledge: “I am
your new commanding officer,” or else he or she may have to be reminded: “I
am your superior officer.” In the event that the other does not acknowledge the
“I” of the first speaker, there are two developments that are possible. One, there
is a rebellion and an insubordination afoot and steps have to be taken to establish
the rights of the I to have said “I” and the words that followed it. Or else the first
speaker would be rendered ridiculous, his claim to authority rejected with the
addressee assuming a dominant position. In any case, the I and the you in the
transaction become salient not as mere pronouns but as nouns—as names or
titles—that encapsulate a history and represent multiple social and interpersonal
claims. When asserted, the “I” reflects back on the noun and the proper noun of
the asserter and announces all the claims that the individual can make about his
or her self and identity. These claims represent the biography of the individual—
occupational, social, and interpersonal—that are relevant. If these are not known
to the other and cannot be recovered from his or her memory, they have to be
made available in the ensuing discourse. Typically, the situation, appearance, and
the selected vocabulary of the discourse would suffice to indicate what the “I” of
the speaker represents. The self of the speaker can be seen to be present insofar
as it is possible for one to say “I” in relation to an act and a verbal articulation;
and to the extent others can respond to this “I.” The discursive act places the self
in various particularities and transfixes it. The reflexivity of the utterance,
typically manifested as an I in utterance and a me, invites the individual to
consider his or her complex presence in the world and to consider it from the
standpoint of others, a you, and then for the other to consider it as a you in
return. Reflexivity is then not an interior monologue, but an active rhetorical
process by which the other is implicated in one’s acts and a self given presence.2
One can see this reflexivity of self even among people who are reputed to
have a weak sense of self. The Dinka, writes Godfrey Lienhardt, “have no
conception which at all closely corresponds to our popular modern conception of
the ‘mind’ as mediating, as it were storing up experiences of the self” (1961:
149). It appears that memories, experiences, and even dreams are taken as part of
the external world that acts upon the individual. Commenting on this, Yi-Fi Tuan
writes:
What, then, happen to the feelings—those of guilt and envy for instance—that the Dinka, like all
human beings, unavoidably have? The answer is that these feelings are expelled from the experiencing
self to the external world. Because a sense of guilty indebtedness can come to the debtor suddenly (as
memories often do) he finds it reasonable to interpret that unpleasant feeling as a Power directed at
him by the creditor. Likewise an envious man, not recognizing the envy in himself easily transfers his
experience of it to another person who thereby assumes the visage of a witch. The outside world, thus
loaded with projected moods and passions, comes alive—a dense-textured, vivid, but often also
frightening place. (1982: 142–143)

It is clear from this that it is not the case that the Dinka have a weak sense of
self or that they have no sense of self, as some would no doubt have it, but rather
that each Dinka actor conceives the self as defined, guided, directed and
controlled by an external force. Indeed the person would be unable to act at all if
he or she did not initially conceive a self, albeit one given shape and presence by
witches and powers external to his or her mind and body. Insofar as a Dinka is
himself or herself symbolizing and naming with various particulars this external
force, and doing so by the exercise of his or her own powers, that is, the power
to name and symbolize, he or she is in fact reflexively conceiving a self, albeit
one that uses an externalist metaphor to do so. It is not the witch that is making
him envious but that he is conceiving his envious self as witch-induced. These
external elements are signs that are given by the culture and are used reflexively
as rhetorical devices for the constitution of a self. The irrefutable universal of the
human experiencing of the world—be he or she a New England Protestant or a
Dinka from the Nile Basin—is that he or she will experience the world through
signs and their interpretants and use them rhetorically to constitute selves.

THE ADDRESSIVE PROCESS

Insofar as the presence of self is typically manifested in conversational

interactions, there is always the issue of addressing the other. Each must address
the other in some way and the way itself will define immediately the addressee
and the addressor. Bakhtin describes addressivity thus:
An essential (constitutive) marker of the utterance is its quality of being directed to someone, its
addressivity. As distinct from signifying units of a language—words and sentences—that are
impersonal, belonging to nobody and addressed to nobody, the utterance has both an author . . . and an
addressee. The addressee can be an immediate participant-interlocutor in an everyday dialogue, a
differentiated collective of specialists in some particular area of cultural communication, a more or
less differentiated public, ethnic group, contemporaries, like-minded people, opponents and enemies, a
subordinate, a superior, someone who is lower, higher, familiar, foreign, and so forth. (Bakhtin 1986:
95)

What Bakhtin calls addressivity, it turns out, is the combination of two

processes that Mead called “taking the role of the other” and “taking and attitude
of the other” (1934: 360–362). In the first one, an individual identifies the other
and identifies with the other and in the second process, one appreciates the
other’s attitude to the self, for example, that he or she is hostile, and incorporates
it into one’s acts. Such addressivity is to be found both in the content of the
utterances and in the form.
Indeed, one of the markers of such addressivity—an easy empirical index of
addressivity, in fact—is the term used by a speaker to address the other. It is
typically the opening move in a dialogic interaction. With this move an
individual is able to “take,” that is, first define and then incorporate, the other
into one’s own acts. The addressing moves then are rhetorical devices by which
the other is both defined and understood and his or her self given a presence.
The dialogic interactions in which an individual presents an I and is addressed
as a you by another contains a powerful dynamic: The addressed one is thereby
confirmed and validated in it and is expected, if not actually forced, to live
within its parameters. Addressed as “You, my son” by a woman fixes the
addressee in the identity of the son and forces a reciprocal, “You, my mother,”
from the addressee—though the last two words are usually left implicit. This
applies to all such addressive interactions: The pronouns of address define and
confine each other, the addressor and addressee, in the terms by which each is
addressed and creates a symbiotic entrapment. Such addressing defines and
transfixes the other’s self like the eyes of the Ancient Mariner transfixed the
Wedding Guest, making it difficult, if not impossible, to escape its gaze.
Coleridge wrote of this particular gaze, as follows:
It is an ancient Mariner,
And he stoppeth one of three.
“By thy long grey beard and glittering eye,
Now wherefore stopp’st thou, me?
 The Bridegroom’s doors are open’d wide,
And I am next of kin;
The guests are met, the feast is set:
May’st hear the merry din.”
He holds him with his skinny hand,
“There was a ship,” quoth he.
“Hold off! Unhand me, greybeard loon!
Eftsoons his hand dropt he.
He holds him with his glittering eye—
The Wedding-guest stood still,
And listens like a three years’ child:
The Mariner hath his will.

Everyone may not have as glittering an eye as the Ancient Mariner and everyone
may not listen with the rapt attention of a three-year-old, but there are addresses
that are difficult to resist. As Bakhtin puts it, writing, it is thought, under the
name of Volosinov,
Orientation of the word toward the addressee has an extremely high significance. In point of fact,
word is a two-sided act. It is determined equally by whose word it is and for whom it is meant. As
word, it is precisely the product of the reciprocal relationship between speaker and listener, addresser
and addressee. (Volosinov [1930]1973: 86)

The addressor can, by employing one rhetorical device or another, transfix the
other and elicit the necessary attention—an elicitation that is dependent on the
two-sided power of the device used.3
In encountering the other in interactions and engaging them in dialogue, one is
obliged to name them with proper nouns, common nouns, or pronouns. In this
way one gets into the addressive mode and rhetorises a relationship verbally and
gesturally. These are interactions between the richly textured selves of the
participants, each of whom is summarized in the_terms with which each is
addressed—names, nicknames, titles, or pronouns. They represent the
biographies of the individuals, relevant elements of which are summoned to aid
in the management of the current interaction. One uses the proper addressive
terminology—Your Majesty, Sir, Mr. Peabody, Jack, Jill, Johnny-boy, old man,
old girl, Daddy, Mummy, and so on; one bows, curtsies, removes one’s hat,
kowtows, grins apologetically, smiles arrogantly, looks disdainfully, and so on—
and each such move addresses the rich biography of the other as it is known to
the speaker.
Commenting on one aspect of this, Goffman puts this issue as follows:
Certainly our obligation to keep the names of our friends in mind, along with other pertinent social
facts concerning them, is more than a means of celebrating and renewing our social relationship to
 them; it also ensures a shared orientation for reference and hence for talk whenever we come into
contact with them. What affirms relationships also organizes talk. (1983b: 42)

Rather, what affirms relationships also announces a self and orientates actions,
including talk. I am not talking only of “pronouns of power and solidarity” that
Brown and Gilman (1972) discussed, but all forms of address—pronouns,
common nouns and proper nouns, collective nouns and singular nouns, epithets,
names, nicknames—indeed, the entire system of signs by which actors place the
other, and hence the self, in the interactional moment by using one such sign
rather than another.
Nevertheless, Brown and Gilman’s pioneering work on the subject has a
wealth of information and analysis that is useful here. Distinguishing between
pronouns of “power” and “solidarity,” they argue that the pronouns used in
addressing the other indicate whether the ensuing relationship was characterized
by power or solidarity—that is, if the addresser was creating a relationship of
domination over the other or one of intimacy. They further note the historical
changes in the use of these pronouns and their relationship to the types of society
in which they flourished. “The non-reciprocal power semantic is associated with
a relatively static society in which power is distributed by birthright and is not
subject to much redistribution.” They cite the feudal and manorial social systems
of Europe as examples and argue that, “the reciprocal solidarity semantic has
grown with social mobility and an equalitarian ideology” (1972: 265). A major
contribution of this work is to the study of language and interpersonal relations;
yet one can still use their work to answer further questions.
In interpersonal relations, at the moment of address, the uses of particular
terminologies define the self of the other and places him or her in the specific
relationship that the addresser is willing to accept. To the extent the addressee
accepts the terminology, a particular presence of his or her self has been made
available for the dialogue that is to follow. Further, by using a particular form of
address—be it a pronoun or noun, titles, last names, first names, or both last
name and first name and various combinations thereof—the addresser defines
not only the other but his or her self as well as the presence of self that is
relevant to the moment. He or she in fact defines a structural relationship by
using titles and other formal addresses, and an interpersonal relationship by
using first names, nick-names and so on (Stone 1970). In the dialogic
relationship, and in the establishment of a presence for the selves in it, the terms
of address are parsimonious instrumentations. Indeed these terms of address,
within the interactional moment and situation, are signs of the self of each
participant. The availability of these varied terms with their capacity to represent
minutely varied significations enable the articulator to presence his or her self
and the other’s self in exactly the way he or she wants. The degrees of intimacy
and distance, familiarity and strangeness, formality and informality, kinship,
non-kinship, and pseudo-kinship can all be coded into these usages. The tonation
and intonations used in the speech to the other also warrants attention here; they,
too, possess particular addressivities and need to be modulated in the
interactional moments to place the self of the other vis-à-vis one’s own self.
These tonations and intonations addressively signify “inferiors,” “superiors,”
adults, children, parents, lunatics, beggars, and so on.
If the terms of address in conversations, the opening moves, so to speak,
inscribe the relevant aspects of the other’s self into the conversation—what may
be termed formal addressivity—the rest of the discourse is not exempt from the
imperative to be addressive if it is to be effective as a social act. The addressivity
of the content of a discourse—what may be called its substantive addressivity—
is no less important in giving presence to selves. In producing addressivity in the
discourse that follows the naming or the pro-naming of the other, one “takes the
attitude” of the other. Attitude, Mead argues is “the beginning of the act; it is a
part of the act” (1934: 5). In speaking to the other, one displays one’s attitude to
the other in the content and design of the discursive act. To be able to take the
attitude of the other, the attitude must be available in some significant form. In
the interactional moments, the individuals present in it must make two moves
simultaneously: take, that is interpretively attend to, the attitudes of the other and
enable the other to take one’s own attitude. In order to do the latter, an individual
invests his or her acts with addressivity.
Investing one’s speech with addressivity means that the general and the
particulars of the resultant discourse contain ideas, concepts, assumptions,
allusions, references, values, stylizations, imageries, and so on that define the
other and that are accessible to the other. In being addressive, an individual
composes his or her discourse in such a way that it becomes rhetorically efficient
and effective. An individual who articulates a discursive act, recognizing that the
speaker and hearer are at odds with each other—because each has a different self
and multiple identities—will seek to reduce the differences as much as possible
by arranging the words, tonations, and intonations appropriately. The rhetoric of
addressivity, at a minimum, makes it possible for individuals to maintain
interactions for a while and at the maximum sustain relationships. One initiates
an interaction, thereby giving presence to his or her self by addressing the self as
well as that of the other by attending to his or her name, nickname, kin-term, or
title. The addressivity of such openings, however, are but the first step: All the
subsequent words flow from this opening and carry forward the addressivity.
One opens an interaction with “Al, how are you? I haven’t seen you in a long
time,” the words that follow “Al” are contingent on the opening: It is Al who is
being addressed, an Al who has not been seen in a long time by the addresser, an
Al who is entitled to be addressed in such familiar ways and asked such familiar
questions. The rhetoric of addressivity demands that in facing someone an
individual produces texts that are trimmed and arranged in such a way that the
other’s self is properly tended as well as one’s own is suitably situated and
assembled, both in form and content. Addressivity as a rhetorical mode gives the
individuals engaged in interactions and communications the capacity to cognize
and recognize the presence of the other’s self, attend to it, and give it both its
moments and its discursive substantivity. In such discourses, the aim is to give
presence to particularized selves and maintaining interactions and relationships.
Consider an ordinary conversation:
Max: Where have you been these last few days?
David: I have been here every day. Karen came over the weekend so we had a good time. . . . Savvy
spoke to me last week so he said to me, he said, he’d like to see me take the SPO position. He knew I
wanted CIP work and it, and Larry’s got it, it went to Larry.
Max: Really?
David: Yeah, Larry. It’s just a line, it’s just line job.
Max: Oh.
David: So if I would have taken it, I would have given up my CIP work. We can’t risk that.
Max: No, we can’t.
David: No.
Max: You got to stay on the CIP.
David: Oh yeah.
(Office Transcripts)

The opening lines are expressions of friendly interest and exchange of

personal information that are very quickly abandoned when David describes
Savvy asking him to take on a new job. It turns out that if David had taken the
job—a job that Larry got—it would have exposed some operation in which both
Max and David stand to face some risk. David is able to speak to Max about this
by using various allusions that are substantively addressive: The reference to
Savvy without further qualification identified him readily to Max and indicated
the addressive use of shared and remembered information; the use of various
esoteric acronyms indicated a similar state of affairs between the two; and the
allusion to a “risk” was enough to indicate the precise nature of the risk, leading
to an agreement that David did the right thing in not taking the job. The use of
various diminutives of names also helped in the maintenance of addressivity:
They are one of us, we are familiar with them, it said. In using this shared
information and putting them into the discourse David can be said to have
invested it with a certain necessary addressivity and successfully negotiated a
presence for his self and that of the other.
In interaction, then, not only do we take “the attitude of the other” as Mead
(1934) argued, but we also indicate our own attitudes to the other by our speech
—attitudes of friendship and loyalty, aloofness and hostility, and
superciliousness and hauteur, and so on. Attitudes are not only received from the
other but are also offered to the other.

THE PROCESS OF ANSWERABILITY

Bakhtin writes about answerability, in a very general sense, as follows:

What guarantees the inner connection of the constituent elements of a person? Only the unity of
answerability. I have to answer with my own life for what I have experienced and understood in art, so
that everything I have experienced and understood in art would not remain ineffectual in my life. But
answerability entails guilt or liability to blame. . . . Art and life are not one, but they must become
united in myself in the unity of answerability. The individual must become answerable through and
through: all of his constituent moments must not only fit next to each other in the temporal sequences
of his life, but must also interpenetrate each other in the unity of guilt and answerability. (1990: 2)

The “art” that Bakhtin is discussing here includes the art of speech, the
production and enactment of utterances in everyday life as much as the creation
of novelistic texts and the discourses therein. Indeed Bakhtin seeks to unravel
the relation between self and other by examining “the ways in which literary
authors mold their relation to characters and the relation of those characters to
each other in the fiction of a unified art work,” as Clark and Holquist put it
(1984: 63). They also elucidate nicely the implications of the notion of
answerability:
What the self is answerable to is the social environment; what the self is answerable for is the
authorship of its responses. Self creates itself in crafting an architectonic relation between the unique
locus of life activity which the individual human organism constitutes and the constantly changing
natural and cultural environment which surrounds it. This is the meaning of Bakhtin’s dictum that the
self is an act of grace, a gift of the other. (1984: 68)

Answerability, and the facticity of the answers as such, complete an architectonic

relation to addressivity with a self achieved between the two. There is, however,
an ambiguity in the concept of answerability that a social psychology must
exploit. One is answerable, reflexively, in a “unity of guilt” for ones own acts;
that is, one must speak for them, defend them if necessary, and stand by them.
One must also answer, however, the acts of the other satisfactorily if the
architectonic of the dialogic process is to be sustained. A failure to answer for
one’s acts, just as a failure to answer the acts of others, will lead to a failure of
dialogue.
This gift of a self has to be earned and a reciprocal gift offered. And this
reciprocity is achieved by using the rhetorical device of answerability. In giving
presence to a self two forms of answerability are involved. First, a self is put
forward as answer to the implicit, and at times explicit, demand from the other
that one does so. For example, one dresses himself or herself in the manner
appropriate to his or her gender, class, office, worth, or mood so that others can
respond to it suitably. Such a presentation of a self is a management of the
details of a self so that others can respond to them. Second, once such a self had
been put forward, one is answerable to the others for that which has been put
forward: If one puts forward the self of a policeman he is answerable to the
others for such a self. As one puts forward a self that is answerable he or she
confers a “gift” on the other, making it an act of grace; the other can thereby
understand what has been put forward and resolve—however tentatively—the
mystery of the other, appreciate it, and answer it. Further, by answering what had
been presented, the other confers the reciprocal grace and gift on the initial
presenter.
The significance of answerability becomes clear when one considers the
deviant case: When one does not present a self that can be answered on the one
hand and when the other does not answer the self that has been presented. Living
in a household with others, for example, demands that one presents a self to
others: one dresses appropriately, speaks appropriately, responds when spoken
to, shows interest in and appreciation of the others in the establishment. By
doing this he or she has answered the demand of the others that one presents a
self. However, he or she can remain unclothed, indifferent to others, and refuse
to either open conversations or respond to them. This is often a first step, in Jules
Henry’s (1973) phrase, in a “pathway to madness.” It refuses the answerability
of the individual to others and prevents him or her from receiving corresponding
acts of grace and gifts from the other.
A good example of this comes from another analysis of “madness,” by R. D.
Laing and his collaborator A. Esterson. They describe the performance of Sarah
Danzig:
She began to lie in bed all day, getting up only at night and staying up thinking or brooding or reading
the Bible. Gradually she lost interest in everyday affairs and became increasingly preoccupied with
religious issues. . . . She began to express bizarre ideas, for instance that she heard voices over the
telephone and saw people on television talking about her. (1964: 109)
 Both her actions and her ideas in fact lacked answerability: if one lies in bed
all day, when everyone else in the family is up and about, and is out of bed at
night when everyone else is sleeping she cannot very well be recognized,
addressed, and answered. Further if one presents “bizarre” ideas, i.e., ideas to
which the others cannot give even a minimum of comprehension or credence,
one also forestalls answerability. Indeed what an auditor would consider
“bizarre” are words that he or she could not answer intelligibly. Not only were
her words unanswerable, she was interactionally unavailable and therefore
neither addressable or answerable. Laing and Esterson (1964) cite her mother’s
comment:
Sitting up all night thinking and not telling anyone what she thought. Not that we particularly want to
know what Sarah’s thinking or doing, although it’s only natural that a mother should be
curious. . . . Sitting up all night in a blue night dress in the kitchen—just the lights on, nobody making
a sound. She is thinking and thinking—goodness knows what the heck she is thinking about. It’s
enough to twist anybody’s mind. (127–128)

If one is unanswerable as well as unaddressable he or she can be considered

“mad”—or will become “mad” if he or she is left unaddressed and unanswered.
There is no guarantee, however, that taking the steps to present an answerable
self would elicit the appropriate answer. Someone can present himself or herself
with sufficient warrant and the others in his or her circle can refuse to answer
him or her. This problem has been given fictional presentation in Ralph Ellison’s
novel Invisible Man. Ellison wrote:
I am an invisible man. . . . I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the
bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by
mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves,
or figments of their imagination—indeed everything and anything except me. . . . That invisibility to
which I refer occurs because of a peculiar disposition of the eyes of those with whom I come in
contact. A matter of the construction their inner eyes, those eyes with which they look through their
physical eyes upon reality. (1952: 7)

Ellison is describing the travails of a black person achieving a presence in a

world of white people: They don’t answer the black persons’s presentation but
answer something that they concoct with their inner eyes. Even today, years after
Ellison penned those words, a young black man can walk into a store, wearing a
new shirt that resembles ones sold by the store, wander around and leave and
have the store detective stop and search him and ask for the receipt for the shirt
he is wearing. Here is a description by David Stout of an incident:
Mr. Jackson, now 18, Mr. Plummer, 19, and Mr. Cunningham, who is now 20, were shopping at a
Bauer outlet stone in Fort Washington, MD, a largely black and middle-class community, on October
20, 1995, when they were confronted by two uniformed Prince George’s County police officers who
 were moonlighting as security guards.
Testimony revealed that one of the officers, Robert Sheehan, had become suspicious after noticing
that Mr. Jackson’s shirt looked new. In fact, it was: Mr. Jackson had bought it at the store the previous
day.
Mr. Jackson could not immediately produce a receipt, so the shirt was confiscated, despite a
cashier’s recollection of selling a shirt to him the day before, according to testimony.
Mr. Plummer and Mr. Cunningham were detained about 10 minutes while their friend was being
questioned, the jury was told. At one point, Mr. Cunningham was told, “Sit down or I’ll lock you up,”
according to testimony.
Soon after the three were allowed to leave, Mr. Jackson returned to the store with the receipt to
retrieve his shirt, but it was too late for the company to avert a major embarrassment. (Stout 1997)

Here we have a stark case of a failure of answerability. The young man has
presented a self that sought a particular answer, to wit; “I am an ordinary man, I
buy my shirts; I am an honest man.” However, this presentation did not elicit the
proper answer. Rather, it elicited the answer; “There is a black young man,
wearing an expensive shirt that we sell here. He must have switched shirts in the
dressing room and is in fact stealing the shirt.” Such mis-answers can, without a
doubt, lead to rage and resentment and even violence at times.
Answerability, then, faces two issues in interactional relationships. One, an
articulator must present statements that are capable of eliciting answers, and two,
once they are so presented the respondent must be willing and able to respond to
them. The speaker can take the necessary steps to make himself or herself
answerable by employing effective rhetorical strategies, by recognizing that the
respondent is at least minimally at odds with him or her—that is, differentiated
from him or her—and by taking the steps to bridge the gap. Once this
responsibility is fulfilled, the individual can only hope that the other will give the
gift of an appropriate response with the fateful consequences for the self of the
speaker.
Statements made to the other represent one’s self, or an element of one’s self,
and are announcements of a self’s presence. Once it is given such a presence, it
is answerable to it. And, conversely, once a self is given presence, the other is
obliged to answer it, to the extent that he or she lives in the dialogic mode and
answers it in terms of the significations of the initial statement. Answerability in
its double sense is a rhetorical device in dialogic interactions and is used to give
presence to selves in efficient and effective ways. It also has a moral dimension
to it: Not to answer someone else is to deny the individual a social existence, just
as making it impossible for the others to answer one is to deny them the
opportunity to join in a sociality. To escape these moral responsibilities is also to
reject the opportunities to make society possible. In engaging in actions that are
answerable by others, then, an individual takes steps to enable the others to
know his or her self. One can invest one’s acts with answerability and allow
oneself to be known by the other. Goffman’s work in dramaturgical social
psychology (1959) can be considered here as a systematic inquiry into the
processes of presenting an answerable self to the other, of making oneself
available in a relevant guise to the other so that a particularized interaction can
proceed. Performances, selective and aforethought, props, regions, and teams
that Goffman described with such perspicacity (1959) are really semiotic
instruments with which one allows the other to know oneself by giving presence
to a self that the other can take and answer. In assembling these dramaturgical
devises and putting them into practice, an actor is constituting not just a self, but
one that the other can read. One must not only know thyself, but insofar as a
human life is social and sociable, he or she must allow others to know “thy self”
as well so that they may answer it.

THE REFERENTIAL PROCESS

In talking to others, an individual will often make references to absent others,

thereby giving presence to those others in the interaction. This referential
process is captured by the uses of the third-person pronouns: he, she, them, they.
Such references can also be made by names, nicknames, and diminutives. Such
references are not neutral or inconsequential events; rather, they define the self
of the referred to the one addressed and give it a social and interactional
presence. In mentioning somebody’s name in the course of a conversation,
various rhetorical maneuvers can be used to define the other: Doctor Brown,
Professor Smith, Chicken Charlie, Barber Boris, Lucky Luciano. Derogatory
references are often tagged to the name: Sam the shylock, Jim the cutthroat,
Ravenal, the riverboat gambler, Mark the malicious. These are adjectival
characterizations of the other’s self. Further, the reference can code the nature of
the relationship one has to the one named: To refer to someone named Susan
James, as Ms. Susan James or Mrs. Dennis James defines one kind of
relationship, just as does referring to her as Susan or Susie or “Miss Susan
James, my teacher,” “Susan, my friend, or “Susie, my sister.” These are
nominative characterizations of the other’s self.
While these are simple instances of the creation of a referential self, there are
the more elaborate ones by which a presence for the other as a self that has to be
faced is created. These references can take the form of allusions and
characterizations of an absent other that narratively define him or her and
thereby give a description of his or her self. These can be either negative or
positive images of the selves of others. Insofar as a human can deal with others
only on the basis of a certain sufficiency of knowledge about them, it becomes
imperative to gather this knowledge in one way or another. It is obviously
impossible to always gather this information on the basis of personal inquiry and
research. One has, therefore, to depend on the information provided by others.
This knowledge an individual acquires and uses, as he or she remembers it, in
dealing with the relevant party when he or she meets him or her. The acts that
result from such interactions will be colored by the information that one party
possesses about the other, which can be addressed to the other, thereby
influencing his or her self.
The information that individuals use to form an image or conceptualization of
the other, or to add details to the one he or she already knows, can be called
testimony. C. A. J. Coady (1992), in an exhaustive philosophical study of
testimony, defines testimony as “a speech act, or in J. L. Austin’s (1975)
terminology, an illocutionary act, which may be and standardly is performed
under certain conditions and with certain intentions such that we might naturally
think of the definition as giving us conventions governing the existence of the
act of testifying” (Coady 1992: 25). Testimony, or rather testifying, is no doubt
an illocutionary act, which Austin defined as the
performance of an act in saying something as opposed to performance of an act of saying something; I
shall call the act performed an “illocution” and shall refer to the doctrine of the different types of
function of language here in question as the doctrine of “illocutionary forces.” (1975: 99–100)

It is then an act with illocutionary force and it has its own conventions by which
it is to be judged as a felicitous performance or not. These conventions
distinguish between different kinds of testimony—formal, natural, and extended
testimonies (Coady 1992: 25–53).
Formal testimony, for example, the one given in courts of law, is characterized
by the following conventions of usage “that mark it as formal testimony”
according to Coady:
(a) It is a form of evidence; (b) It is constituted by persons A offering their remarks as evidence so that
we are invited to accept p because A says that p; (c) The person offering the remarks is in a position to
do so, i.e. he has the relevant authority, competence, or credentials; (d) The testifier has been given a
certain status in the inquiry by being formally acknowledged as a witness and by giving his evidence
with due ceremony; (e) As a specification of (c) within English law and proceedings influenced by it,
the testimony is normally required to be firsthand (i.e. not hearsay); (f) As a corollary of (a) the
testifier’s remarks should be relevant to a disputed or unresolved question and should be directed to
those who are in need of evidence on the matter. (1992: 32–33)

In everyday life many of these same processes are in operation. In fact, there
is no doubt that the procedures in formal settings were carried over from
experiences in the interactions of everyday life.
It is, however, not enough to produce a felicitous speech act—for example a
“promise”—with the requisite illocutionary force; it should also be believed,
accepted, at least taken at its face value, and interaction allowed to proceed. This
is often achieved by considering the identity of the person providing the
testimony. The very term “testimony,” which is related to testis, shall I say,
attests to the fact that only those with testicles could be trusted to give evidence:
Men being of course “rational” creatures, responsible, and so on were a priori
more reliable as witnesses and indeed had the right to bear witness!
One recent work speaks to some of the issues raised by Coady and introduces
an additional element to the formal ones—the identity of the testifier, his or her
social standing. In an extensive study of a “social history of truth” Steven Shapin
has argued that
what we know of comets, icebergs, and neutrinos irreducibly contains what we know of those who
speak for and about these things, just as what we know about the virtues of people is informed by their
speech about things that exist in the world. (1994: xxvi)

or, for that matter, even about things that do not exist in the world! We accepted
the discoveries in science reported by these people because they were
“gentlemen” who could be “trusted to speak truth.” The “gentleman,” Shapin
argues, was “that culture’s paradigm of the type of individual one could trust to
speak truth” (1994: xxvi). The culture in question is that of early modern
England, the period in which many scientific inquiries were made. In Coady’s
terms these “gentlemen” were considered to be individuals who had “relevant
authority, competence or credentials” to offer testimony. As gentlemen they
could be trusted to speak what they believed to be true. Conversely, these
scientists were also speaking to other gentlemen who could be trusted to be civil
about the claims made by other gentlemen and to accept what they were being
told. In either case, the identity of the communicants as gentlemen guaranteed
the claims of the speaker and enabled scientific truths to become canonized. The
acts of testifying about their discoveries gave presence to the selves of the
scientists with a double identification process in operation: scientist and
gentleman.
In courts of law testimony is also given in which the identity and self of the
witness is defined and described. Once again its dependability becomes an issue.
In many courts of law, a witness is made to take an oath before giving testimony
that what he is about to say is “the truth and nothing but the truth.” These oaths
are typically administered by the witness repeating certain words with the right
hand on a religious text. This procedure is once again a claim and an affirmation
of an identity of the self of the witness: “I am a Christian and as God is my
witness, my testimony is the truth.” If one cannot take this oath, for one reason
or another, he or she can “affirm” that he or she is a truthful witness. In such
cases it could be said that the witness’s identity is being transformed then and
there. From being a neutral as a potential liar or truth-teller, he or she is
transformed into one whose testimony can be trusted. Even here, however, other
identities besides that of “one who had taken the oath” can intrude itself on
judgments about the veracity of the testimony. The professional standing of the
witness, his or her biography, as it is relevant, the individual’s demeanor and
decorousness, and, often, his or her class and ethnic identity will have a strong
bearing on whether the testimony is likely to be accepted for the construction of
the identity of the other.4
While at one time class-based identities were adequate not only for testimony
in the courts as well as in scientific endeavors, today one needs credentials given
by accredited institutions to gain the authority to confer identity on others. In the
procedures by which someone is defined as “mentally ill” or “insane,” these
credentialed identities seem to be in operation. His or her self is subject to these
procedures and referentially labeled as insane, with or without his or her active
and consented participation. Often the emergence of a referential self of
“insanity” begins with a reflexive process and ends with a referential one with
the testimonial interference of experts. Susanna Kaysen gives one such example:
I signed myself in. I had to, because I was of age. It was that or a court order, though they could never
have gotten a court order against me. I didn’t know that, so I signed myself in.
I wasn’t a danger to society. Was I a danger to myself? The fifty aspirin—but I’ve explained them.
They were metaphorical. I wanted to get rid of a certain aspect of my character. I was performing a
kind of self-absorption with those aspirin. It worked for a while. Then it stopped; but I had no heart to
try again. (1993: 39)

This description of a reflexive self is the beginning of a process by which she

surrenders herself to the hands of experts who will now create a referential self
for her. Later on in her narrative Kaysen says, “I have to admit though, that I
knew I wasn’t mad.” Nevertheless she is incarcerated and given medications.
She describes the process of being referentially constituted as an “insane” and a
“patient” thus:
Take it from his point of view. It was 1967. Even in the lives like his, professional lives lived out in
the suburbs behind shrubbery, there was a strange undertow, a tug from the other world—drifting,
drugged-out, no-last name youth universe—that knocked people off-balance. One could call it
“threatening” to use his language. What are these kids doing? And then one of them walks into his
office wearing a skirt the size of a napkin, with mottled chin and speaking in monosyllables. Doped
 up, he figures. (1993:39–40)

Kaysen is admitted to the clinic and elicits a referential self, to wit:

“Psychoneurotic depressive reaction. Personality pattern disturbance, mixed
type. R/O Undifferentiated schizophrenia. Borderline Personality” (1993: 4).
These terms are put in her “case record folder,” along with father’s name,
mother’s name, address, and names of persons to notify in an emergency. Her
referential self is, if anything, complete. And provided by one “who has the
relevant authority, competence and credentials,” in Coady’s already cited words,
to identify Kaysen’s self. While the formal language of this referential self is not
made available to Kaysen while she is a patient, she is treated in such a way that
she accepts the designation of herself as insane and defines herself with
fragments of this diagnosis and the attitudes they conveyed.
Formal testimony as a discursive act is found more frequently in courts of law
and in front of committees of inquiry. I will take Elia Kazan’s testimony before
the House Committee on Un-American Activities for analysis here. He went
before the committee that was investigating the influence of the Communist
Party of the United States of America in the film industry. Kazan had been a
member of the party for a while and had left it. In his testimony before the
committee, he made two significant claims: (a) he explained the reasons why he
left the party and interpreted the meanings of his films in a way that a priori
refuted all suspicion that they were critical of American society and civilization;
(b) he named the other people who were members of the party, thus creating or
confirming a referential self for each of them. Kazan told the committee: “I was
instructed by the Communist unit to demand that the group be run
‘democratically.’ This was a characteristic Communist tactic; they were not
interested in democracy; they wanted control” (Navasky 1980: 202).
Kazan sets up a subtle set of categories of opposition here: Communist
democracy versus. real democracy; that is, Communists may speak of
democracy, but what they really want is centralized control.
Kazan goes on:
This was the specific issue on which I quit the Party. I had enough regimentation, enough of being told
what to think and say and do, enough of their habitual violation of the daily practices of democracy to
which I was accustomed. (Navasky 1980: 202)

Here the opposition is between his own integrity as a person, used to the
“daily practices of democracy” as opposed to the “regimentation” of the
Communist Party.
In both these passages all the symbolic resonances of “democracy” are given
full play. Democracy is the characteristic, defining feature of the ideology of
American civilization. It means autonomy for the individual, freedom to resist
authority, participatory decision-making, and Kazan’s testimony swells with its
various representations. Needless to say these features of the testimony gave it
force and power—at least to the committee and to various admirers and
defenders of Kazan.
In the second aspect of this testimony—the naming of his former comrades in
the party—once again he establishes himself as one who was misguided and
misled at one time but now had seen the light, while others were still in the
darkness and deserved to be exposed. Kazan was able to establish a self for
himself just as he was able to referentially create one for the others he named—
one that they refused to honor for the rest of their lives. Nevertheless, many
members of the public defined the selves of the named with the terms and
categories provided by Kazan. Similarly, the named and their friends and
admirers constituted a referential self of their own for Kazan: turncoat, betrayer,
stooge.
What Coady calls “natural testimony” is encountered
in such everyday circumstances as exhibit the “social operations of mind”: giving someone directions
to the post office, reporting what happened in an accident, saying that, yes, you have seen a child
answering to that description, telling someone the result of the last race or the latest cricket score.
(1992: 38)

To this I would add telling or testifying what sort of person someone is or has
been or will be. This kind of testimony includes the kind of talk described as
“gossip” but is not exhausted by it. Detailed and systematic descriptions of the
other for certain defined purposes constitutes a referential self: For example,
letters of recommendation, often also called letters of reference, are good
examples of referential selves being constituted by means other than gossip.
Reports provided by private detective agencies, espionage organizations, and law
enforcement units also constitute referential selves for the objects of their
attention. The difference between gossip and the latter kind of referentiality is
that the latter is likely to be more systematic and in accord with certain
disciplined evidentiary procedures—though these reports may include gossip as
well.
In spite of its bad reputation among moralists, gossip has an important
function to play in social life. Jorg Bergmann, in a rather thorough examination
of gossip, considers it a “communication genre” that has its own regularities,
organizational principles, and presentational styles. Further, he argues that gossip
has its own relational structure: the subject of the gossip, the producer of the
gossip, and recipient (1993: 45–49). With this framework Bergmann develops a
sophisticated hermeneutics of this particular genre of communication, paying
attention to the situational and interactional imbrication of gossip. This
interactive “securing” of gossip, as Bergmann puts it, is what is of interest here:
It is in such a relationship between the producer of the story and the recipient
that the identity of an absent other is defined or refined. Various stories that
define the identity of the other are recounted in such relational structures. This
identity will be accepted by the recipient, unless he or she has reasons to
challenge the stories, and carried away, to be repeated to the another person. This
establishes a chain of gossip, which, when it is sufficiently interconnected, will
become the commonly shared identity of the individual in question. The
relational structure of gossip extends from an initial dyad into a chain of such
dyads and traps the subject of the gossip in it.
In the talk between the two, certain significant meanings for the participants
themselves are also created. Patricia Mayer Spacks, in her study of gossip,
addresses the latter issue. She distinguishes “idle talk,” “malicious and frivolous
gossip,” and “serious gossip” from each other and notes that the latter
takes place in private, at leisure, in a context of trust, usually among no more than two or three people.
Its participants use talk about others to reflect about themselves, to express wonder and uncertainty
and locate certainties, to enlarge their knowledge of one another. (1986: 5)

To enlarge knowledge, not only about themselves, I may add, but of others as
well, others who are not parties to the talk, and thereby create an identity for
them.
Gossip typically takes a narrative form and uses plots, characterizations not
only of the other in question but of the various others involved in the plot. One
does not merely say “John the wife-beater,” but gives a story with corroborative
details that suggest at least a minimum verisimilitude: “I was speaking to Anne
and she told me that Susan, John’s wife, was all black and blue in the face,” or
“Victor told me that Jane, Bob’s wife, and Carl were having a lovey-dovey lunch
yesterday at the Carlton.” Not only do these have a semblance of a plot but they
bring in the names of others as presumptive witnesses who can attest to the
veracity of the story as well as providing significant details: Susan’s face was
black and blue, Jane was having an intimate lunch at the Carlton with someone
other than her husband. Or else the teller of the gossip can present himself or
herself as the witness and say “I saw Jane and Victor coming out of the Step Inn,
arm-in-arm.”
In the first type of gossip the veracity claimed for the tale is dependent on
citation: Somebody else is cited as the source of the story, and its capacity to
become a constituent element of the referred one’s self is dependent on this
person’s reputation for reliability. In the event of such a reputation being low, the
auditor of the story can debate the story, reject it, and refuse to code it as an
element of the self of the referenced one. In courts of law that are influenced by
Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence, this kind of report—hearsay—is not considered
acceptable as evidence. In everyday life we are heavily dependent on such
reports to form impressions of the other. Nevertheless, as in the formal settings,
the identity of the testifier—his or her reputation as a truth-teller, fabricator,
fabulist—will play a part in the acceptance of the testimony. The testifer must be
able to elicit “trust” from the auditors of the testimony. This in fact has come full
circle—in an etymological sense: The word “truth” comes from the word for
trust. One accepts statements as “true” from another because he or she is
“trustworthy”—i.e., bears the identity of someone who can be trusted—indeed a
matter of interpersonal transactions.
When the tale about the other is reported by the teller as one that he or she
witnessed himself or herself, the individual may be believed or not, once again
depending on his or her reputation for veracity and reliability and on whether he
or she has a special interest in either maligning the referred one or praising him
or her. If either of these conditions is suspected, the tale could be subject to
various degrees of discount: “You know Harry, you can’t trust anything he says
about Susan—she left him for Charles;” “He is talking about his son. It is his
father’s pride that’s talking.”
The rhetoricity of the referential mode—that, is defining a self by attributing
qualities to it, sometimes by the mere naming of it—demands, if not veracity, at
least plausibility. To say that someone is a thief or that someone is “really a
man” it is necessary to go one step further and give necessary details, occasions,
and circumstances under which this information became available and the
reasons for accepting it as persuasive. Conversely, if the reference is a
noncontroversial one, again it must conform to certain forms of verbal and social
decorum. If a lowly worker in a corporation is to refer to the president of the
corporation by his first name or nickname—except in ironic allusion—he or she
is making a claim of familiarity and friendship. In the absence of such a
familiarity the referential rhetoric here would be grossly inappropriate and
unpersuasive. Indeed it would persuade the others that the speaker is
presumptuous and ill-mannered, out of place in the social world. Referentiality
that cannot or does not receive the acknowledgment and acceptance by the other
is one that has failed rhetorically. In making references to the other and helping
in constituting a self for him or her, it is imperative to have a certain rhetorical
vigor and effectiveness.
“Natural” testimony, that is, everyday talk, can also lead an individual to be
constituted as “mentally ill,” indeed made “mentally ill” by referential processes.
In a now classic paper Edwin Lemert argued that paranoia can be caused by
systematic exclusion from social circles:
Suffering misfortunes of one sort or another in one’s professional or domestic life, an individual
becomes emotionally overwrought and begins to be seen by his or her social circles and referred to as
one who was violating the norms and values of the primary group, revealed by giving priority to
verbally definable values over those which are implicit, a lack of loyalty in return for confidences, and
victimizing and intimidating persons in positions of weakness. (1970: 656)

As these perceptions get discussed in the chains of interactions in which each

member of the organization is involved, in Lemert’s words “a new configuration
takes place in the perceptions others have of the individual with shifts in figure-
ground relations. The individual . . . [becomes] an ambiguous figure. . . . From a
normal variant, the person becomes ‘unreliable,’ ‘untrustworthy’ ‘dangerous’ or
someone with whom others ‘do not wish to be involved’ ” (1970: 656–657). The
adjectival references are made about the person by other members of his or her
social circle and become the modalities with which their relationship to the
individual so referred would be conducted. They will avoid him or her and
exclude him or her from informal social interaction, thereby, of course, making
him or her more angry and disturbed. Acts of avoidance or exclusion, starting as
referential ones, eventually become ones addressed to the other, nonverbally to
begin with but verbally later. The upshot of these interactions is that the
referential self of the individual in question eventually becomes an addressive
self and leads to the emergence of a paranoid reflexivity by making, “the
situation or group image an ambiguous one for ego, much as he is for others”
(Lemert 1970: 658).
Testimony, whether it is of the formal kind or “natural” kind, then, is used as a
rhetorical device to constitute the self of the absent other. Such constitution
sooner or later affects the reflexive self of the individual in question. This is done
in the interactional situation. Testimony given to the other, addressed to him or
her, performs a double rhetorical function: one, it creates the details of the self of
the absent other; two, the testimonial rhetoric is used by the testifier to influence
the listener in one way or another, to induce his or her cooperation in whatever
line he or she is pursuing vis-à-vis the listener and vis-à-vis the absent other.
Once such a conception of the absent one is agreed upon, it becomes the stuff of
the attitudes that are directed to him or her by both and eventually becomes
incorporated as his or her self.
 These rhetorical devices then are discursive modes with which an individual is
constituted as a subject and object of attention for interactional purposes. Such
constitutions are achieved, not by the mere fact that certain discursive formations
are available in a general sense but by the active deployment of discursive acts in
which these formations are featured. Such deployment takes the form of
reflexive, addressive, answerable, and referential moves within situated
interactions and ongoing interpersonal transactions. Individuals, in a sense, are
always at “odds with one another” (Burke 1969b: 22), find it difficult to fully
“know the mind of the other” (Malcolm 1966: 371), and seek, with varying
degrees of desperation, to overcome such problems and construct a self, an other,
and interactions, relationships, and social order with the help of various
rhetorical strategies. In the reflexive process, they seek to overcome their own
doubts about their own selves and knowledge of their own minds, while in the
addressive, answerable referential modes they seek to overcome their separation
from others and seek to know their minds and reveal one’s own, as may be
necessary and prudent, to others.

NOTES
1. I have given here only a small segment of the data and analysis contained in this work for any one
who is interested in the relationship between narrative and the self. See in particular the insightful essay in
this volume by Katherine Nelson on the functions of monologues in the crib as well as the work of Julia
Gerhardt (1989) and especially John Dore’s (1989) work, which draws on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin
(Nelson 1989).
2. See Wiley (1994) for a sound argument that takes the “I” and “Me” of self-presence that one finds in
G. H. Mead’s work to an “I,” “Me,” and “You” through a Peircian route. He does not, however, take this
discussion beyond the pronouns to examine the nouns they represent and the further significations that these
nouns themselves represent. Pronouns, of course, represent nouns and these nouns in turn represent an
entire plethora of significations, some of which will influence the current interaction. When the pronoun “I”
occurs in a situated utterance, it no doubt represents the one speaking, but anyone uttering it and the others
listening to it, will also know what else that particular “I” represents insofar as both parties have knowledge,
memory, and expectations. There are always further interpretants to the initial interpretant, constituting
thereby a chain of signs. The meaning of a sign is not exhausted by merely one transition from a sign to one
interpretant. A decisive statement on this can be found in Burke, “What are signs of what?” (1966b: 359–
379). Nevertheless Wiley’s study is a creative synthesis of Charles Sanders Peirce and G. H. Mead and
contains insightful discussions of reflexivity and the conversational placement of the self. Also see Singer
(1984) for a probing discussion of the relationship between dialogue and pronouns and identity. He, too,
sees only the immediate deixic significance of pronouns and not their embedded significations.
3. It is believed by many that “Volosinov” is a pseudonym under which Mikhail Bakhtin published some
of his work. While there are many similarities in the ideas in the books published under these names, the
Volosinov books are explicitly committed to a historical-materialist view of language, whereas the Bakhtin
books are not.
4. In cultures outside the influence of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence different strategies to indicate the
dependability of the testimony being given had to be devised. For a perceptive study of the practices in Sri
Lanka and conflict between the English view of oath-taking and the Sri Lankan view, see Samaraweera
(1997). He discusses the differences between an act of truth, which is used in dealings with God, and other
oaths, which are used in everyday relationships. He also describes the introduction of sacred objects other
than the Bible that were used in the administering of the oaths in order to elicit dependable testimony from
witnesses. They were not, apparently, too successful.
 II

Identificatory Processes
 Chapter 3

Identity: The Continuity and

Differentiation of Self

Mrs. Smith: You know very well that they have a boy and a girl. What are their names?
Mr. Smith: Bobby and Bobby like their parents. Bobby Watson’s uncle, old Bobby Watson, is a
rich man and very fond of the boy. He might very well pay for Bobby’s education.
Mrs. Smith: That would be proper. And Bobby Watson’s aunt, old Bobby Watson might pay for
the education of Bobby Watson’s daughter. That way Bobby, Bobby Watson’s
mother, could remarry.

Ionesco,
The Bald Soprano

The relationship between identity and self has been an unsettled issue in social
psychology for a long time. Some use these terms conjointly, and confusingly, as
in “self-identity,” while others use them interchangeably. The two concepts,
however, have different referents and should not be conflated. Self is reflexive
objectification of one’s presence in a world of other selves and objects, a process
achieved by using signs of various kinds. Such signs of objectification, however,
are always elements of complex vocabularies, each of which is able to allow a
minded organism to identify itself and be identified by others. This is identity.
Identities are embedded in these discursive structures. An individual and his or
her social circles use elements from these structures to name a self and be named
by it.
One of the earliest scholars in recent times to use the concept of identity in his
social psychology was Erik Erikson. He developed what may be termed an
enrichment and amendment of some of Freud’s ideas and produced the concept
of identity to denote an individual as evolving in stages through the life cycle,
with each stage being different from the earlier stage while at the same time
being connected to it. He describes one such stage, adolescence, as follows:
 The integration now taking place in the form of ego identity is more than the sum of the childhood
identifications. It is the inner capital accrued from all those experiences of each successive stage,
when successful identification led to successful alignment of the individual’s basic drives with his
endowment and his opportunities. In psychoanalysis we ascribe such successful alignments to “ego-
synthesis.” I have tried to demonstrate that the ego values accrued in childhood culminate in what I
have called a sense of ego identity. The sense of ego identity, then, is the accrued confidence that one’s
ability to maintain inner sameness and continuity (one’s ego in the psychological sense) is matched by
the sameness and continuity of one’s meaning for others. (1950: 89)

At any stage in this “epigenesis” of identity, an individual is able to maintain “an

inner sameness and continuity.” In other words, identity is a reflexive sense of
continuity and sameness and is separable into stages that are culturally defined.
An individual has to pass, at a certain chronological age, from one stage to
another, assuming the responsibilities that are commensurate with the “basic
drives” that are appropriate to the stage, and thereby acquire his or her ego-
identity. He or she may pass from one stage to another but he or she would
nevertheless maintain an inner sense of continuity with the earlier stages.
Nelson Foote, in a paper that was to define identity more clearly for
sociologists, described it as an ongoing activity rather than as an achieved state.
Influenced by Freud, Mead, Sullivan and Burke, Foote says,
We mean by identification the appropriation of and commitment to a particular identity or series of
identities. As a process, it proceeds by naming; its products are ever-evolving self-conceptions—with
the emphasis on the con, that is, upon ratification by significant others.” ([1951] 1970: 484)

He went on to say that the activity of identification “will continue, for what is
involved is the necessary activity of every social being, and not merely of social
psychologists. Every man must categorize his fellows in order to interact with
them” (Foote [1951] 1970: 484).
Foote’s paper had a great impact in sociological circles that were working
with the ideas of G. H. Mead and Herbert Blumer. Anselm Strauss in an essay on
identity—which he happily characterized as consisting of mirrors and masks
(1959)—further developed the connection between naming, language and
identity, calling attention to the act of naming as the placement of the other in an
identity. Such naming classifies the named into various categories that together
provide “for directive to action” (Strauss 1959: 22). Such a classification also
indicates an evaluation of the object: “Classifications not only carry our
anticipation, but also those values that were experienced when we encountered
the things, persons or events now classified” (1959: 23). Strauss then appeals to
Kenneth Burke and indicates that the struggles for identity are struggles for
terminologies that can be used for classifying individuals, and these struggles are
really rhetorical moves to establish identity.
 Having described his perspective on identity along these lines in his opening
chapter, Strauss devotes the rest of the book to their explication and then focuses
on “transformation of identity,” the changes it undergoes over the life cycle, the
continuity it maintains in each individual case, and concludes with a statement
on the relationship between identity and membership in given groups. While
Strauss’s work was full of insights of the interconnections between fields
considered disparate, there is a certain vague and underdeveloped quality to this
monograph. It cries out for more detail and specification.
This specification, if not more detail, was to come in the work of Gregory
Stone, in whose work it is easy to see the influence of both Strauss and Foote.
Among the many fruits of Stone’s work was the clarification of the relationship
between self and identity. He argues:
Almost all writers using the term imply that identity establishes what and where the person is in social
terms. It is not a substitute word for “self.” Instead when one has identity, he is situated—that is, cast
in the shape of a social object by the acknowledgment of his participation or membership in social
relations. One’s identity is established when other’s place him as a social object by assigning him the
same words of identity that he appropriates for himself or announces. It is in the coincidence of
placements and announcements that identity becomes a meaning of the self. (Stone [1962] 1970: 399)

Identity then, according to Stone, depends on the words that an individual

appropriates, which others acknowledge and accept, thereby placing him or her
in an identity. These words, as Stone was to show in his study of appearance and
clothing and their uses in social interaction, can be transformed into visual
imagery as well. In this formulation of identity, an individual is placed and
situated as a social object by the use of “words” that are current in the social
circles in which the interaction was occurring.
Stone also gives weight to the processes by which identification is
accomplished, arguing that there are really two processes involved in
identification: Identification with and identification of. He describes the
relationship between the two as follows; “Identifications with one another, in
whatever mode, cannot be made without identifications of one another” (1970:
396). Identification of one another precedes all interpersonal communication
processes and is initially accomplished silently or nonverbally. The sighted see
the appearance of the other and place him or her in an identity that the other had
defined by controlling his or her appearance, indeed claimed by the organization
of an appearance. The visually impaired, however, have to rely on voice and tone
recognition and the recognition of touch and smell to identify the other, and the
producer of the voice has less control over it than those who present
appearances.
 Identity is presented as a system of claims by the self that elicit validation
from others, albeit in varying degrees. Further, these claims are also made by the
presenting self to that very self in question as part of the “reflective process.” If
“the self has the characteristic that it is an object to itself” (Mead 1934: 136),
then before any given interaction with others it is able to objectify itself and
present this objectification to the other, and it is only then that it can be
validated. This process of objectification can be accomplished by using clothing
and other “apparent symbols” as Stone shows, and/or it can be accomplished
afterward in and through conversations that ensue after the appearance has been
presented. Stone, in fact, refers punningly to appearance as pretext, i.e., the
identity that appears before the text and which can be used to deceive the other
as well. Nevertheless, identities are established more securely and with greater
subtlety and with more delicate nuances by discourse than by clothing and
demands analysis in its own terms.
Recently, Harrison White has offered a theory of identity as the source of
action and situates it in networks of social relations. He observes,
Identity here does not mean the common sense notion of self, nor does it mean presupposing
consciousness and integration or presupposing personality. Rather, identity is any source of action not
explicable from biophysical regularities, and to which observers can attribute meaning. An employer,
a community, a crowd, oneself, all may be identities. An identity is perceived by others as having an
unproblematic continuity. Identities add through contentions to the contingencies faced by other
identities. (1992: 6 my emphasis)

Such an identity is essentially social; it is a variable to which observers attribute

meaning, an attribution that results, cumulatively, in the emergence of social
organization. Identity here becomes the keystone with which social organization
is constituted. However, if observers define identity, it is safe to say that sooner
or later it becomes subjectively acknowledged as well.1
Fruitful as these studies and essays are, they can stand further specifications
and descriptions. This is true of Erikson’s depiction of what may be termed
reflexively achieved identities, and Foote’s, Stone’s and Strauss’s depiction of
what may be termed addressively achieved identities. Erikson, for example,
speaks of the “accrual of inner capital,” leaving the shape, form, and character of
this capital unspecified. Strauss and Foote describe naming as a key process in
identification, whereas Stone describes the identification process as occurring
with the “assignment” and “appropriation” of words by interacting individuals.
For White identity is a meaning conferred by an observing intelligence. The
“capital” that an individual acquires, whether it is inner or outer, the “names”
that are used in the identifying process, the “words” that are appropriated and
assigned during the same activity, and observer’s “attribution of meaning” can
be achieved only with the operation of semiotic processes. They need to be
articulated as signs and read as signs. These signs may be called signs of identity.
These signs are deployed within various discursive formations and through a
variety of discursive strategies. They can be further specified into two broad
categories: Verbal signs, which may be termed vocabularies of identity, and
tactile and visual signs, which may be termed materials of identity.
These signs are used by human agents to objectify their respective selves to
others, as to themselves, so that they may be readily identified. Identities, in
other words, are not possible without a specified process of identification and
such a process of identification is not possible without signs to represent them.
These signs of identity are used in all four rhetorical modes of selfpresencing.
They are used reflexively to identify the individual to himself or herself as well
as to others: “It is I, Hamlet the Dane.” They are used to address the other and
thereby identify the “you”: “How fares our cousin, Hamlet?” Referentially they
occur to establish an identity too: “Something you have heard of Hamlet’s
transformation, so call it, since nor th’ exterior nor the inward man resembles
what it was.” Answerability, too, involves signs of identity: “I am glad to see you
well: Horatio—or I do forget myself.” These signs of reflection, reference,
address, and answer are forms of objectification, and processes in the
objectifications of self or the other. They are in fact used in everyday life to
identify self and other through acts of identity. Such acts are deliberate moves
made by an individual to classify himself or herself, or an other, in culturally
given categories.
Once the self has been identified in this manner, the particular signs of
identification become a meaning for the self and are used to achieve his or her
presence in the world through these vocabularies. Such a presence enables the
individual to establish a continuity as well as claim a substantiative sameness
over time for self or for other. Further, in claiming and being conferred an
identity by using concurrent vocabularies, he or she is also differentiated from
relevant others and given a shape and a substance that is sufficient unto itself for
all practical purposes. An identified person is not only the same individual who
was similarly identified, by self and others, at an earlier occasion, but is also
different from other individuals who are so identified by self and other. Identities
indubitably exist only within the discursive processes of the mind and those
between minds, and in these discursive processes given signs of identity are used
to define a narrative continuity for an embodied and social entity and to
differentiate the same entity from others. Each such identity will have a separate,
addressively conferred and reflexively appreciated, trajectory through life. The
key process, then, the fundamental activity that occurs when an individual
identifies himself or herself and is identified by others, is the claim of continuity
of the individual over time and a differentiation from others. Such claims, made
in the reflexive and addressive modes of discourse, as well as in the referential
and answerable modes of discourse, are possible only with a particular logic of
classification.2

THE LOGIC OF IDENTITY

Processes of identification are essentially exercises in classification.

Classificatory exercises that lead to identifications of objects in the world are
ways of organizing the perceptual world and bringing an intelligible and
communicable order to it. Such exercises are coded into the very language that
we use, and they eventually become habits of action. Classificatory processes are
an essential part of the adaptation that an organism makes to the environment,
and insofar as the human is a discursive organism par excellence his or her
adaptations are discursive ones, too. One parsimonious instrument with which
the perceptual world—or the elements thereof—can be given an “intentional
unity” (Rosenthal 1977: 208) is to give it a logical character. Rosenthal writes,
Man is also that being in the world which perceives his world through an intentional unity with it; man
is that organism in the world which is conscious of its own ends. Thus, pragmatism approaches the
perceptual situation in terms of a second type of analysis which emphasizes the “logical character” or
intentional character of the relationship. (1977: 208)

The intentional character of this relationship with the perceptual world begins
with the identification of the elements that are perceived. Abraham Kaplan puts
this issue as follows;
Knowledge begins with discrimination of differences, but every difference presupposes an identity. A
differential response becomes a cognition—as Aristotle, Kant and Peirce all emphasized—insofar as a
habit of response is engendered, which confers on the stimulus a meaning embodied at last in a
symbol. There is no cognition without recognition, that is without a constancy of some kind by which
what is being known is recognized for what it is. (1964: 85)

The intentional organization of the world, then, involves identifying the objects
in the world. And such identifications, to be practicable and talkable, must
separate the objects on some basis or other and ensure that a particular identified
object is not confused for another or taken for another or is indistinguishable
from another. In other words they must follow schemes or conceptual systems
that enable a discursive mind to achieve this conceptual clarity and practical
validity. Such conceptual systems are, a fortiori, semiotic systems. If one
examines Peirce’s seminal paper on logic as a semiotic, it will be clear that he
proposes not only definitions of a sign and its attendant elements but a logic
based on the classification of signs. The point and purpose of these complex
systems of signs is indubitably to enable an individual to intentionally organize
the perceptual world, to put into practice a logic of inquiry, and to achieve the
necessary abductions with which he or she can “adjust” to living in the said
world. Peirce wrote: “The first starting of a hypothesis and the entertaining of it,
whether as a simple interrogation or with any degree of confidence, is an
inferential step which I propose to call abduction” (1955: 151). This is
applicable not only to the conduct of inquiry in scientific endeavors but also in
the conduct of everyday life, which also proceeds as a series of inquiries.
Consider in this instance Peirce’s distinction between a qualisign, sinsign, and a
legisign:
A Qualisign is a quality which is a Sign. It cannot actually act as a sign until it is embodied; but the
embodiment has nothing to do with its character as a sign.
A Sinsign (where the syllable sin is taken as meaning “being only once” . . .) is an actual existent
thing or event which is a sign. It can only be so through its qualities; so that it involves a qualisign, or
rather several qualisigns.
A Legisign is a law that is a Sign. This law is usually established by men. Every conventional sign
is a legisign. . . . It is not a single object, but a general type which, it has been agreed, shall be
significant. (1955: 101–102)

Insofar as various kinds of signs are put to use to indicate an object and elicit
an interpretant, they enable the sign-user (who is himself or herself a sign) to
organize the world—by abductive processes, as qualisigns, sinsigns, and
legisigns as the situation warranted. In such organizational activities, the sign-
user, insofar as he or she is also an element of the perceptual and intentionally
unified world, has perforce to organize himself or herself as a qualisign, sinsign,
and legisign as well. In less cumbersome words, what an individual does is to
organize the world in terms of identities that are subtly or grossly signed into
differences and similarities given by their respective qualities, uniqueness, and
their applicable “laws.” Everyday life, in such a conceptualization, becomes then
a “conduct of inquiry,” indeed the conduct of semiotic inquiry, in which a “social
logic” is put into operation. In conducting such inquiries in everyday life, an
individual discovers the signs of his or her own identity as that of the others that
he or she encounters and arrives at a working relationship with them. The
identity of the self as that of the others is apprehended as logically distributed
signs.
 The intentional organization of the perceptual world and the assembling of
them into a “unity” must perforce use an already established instrumentation,
one that is known to the organism in question, so as to “sign,” that is, identify,
the objects in the world with its own logic. Such a logic is, no doubt, put into
practice in given contexts and situations but not invented by the actor, then and
there. Far from being endogenous to the occasion, it is an essential element of
the conceptual system and what Mead called the “imagery” (1904:2; 1964: 274)
of the organized world that an actor has learned and “remembers,” and puts into
practice. Volosinov puts this very well, as “consciousness takes shape and being
in the material of signs created by an organized group in the process of its social
intercourse. The individual consciousness is nurtured on signs; it derives its
growth from them; it reflects their logic and laws” (1973: 13). The actor, far
from being an immaculate conceiver, is subject to a logico-linguistic
socialization, which affects his or her interpretation of the world. The language
that he or she acquires is in fact structured, at the simplest level, into binary
systems and it is this logic that he or she would use to code identity as well. This
system of codification will manifest itself as the basis of an individual’s “stock
of knowledge”(Schutz 1964: 283) and would become useful in the management
of both the continuity and differentiation of identity.
This logic of classifications—expressed in significant signs—may be
available in concrete forms as well as in abstract ones. Indeed the symbols
themselves, to be able to signify anything at all, need to be organized in
accordance with a logic. No doubt for Mead acts were practical
accomplishments in an unfolding of experience but even such practices need a
logical system with which individuals can achieve precision and clarity for their
acts. Without a minimum of such precision and clarity no meaning can emerge
because no one will be able to separate one act from another or one meaning
from another.3
In the course of constructing an act an individual needs perforce to identify
the external objects in some fashion or another in the ongoing imagination that
accompanies the act, place them concretely or abstractly in categories and
proceed to complete the act. Insofar as Dorothy Lee’s (1959: 131) claim that
identification of selves is dependent on the “law of contradiction” seems
indisputable, one can say that one of the “images” or “conceptual systems” that
an individual, a discursive organism that it is, will use to organize identities is
Aristotle’s systematization of logic—not as an a priori stencil—but as a semiotic
in the pragmatic organization of experience. Again I resort to Sandra Rosenthal’s
perceptive analysis of the issue:
 The world, as the “outermost” content, encompassing frame of reference, or implicit categorical
contours within which the independently real reveals itself within experience, provides the context for
the propositions that can delineate experience. . . . The world answers to the laws of the excluded
middle and noncontradiction because it is the regulative ideal of that which can be conceptually
articulated and made precise to an ideal limit. (1988: 314)

Identities may be fluid, moving, imprecise at the boundaries, and may indeed
be characterized by the same “play of differences” that Derrida finds in words,
but for all that, a conceptualizing intelligence and an acting self will define
boundaries that are relevant for the purposes at hand, separating one from
another into semiotically realized categories, and conduct his or her life with
their help. Just as engineers who build bridges do not pause to consider the
implication of the developments in quantum physics in their work, discursive
individuals in everyday life do not pause to deconstruct identities and play with
differences in their acting moves: They perform the acts of identity and expect
them to be either confirmed or corrected.4
In Aristotle’s logical system these three “laws”—the law of identity, the law of
contradiction, and the law of the excluded middle—are used as socially shared
rules of thought for the conduct of inquiry. The laws seek to establish that A = A
—that is, a phenomenon remains identical to itself for all discursive and
practical purposes. Whatever the importance of this law in other fields of
endeavor, it is of paramount importance in undertaking discursive activities.
During the course of a discussion, debate, or argument, or, for that matter,
reflection and thought, a phenomenon that occurs in it must maintain its
integrity. Without such integrity, without the phenomenon in fact being equal to
itself, at least for all discursive processes—which can, of course, be long or short
—no intelligible activity can occur. If one is referring to Abe, he must remain
Abe during the course of the discussion. If X is speaking to Abe and Y
understands X to be speaking of Ave, then intelligible exchange cannot occur.
Similarly if Sam thinks that he is Napoleon and Josephine thinks that he is only
Sam no fruitful discussion can emerge. Similarly if X believes that he is Anton at
one point in the conversation (or in a larger duration for that matter) and Antonia
at another moment, neither successful conversations nor stable relationships can
emerge.
For discourse between actors to proceed efficiently and pragmatically, and for
that matter within each actor himself or herself, the use of a categorical logic is
unavoidable. Insofar as one has perforce to engage in speech acts that are
intelligible to self and other, then one must perforce use the logic of categories.
Anton and Antonia may be “really” the same or be “really” different—but at the
discursive level and practical level they are classified as separate and different—
a classification that may be changed later by mutually agreed rules of
transformation.
The law of identity as an operational principle within discursive processes
means that in the activities of every day life, an individual treats himself or
herself as having a continuity with earlier manifestations of his or her self and a
separation from other such individuals. The others treat him or her with the
same consideration: He or she (or it) is what he or she was earlier for all
practical purposes and different from me, him, her, them, or it. It is of course not
the case that humans read Aristotle or learn Aristotle’s system and put it into
operation; rather Aristotle systematized practices that were in use by humans
who were in the business of communicating with each other and seeking to do so
with parsimonious methods. To be able to operate in the social world, an
individual must be able to maintain a sameness and continuity over time—that
is, to be able to claim, and allow others to claim, that Abe=Abe. Second, he or
she must be able to claim and allow others to claim that simultaneously he or she
is not someone else: that he is Abe and not Ave at the same time, thus affirming
the validity of Aristotle’s law of noncontradiction. And finally, Aristotle’s third
law states that a phenomenon cannot be a member of two opposing classes: Abe
cannot be Abe and not-Abe.
There is, however, no claim here that the differences between identified
objects—between A and B for example, as between Anton and Antonia—are
“real” or “essential” in any meaning of these terms or can always be
“empirically” substantiated. There is no need to insist that identities are forever
fixed and unchangeable or that they have an obdurateness and quiddity outside
discursive processes. These moves of identification truly arrest ongoing and
evolving identities into easy categories so that discourse can proceed. The names
of identity—the categorization of reality—are “measurements” achieved by
means of a commonly agreed system: They capture commuting variables into a
coherent stability. It is not, then, that the world and its contents, including human
beings, have fixed identities, forever stable; rather by one means or another,
individuals fix and stabilize them so that they can handle the world at the
practical level of action, interaction, and discourse. As instruments of
measurement these categories of identity run into the same conundrum that
quantum physics faces: to measure something is to arrest it in its onward
movement thereby changing its character; without measuring it, its existence
cannot be gauged or discussed. This difficulty gives rise to what Werner
Heisenberg calls the “principle of uncertainty”—which applies not only in
physics but has a general application. Commenting on the generality of the
Heisenberg principle, Burke writes:
One may well take it for granted that statements about the nature of the world’s substance can never be
established any more firmly by instruments than they can be by words. At least, since instruments
themselves are so fundamentally implicated in language, deriving both their formation and their
interpretation from this source, one might well expect in advance that they would be as beset by
ultimate dialectical embarrassments as language itself. For though they contrive to eliminate pressures
that beset language at the Rhetorical and Symbolic level, they are profoundly Grammatical. . . . We
might glimpse the full paradox in stating the Heisenberg principle thus: A margin of indeterminacy is
inevitable in measurement. That the determination of a particle’s speed would interfere with the
determination of a particle’s position and vice versa seems simply an ultimate refinement, in precision
instruments, of the old paradox considered by Zeno, just as in mathematics there is, finally, the
principle of discreteness pitted against that of continuity. (Burke 1969a: 260)

These moves by which an acting individual classifies the objects in the world,
including himself or herself and other human beings, by using the law of identity
and its derivatives are devices for measuring the objects in the world. Indeed
without such measurements no human being would be able to deal with any
object in the world—be it a human or nonhuman one. The issue really is not
whether a dialectical and processual logic that is needed in quantum theory, or
for that matter in Jacques Derrida’s grammatology, is “better” or “worse” than a
logic using stable categories; it is rather that both logical systems are, if I may
use the term, complementary systems. “Either we make a good measurement and
obtain an accurate knowledge of the speed of a particle without being able to tell
exactly where it is, or else we can make an accurate measurement of the position
at the cost of interfering with the velocity,” as Silva and Lochak (1969),
summarizing the conundrum in microphysics, put it. The sacrifice of velocity,
i.e., process, needs to be made in order to even discover the existence of the
particle. In the world of meaning—in fact, the physicist John Wheeler (1984)
called the new physics “the child of meaning”—in everyday life the same
principle is applicable. No doubt identities are evanescent, changing, in process,
and categories of identity are arbitrary impositions in the social and interpersonal
life of the individual. Nevertheless, stable units need to be produced so that
dependable discourse and interaction can proceed. An individual reflexively and
the others addressively and referentially define, “measure,” and label a self with
an identity—labels, names, nicknames, and so on, which are constituted in
accordance with the law of identity.5

IDENTITY AND INDIVIDUALISM

While many have argued for the universality of some form of the conception of
self and identity for the linguistically minded species, this has recently been
challenged by some scholars. This challenge focuses, on the one hand, on the
historicity of the concept of self, arguing that it emerged only recently and only
in Western civilization, and, on the other hand, that it is a culturally specific
conceptualization. This view has been put forth by Clifford Geertz as follows:
The Western conception of the person as a bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and
cognitive universe, a dynamic whole, the center of awareness, emotion, judgement and action,
organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively against other such wholes and against a social
and natural background is, however incorrigible as it may seem to us, a rather peculiar idea within the
context of the world’s cultures. (1976: 229)

Geertz draws, with his characteristic rhetorical vigor, too sweeping a contrast
here. In fact the polar opposites he depicts between a “western conception of the
person” and other such conceptions confounds the particularized notion of the
“individual” resuscitated during the period of the Renaissance after its first
appearance in classical Greece (Dumont 1983; Barbu 1960) and the conception
of a self-conscious human who can initiate acts as a “bounded, unique, more or
less integrated motivational and cognitive universe.” An “individual” in the
former sense is a term in political and religious discourse and literary studies. In
political discourse it manifests itself in the definition of the individual as one
who is endowed with certain inalienable rights and duties. In religion the
doctrine of individualism finds its perfect expression in Protestantism: the
individual as the “master of my fate; . . . captain of my soul,” in the words of the
poet Ernest Henley. In literary studies when characters in various works of the
imagination are given “inner” feelings and desires as the “cause” of their actions
one can see the presence of such an individualism.
These doctrines of individualism found in various political, religious, and
literary texts may very well be reflective of the way in which the people who
produced these texts sought to live their lives. But that is a far cry from the claim
that all the humans who lived in cultures that did not create these texts were not
self-conscious agents of their action. A human acts with a consciousness of self
regardless of whether his or her culture produced texts of the individuation of the
person. This is a characteristic of the human being, not merely as a subcultural-
being, but as species-being. To the extent that all humans are born into an
ongoing linguistic community and learn both language and being from other
humans, he or she also learns to be a self.6
Consider here the Greek case. Barbu has argued that the conception of
“individualism” emerged in the Hellenistic period of Greek history, but that in
Homer’s time such a conception was unknown: “The people described by Homer
did not feel that the “motives” of their behaviour lay in themselves; on the
contrary, they believed that their behaviour was determined from the outside, by
the gods” (Barbu 1960: 75). However, by the time of Sappho these beliefs had
changed in such a way that “the inner world of emotions is exalted so much that
it dominates the life of the individual” (79). Nevertheless, there can be no doubt
that the Homeric hero, after telling himself that it is Athena who is responsible
for his action, must yet tell himself again to act, to take the next step. To take the
example that Barbu uses: Achilles is in a predicament in the beginning of the
Iliad as to what to do next, and “Athena stepped behind him, caught him by his
golden hair” and helped him to make his decision (Barbu 1960: 75). Of course
there is no such goddess as Athena, outside the discursive process, engaging in
such actions, either to an exalted figure like Achilles or to an ordinary person.
Rather, Homer and Achilles, and other human beings at certain points in history,
used the rhetoric of divine causation to propel their selves into action. Even
Achilles on this momentous occasion had to recognize the push from the divine
Athena and then take various mental and physical steps and act on his own,
recognize himself as a “dynamic whole,” a “center of awareness,” in order to
execute the next step.
This claim cannot be challenged by arguing that “individualism” as a doctrine
emerged only in Western civilization and emerged only recently. This may or
may not be true, but is quite irrelevant to the claim that human conduct is self-
conscious activity. This claim can be refuted only by showing the existence of
humans who have no linguisticity, no minding capacities, and no capacity for
what Mead calls “delayed reaction” (1934: 99). Long before Mead developed
these notions, it was Marx who put this very eloquently—almost poetically:
A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an
architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst of architects from the best of
bees is this: that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the
end of every labor process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the laborer at its
commencement. He not only effects a change of form on the material on which he works, but he also
realizes a purpose of his own that gives the law to his modus operandi, and to which he must
subordinate his will. ([1865] 1965: 179)

If one is an architect and achieves a design of a projected work in his or her

imagination, he or she is doing that indubitably as a self—that is, as one who can
observe his or her actions and projections as objects, consider them, delay
executing them, and perform accordingly. It is, however, not only the architect
who raises his or her structures in imagination before he or she erects them in
reality, but all humans who erect the structure of their acts in their imaginations.
Such imaginations are conscious of the place of the actor in the world of others,
things, space, situation, context, time, and biography. In other words, a human
erects the structure of his or her acts in either a maximal or minimal awareness
of self and its place in the world. This is not subcultural peculiarity but an
evolutionary universal of the human species (Franks 1985; Bickerton 1990).
Even if there are cultures in which the person is not conceived as a “bounded
and integrated motivational and cognitive universe,” in their own ethno-theories
of the person and the world, the individual is, to begin with, at least bodily
separate from others and has a name that separates him or her from others; surely
there are no cultures in which someone, say a man, is denied his physical
integrity and told that his body is constantly disintegrating and coalescing with
that of others. At least in this respect, he is bounded and integrated. When he
declares, “I have a headache,” I am sure his significant others don’t tell him, “No
you cannot possibly have a headache and make this claim because you are not a
bounded and integrated spring of action. You do not have a headache; it’s your
brother and you together who have a headache.” He does have, at least at this
level, a motivational and cognitive dynamism and unity. When the same
individual claims that he is bleeding from a wound and that he is in pain, his
others will surely not refuse to attend to him on the premise that since he cannot
be a center of awareness, emotion, judgment, and action, neither his pain nor his
bleeding, or for that matter, he himself, can exist. Once this is granted, it is easy
to take the next step: With these separate bodies and names, he or she at least can
be considered “individuated.” If he or she can be thus individuated, he or she can
identify a self, but the self may be defined, at times, as being coterminus with
dyads, triads, or a whole group. Consider the case of the Wintu. Dorothy Lee has
argued:
The Wintu Indians of northern California have a conception of self which is markedly different from
our own. . . . The definition of self in our own culture rests on our law of contradiction. The self
cannot be both self and not self, both self and other; the self excludes the other. The Wintu philosophy
in general has no law of contradiction. Where we have mutually exclusive dualistic categories, the
Wintu have categories which are inclusive, but not mutually so; that is, object A will be included in
object B, but not vice versa. (1959: 131)

Yet there is no doubt, according to Lee’s own version, that the Wintu are able
to conceive of A and B as separate categories, even though A may include B,
because without such a categorization it would not be possible to include B in A.
Lee continues, however, to derive an inference from this want of a law of
contradiction among the Wintu:
A study of the grammatical expression of identity, relationship and otherness, shows that the Wintu
conceive of the self not as strictly delimited or defined, but as a concentration, at most, which
gradually fades and gives place to the other. (1959: 134)
As an example of this she writes,
The Wintu do not use and when referring to individuals who are, or live or act together. Instead of
analyzing the we into: John and I, they say John we using John as a specification. Only when
individuals who are not already in relatedness are brought together is the word and used. (134)

This does not mean, as far as I can see, that the Wintu do not have a law of
contradiction in their thoughtways or that they have no conception of the self as
a bounded unit. It rather means that the Wintu use conceptions that are collective
rather than singular nouns to identify their selves: “John we” is still spoken by
one individual about a unit that is different from other units of identity—“Mark
they,” “Luke they,” “Matthew they,” “Simon they.” The Wintu seem to identify
the self with vocabularies that are different from Western ones, to be sure, but
identify they do and they do also separate one entity from another—“John-we”
from “Mark-we,” for instance. In other words, the vocabulary of identity a Wintu
man would use to identify the self may be a collective noun and Wintu may very
well attribute the “spring of his motivation” to this collective entity—but for all
that he is doing exactly what others, say in “Western civilization,” are doing:
naming his self, identifying it with a culturally specified vocabulary, and
claiming it as his essential being and motive for action. The Wintu man in this
example is able to use certain vocabularies to identify himself and define a
continuity for himself just as he is able to distinguish himself from others. A
Wintu man will no doubt identify his self in specific circumstances as “John
we,” which really means that he would consider this vocabulary as defining
himself as a “bounded unique and more or less integrated motivational unity,”
and predicate his bodily actions on such an identification. There is no
ethnographic record that the Wintu speaking and doing their acts always do so in
unison. When a Wintu man says “John we,” he does not have others standing
with him harmonizing their speech to his; nor are they standing with him when
he eats, fights his enemy, copulates with his mate, or defecates. The locution
“John we” is rather another sign for identifying the self. It identifies the self in
all its social complexities, as does the I and me, and functions as the description
of an individuated entity in his relations with the world. Such different
metaphorisations for identifying the self would no doubt have different
consequences for the kind of morality, industry, and social organization that
would emerge. Nevertheless, it is a far cry from claiming that the basis of action
among people like the Wintu is radically different from the Western one. “John
we” is really an interpretant of the self of John, a concept of self formulated
within the cultural logic of the Wintu.7
Buddhism, too, is said to present a challenge to conceiving the self as a
continuity of identity over time and a source of action and meaning in the world.
Indeed, one can see in the Buddhist texts dealing with self, identity, and time one
of the earliest attempts at the practice of deconstruction. The Milinadapanha text
describes a conversation between a Buddhist monk, a Bhante, and a king in
which this thesis is examined. This discussion and the examples that are used
were developed to validate the Buddhist claim that there was no continuous
personal identity: The seeming continuity is an illusion, Buddhism claimed, and
at each moment an individual is a unique “instantaneous being.” Nevertheless,
when this argument given by the monk in the following excerpt is examined, one
can see the paradoxical nature of this claim. An individual at a given point in
time has an instantaneous being, to be sure, but his or her continuity with earlier
such identities is also recognized:
“Bhante Nagasena,” said the king, “is a person when just born that person himself, or is he some one
else?”
“He is neither that person,” said the elder, “Nor is he someone else.”
“Give an illustration.”
“What do you say to this, your majesty? When you were a young, tender, weakly infant lying on
your back, was that your present grown-up self?”
“Nay verily Bhante. The young, tender, weakly infant lying on its back was one person, and my
present grown-up self is another person.”
“If that is the case, your majesty, there can be no such thing as a mother, or a father, or a teacher,
or an educated man, or a righteous man, or a wise man. Pray, your majesty, is the mother of the kalala
one person, the mother of the abbuda another person, the mother of the pesi another person, the
mother of the ghana another person, the mother of the little child another person, and the mother of
the grown-up man another person? Is it one person who is a student, another person who has finished
his education? Is it one person who commits a crime, another person whose hands and feet are cut
off?”
“Nay, verily, Bhante. But what, Bhante, would you reply to these questions?”
Said the elder, “It was I, your majesty, who was young tender weakly infant lying on my back and
it is I who am now grown up. It is through their connection with the embryonic body that all these
different periods are unified.”
“Give an illustration.”
“It is as if, your majesty, a man were to light a light;—would it shine all night?”
“Assuredly, Bhante, it would shine all night.”
“Pray, your majesty, is the flame of the first watch the same as a flame of the middle watch?”
“Is the flame of the middle watch the same as the flame of the last watch?”
“Nay, verily Bhante.”
“Pray, then, your majesty, was there one light in the first watch, another in the middle watch and a
third in the last watch?”
“Nay, verily, Bhante. Through connection with that first light there was light all night.”
“In exactly the same way, your majesty, do the elements of being join one another in serial
succession: one element perishes, another arises, succeeding each other, as it were instantaneously.
Therefore neither as the same nor as a different person do you arrive at your latest aggregation of
consciousness.” (Warren [1896] 1987: 148)
 What does the Bhante Nagasena’s explication leave us with? “Neither as the
same person nor as a different person do you arrive at your latest aggregation of
consciousness,” the Bhante says. The individual, at any given moment, is neither
the same person as he or she was at an earlier moment, nor is he or she a
different person. He or she is the same person under the auspices of one set of
conditions and another person under a different set of conditions. What are these
conditions? If the issue is whether there are any sort of connections between the
person at a given moment and another at an earlier moment, then Nagasena’s
Buddhist answer is, yes, there are these connections, and therefore for these
purposes one can consider this person, having varying presences in varying
moments, the same person. The answer to another question, “Are there
differences, substantial or otherwise, between this person at this moment and at
an earlier moment?” is also in the affirmative. An individual at any moment
maintains a continuity with earlier moments of his or her existence, just as he or
she is different from the one who inhabited the earlier moments.
The Buddhist version of the problem of identity, it turns out, is not able to
dispense with what may be called the paradox of measurement: it understands
consciousness and consciousness of identity as an ongoing and changing
process, but to be able to discuss such evolving identities it has to name static
stages so that intelligible discourse can occur. It calls attention to the complex
implications of the processes of identification demanding in turn complex
solutions as well. An individual then is the same as he or she was at one time
and a later time in certain respects and different in certain other respects. The
social-psychologically relevant question at this stage is how does an individual
operate this double consciousness of sameness and difference? This question
cannot be answered in any abstract logical way but by attending to the way an
individual—Buddhist or Christian, Jew or Hindu—operates in the world of
everyday life. Such an individual will be one who talks to others and talks to
himself or herself. He or she, that is, lives and dies in a discursive community
and operates with a discursive mind. One way of attending to the problem of
identity of such an individual with a given continuity and a certain difference is
to investigate how he or she attends to the problem of his or her identity. The
discussion between the king and Bhante Nagasena provides a fruitful starting
point. The Bhante asks the king: When you were a young tender weakly infant
lying on your back, was that your present grown-up self? In this conversational
gambit, the Bhante introduces various concepts that implicates a theory of
continuous identity: “tender, weakly infant” is contrasted and connected with the
“grown-up self.” When the king denies a sameness between the infant and the
grown-up, the Bhante introduces the various stages of the embryo. These are
named and sorted stages of the embryo: kalala, abbuda, pesi, ghana. Each
named stage is identical unto itself and remains stable at least for a time. These
names were devised and used in discourse to identify the changes that were
occurring to the same presumptive entity. Indeed, then, one can say that in the
talk the king and the Bhante recognize both the existence of difference and
sameness in the embryo. The embryo at an earlier stage is called kalala and the
same embryo is called abbuda at a later stage. That is to say, the embryo has
sameness under one set of conditions and difference under another set of
conditions—conditions that are culturally available to the discursants.
These identities, the way they are conceived and “discoursed,” imply a
continuity: It is the kalala that “becomes” the abbuda, and it is this that
“becomes” pesi and then “becomes” a ghana and so on to become a little child
and adult person. As the discourse separates and identifies these entities, it also
recognizes their continuity by articulating them in the very formulation of this
sentence. This discourse from the Bhante Nagasena also recognizes the
importance of the interactional process in the establishment of identity: He
brings the mother into the discourse. It is from the standpoint of the mother that
the embryonic child and the little child and the adult individual achieve their
continuity. These various moments of the evolving individual are unified into a
coherent identity: He is the son of this one, mother. She can identity him,
however many changes he may have undergone since sperm met egg and
constituted the entity. And she can identify the stages through which he has
passed and what he is now by employing very distinct terminologies, which have
their own logic to them.
One can envisage a slightly different discussion between the king and the
Bhante. Are you now the king of this land? Yes, the king can answer, I am king
of this land. Were you king yesterday, last month, last year? Yes, I was because I
remember discursively that I was king at those particular times. That is to say, I
was able to refer to myself as a king yesterday, last month and last year, treat
myself as such and have various relevant others refer to me, address me, and
treat me as a king. Are you the same person, the king now, as you were when
you were five years old, or when you were a kalala? No I am not the same
person, but I have “grown” from the kalala, to a five-year-old and so on to the
present kinghood. How do you know? So have I been told along the way by all
and sundry and I remember being told. In other words, the continuity of identity
and its difference from earlier shapes of such identities are discursively
established and used by participants in ongoing relationships. So to the extent
that vocabularies are made available to describe these continuities and
differences then an individual as a discursant will use them to claim the reality of
the paradox: I am the same person and I am a different person. These
vocabularies may be finely differentiated—as in the Buddhist one about embryo,
or more grossly differentiated—but one uses what one and his or her others,
know, understand, accept and are willing to validate.
If there are distinctions made along the temporal dimension of existence, the
same distinctions are made between different individuals. One has a continuity
and a difference simultaneously from earlier moments in the discursive process
of the individual just as one can claim a separateness and a connection with
others by similar processes. The king and the Bhante, for example, have separate
identities and the descriptive titles they bear—that is, accept and use—confirm
the respective identities of each of them.
Even as continuous identity is being denied, the monk addresses his
interlocutor as “Your Majesty,” which is equal to “King,” and the king in return
addresses the monk as “Bhante”—honorific title for a monk. “King” and
“Bhante” are concepts that summarize a long series of “incidents” into a
coherent usage. In other words, each participant takes these various experiences
of the past and treats them as an interpretant. The particulars of kingliness and
bhanteness are collapsed into a universal and subject to a logic of classification;
it becomes a concept. Neither the king nor the monk can address each other,
relate to each other, or treat the other as an object without remembering who the
other was a moment ago, a day earlier, or months before that. The same can be
said of the mother mentioned in the Bhante’s discourse: She is able to recognize
her “son,” a concept that cannot be used without it being a continuous identity.
Indeed, as the good king and the equally good Bhante seek in their debate to
question the existence of a continuous identity, they are forced to talk as if there
are such identities. In such talkings an individual is forced to semiotize the
concept of identity, thereby giving it a discursive presence. In the moments of
referential and reflexive discourse it has a static existence, as is apparent in the
exchange between the king and the Bhante, as a discreet identity. A Buddhist
must yet use it as a sign to conceive the nonexistence of his or her presence in
the world as in his or her relationship with others.
Buddhism, seeking to deny the validity of the notion of a continuous personal
identity, has succeeded in providing a theory of successive identities that
nevertheless constitute a logical series of separated identities which can be
unified into a coherence when seen from a particular perspective. An embryo
may have these separate but successive identities but from the mother’s
standpoint it still bears the identity of her son. In the absence of these
vocabularies of identity there cannot be an identity or memory or consciousness
of a continuing or separate existence. It is the continuity indicated by given and
available vocabularies that gives an identity that can be simultaneously
continued and differentiated. There cannot, however, be any doubt that an
individual who claims to be anatta, and is both same as he or she was at an
earlier time and different from it as well, will be able to function as a
“motivational unity” in the everyday activities of this world.
However hard some theories may strive to obliterate or underplay the
individual “as an integrated motivational unity,” and whatever metaphors of
collective identification that they may fashion, at the fulcrum of the act the
embodied entity must produce moves and countermoves against or with another
such entity and against the material world. This is, one may say, a limitation put
on humans by the fact that they are physically separated from each other and can
face the body and feel it and command it with their discursive minds. Without
such differentiation, there is nothing to either see in the world or conceive in the
mind; without differentiation there is no world that the discursive mind can
discuss and such differentiations are constituted by the use of systems of
classification and identification.8

ACTS OF IDENTITY

The differentiation of self and the interactive claiming of a continuity of self is

accomplished by moves that may be termed acts of identity. David Snow and
Leon Anderson describe the various means by which these acts—what they call
“identity work”—are accomplished. Identity work, they aver,
is the range of activities individuals engage in to create, present and sustain personal identities that are
congruent with and supportive of the self-concept. So defined, identity work may involve a number of
complementary activities: a) arrangement of physical settings or props; b) cosmetic face-work or the
arrangement of personal appearance; c) selective association with other individuals and groups; d)
verbal constructions and assertion of personal identities. (1987: 1348)

These four instrumentations for the claiming of identity may be reconsidered

as materialistic identification, associative identification, and vocabularic
identification. These acts of identification are simultaneously acts of
classification. Acts of identity are undertaken then by selecting one vocabulary
or another for use in the identification process or set of associates or objects and
materials to do so. In such forms of action, an individual uses modes of
identification either to define his or her own identity just as to read the identity
of the other. The verbal form of identification and the material form manifest
themselves as claims and assertions on the one hand and as acceptance and
validations on the other—unless, of course, the claims are refuted and rejected
and a new identity demanded or conferred on the other. In any case identificatory
processes are social acts that are fundamentally moves with which actors seek to
separate their selves and that of others from other selves and facilitate the
emergence of reflexive and discursive interactions.
Such naming processes practiced by an individual, the acts of identification,
are redolent with purpose. Such acts are not just empty logical activities but are
indubitably pragmatic exercises and as the purposes change, the systems of
classification used may also change. The purposiveness of the process of
identification introduces a fundamental selectivity to it as well: An individual
and his or her social circles, the cultural group in which he or she lives and acts,
chooses among many options, which particular identity that he or she is to have.
Societies, for example, can select “adolescence” as an identity for individuals
conforming to certain boundaries marked by age and the nature of the
responsibilities that he or she has to accept and this can be distinguished from
“childhood” and “adulthood.” Other societies may choose to skip adolescence
altogether and move from childhood to adulthood and expect the person in the
latter category to undertake commensurate responsibilities.
Narrower identities, the more personal ones, are also subject to pragmatic
selectivities. A man may have had conferred on him a patrilineal name that also
coded his ethnicity and religion. He may choose to change his gender and
become a woman—by one means or another. Or else he may seek to alter his
ethnic and religious identity: He changes his name from Franco Rosenweig to
Francis Roberts. Indeed, changes of names always accompany nearly all
conversion experiences: When a heathen becomes a Christian he or she gets a
new name that connects him or her to the source of the new religion in the Bible,
when one changes from an ordinary civilian into a revolutionary, he or she
would receive a nom de guerre, and so on. Further, an individual himself or
herself can selectively construct an identity and project it as the salient one in
given social circles. A talented and accomplished woman may allow herself to
be identified as a talented and accomplished woman in her professional life and
seek to diminish or obliterate it at home and become a submissive wife in order
to keep her marriage to a traditional husband going. Or else a man who is a
successful gambler at certain times of the week may choose to submerge it at
other times when he is a successful schoolmaster.
In each of these cases the complex and evolving, multifaceted and
kaleidoscopic reality of an individual is submitted to the available logic of
categories and thereby identified and classified, so that he or she can conduct
relationships with their respective others. The discourse that subverts that
relationship in fact demands this seeming coherence to be effective and efficient.
One can be many things to many people but it is easier to be one thing at a time
to relevant people. The identification or naming process, that is, can be self-
referential as other-referential and the “properties” that an individual can
attribute to himself or herself, just as those that he or she can attribute to others,
are provided by the discourse of the community in which such operations are
being performed. Indeed, the very purpose of naming and delineating an identity
for the self is to facilitate the interactions and relationships that are fundamental
to the society.
In addition to a strictly defined vocabulary of identity one can also use things
and territory to define his or her identity, that is, use them in acts of identity.
Such a view of the relationship between objects and the identification of self was
discussed by G. H. Mead himself. Doyle McCarthy (1984: 105–121) has elicited
the relevant discussion in Mead’s work. This can be summarily put as follows:

(a) Objects play a central role in the constitution and maintenance of social
identities.
(b) Objects serve to provide the self with a stable and familiar environment.
(c) The acts of touching and grasping play a central role in reality
construction and reality maintenance.
(d) The self’s relation with the physical world is a social one.

The use of space and its contents—props and the arrangement of settings and
other materials of identity—have been extensively described by Goffman
(1959). Space and its contents are the arenas in which identities are situated but
they are used purposively to identity the self—that is, show its continuity in
other identities and separation from still others. In Goffman’s work places and
things are used to represent the self and identify it for others. It is full of rich
examples of identity work. I will call attention to merely one such case and
recast it in terms of the logic of identity. In setting up what Goffman calls
“barriers to perception,” an individual arranges the various objects in his or her
domain in such a way that there is a “backstage” and a “frontstage.” The
essential process here is the establishment of certain categories by the use of
space and to give them social significance. I, and certain others, bear the identity
of those who can enter the backstage; we represent a particular structure of
relationships, and “you” or “they” do not. “Backstage” then becomes an
identifying tag that separates one set of individuals from others—for example,
family and close friends, or teammates. In this way not only does the
arrangement of the barriers enable identities to be defined and claimed, they can
be actively used whenever others enter the scene: Certain people I will allow
inside, while others will remain outside, thereby defining the identities of
insiders and outsiders, intimates and strangers, and so on. Further, the identities
can be transformed by one asking the other to transcend the barrier and enter the
inner space; one is thus made an intimate. Conversely one can transform an
intimate into an outsider by ordering him or her out of particular territories,
temporarily or permanently. A spouse, for example, who separates from the other
has to leave the space they occupied together and relinquish rights to it—
essentially redefining the identity he or she bore before. The use of space to
define identity extends to larger spheres and arenas: concepts of neighborhood
and region and so on are signs that individuals use to claim identity. I belong
here and the “here” enables me to put myself into one category and excludes
certain others from this category. These places do not then symbolize a self so
much as enable an identity denoting a continuity and a difference to be claimed
by self and other. The self is particularized as one who belongs to this household,
as an insider, backstager, as a West-sider, as a New Yorker, as an American—all
words with distinct spatial referents and counterreferents: I am not an outsider, I
am not a frontstager, an East-sider, not a Jerseyite, not a Canadian.
Objects also play an important part in Goffman’s thesis about the presentation
of self. From the standpoint adopted here, these objects—called props by
Goffman—may indeed be used to present a self, but as such a self is presented
through these objects, it is particularized as bearing a given identity because it is
registered with the help of these objects as being one kind of self rather than
another, as well as a self that is continuous with an earlier manifestation. If one
exhibits the tennis trophies he or she has won in high school in the living room,
he or she is claiming the identity of champion, albeit a past champion, and to the
extent the trophies remain on display the individual is claiming a continuous
identity to himself or herself as to a real and presumptive audience. Similarly, he
or she is also establishing a difference between himself and herself and other
slobs and nonathletes, nerds and bookworms, and so on.
The relationship between objects and identity goes deeper than the examples
given by Goffman. Objects, or objectified things, after all, have their own
identity. That is to say, they have a continuity over time, though they may not
recognize it and they are differentiable from other things as particularized
objects. A diamond has a continuity as an object of value just as it is
differentiated from other diamonds by the fact that it is bigger, more expensive, a
better grade, but most significantly for our purposes that it is owned by X rather
than Y. To the extent it is owned by X, he or she can use it to present a self. This
particular diamond confers an identity on the owner: He or she is the one who
owns and wears the diamond, he or she is the one who can afford to own this
particular diamond. Objects and identities in fact are participants in a dialectic in
which the individual uses the object to present a self and claim an identity as the
object in turn elicits an identity from the owner: the Sultan’s diamond.
The objects then in one’s particularized world are not merely signs that are
extensions of the self in which the “psychic energy” of meaning and attention are
conferred by an individual as Mihail Czikszentmihalyi and Eugene Rochberg-
Halton (1981) have argued. They may certainly do that, but they also exist as
signs in themselves and as signs in relation to other signs. A diamond has sign-
power of its own and such power is augmented by the fact that it is not a
sapphire, is not a tiny diamond, and is not dull of color and water. That is, this
object exits in a world of other objects and other’s objects, and in its unique
claim to belong to me it has an identity that it confers on me. The object, of
course, can be a diamond, a car, a house, or even a trophy wife or trophy
husband, for that matter. These things in the world, objectified as they are by the
attention of individuals, have their own identities and in a symbiotic dance of
being and becoming, a human confers an identity on the thing and the thing in
turn confers an identity on the human: “It is my Rolls Royce, the steel gray one,”
a man may say reflexively. “It is Mr. Wilson’s Rolls Royce,” someone else may
say, or, “It is your Rolls Royce, isn’t it?” These processes allow individuals to
convert neutral things into objectified vocabularies and make them into
relational indices of identity.9
These signs of identity, with their logical structures, are put into practice in
everyday life to organize the world in which an individual has to live. The signs
become elements of acts, the meaning and significance of which may change as
they proceed. Further, with these acts of identity an individual casts himself or
herself into a role and a character in the strictly dramaturgical or narrative
significance of these terms. To claim an identity by an act is also to claim a place
in an evolving narrative. Proposing marriage may be said to be an act that
identifies a man as one who is a heterosexual, interested in a continuous social,
emotional, and sexual relationship with a woman that is legally and/or
religiously sanctioned. Once this act of identification has been announced, the
man becomes committed to playing the role of husband and perhaps father. Or
else, in a shorter time span, a woman may wear the uniform of a police officer
and will find herself cast into the narrative of being a police officer in the acts
that are subsequent to the donning of the uniform. That is to say, an individual
can appropriate certain objects and acts in order to cast himself or herself in a
selected narrative of identity. Guns, for example, are assembled and used in acts
that cast an individual in narratives of masculinity and self-aggrandizement. A
boy growing up in circles in which a close identification of acts with guns and
masculinity, with aggression and violence, is the accepted norm may choose to
shoot someone because he or she has offended him in some way. Such moves
may be considered not as indices of underlying psychological pathologies but as
subculturally recommended ways of producing masculinity.
Identity is not a mysteriously immanent process nor is it a mechanical and
static act of naming. Rather, once individuals are identified with one or many
forms, they are subject to a variety of uses by self and others. Indeed they are
used improvisationally to suit the situation and align it with other participants in
the situation in all the four rhetorical modes discussed earlier: reflexively an
individual is a self to himself only in terms of the logical and nameable
categories of identity: “I am what I am; I am Hamlet the Dane,” or “I am a
Christian, a Southern Baptist,” or “I am a paranoid-schizophrenic of the
hebephrenic type.” In the addressive mode the categories of identity manifest
themselves in the initiating moves of conversations. The very form in which this
address is presented has an impact on the nature of the interaction that emerges,
and such addresses define and elicit the particular identity that is relevant to the
interaction. Brown and Gilman’s (1972) study of the use of intimate as opposed
to formal modes of address, what they called T and V forms, are surely acts of
identity. As one addresses the other in a T form he or she automatically classifies
him or her and establishes an identity for the other. In American usage, the
pronominal distinction between the formal and the intimate styles are not
available, but the need to make this distinction in social relationships
nevertheless remains. It is handled by an elaborate system of conventions for the
use of first names and nicknames: John becomes Jack, Jacqueline becomes
Jackie, and so on, or Jackie and Jack sometimes become “Honey” or
“Sweetheart” or “Darling.” In American society today, one cannot copulate with
a woman, have children with her, and live in the same household for a certain
period of time and continue to call her “Mrs. Bennet” as Jane Austen allowed
Mr. Bennet to do in Pride and Prejudice. These forms of address are substituted
for the intimate pronouns that the French have thoughtfully allowed to remain in
their language. In the initiation of conversation and in greeting the other, the
intimate mode can be established by this instrumentation. This is to be
contrasted with a number of formalistic variations:
 (a) Mr. John Smith, Doctor, Professor, or President John Smith, Mr. Smith. In
these usages the other is defined as a superordinate in a system of
hierarchical relationships in which Mr. Smith bears the identity of a
superior to the one doing the addressing.
(b) Smith without titles will be used to address one in a subordinate position—
except, of course, in England it will be used by those of equal standing
who have not yet become familiar.
(c) John, without surname and title is used to address friends or those of
subordinate rank.

In each of these addressive interactions with their reciprocal answerable

modes, the other is identified for purposes of immediate conversation and an
identity conferred on him or her. However, such conferral procedures are
reflexive on the addressee as well: As he or she confers an identity on the other,
he or she is conferring an identity on himself or herself as well, both of which
acts need the support of the other to proceed to the next step. The same
observations can be made about kin-terms: Each time somebody calls another
“Dad,” he identifies not only a father but a son—whether the relationship is
legally sanctioned or merely fictive. They too are reflexive exercises, for as one
identifies the other by kin-term, one also places oneself in a reciprocal identity.
Some reciprocal identities reflect the unequal status relationships between the
partners, while others reflect their equal statuses.
Referential modes of discourse must perforce proceed on the systematic use of
the logic of nameable categories—or else one would be faced with the situation
described in Ionesco’s elaborate joke on identity presented at the beginning of
this chapter. Referential identification of the other’s self also allows one to
introduce various qualifications to the relevant identity: That’s Sam the
carpenter; It is Max the spy, and so on.10
Differentiation of identity, with whatever cultural vocabulary that is available,
is not something that a functioning human consciousness can avoid; rather it is
an ontological condition of the beingness of itself and of the others it encounters.
Such processes of the construction of the self of an individual, as of the other, is
not a matter of choice but a semiotic imperative that cannot be dissolved or
undone by deconstructive fiat and will. Culler’s claim that “deconstruction seeks
to undo oppositions that in the name of unity, purity, order, and hierarchy, try to
eliminate difference” (1989: 783) is merely a literary conceit rather than a
practically useful proposition. To eliminate, dissolve, undo one pair of binarisms
is to automatically create another—for instance, those who accept the new
“undone” oppositions and those who cling to the old ones. Insofar as humans
have perforce to live with others in organized relationships, differentiations will
be semiotically impossible to avoid—though no doubt certain obnoxious and
invidious and ahistorical ones can be eliminated in favor of others.

FIELDS OF IDENTITY

The differentiation of identities is not achieved solipsistically in the practical

world. Rather, they are culturally constituted and collectively shared discursive
representations. Each such representation—or field of identity—gives both depth
to the entity being identified as well as range. Each such field of identity will
have a number of features that are specific to it. To be a Christian is to have a
rich variety of identifying features that separates the bearer of the identity from
Jews and Muslims and Hindus, thereby giving the identity depth. Some fields of
identity, for example, that of “East-sider of New York,” are shallow. To the
extent that this identity is shared with others—members of small social circles or
world religions or nations—identities may be said to have a range, small or
large.
The fields of identity use the logic of categories to establish terminologies that
can be put into practice in the identification of individuals. They embody the
logic and give it a practical reality on the basis of which an individual can
organize his or her world, act in it, live in it with a minimum of confusion. They
provide what E. J. Lowe called the “sortal terms” with which an individual can
name and act in the world in such a way that his or her others, interlocutors,
fellow-participants, will be able to accept his or her actions as valid. A sortal
term, says Lowe, drawing from Aristotle, Locke, and various other philosophers,
is a term used to sort individuals from each other: “for any sort of individuals,
there is a criterion of identity for individuals of that sort” (1989: 9). Lowe further
notes, “Individuals are only recognizable as individuals of a sort, while sorts are
only intelligible as sorts of individuals” (1989: 11). Fields of identity are theories
or schemes that provide individuals with the terms for sorting the objects in the
world, including the individual himself or herself and other such individuals, as
objects of a certain sort, rather than another sort for immediate purposes. For
example, a racist in an airplane may sort the man seated next to him as an
unacceptable outsider and may not even speak to him, but if the plane crashes on
a deserted island and they are the only two survivors he may now sort him as a
fellow survivor with whom a working relationship can be constituted. Here the
racist has to abandon one field of identity—”non-Aryan,” say—and adopt
another—”survivors together”—who will need each other to survive further.
Sorting draws from one field or another to identify the self or the other and is
always fitted to an immediate purpose. Typically they name the identities on the
basis of contrasting sets. Religion, for example, as a field of identity orders its
membership in terms of, say, Christian or Jew, Hindu or Muslim, my religion or
your religion.
While there are many fields and subfields of identity I will examine four here:
therapeutic, familial, national, and racial. These too are to be taken as
“representative anecdotes;” that is, I am not dealing with all the possible fields of
identity.11

THERAPEUTIC IDENTITY

The varied processes of identification, dependent as they are on a variety of

discourses of separation and continuity, create their own institutional complexes
in order to confer identity on those subject to them. In modern Western society
what may be broadly termed the psychological field—in which I will include all
the institutionalized programs that deal with the individual as a unit for either
academic study or therapeutic intervention—has become very powerful and
influential. For example, a number of Freudian concepts have become the
normal currency of therapy in many circles. Erikson’s concept of “identity” and
“identity crisis,” not to mention the countless idioms of popular psychology,
have also achieved a decisive place in the culture. Most of these therapeutic
vocabularies have their roots in Freud’s monumental work and should be given
prominence in any discussion of the psychologistic field.
To begin with, Freud initiated one of the most effective ways in which
identities are transformed and confirmed—the therapeutic interview. This came
with precise instructions on how a patient should be treated, how he or she
should comport himself or herself, how the interview should begin and end, and
how he or she should be charged. The very architectonic of this situation sets up
a definition of a relationship: the patient as a supplicant, lying down, helpless,
with the therapist dominating him or her and presenting authority and control.
Any words that come from the patient are issues in this supplicatory mode
needing completion in the commentary by the therapist—a commentary that will
give the patient an identity. In such a situation, the patient engages in “free
association” and displays to the therapist, conversationally and addressively,
whatever comes into his or her “mind.” This method was discovered “gradually”
says Ernest Jones, “becoming steadily refined and purified from the adjuvants—
hypnosis, suggestion, pressing, and questioning—that accompanied it at its
inception.” (1963: 153) Once it was discovered, it became the standard method
for the field. Jones describes it well:
The patient, lying down with closed eyes, was asked to concentrate her attention on a particular
symptom and try to recall any memories that might throw some light on its origin. When no progress
was being made Freud would press her forehead with his hand and assure her that then some thoughts
or memories would indubitably come to her. Sometimes in spite of that nothing would seem to happen
even when the pressure of the hand was repeated. Then, perhaps on the fourth attempt, the patient
would bring out what had occurred to her mind, but with the comment: “I could have told you that the
first time, but I didn’t think it was what you wanted.” (Jones 1963: 154)

Jones also notes that Freud gave his patients “the strict injunction to ignore all
censorship and to express every thought even if they considered it to be
irrelevant, unimportant, or too unpleasant” (1963: 154).
Once these thoughts, even the “unimportant” and “irrelevant” and
“unpleasant” ones, are vocalized within the confines and architectonic of the
interview, it was possible for the therapist to interpret them and make the new
meanings available to the patient. This process of interpretation is inescapably a
substitution of a new metaphor, a new poetics, for the one in which the patient
expressed himself or herself initially.
The social and interactional process by which dreams come to be interpreted
by the therapist can serve as a representative case here. Freud writes,
My patients were pledged to communicate to me every idea or thought that occurred to them in
connection with some particular subject; amongst other things they told me their dreams and so taught
me that a dream can be inserted into the psychical chain that has to be traced backwards in the
memory from a pathological idea. (1965: 133).

The process involved in these activities can be summarized as follows:

(a) There is a patient who, recognizing some problem in her or his life, mind,
relationships, submits herself or himself to the therapist.
(b) He or she has dreams, which are remembered sufficiently and articulated;
that is, the dreams are put in the shape of discursive acts and narratives and
presented to the therapist.
(c) In recalling and in recounting the dreams, the patient is able to
interpret/respond to them on his or her own.
(d) The therapist receives the articulated dreams and interprets them for the
patient.
Consider here, then, a dream that Freud reports and then analyzes. In the
interpretation one finds the twin elements of Freud’s interpretational theory
nicely blended: The daily empirical experiences of the patient manifesting
themselves in a different form in the dream and the details of the dream as
indices to the unconscious wishes, accumulated from childhood onward. Here is
the dream:
A man dreamt that he had a secret liaison with a lady whom someone else wanted to marry. He was
worried in case this other man might discover the liaison and the proposed marriage come to nothing.
He therefore behaved in a very affectionate way to the man. He embraced him and kissed him. (Freud
1965: 434)

This is of course Freud’s report of the dream. The actual words, their
arrangement and imagery, are lost to us; however here is Freud’s interpretation
of this dream:
There was only one point of contact between the content of this dream and the facts of the dreamer’s
life. He had a secret liaison with a married woman; and an ambiguous remark made by her husband,
who was a friend of his, led him to suspect that the husband might have noticed something. But in
reality there was something else involved, all mention of which was avoided in the dream but which
alone provided a key to its understanding. The husband’s life was threatened by an organic illness. His
wife was prepared for the possibility of his dying suddenly, and the dreamer was consciously occupied
with an intention to marry the young widow after her husband’s death. This external situation placed
the dreamer in the constellation of the Oedipus dream. His wish was capable of killing the man in
order to get the woman as his wife. The dream expressed this wish in a hypocritically distorted form.
Instead of her being married already, he made out that someone else wanted to marry her, which
corresponded to his own secret intentions; and his hostile wishes towards her husband were concealed
behind demonstrations of affection which were derived from his memory of his relations with his own
father in childhood. (Freud 1965: 434, my emphasis)

A dream, remembered and reported to the therapist, has now become, besides
a therapeutic tool, a poetics of identification for the hapless patient. To begin
with, he is being given the “Oedipus constellation” as a primal metaphor not
only for all family relationships, but for others as well. Then he is identified,
from being merely an adulterer and seducer, perhaps a sexual adventurer, into a
potential murderer, a murderer who is capable of killing his friend in order to
obtain his wife, of being a hypocrite in having disguised this in his dream, and
finally he is also identified as reproducing in his dream his father and mother.
The dream, as well as his liaison with the married woman, was a reproduction of
his “Oedipal constellation”: The married woman was really his mother, and her
husband was really his father.
The therapeutic situation had essentially functioned as a ceremony of
identification, a rite by which an old identity is refurbished. Once this dream has
been presented by the dreamer and the interpretation received from an
authoritative scientist and accepted, the dreamer has to place himself and define
and identify himself as a potential murderer, hypocritical, recalcitrant to certain
social standards and certainly needing a thorough reevaluation of his life—i.e.,
his identity. Freud had successfully translated the bare outlines of the dreamer’s
account into his own more intricate poetic: the “married woman” is really “his
mother”; i.e., she is a metaphor for his mother; the friend is really his father; the
dreamer behaving in a friendly manner to his metaphorical father was a distorted
metaphor for killing him. The dreamer’s liaison with a married woman is also a
metaphor for mother, who was of course a married woman, and with whom love
was forbidden.
Freud was able to convince many of his patients that the discourse they
presented him were really disguised versions of Oedipal languages. In other
words, Freud was able to take one version of a reported story, say, a dream,
convert it into another, and use it to confer on the hapless subject the identity of
Oedipus: father-killer and mother-fucker! Freud writes:
When I insist to one of my patients on the frequency of Oedipal dreams, in which the dreamer has
sexual intercourse with his own mother, he often replies: “I have no recollection of having had any
such dream.” Immediately afterwards, however, a memory will emerge of some other inconspicuous
and indifferent dream which the patient has dreamt repeatedly. Analysis then showed that this is in fact
a dream with the same content—once more an Oedipus dream. I can say with certainty that disguised
dreams of sexual intercourse with the dreamer’s mother are many times more frequent than
straightforward ones. (1965: 433, my emphasis)

The disguise is in fact removed by Freud himself, by analysis, according to a

theory of symbolism that he himself had devised. Interactionally speaking, a
patient submits a discourse that includes dreams which the therapist recasts into
different vocabularies and uses to confer an identity on the patient. Given the
fact that the patient voluntarily submitted himself or herself to these procedures
and that the therapist had institutional authority and cultural/intellectual power,
whatever identity that is conferred, Oedipal, neurotic, and so on would become
one facet, if not the dominating one, of the identity of the patient. Therapeutic
sessions are in fact identity forums where particular identities drawn from the
psychotherapeutic field are foisted on a more or less hapless and helpless self.
From being a member of a civilian community with an appropriate identity, the
patient by submitting himself to analysis becomes identified as a character in a
replay of a Theban tragedy.

FAMILIAL IDENTITY

The family, and the kinship system of which it is the central unit, is the most
ubiquitous source of identifying vocabularies in the world. He or she is given a
name (or a set of names) and soon thereafter it is used to address him or her as
well as to refer to him or her. In all cultures these names have certain properties:
they separate boys from girls and each sibling from the other. They in fact code
an identity and a difference: John is John and is sometimes John-John, John Jr.,
and Jack, but they identify the same individual, one who is different from Susan
and Robert, which identifies some other individual. In being systematically and
persistently addressed and told that he is in fact John he learns to identify
himself as John and may even address himself as John in his earlier discursive
exercises. He soon learns that he is differentiated from Susan and Robert, not to
speak of Mom and Dad and any others who may be hanging around. John has an
identity only because Robert and Susan have their separate and continuous
identities. Indeed, without others having identities, one cannot have his or her
own identity either. He or she is continuous and separate because relevant others
exist who are also continuous in different trajectories and separate in varying
realms. In addition, he or she learns that the world of objects around him or her
also confers an identity on him or her: John’s teddy bear, John’s shirt, not
Susan’s, John’s diamond. These locutions confer an identity on the object in
question, of course, but they also reciprocally identify John as one who
possesses a teddy bear, a shirt or the Hope diamond. Objects in the world
become endowed with possessive significations thereby becoming signs of
identification. Needless to say, in cultures in which objects like toys or shirts or
chairs are not identified as belonging to named individuals, they cannot be used
for purposes of identity-formation and other signs have to be devised.
Conversely, if there is a systematic rejection of the aggrandizing of objects to
self, shall I say, personalization of objects, then the nature of the identities of
separation that emerge may also be different. If objects are collectively owned
by the siblings and shared by them on a rough-and-ready basis then a sense of a
shared sibling-identity, or sense of shared male-sibling identity, or female-sibling
identity, “brotherhood,” “sisterhood,” and so on may well emerge.
In any case, sooner or later the child John—in cultures of a particular sort—
learns that he does share with Robert and Susan another type of identity, one that
is articulated in a surname: He is no longer John or Jack, but John Wilson and he
has an identity as the “one of the Wilsons” that he can claim along with his
brother and sister and father and mother and paternal ancestors. This may be
termed the second level of the familial identification process, and it is made
possible by the availability of another set of culturally devised codes: patrilineal
systems of descent signed in “surnames.” John then becomes John Wilson of the
Wilson family and the Wilson line of descent.
Such proper-naming vocabularies of identity exist in conjunction with kin-
terms. These terms have been studied as elements in the structure of relations by
many anthropologists from A. Radcliff-Brown onward. No doubt they are units
in a social structure, but primarily they are elements in a vocabulary of identity:
They identify an individual by means of his or her relationship to others and
these terms are used for reference, reflection, address, and answer. In
addressings and answerings every time the one says “Dad” to someone he
expects an answer that defines as a son. The same claims can be made about
other kin-terms: uncle, aunt, nephew, niece, grandfather, grandmother, and so on.
In addition to these vocabularies, one can consider nicknames as bearers of
identity. Nicknames too have their discursive regimen. Some diminutives are
standard alternatives to proper names and indicate special rights: Bob for Robert
represents an identity that can be addressed and referenced by familiars and
intimates; Jack for John is an alternative that also indicates familiarity. Further,
there are very personal nicknames that members of families develop that code
the special standing that each has with the other and identifies each to the other
accordingly such as “Tiger,” “Princess.” Conversely, as Morgan, O’Neill, and
Harre (1979) have argued, nicknames can be used to indicate negative
designations of the self of the other. Accidental events, irrelevant attributes, and
arbitrary categorizations of the self of the other are selected and given force and
substance in discourse and used to identify the self of the other.
The vocabularies of proper-naming and kin-naming and the consequent acts of
identity are derived from the discourse of patriarchy. The examples used earlier
are of course derived from the European model of patriarchy as it underwent
changes along the way. In Europe itself there were some variants: In Iceland
daughters are identified as mother’s daughters and in Spain, the mother’s maiden
name becomes a part of the child’s own name along with that of the patrilineal
surname. Indeed when the holds of the patriarchal discourse begin to weaken,
naming practices, or the processes by which identity is bestowed, also begin to
change. Zhigang Wang and Michael Micklin report for example that “the
declining influence of patriarchy” among certain members of the Chinese
community has resulted in changes in the naming practices for newborn
children: Even the family name is a matter for debate and often it is abandoned
in favor of a new name. “These microsocial conflicts,” they aver, “are consistent
with observed structural discontinuities in family organization, illustrating the
reciprocal relationship between institutional conditions and behaviors” (1996:
187). Indeed, they describe conflicts within families over these naming practices
suggesting really a debate between patriarchal discourses and other such
discourses.
 In any case, the construction of identities, the schemes by which selves are
identified and given particular characteristics, is an exercise in the logic of
classification. The family, of the extended sort or the nuclear one, can be
described as an institution where units are created in such a way that they
achieve a differentiation from each other. Each unit becomes equal to itself and
separate from the others and on it is conferred a descriptive label, a name, a title
to indicate it. It is the existence of the names or vocabularies of identity that
enables anyone, or anything, for that matter, to have identity. In addition the
vocabularies of identity also specify certain rules of combination, such as the
incest rules for example. These rules in turn protect the law of identity from
disintegrating: They ensure that one’s son remains a son and one’s daughter
remains a daughter and does not also become one’s stepsister and stepbrother.12

NATIONAL IDENTITY

This field of identity emerged comparatively recently—indeed, with the

emergence of the nation-state. Once such states emerged, local and regional,
ethnic and religious identities were also subordinated to national ones. Romans
became Italians, Jews became Germans, Saxons became Englishmen and
Englishwomen. In a penetrating study of the emergence of England as a nation—
and Englishness as an identity (which can be used here as “a representative
anecdote”)—Richard Helgerson has examined how it began to take shape in the
reign of Elizabeth I and the variety of instrumentations that was used to occasion
it. He considers language as the central and unifying feature of the emergence of
Englishness and describes various projects in the middle years of the sixteenth
century as having contributed to it. He quotes as his opening gambit a sentence
from a letter that the poet Edmund Spenser wrote to Gabriel Harvey in 1580:
“Why a God’s name, may not we, as else the Greeks, have the kingdom of our
own language?” (Helgerson, 1992:1). These words, Helgerson, argues, “carry us
from an essentially dynastic conception of communal identity (‘the kingdom’) to
an assertion of what we recognize as one of the bases of post dynastic
nationalism (‘our own language’)” (1992: 2). Nevertheless, Helgerson argues,
“Nor are the possible competitors for representational attention exhausted by the
extremes of ‘kingdom’ and ‘language,’ for between them comes that first-person
plural ‘our’ with its suggestion of shared participation and possession” (1992: 2).
The century following the one in which these words were written by Spenser
was characterized by conflicts that attempted to resolve the contradiction implied
by “language” and “kingdom.”
 Even a small acquaintance with the history of England in the next century or so will remind us that
conflict was to develop along precisely the lines suggested by those few words: between royal
prerogative, subjects’ rights and the cultural system. (1992: 2)

The aim of one side in this conflict, and of Spenser and this cohort, too, was “To
have the kingdom of their own language. To govern the very linguistic system,
and perhaps more generally the whole cultural system, by which their own
identity and their own consciousness was constituted” (1992: 3).
Helgerson, having set the terms of his argument then describes the various
modalities by which Englishness as an identity, distinguished from a
monarchically based one, was devised by various authors. He begins by showing
how the forms of Elizabethan poetry and the composition of the most “ambitious
single Elizabethan poem, Spenser’s Faerie Queen,” contributed to this. The
analysis of English verse is followed by a discussion of the emergence of
English law, as distinct from Norman law. He quotes Thomas Starkey who in
1529 wrote, “Who is so blind that seeth not the great shame to our nation, the
great infamy and rot that remaineth in us, to be governed by laws given to us of
such a barbarous nation as the Normans be?” (Helgerson 1992: 65). Yet
Starkey’s pleas were not heard by anyone at that time and he did not produce his
own work on the subject. It was left to Edward Coke nearly seventy-five years
later to produce works on English laws. Coke, it appears, was not very learned in
Roman law, which had become the dominant mode in the rest of Europe, and it
was this ignorance that enabled him to produce treatises suitable for the newly
emerging Englishness.
Yet I would contend that Coke’s very insularity, his myopic insistence on the uninterrupted
Englishness of English law, was the product of a constant sense of legal and national difference, a
persistent awareness of a rival system of law against which English law had to defend and define
itself. (Helgerson 1992: 71)

Helgerson describes also the map makers who defined the nation
cartographically, the description of overseas voyages by returning travelers who
helped define English differentness and the institutions of the theater and newly
reformed church.
But as poets, lawyers, chorographers, propagandists for overseas expansion, playwrights and
churchmen, they all belonged to different discursive communities and, as a result, wrote England
differently. . . . But unexpected similarities nevertheless link the divided communities, suggesting that
the walls between them were less solid than they sometimes seem. (1992: 5).

These various discursive communities, participated unwittingly in the narrative

construction of Englishness, a construction that was to give both the language
and metaphor for the construction by men and women born in England in later
years of their identity as Englishmen and Englishwomen.
Helgerson’s work, then, describes in great detail how the field of national
identity was created for England. Similar exercises were undertaken—are being
undertaken now—to create fields of identity in every part of the globe. The
coming of the nation-state coincided with the creation of discursive fields in
which national identities can be maintained. Once such identities were
constructed, they became potent sources of action that were creative and
sustaining of life but were also often murderous and genocidal.

RACE AND IDENTITY

The most perfect representative anecdote with which race can be examined as a
field of identity is without doubt the emergence of what may be termed the
Aryan mode of discourse in nineteenth-century Europe. By the beginning of the
eighteenth century the close affinity between most of the European languages
and certain languages in India and Iran had been recognized. James Parsons was
one of the earlier scholars to make this discovery. After detailed work in
comparative philology, he concluded that the “languages of Europe and Iran and
India were all derived from a common ancestor, the language of Japhet and his
offspring who had migrated out of Armenia, the final resting place of the Ark”
(Mallory 1989: 1). In spite of these biblical claims, Parsons is credited with
having discovered the group of languages called the “Indo-European family.”
Later in the century (1796) the Chief Justice of India, William Jones, a trained
philologist himself, gave a lecture on Indian culture, in the course of which he
spoke the words that have become famous to students of historical linguistics:
The Sanskrit language, whatever may be its antiquity, is of wonderful structure; more perfect than the
Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either; yet bearing to both of
them a stronger affinity, both in roots of verbs and in forms of grammar, than could have been
produced by accident; so strong that no philologer could examine all the three without believing them
to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps no longer exists. (quoted in Mallory 1989:
12)

Once the affinity between the languages of Europe and certain languages of
India was discovered and the Indo-Persian word “Aryan” was applied to them,
the search for an Aryan race, an Aryan language, and an Aryan homeland was
begun in earnest. One early writer begins his book on the “Aryan Race” with
these striking words:
Somewhere, no man can say just where, at sometime, it is equally impossible to say when—there
dwelt in Europe or Asia a most remarkable tribe or family of mankind where or when this was we
 shall never clearly know. No history mentions their name or gives a hint of their existence; no legend
or tradition had floated down to us from that vanished realm of life. (Morris 1888: 1)

This is Charles Morris’s description of the prehistory of the Aryan. Morris

continues:
And yet from the earliest date of which we can trace them, the Caucasian exhibited the qualities they
still possess—those of superior intellectuality, enterprise and migratory vigor. When we first gaze
upon the race—or rather at its Xanthochromic section—it is everywhere spreading and swelling,
forcing its way to the East and the West with restless energy. Before its energetic outflow, the
aborigines vanish or are absorbed. In the continent of Europe no trace of them is left, with the
exception of the Basques, pushed back into a mountain corner of Spain, and the Finns and Lapps,
driven into the Arctic regions of the North. A similar fate has befallen them in Southern Asia. During
the whole historical era this migratory spirit has continued active. The separate branches of, and the
Aryans as a whole, have been persistently seeking to extend this border. They are still doing so with
all the old energy driving the wedge of invasions deep into the domain of Mongoloid and Negroid life
until the Caucasian of today number one fourth of all mankind, and bid fair in many countries to
reduce the other race to mere fragments like the Basques or the North American Indians of the present
day. (Morris 1888: 108)

A recent scholar of the Indo-Aryan puzzle, J. P. Mallory, describes Morris’s

work as one that provided “comic relief.” Nevertheless, there is no doubt that it
presents the main elements of what was to emerge as the themes of a popular
discourse. Morris was no doubt influenced by the works that were being
produced in Germany at this time. Indeed, if Morris’s work was comic and
expressed in the optative mode, serious scholars themselves were not immune to
the seductions of the Aryan discourse. Gordon Childe was to write his own book
on the subject, making substantially the same claims as Morris, though he
dismissed it as a “childish” exercise later (Mallory 1989: 143). Nevertheless,
Childe’s work is a sober examination of the available evidence and is of a
different genre than those of Morris’s ilk. He dismisses the theory of “the Asian
cradle of the Aryans” with a number of well-grounded arguments and opts for a
north European cradle for them. He further rejects the idealization of the Aryan
past. He writes,
They were not the inaugurators of the neolithic civilization even in Europe nor were they as a whole
the pioneers in the use of bronze and iron. The makers of the widens on the Danish coasts have been
justly termed “disgusting savages.” Even stranger epithets might be applied to the other claimants to
the title of proto-Aryans, for a suspicion of cannibalism clings to the ochre-grave peoples. (Childe
[1926] 1970:206)

In his later work he even acknowledged the relationship between the usage of
the concept of Aryanism in more recent years, after the work of Houston Stuart
Chamberlain in England, to racist doctrines and to “pogroms” ([1926]
1970:164).
 Nevertheless, the search for a homeland and for a linguistically defined race is
the substratum of Childe’s work as well. The roots of this search, however, lie in
certain structures of German intellectual and political life. Max Muller, in his
“Biographies of Words” and the “Home of the Aryan,” raised certain issues that
others were to take up as well. One was the “original home” of the Aryans, as
Muller calls it, who were subject to the “Great Separation” (1905). This quest
carries its own pathos. Here were these heroic people who were “scattered” by
some force or another to many parts of the world and no one seems to know their
home! This theme of a lost and scattered people driven from paradise looms
large in the writing of the Aryan theorists. There were those who thought it was
Germany, but Muller comes down to “somewhere in Asia.” Muller writes,
The actual site of the Aryan paradise, however, will probably never be discovered because it left no
traces in the memory of the children of the Aryan emigrants partly because imagination would readily
supply whatever memory had lost.” (1905: 127)

In the late eighteenth century itself Johann Herder gave an initial impetus to an
association between India and the Aryans. He, having evidently never met a
brahmin, wrote rhapsodically:
The brahmins have formed their people to such a degree of gentleness, courtesy, temperance and
chastity, or at least have so confirmed them in these virtues, that Europeans frequently appear, on
comparison with them, as beastly, drunken or mad. In their air and language they are unconstrainedly
elegant; in their behaviour, friendly; in their persons clean; in their way of life, simple and
harmless . . . they are not destitute of knowledge, still less of quiet industry or nicely imitative art;
even the lowest castes learn reading, writing and arithmetic. (Herder 1803, vol. II; 34, in Poliakov
1974: 186–187)

Here, then, one faces the earliest example of a confusion, so common in later
expressions of the Aryan mode of discourse, between race and language that was
to find acceptance in the work of many others. The essential elements of this
mode of discourse was to become themes in the discursive culture of both
literary and political institutions of European and particularly German society.
This is nicely satirized in Mallory’s words. Some nineteenth-century and even
twentieth-century writers, he notes, portrayed “Proto-Indo-Europeans or Aryans
as a single people constrained within their homeland, perfecting their language
and then bursting out all over the earth waving swords and spreading paradigms”
(1989: 22).
This identification between language and cultural and psychological
endowments was to blossom further into one about a whole race of people and
their unique personal and cultural characteristics found in many continents and
become the foundation of various political movements and historiographical
studies. The German and German-speaking nationalism that it engendered was
to find its fruition in Nazism and became also the foundation of other nationalist
movements.
The basic epistemes of the Aryan mode of discourse can be summarized as
follows:

(a) A language, loosely defined, can be used as the criterion by which a

peoples’ identity as a homogeneous unit can be defined.
(b) There was an ancient people who lived somewhere in India or in the
Caucasus Mountains who created and spoke a pristine language that was
beyond compare in every way.
(c) These people not only spoke this pristine language but they possessed
distinct moral and psychological characteristics that were exemplary in
every way.
(d) These people, for one reason or another, had a habit of leaving their
homeland and wandering into Europe, taking with them their language,
culture, and genes.
(e) What is glorious, noble, and unique in European culture is derived from
these people who came from India, or somewhere else, in successive
waves of immigration.

One of those who built modern race theories on these assumptions was Joseph
Arthur, Counte de Gobineau. His “principal criterion for judging the superiority
of a ‘race’ was its capacity to originate a great civilization,” writes John Barker,
summarizing Gobineau’s views.
In his opinion there were ten such civilizations in the course of history, seven in the Old World and
three in America. The seven were those of the Indians, Egyptians, Assyrians, Greeks, Chinese,
Romans, and finally “les races germaniques. . . .” The Germanics were, for Gobineau, a branch of the
‘Aryan race’, to which he ascribed, in part at least, no fewer than six of the great civilizations of the
Old World. (1974: 37)

Gobineau’s rather tentative conclusions on the racial basis of civilization were

soon followed by a large number of others. Francis Galton in England sought to
show that “Negroids” were of systematically lower “intelligence” than English
people, and Vacher de Lapogue did the same for the French. Lapogue divided
the French into endemics and immigrants, the former tall, blond, blue-eyed
dolichocephalic (Nordic), and the latter, short, brown-haired brachycephalic
(Alpinids). He claimed the “former as superior, and gave a list of eminent
Frenchmen who appeared, from their portraits or other evidence, to belong to
this subrace” (Barker 1974: 47).
Two kinds of logical operations are being performed by these various authors.
One was a continuity for a large structure of members—continuity of character,
disposition, talent, capacity for hard work, discipline, leadership, intelligence,
creativity, idealism, bodily stamina, industry, foresight, and so on. Strikingly, all
the members of the taxon of race, or at least the males, were, more or less,
equally endowed with these characteristics. This continuity of identification was
then both across time and across whole populations: They inherited these
characteristics ancestrally, mongrelization having been avoided, and shared it
with all others similarly appointed. Two, these characteristics separated them
from the other races or “species,” as they were sometime labeled, who of course
did not possess these characteristics and did possess other repulsive ones.
Continuity of the people over time and space provided a wide-ranging and
encompassing terminology that could be used to identify with such a large
group. Further, the meanest member of the relevant population, however
insignificant his or her own personal achievement may be and however ignorant,
inartistic, nonscientific, and intellectually backward one may be, could
nevertheless identify with the highest achievement of individual members of the
population and derive satisfaction. I once heard a member of the “Aryan Nations
of America,” barely able to speak a literate sentence, and unable to contain his
anger and resentment, explain his political views to a television audience: “All
the great achievements in the history of the world were made by white people.”
In one clear stroke this poor embittered illiterate young man has become one
with Aristotle, Plato, Leonardo da Vinci, Beethoven, Michelangelo,
Shakespeare, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, and so on: “It is my people who
made these contributions; I am one of them.” Such an identification with a larger
structure of members enables the author of his own identity to disidentify himself
or herself from others—non-Aryans, Jews, Africans, Asians. “They did not
create great civilizations or great art and science; my volk did and I can claim to
be part of it.” Such claims are essentially continuations of statements made in
white supremacist literature. Jessie Daniels has argued that such statements are
really assertions of male identity and describes an illustration that carries a
picture of a working-class white male with the legend “white men built this
nation.” She argues,
The image points to a connection between white masculinity and class position; the white men to
which the illustration presumably refers are those materially involved in “building” an infrastructure,
those who literally “built” the bridges, airplanes and skyscrapers featured in the background. (1997:
34–35)
Not only does this claim exclude the contributions made by nonwhite people, it
also enables any and every white man to claim participation in the enterprise
without having contributed anything to the buildings and the inventions and the
technology.13
Racism, then, is a field of identity that provides richly textured vocabularies of
identity. These vocabularies conformed to a very particular logic: Populations of
people with certain physical characteristics could be classified into a discrete
structure where each member was logically equal to another. Insofar as each
member was logically equal, it follows that they were equal in every other way
—for instance, in social and intellectual characteristics, as well as in the
entitlement to preference, power, and authority. If one belonged to a particular
population, one had claims to all its achievements and if one did not belong to it,
one did not have claims to it. This is a reverse of the conventional stereotyping:
Stereotyping is a form of addressive and referential identification of the other’s
self by generalizing a particular to cover the whole population. One criminal or
duplicitous member of the population is taken as evidence that the entire
population is similarly distinguished. In identifying the self with the
achievements of given individual members of a population, one reflexively
assigns to himself or herself the same achievements and an inherent and
potential capacity to obtain the same achievements. Stereotyping then has two
forms: stereotyping of the other and stereotyping of self. Such acts produce an
automatic identity that elevates a doubtful and lowly self to a secure and exalted
position: I am one with them, an incarnate of greatness by affiliation.
Such self-stereotyping and restrictive identifications is not necessarily the
domain of the feeble-minded or the unimaginative. Rather, this logic of
classification and identification has been practiced by anyone—indeed has been
practiced systematically over the centuries, and the Aryan mode of discourse is a
mere variation on a general theme. Various religious discourses are based on this
logic: the people of the book versus the people of the heath; the people chosen
by god versus the others; Christians versus the pagans and infidels, Buddhists
versus Hindus, Hindus versus Muslims, and so on. The mere membership in
these categories confers moral qualities on the individuals and excludes the
others from such qualities: All are equally the children of god, the chosen, the
heathen, the pagan, and so on. This logic of classification has its analogue in the
gender sphere as well: Males have moral qualities that women lack and therefore
are not entitled to the same privileges. As in the Aryan mode of discourse, the
claim is that mere membership in a category confers on each member of the
category, however different in other respects each may be, moral and ethical
qualities that members of other categories lack, confers on them in fact a
particular identity.

IDENTITY AND EMOTION

These structural elements of the fields of identity, however, are manifest in the
everyday lives of the relevant peoples. They in fact serve to identify these people
to themselves and derive their strength from the emotional bonds that they can
create and sustain. When someone identifies himself as “John Watson” it
automatically embeds him in a number of real and presumptive interpersonal
relationships: his father and mother, his brothers and sisters, and perhaps his
cousins and certainly some of his ancestors and descendants. John Watson is not
alone: he is connected laterally as well as vertically. His identity has breadth and
depth. Similarly, when someone identifies himself as an Englishman, he embeds
himself not only in some or all of the aforementioned structures but in a structure
of other interpersonal relationships as well: me, my family, my ancestors and
descendants, my neighbors and friends are all English together. I am not alone:
there are so many of us who are English, who can talk in the shared language
about shared phenomena.
When one identifies oneself as an Englishman or American, as a Christian or
Jew, as an Aryan or a Semite, then one invokes not merely arid texts and lifeless
monuments, but interpersonal relations and emotional ties and loyalties that
define a self. The texts and the monuments may have an independent existence
but they also function as signs by which communities are created and sustained
and interpersonal ties given significance. They provide the symbolic medium in
which selective ties—as Watson to Watson, as Englishman to Englishman, as
Christian to Christian, as Jew to Jew, as Aryan to Aryan—are cultivated. Once
such a vocabulary of identity is made available to an individual and sustained by
continuous usage in interactions and relationships it becomes a ready answer to
the ever-present sense of uncertainty and anxiety that bedevils humans. These
answers situate him or her in interactions, societies, and histories and at times in
cosmologies and eschatologies. One’s being gets defined, then, by
interpersonally and structurally embedded vocabularies that identify the self. The
claimed, presented, and acknowledged identities also become felt identities and
it is as felt identities that they elicit commitment, loyalty, and passion. Such
feelings for identities, however, can emerge only on the basis of their being
continuous, differentiated, and nameable and interactionally viable phenomena.
If one cannot separate one’s identity from that of others, if one cannot
comprehend its continuity over time, however segmented into fragments it may
be, and if it cannot be reflected upon, referred to, and addressed, it cannot
possibly elicit any emotional commitment.
Emotions may be “sensations,” “feelings,” or “bodily reactions,” but for all
that they must also be cognitions. For a while cognition was considered free of
emotionality, and complex theories of action and behavior were formulated as
exclusively cognitive acts. Now it is believed by some that emotions are
sensations and bodily reactions. These disjunctive contrasts should be abandoned
and cognition should be considered as carrying degrees of emotionality all the
time. Emotions are indubitably felt sensations, but to be felt and experienced
they must be about “something”: Emotions occur within cognition of situations,
self, and objects. Peirce wrote,
Now every emotion has a subject. If a man is angry he is saying to himself that this or that is vile and
outrageous. If he is in joy, he is saying “this is delicious.” If he is wondering he is saying, “this is
strange.” In short, whenever a man feels he is thinking of something (Peirce 1960: 292).

For Peirce emotions are inconceivable without there being also thoughts or
cognitions. It is then a conceiving and cognizing individual who also feels the
emotions. The conceptions occur to individuals who are situated in interactions,
real or presumptive, and one of the foundations of such a conceiving and
experiencing of emotions is the identity of the conceiver. One of the
“something” that a person thinks of whenever he or she “feels,” besides the
relevant emotion, is his or her own identity and that of the identity of the other or
others with whom he or she is dealing. To be able to do this, the individual must
be able to identify his or her own self and the other, be it person or thing, and use
such identifications as the “subject” of the emotions. Such emotional resonances
cannot typically be done in a general or vague and uncertain way; rather, a more
or less precise subject of the feelings must be made available. One such subject
about which an individual can experience feelings is the differential identity of
the self and the other in given scenes and situations.14
The relationship between emotion and identity can be profitably examined by
considering occasions in which someone’s identity has been challenged. Such
challenges can occur when one is subjected to an insult that questions one’s
chosen identity or when an event, public or private, makes one re-examine one’s
identity and affirm one’s solidarity with others who share the identity.
What is to insult someone? It is to answer the other’s presence with an
inappropriate address, to challenge his or her presumptive identity and to
substitute another one implicitly or explicitly. Insults can be considered as modes
in which the selves of individuals are diminished by introducing negative
descriptions of one or another specific identity of the other. In tune with the
earlier representative discussion of family, nationality, and race, I will consider
the familial insult and the ethnic or racial insult.
Familial insult can take two forms. First, the family as a whole is denigrated
with various tags: “White trash,” “Trailer park trash,” “Soup-kitcheners,”
“Welfare family;” second, individuals may be described with various tags that
question central aspects of their identity: “bastard,” “son of a bitch,”
“whoreson,” or “son of a whore,” “motherfucker.” The second set of insults are
typically capable of eliciting strong emotional reactions and are in fact widely
used throughout the world. These are insults that can be addressed only to male
members of the family. The female members of the family are addressed
insultingly as: “bitch,” “whore,” and with various allusion to bodily parts. Each
of these insults speak to central elements of patriarchy. Indeed in the insults
addressed to male members of the family, the identity of each as a legitimate
member of the family is challenged and refuted by using “woman” as the
signifier. When a male is called a “bastard” it is his mother’s fidelity and chastity
that is being used to denigrate him. Because a mother was unfaithful to her
husband or produced the child out of wedlock his identity as a member of the
family is unacceptable. And if he is not a legitimate member of the family, he is
also not a legitimate member of society. The same observations apply to “bitch.”
The allusion to the female of the dog family is based on the belief that it is
incapable of loyalty and is an unreliable and flighty partner to the male. A son of
a bitch, then, is once again defined from the standpoint of male rights: Males are
entitled to loyalty and disciplined commitments from female members of the
family, and anyone who is a son of a bitch is likely to be of questionable
character. Again, the phrase strikes at the heart of a familial identity of the male
as member of a disciplined patriarchal and patrilineal household. “Whoreson”
and “son of a whore” have similar significations as insults.
“Motherfucker,” however, is in a class by itself. Its ubiquity in the world is
itself noteworthy as is the absence of the parallel “fatherfucker.” To suggest that
a male is having intercourse with one’s mother is to charge him with violating
one of the central features of the patriarchal and patrilineal system and question
two of its cherished identities: son of his mother and father and brother to his
siblings. The most famous violator of the rules that lead to the primal confusion
of identities put it in Sophocles’ version of it as follows:
My own blood, spilled by my own hand: can you remember
The unspeakable things I did there, and the things I went on from there to do?
O marriage, marriage!
 The act that engendered me, and again the act
Performed by the son in the same bed—
Ah, the net
Of incest, mingling fathers, brothers, sons,
With brides, wives, mothers: the last evil
That can be known to men: no tongue can say
How evil!
(Sophocles: Oedipus Rex, trans, by Fitts and Fitzgerald 1977: 72).

Oedipus’s offense may have been against religion and may have been the one
to which “no tongue” can be given, certainly in his own consciousness. The
“mingling” that Oedipus mentions here is not merely the mingling of kin alone
but the mingling of the identities of “fathers, brothers, sons,” and “brides, wives,
and mothers,” and is not so much the last evil as the first one—the confusion of
categories. As a result of his actions, it was not possible to identify his children
Antigone, Ismene, and Haimon as his sons and daughters because they were also
his siblings as children of his mother. His offense was against the logic of
identity. It was no longer possible to identify the kin with clear and
noncontradictory labels, making interactional life and discursive activity
difficult.
In everyday life when someone is addressed as a motherfucker he is being
charged with violating the central organizing principle of the family, the rule of
incest. The rule of incest in fact permits the construction of stable familial
identities: it enables what may be termed colateral identities such as brother and
sister to have clear boundaries but also enables the constitution of identities of
descent: Son, daughter, grandson, and granddaughter. In the familial field, then,
the strongest condemnation seems reserved for those who presumptively violate
one of the principles on which the family is founded.
However, this leaves unexplained why no woman is ever charged with being a
fatherfucker. When a male is being charged with copulating with his mother, he
is also being charged with violating one of the sacred rights of the father: the
exclusive sexual rights to the mother. The converse does not of course obtain: if
a man copulated with his daughter, he is merely exercising his rights to the
“fruits of his garden,” as one man expressed it in a court of law. In other words,
it is not considered a serious offense in patriarchal and patrilineal societies,
though modern law considers it so. Hence there is no insulting term that one can
find in any culture that uses father/daughter incest as a signifier.15
Similar arguments can be made about other types of insults. One of the most
pervasive forms of insult in Western society is the ethnic insult. Some of the
insults are issued by using single words that have over the years achieved so
much special negative connotations that the mere uttering of it is enough to
evoke anger—”nigger,” “kike,” “wog,” “paki,” “wop,” “spick,” “dago,” and so
on. These words can be used to address someone or refer to someone in
everyday life. Wherein lies the insult? Among other valences that these words
may possess, the insulting power of these words arises from the fact that they
constitute identification and the placement of the individual into a generalized
structure of persons. To call someone a nigger is to reject the other identification
of himself or herself and put him or her into the category of a large group. The
response of the person so addressed is to get angry on the ground that he is not a
nigger but Frank Robinson, accountant, husband, father, and American citizen.
In other words, such name-calling advances a particular identity into the
forefront and provokes resentment because the individual himself is committed
to the other identities. Not only does this form of address project an irrelevant
identity into the forefront but it also obliterates the individual’s unique identity
and submerges it into a group. Furthermore, the historicity of this term and the
others listed above carries its own emotional weight: It had been used again and
again precisely as a word of belittlement of the other’s identity, even an
effacement, in acts of power and domination, so that its further use can evoke
complex feelings in response. Indeed, all ethnic insults have been selected and
invested with meaning as an instrument for the management of relations with
people of varying ethnic identities. Consider the following incident:
Three days after Nets coach John Calipari called the reporter a “Mexican Idiot,” the team publicly
apologized today. Calipari declined to discuss the incident but his agent acknowledged that Calipari
had made the comment to Dan Garcia of the Star Ledger of Newark as Garcia stood 30 to 40 feet
away in Ramapo College parking lot on Thursday afternoon. (Roberts 1997: B9)

This remark was not addressed directly to the recipient but he was no doubt
meant to hear it. It was defined as an ethnic insult rather than an insult to Mr.
Garcia’s intelligence. That is, the adjective “Mexican” was the focus of the hurt
feelings, rather than the attribution of idiocy. The thrust of the insult, therefore, is
the invocation of an identity that was irrelevant to the situation and interaction.
Mr. Garcia is of Mexican ancestry but in the situation in which the abuse
occurred he was a reporter for a newspaper. The issue was that his Mexican
identity was not salient to his present occupation and the nature of the
interaction he was conducting with the coach. In a sense he had transcended that
identity and become a sportswriter belonging to the mainstream of journalists.
By calling him a Mexican and using it as an adjective to qualify “idiot” the
coach compounded three categories into one phrase—his identity as a Mexican,
the intelligence of the sportswriter, and the intelligence of Mexicans in general—
and produced a phrase pregnant with insult.
Another incident, this too from the world of sports, was also considered
offensive and required an apology. Tiger Woods, the golfing champion, was told
by Fuzzy Zoeller how he should disport himself at the champion’s dinner of the
professional golfers. Here is Dave Anderson’s description of this incident:
“So you know what you guys do when he gets in here?” continued Zoeller, surrounded by at least one
CNN camera and several microphones.
“You pat him on the back and say congratulations and tell him not to serve fried chicken next
year.”
Snapping his fingers Zoeller turned to walk away and added, “or collared greens or whatever the
hell they serve.” (Anderson 1997:8:2)

Earlier in the same interview Zoeller had described Woods as “that little boy
who was driving well and putting well, he is doing everything it takes to win”
(Anderson 1997:8:2).
Strikingly, this insult—though it was dismissed as a joke—did not use any of
the standard epithets of racial identification, but contained what may be
considered a “racial slur.” It was in fact insult by sly allusion and indirection.
Nevertheless, here, too, there was a process of insult by identification: The “little
boy” is the use of an identification label by which white men and women
systematically diminished the social presence of black men, whatever their status
or age, by referring to them and addressing them as “boy.” The allusion to the
items of food was used to reinforce the identification of Mr. Woods as not only a
diminished man but as an unsophisticated backwoodsman who would not be
able to choose from the haute cuisine. Collard greens and fried chicken is, of
course, the habitual fare of the black masses in the southern United States. Golf
has always been the sport and pastime of the courtly and cosmopolitan
gentlemen and gentlewomen, and here was Mr. Woods, the son of a working-
class black man, usurping an identity to which he is not entitled. In one fell
swoop Mr. Zoeller has thrust back Mr. Woods to his ancestral identity: both race
and class were neatly captured in his remarks and Mr. Woods stood identified,
irrelevantly, as a black working-class usurper.16
If one insults the other by placing him or her in an unwanted identity, often
individuals forcefully claim a desired identity by a variety of other means. One
such method is to use certain public events to place oneself in a definite category
and thereby claim an identify for oneself as a member of that category. If insults
generated negative feelings of anger and resentment and were meant to forestall
the emergence of interactional solidarity, the latter process of identification was
meant to announce solidarity. While this can occur with any public event that
becomes available for partisan posturings, racially charged events seem to elicit
a great deal of identificatory activity. They often get transformed into what
Victor Turner calls “social dramas.” He writes, “Social dramas are units of
aharmonic or disharmonic process, arising in conflict situations. Typically, they
have four main phases of public action, accessible to observation” (1974: 37–
38). These phases were identified as: breach, where normal relations between
persons or groups are disrupted; crisis, where the breach widens unless it was
repaired soon after it occurred; redressive action, in which steps are taken to
prevent the crisis from developing further. Eventually, these various stages lead
to reintegration, the final stage. While this is a useful model there is, of course,
no necessary guarantee that in every social drama the stages will follow this
order or that a final reintegration will in fact take place. Social dramas
nevertheless present individuals a fertile opportunity to claim and display
identities and be emotionally drawn into them. The occurrence of breach by
definition creates two sides, enabling individuals to select one side and identify
with it. Once the identification is made and commitment created, it is possible
for the individual to participate, either directly or vicariously, in the subsequent
stages: He or she can either contribute to the healing of the breach or participate
in widening it, all the while reaping the emotional benefits of identification. The
same can be said for the next two stages or redressive action and reintegration:
An individual can participate, directly or vicariously, and feel the relevant
emotions and identities.
Such social dramas are ubiquitous in social life. Sporting encounters between
teams, for example, are social dramas of this sort, as are more serious cases of
riots and other forms of social conflict. Electronic media have made some of
these conflicts national events and indeed made it possible to convert them into
social dramas. Long years ago W. E. B. DuBois understood this clearly when he
wrote:
When, now, the real Negro criminal appeared, instead of petty stealing and vagrancy we began to have
highway robbery, burglary, murder, and rape, there was a curious effect on both sides of the color line:
the Negroes refused to believe the evidence of white witnesses or the fairness of white juries, so that
the greatest deterrent to crime, the public opinion of one’s own caste, was lost, and the criminal was
looked upon as crucified rather than hanged. On the other hand, the whites, used to being careless as
to the guilt or innocence of accused Negroes, were swept away in moments of passion beyond law,
reason and decency. ([1903] 1982: 201)

Cases in the courts of law have often become such social dramas. One can
take one such case and examine it as a source of emotional identification—the
trial and subsequent vindication of O. J. Simpson for murdering his wife and her
companion.
 Mr. Simpson, a football player of renown in his youth, had continued to be in
the public eye as a commentator on televised football as well as an actor in
movies and advertisements. He was an African American and was married to a
white woman. They were divorced after a stormy relationship but he had not
given up his interest in her. She and her male friend were found dead one
morning in July 1994, and soon after that Mr. Simpson was arrested and charged
with the murder. With this move we have an example of Turner’s breach
occurring: The public was divided into those who believed he was guilty and
others who believed he was innocent. Once the trial started the breach really
became a crisis because it was claimed one of the policemen, who investigated
the crime and was a witness, was a racist who had in fact used standard
derogatory epithets to describe black people. The trial went on, and eventually
the jury rendered a “not guilty” verdict. No redressive action was taken, and no
reintegration took place after the trial—though most people seem to have
forgotten about it. During the course of the trial and soon after the verdict, it was
possible for a large number of the members of the public to proclaim Mr.
Simpson guilty or innocent. If indeed we had justice by plebiscitary processes of
adjudication in the country Mr. Simpson probably would have been found guilty!
However, it was not justice that was involved here, on either side, but the
claiming and proclamation of identity by using the vocabulary of justice.
Arriving at a judgment of guilt or innocence by a jury is a complex process in
which its members have to weigh every piece of evidence that is submitted by
attending to its significance as it emerges in the proceedings in the court itself. It
is not that they do not come to serve on the jury without a knowledge of a
common culture of what is just, what is unjust, what is acceptable evidence and
what is not, and what is the correct procedure to follow in the presentation of
evidence. Everyone on the jury, however, will not have the same expertise on
these matters. Further, they will also have varying identities with varying
intensities of commitment. Nevertheless, there is the dynamics of the jury
deliberation: the interactional system, power plays by individual jurors, and their
rhetorical skill also play a part in arriving at a final judgment. Yet, without the
benefit of most of these circumstances, the public at large judged Simpson guilty
or not guilty on the basis of what they saw on television. These judgments,
however, were distributed generally along racial lines: Most of the black people
accepted the verdict of “not guilty” as the only correct verdict, whereas most of
the white people thought it a travesty of justice. These people were not, however,
passing a judgment on the evidence as such and were not even saying that
Simpson was guilty or innocent; rather, they were announcing their identity as
“black people” or “white people.” Or else as “people committed to justice,” or as
“people who believed in the American system of justice,” or as “feminist,” or as
“masculinist,” and so on. Polls conducted over several weeks in the United
States showed that 80 percent of white people said that the charges were true and
15 percent said that they were not true, compared to 34 percent of blacks who
said the charges were true and 58 percent who said that they were not true,
reported Frank Newport. He noted further, “The recent polling shows little
sympathy for Simpson as a person.” Nevertheless, there is once again a striking
difference in the attitudes of black and white respondents: “79 percent of whites
interviewed in May 1996 said they were unsympathetic toward Simpson as a
person, while 18 percent said they were sympathetic. Among blacks, 36 percent
were unsympathetic while 56 percent were sympathetic” (Newport: 1996). On a
more personal level Diana Beard-Williams, a black talk show host, describes
various processes by which the verdict in the trial of O. J. Simpson was used to
make claims of identity: “The verdicts had wounded the psyche of white
America in a way that was unprecedented in American history and vengeance
was the key to white America’s healing—there could be no other acceptable
antidote,” she writes and introduces the interpersonal dimension of the reactions
to the verdict. “But I knew I wasn’t alone in my frustration and growing fear of
how out of control white America was at that time. Any black person who spoke
up in defense of O. J. Simpson or the verdicts was looked at with a jaundiced
eye.” She uses the verdict herself to make identity claims of her own as well as
describes the selective exercises by which such claims are made:
African-Americans have had to become adept at politely and skillfully sidestepping all O. J.
conversations if they wanted to keep their white relationships intact, much the same way they sidestep
comments with racist subtleties in the office, in corporate boardrooms, on the golf course or at the
gym. (Beard-Williams 1996)

That is, one cannot discuss this issue with white colleagues and can do so only
with one’s kith and kin who now become one’s identity forum. The white
people, presumably, could discuss it easily with their kith and kin and have one
or more of their identities—as white people, as law-abiding and law-respecting
citizens, for instance, validated and sustained in their social circles.
These moves were then identity claims, affirmations of memberships in one
category or another, and not a studied and responsible judgment of the evidence.
They are acts by which identities are manifested, made public, defined for
relevant audiences, and can be taken as indices of emotional commitment to
them. In primary relationships, and in secondary ones as well, it was possible for
an individual to take a position on the verdict in the Simpson case both to
experience the emotions of identification as well as to display loyalty to one’s
ethnic taxa. As one did so, he or she showed loyalty and commitment not only to
this abstract category but simultaneously to one’s own kith and kin and received
their support and validation in the flesh. The trial and the verdict became, then, a
social drama in which both cognitive and felt identities were given play and the
consequences thereof experienced.
To conclude, these cases of patriarchy, psychology, nationalism, and racism
can be taken as exemplary anecdotes that describe different fields of identity.
Needless to say, these fields also construct opposing fields: the family as a field
establishes outsiders to the family who become contraries for selected purposes.
Clans and other kinds of familial organizations do the same. Nationalism as a
field creates enemies and outsiders as does race. Englishness as a national
identity creates non-Englishness, “Frenchmen,” “Frogs,” “Wogs,” and so forth,
as alternative fields against which Englishness learns to define itself and act.
Aryans too establish non-Aryans as the contraries. These identities too—“non-
Aryans,” “Africans,” “Asians,” and so forth—will construct themselves as fields
with their own texts and narratives and use them to exclude the other.
The fundamental feature of fields of identity is their systematic embeddedness
in a variety of structures: verbal texts, artifacts, architectural and monumental
forms. Such an embeddedness enables and facilitates the formation of
interpersonal and communal relationships—cognitive and emotional. The family
certainly has its hallowed texts in the scriptural writings of all religions, and in
the legal codes, property, and the literary and poetic compositions of the culture.
Nationalism, too, has the same forms. Englishness, for instance, can be
discovered in literature, historical writings, legal codes, travelers’ tales, religious
doctrines and their practices, churches, cathedrals, statues of national heroes, and
a shared language. These various structures can be said to be integrated into a
more or less coherent whole providing the discursive font for the construction of
an English identity. Similarly, the field of race has its scholarly texts, its
arithmetic—measurements of intelligence, skulls—a presumptively common
language, theories of the relationship between biology, language, and mentality,
and myths and rituals that bind them together.
If indeed a human is constantly faced with having to encounter nothingness,
or contemplate the possibility of such encounters, the availability of embedded
familial, racial, ethnic identities, and religious and political ones, can be used to
diminish the nausea that would ensue and convert such encounters into those
with a somethingness. A reliable way to overcome the feeling of nothingness is
to be an Englishman or American, an Aryan or an African, a neurotic with
unresolved Oedipus conflicts, a Christian or Jew or Hindu, or perhaps even an
agnostic. It is easy enough to conclude that in life a human being confronts a
nothingness and sooner or later discovers that life is absurd. The sociologically
interesting task, however, is to discover how human beings nevertheless
construct meaningful identities and sustaining relationships and carry on with
their lives.

NOTES
1. The concept of identity has been widely used in the social sciences since Erikson published his work
in the 1950s. Structural social psychologists, Freudian theorists, critical theorists, and macrosociologists, as
well as interactionists, have all seen it as a valuable concept, either to depict the unique subjectivity of the
human, or as a source of action. For a comprehensive examination of the concept as used in sociology and
social psychology, see Andrew Weigert, J. Smith Tietge, and Dennis Tietge (1986).
2. Philosophers have been seeking to clarify the meaning of the term identity but a perusal of many such
essays leaves one with the impression that anyone with the least bit of philosophical sophistication will
have no warrant to use the word at all! See the essays in the collections edited by Amelie Rorty (1976) and
John Perry (1975). Elvi Whittaker (1992: 191–219) has discussed the importance of the concepts of self and
identity in recent anthropological work.
3. I am indebted to Karl-Otto Apel (1981: 84–135) for a discussion of Peirce’s defense of the “principle
of the social nature of logic” in an essay that Peirce wrote in his early years. Peter Mills, however,
concludes in a review of the relationship between Pierce’s view of logic and Mead’s reaction to it:

Social pragmatism [Mead’s] . . . forms a coherent base for symbolic interactionist sociology in its
Blumerian formulation. Logical pragmatism [Pierce’s] is by contrast, antithetical not only to
symbolic interactionist sociology but also any examination of naturally situated social order
considered as an on-going accomplishment. (1982: 130)

This may well be true in a strictly textual examination of Mead’s work and that of Pierce, but is empirically
indefensible. The “on-going accomplishment” of “situated social order” is, after all, undertaken by using
signs that an actor has already mastered and such signs carry a logic with them. Milton Singer has also
provided a sketch of Peirce’s attempt to deal with the idea of self and identity and its relationship to dialogic
processes (1984: 74–104).
4. The recent work on a social logic by Bourdieu (1980) can be fruitfully compared to pragmatic work
in the field. Indeed, I would say that Bourdieu’s entire opus, innocent though it is of any reference to the
work of American pragmatists, is a thoroughly pragmatic social theory. Consider, for example, Bourdieu’s
position on the relationship between “mental structures” and the objective structures of society.
Summarizing Bourdieu’s argument, drawn from the work of Durkheim and Mauss, Wacquant notes,
“Bourdieu proposes that social divisions and mental schemata are strictly homologous because they are
genetically linked: the latter are nothing other than the embodiment of the former” (1992: 13). Peirce had
argued the same position with the claim, “All knowledge of the internal world is derived by hypothetical
reasoning from our knowledge of the external facts”(1955: 230).
5. See Heisenberg’s (1958) discussion of these issues in connection with physics, particularly the section
on “Language and Reality in Modern Physics.” A lucid examination of the relationship between quantum
physics and certain issues in philosophy can be found in Vladmir Fok (1971). See also my essay on the
relationship between Meadian social psychology and the new physics (Perinbanayagam 1986).
6. One of the more extreme challenges to the practice of categorization in sociology, as in everyday life,
comes from Steven Seidman (1994), who has called for a rejection of all categories. The inescapability of
categorization in conceiving and communicating about objects in the world becomes apparent when one
examines Seidman’s own argument. Guy Oakes in fact shows that what Seidman calls “queer theory,” the
“overarching alternative” to “modernist theory,” is replete with binary categorizations. Oakes writes,

On the one hand queer theory exhibits a peculiar loathing for binary oppositions and . . . damns them
all by subjecting them to the implacable logic of radical constructionism. On the other
hand . . . queer theory is possible only on the basis of the binaries queer/conventional. Without these
or equivalent dichotomies queer theory would have no redoubt from which to criticize and
transgress rules. . . . Queer theory is either self-contradictory or reflexively self-defeating. (Oakes
1995: 379–388).

But then of course postmodernists may claim that the demand for noncontradiction and consistency are
themselves evidence of a modernist neuroses! For an informed and sober examination of the place of logic
in the deconstructionist enterprise—from which Seidman’s thesis is derived—see John Ellis (1989). He
notes that deconstructionism’s “new logic,” as some of its advocates (for instance, Barbara Johnson 1980)
call it, is the old mysticism. He cites Johnson and other deconstructionists as claiming that the way to pin
down the “unclear” logic of deconstruction was to proceed by distinguishing it from traditional logic
(1989:8). In other words binary logic is needed to characterize, with due clarity, deconstructive logic itself.
7. See Rosenthal (1969) for a discussion of the relationship between “interpretant” and “concept.”
8. The claim has also been advanced by some sociologists who have worked in India that

individualism is devalued in India . . . [and] that personal autonomy is subordinated to

familism . . . and that explanations of motivation for behavior are expressed in the logic of caste
rules and kinship ideologies or in terms of extrinsic factors such as astrological considerations or
beliefs about the actions of demons, deities and supernatural forces,

notes Mattison Milnes, and he provides a convincing refutation of these views using personal narratives
from informants who displayed an abundance of self, autonomy, and individualism (1988: 568–579).
9. See in this connection a study by Carmen Luke (1994) on the manner in which toys are used by the
adult world and the world of consumer industry to confer particular race-related, gender-related, and family-
related identities on children in Australia. Needless to say, her conclusions can be extrapolated to all
cultures.
10. Gregory Stone (1970) referred to identities based on formal categories as structural identities and
those based on informal ones as interpersonal identities.
11. My use of “field” here is to be differentiated from Pierre Bourdieu’s usage. For me, “fields” are
primarily conceptually organized meaning-systems and not arenas of contention, or conflict, for the
manifestations of power. Nevertheless, to the extent that such meaning systems are often issues in conflict
and contention, there is, no doubt, an affinity between his usage and mine.
12. Susan Ervin-Trip (1969) has provided a thorough linguistic analysis of these terms of address by
examining titles, last names and titles, last names, first names, and multiple names as forms of addressing
others. As one addresses the other, one is indicating the identity of the other vis-à-vis self and claiming that
their subsequent relationship is going to be based on these respective identities. Roland Barthes has
discussed the significance of proper names in the novels of Marcel Proust. A proper name, he writes, “is a
voluminous sign, a sign always pregnant with a dense texture of meaning, which no amount of wear can
reduce, can flatten, contrary to a common noun which releases only one of its meanings by syntagm”
(Barthes 1980: 59–60). The dense texture, of course, allows them to become markers of varied and complex
identities.
13. Were only males conferred with these identities? Some of the terms used in these descriptions seem to
apply only to those associated with male identities. Nevertheless, it is clear that the racial identity was
conferred on both males and females, leading also to the claims of protecting the females, the mothers of
future members of the race, from contamination by alien impregnations.
14. See Lynn Stephens (1981) for a perceptive discussion of the relationship between cognition and
emotion in the work of Charles Peirce.
15. In matriarchal and matrilineal societies, one would expect insults indicating copulation with a father
to occur. I have been unable to check this out, however.
16. Items of food that are typical to a group are used as objects of identification and are also used as
summarizing terms to identify the group in question. The availability of these summaries also makes them
potent terms for insults: “kraut,” “meatball,” and so on.
 Chapter 4

The Poetics of Identity

Since by nature we are given to representation, melody and rhythm . . . from the beginning, those
by nature most disposed to these, generated poetry from their improvisations.

Aristotle

One is a self when one is able to look upon one’s actions and being as an object,
and such conceiving of oneself as an object is made possible by the use of
linguistic categories. In Mead’s words, “I know of no other form of behavior
than the linguistic in which the individual is an object to himself, and so far as I
can see, the individual is not a self in the reflexive sense unless he is an object to
himself” (1934: 142). More recently Derek Bickerton, after surveying a variety
of anthropological and neurological studies, observes, “For, more than any other
factor, language created our species, and created too the world that our species
sees” (1990: 255).
However, there is no such thing as “language”; rather, all languages are
constituted by various structures and tropic mannerisms: paradigmatic and
syntagmatic structures, deep and surface structures, tropic structures and
phonological structures. Every usage of a word manifests itself in paradigmatic
and syntagmatic embeddedness and in grammatical forms, and in phonological
voicedness and as metaphors or metonymies, synecdoches, oxymorons, or
ironies. If the meaning of a word is its usage in language, as Wittgenstein argues
(1958), then insofar as the usages are always structured and troped, it follows
that the meaning of a word is its usage as it is manifested in structures and
tropes. In such purposive use of structures and tropes the special qualities of
cultural systems as well as specific interests of given individuals may be realized
—perhaps even their very destinies. The moment one acknowledges that
language is necessary to constitute oneself and objectify it, the structured and
tropic nature of language itself must be accepted as significant in constituting
the self and objectifying it. These intrinsic characteristics of language renders its
usages, in everyday life, as in other forms of life, inescapably poetic. After
examining a variety of studies, Raymond Gibbs observes,
Recent advances in cognitive linguistics, philosophy, anthropology, and psychology show that not
only is much of our language metaphorically structured, but so is much of our cognition. People
conceptualize their experiences in figurative terms via a metaphor, metonymy, irony, oxymoron and so
on, and these principles underlie the way we think, reason and imagine. (1994: 5)

That is, we “conceptualize experience,” and the world itself, poetically. It is this
feature of language—that it is always available in poetic forms—that is also used
in the construction of identifying vocabularies for the self.
In order to achieve a differentiation of self from others and a continuity over
time, thereby constituting an identity for the individual, a poetics of identity
becomes imperative. Poetics is the use of all the resources of language to
rhetorically constitute a social object. In an early paper Burke writes:
Indeed, beginning with such a word as composition to designate the architectonic nature of either a
poem, a social construct, or a method of practical action, we can take over the whole vocabulary of
tropes (as formulated by rhetoricians) to describe the specific patterns of human behavior. Since social
life, like art, is a problem of appeal, the poetic metaphor could give us invaluable hints for describing
modes of practical action, which are too often measured by simple tests of utility and too seldom with
reference to the communicative, sympathetic, propitiatory factors that are clearly present in the
procedures of formal art and must be as truly present in those informal arts of living we do not happen
to call arts. (Burke [1935] 1965: 264)

One of the “social constructs” to which Burke’s procedures of analysis can be

applied is the poetic processes by which identities are constituted. It is a process
infused with “communicative, sympathetic, proprietary” factors and are truly
one of the “informal arts” by which individuals and their others manage to live
in the social and material world. By poetics of identity, then, I will signify the
use of various resources of the language, such as the tropes, to constitute and
announce identities, and I will argue that these resources make a difference in the
particular identity that emerges. In talking of the poetics of identity, I am
addressing the art and the artfulness with which social identities are constituted
in given cultures and subcultures. This artfulness depends on using the tropic
features of language with varying degrees of deliberateness—sometimes with
total willfulness and at other times unwittingly, to depict the self and delineate an
identity. Recognizing that literally countless treatises have been written on the
four major tropes—metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony—from
Aristotle in the West and to Abhinavagupta in ancient India to modern times, I
will confine my discussion of the tropes to Burke’s own work on the topic.1
 Among other attractions of Burke’s work—for example clarity and economy
—his is also the most sociologically relevant because his examples are nearly
always social and political ones. He identifies metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche,
and irony as the four “master tropes” of rhetorical communication. His primary
concern with these tropes is not in “their purely figurative usage, but in their role
in the discovery and description of ‘the truth’ ” (1969a: 503). Burke admits that
these four tropes are not self-contained and readily bounded in their actual
usages:
It is an evanescent moment that we shall deal with—for not only does the dividing line between the
figurative and literal usages shift, but also the four tropes shade into one another. Give a man but one
of them, tell him to exploit its possibilities, and if he is thorough in doing so, he will come upon the
other three. (Burke 1969a: 503)

Summarizing his ideas on the four tropes, Burke observed that metaphor is equal
to perspective, metonymy to reduction, synecdoche to representation, and irony
to dialectic. The dividing line among the tropes may shift, just as the
identification of everything in the world will, but one can nevertheless use them
categorically to order the constitution of identity in everyday discourse.
The choice of the tropes with which particular identities are to be constituted
is, however, not a matter of whimsy; rather the choice is dictated by the aims that
the theory is meant to serve. For example, a Buddhist poetics of the self
functions to fulfill a Buddhist theory of knowledge and world and individual,
just as a Freudian poetics of the self serves to support a psychobiological view of
humans. In each case a theory of knowledge and world accompanies the poetics
selected to define the self. Nevertheless, any theory about the beingness of the
discursively minded organism and its propensity to act in nondeterministic ways
demand one poetic or another, and it is not possible to claim that one theory is
empirically more defensible than another. They are all poetry composed by that
being who, in Kenneth Burke’s words, faces “a staggering disproportion between
man and no-man” and finds that
there is no place for purely human boasts of grandeur, or for forgetting that men build their cultures by
huddling together, nervously loquacious, at the edge of an abyss. ([1935] 1965: 272)

One product of such nervous loquacity are theories of the human subject that
such a subject uses to construct its presence and being in the world. Harry Stack
Sullivan, in fact, argues that a human constitutes a “self-system” in order to
obviate the feeling of anxiety that the significant other would reject him or her if
he or she violated its expectations (1953). The self-system becomes a “security
operation.” I am suggesting something larger here: One formulates an identity
and has it ratified as an answer to a more existential anxiety than the fear of
rejection by a significant other who is one, after all, at large in the world at hand.
It is psychologically safer to be something rather than nothing, to be anything
rather than nothing.
Such theories, patently rhetorical in their construction, enable a linguistically
minded organism to construct an identity by using one of many available
theories. These theories deploy within them the various tropes of the language in
varying ways. Nevertheless, it is possible to identify certain tropes as dominant
in one theory as opposed to another. In some theories, metaphorical tropes may
be featured while in others metonymies, synechdoches, or ironies may be the
mainstay of the rhetoric of identity. I will select certain of these rhetorics of
identity and show how tropic figurations are featured in them. These tropes are
the instrumentations with which the logic of identity is given shape, form,
concrete expression. These poetic devices at once separate an individual from
another as join him or her with another and work to separate a structure of
individuals from another. A man is separated from a woman, for example, but
joined to each other by their kinship as siblings and they, as well as various
others, are joined as, say, Christians, and separated from Hindus.

METAPHORS OF IDENTITY

Burke defines metaphor

as a device for seeing something in terms of something else. It brings out the thisness of a that or the
thatness of a this. . . . If we employ the word “character” as a general term for whatever can be thought
of as distinct then we could say that metaphor tells us something about one character as considered
from the point of view of another character. And to consider A from the point of view of B is, of
course, to use B as a perspective upon A. (1969a: 503–504)

In seeing something in terms of another, in delineating its shape and contour, its
thisness, one may see it from several perspectives.
If we are in doubt as to what an object is, for instance, we deliberately try to consider it in as many
different terms as its nature permits: lifting, tasting, tapping, holding it in different lights, subjecting it
to different pressures, dividing, matching, contrasting etc. (1969a: 504)

If we are in doubt about identity, our own or identity in general, then we have
to view it from different perspectives in order to arrive at some definition of it.
Given cultures, however, typically do not put this burden on individuals but
provide them with the perspective with which to view their respective identities.
These perspectives are then metaphors of identification and they are used to
achieve rhetorical effects. Or, in other words, the process of identification
involves acts of composition, both individual and collective, and identities of
individuals are results of such poetic exercises. In these exercises perspectives
are clarified, metaphors put into action, by verbal and practical means and
identities constituted.
Different cultures of knowledge and belief use different poetics to constitute
identity. I will take Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Freudianism and
expose their respective poetics of identity. Such a discussion will focus on the
particulars and details of the “language” used in the construction of identities
and their function in the structures of the respective narratives in which they
occur and makes no claim at all about their theological validity or philosophical
acumen. Furthermore, the discussion does not purport to be a comprehensive
analysis of various religious and secular theories but draws selectively from each
of them as they pertain to the construction of differentiated identities.

Christian Identifications
Christianity as a religious and cultural field has perhaps provided the most
pervasive poetics of identity in the world today. The texts in which this poetry is
articulated, their variations and subtleties, are rich and narratively complex, and
have produced a plethora of commentaries. I will select four “representative
anecdotes” (Burke 1969a: 59–61) and examine their uses in the constitution of a
Christian identity. These four are the myths of creation and Eden, the story of
Jesus’ birth, his baptism by John, and his death and resurrection. Each of these
“anecdotes” presents a perspective on man, woman, and world by embodying
them in a narrative in which each episode becomes a metaphor for identification
of “man,” “woman,” and “world” and the interrelations thereof.2
The poetics of Christian identity may be said to begin in the pre-Christian
myth of creation described in the Old Testament. It first describes the place
where this identity was to be given play and then sets the stage where it was to
continue to play: God creates heaven and earth and lights the place and
establishes a division between the “firmament” and the “waters” and so on and
so forth. Having done this, God creates “water and such things” and then the
“cattle and creeping things” come forth. Having done all this, he comes to the
main character, the protagonist: “Let us make man in our image, after our
likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the fowl
of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping
thing that creepeth upon the earth” (Gen. 1:26). But how did he create man?
“And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his
nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul” (Gen. 2:7). He then
creates a “garden eastward of Eden; and there he put the man whom he had
formed” (Gen. 2:8). Here “grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good
for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of
knowledge of good and evil” (Gen. 2:9). He then creates rivers, gold and
bdellium and onyx stone. “Then the Lord God took the man, and put him in the
garden of Eden to dress it and keep it” (Gen. 2:15). Having done all this,
including making rivers that “compasseth the whole of Ethiopia,” and another
one that “goeth toward Assyria,” and another that is the Euphrates, not to speak
of bdellium and onyx stone, he makes a momentous discovery: “And the Lord
God said: It is not good that man should be alone; and I will make a help meet
for him” (Gen. 2:18). Then “out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast
of the field and every fowl of the air and brought them unto Adam to see what he
would call them: and whatever Adam called every living creature, that was the
name thereof” (Gen. 2:19).
Everything is in place now: the protagonist, the environment, the lighting, and
the other characters who now have names. The plot now needs a co-protagonist
—a woman.
And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs,
and closed up the flesh instead thereof; And the rib, which the Lord God had taken from man, made he
a woman, and brought her unto the man. And Adam said, “This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of
my flesh: she shall be called Woman because she was taken out of Man. (Gen. 2:21,22)3

Several poetic devices are involved in this version of the creation of humans.
To begin with, there is the narrative sequencing: Space and time are created, then
nonhuman living phenomena and water and so on, and then man is created out of
the dust. And woman is created after all this is accomplished. This sequencing
by itself establishes Adam as the central figure in the narrative and invests him
and all his putative male descendants with the identity of chief protagonists in
the world. God made the world and the plants and creatures including “woman”
for him. Further, he gets to name the plants and creatures—an act of
identification that is an exercise of power. The woman herself is created to be his
helper and she came out of him, out of his ribs, forever indebted to him for
having given the gift of life. These poetics then establish the following identity
for Adam and men, and Eve and women: Adam, dominator, center of the earth,
he who named the creatures in it, he who was created first in God’s image, he
who gave life to woman in order to help him—do what? Run the world? The
generic identity of man as the lord of all that he surveyed was established
poetically and narratively and was to be reproduced in numerous narratives
henceforth.
However, the author also used another poetic device here: He sought to create
a difference between Adam and the other creatures by breathing “into his nostrils
the breath of life, and making him into a living soul.” The human identity is
separate from that of other living creatures, because humans have a living soul.
There is no record of the woman receiving the breath of life, but interpreters of
the Bible, for the most past, have assumed that women have souls. From the
account in Genesis it is not possible to infer that animals and plants had this
distinguishing feature: There is no record of God breathing into their nostrils.
However, later theologians have indicated “animal souls” and “vegetative souls”
for their respective categories, reserving “rational soul” for the human. Here
again a distinctive identity was maintained for humans, for it was argued that
humans alone were immortal and capable of union with God. The metaphor of
“soul” is one of the most pervasive identifications of humans in many religious
traditions. They are endowed with this “vital essence,” this “spirit,” this
“substance,” that is different from the body and transcends it. Unlike the Hindu
and Buddhist notions of atman and atta (or anatta), the Christian obtains his or
her soul either at conception or at birth. Once it comes into being it goes on
forever, each soul unique unto itself.
What, then, is the soul? Thomas Aquinas, in a statement preliminary to his
discussion of the soul, notes almost in a Wittgensteinian manner,
Of no thing whatever can a perfect knowledge be obtained unless its operation is known, because the
measure and quality of a thing’s power is judged from the manner and trope of its operation, and its
power, in turn, manifests its nature; for a thing’s natural aptitude for operation follows upon its
possession of a certain kind of nature. ([1258]1975: 29)

One can obtain knowledge of a thing, that is, its meaning, by understanding its
usage, just as a meaning of a word is its actual usage in a language. What, then,
is the meaning of “soul”? To answer this question, Aquinas addresses the whole
thesis on creation. He deals with three problems, notes James Anderson, a
commentator on Aquinas’s work. These are “the act of bringing things into
being; the distinction of things from one another; the nature of the things which
were brought into being and made distinct from one another, was relevant to the
truth of the faith” (1975: 13).
The first problem is answered by the claim “that God is the very source or
cause of the being of other things” (1975: 13). The second problem is concerned
with “the distinction of things—their multiplication and diversification,” as
James Anderson, puts it (1975: 15).
Insofar as God by his act of creation brought things into being, he also
brought them as different things, things different from each other. But “why,”
continues Anderson, “are these things many and distinct?” (1975: 15). Why, in
other words, do they have an identity? Anderson summarizes Aquinas’s answer:
The multiplicity and variety of things in the created universe did not, as the ancient Greek
cosmologists supposed, result from chance movements or convergence of material principles; that, on
the contrary, matters were created diverse and mutually distinct and exist in order that they might be
suitable recipients for various forms. . . . There is this distinction—multiplicity and variety and
diversity—among created things primarily for this reason, that they may more adequately represent
the perfection of God. (1975: 15)

It was the intention of God to create diversity and inequality in things and it is
“God Himself, who wills to give the creature such perfection as it is possible for
it to have” (1975: 16). The third problem is answered with the “nature of the
distinct and diversified creatures as far as this concerns faith” and these
creatures are endowed with “intellectual substance,” notes Anderson as he
concludes, “The perfection of the universe required the existence of some
intellectual creatures in order that creatures might perfectly . . . represent divine
goodness” (Anderson 1975: 16).
The world created by God needed an intellectual creature (read symbolic
creature) so that he or she could be a witness to God’s goodness. Such a creature
is
possessed of will and free will; that they are incorporeal and immaterial; that there is in them, as in all
creatures, a composition of essence and being, of potency and act (though not of course of matter and
form); and that they are therefore by nature incorruptible. (Anderson 1975: 16)

This is the soul. Having argued this, the problem that is left is the union of these
qualities of incorporeality, essentiality, beingness, potency, actionality, and
incorruptibility with a body. Rejecting the arguments of Plato, Avicenna,
Averroes, and many others, Aquinas concludes that each human possesses not
three souls—nutritive, sensitive, and intellective that move the body—but one
cohesive soul. There cannot be two separate souls, or three, because it faces a
logical problem. In Aquinas’s words:
One cannot be made from two or more, without something to unite them, unless one of them be
related to the other as act to potentiality; for thus matter and form become one, without anything
outside uniting them. Now, if there are several souls in man, they are not related to one another, but
they are all, by hypothesis, acts and principles of action. So, if they are united in order to form one
thing, say, man or animal, there must be something to unite them. But this cannot be the body, since it
is precisely the body which is united by the soul; a sign of which is the fact that, when the soul
departs, the body is dissolved. . . . Since then it is impossible to go on to indefinity, it is necessary to
come to a thing that is one itself. And the soul, especially, is such a thing. Therefore there must be one
soul in one man or one animal. (Aquinas [1258] 1975: 175)
 God’s creations, then, are diverse and multiple, each of them differentiated
from the other on a number of dimensions. There are to begin with distinctions
between classes of phenomena: animals, humans, the latter being “intellectual
creatures.” Further, there is the distinction between humans themselves: there is
but “one soul in one man.” Each human’s soul, then, is distinct from that of
another and therefore has a separate destiny. Conversely, since each human has a
separate soul he or she, in all his or her composite essences, is also distinct from
other such humans. This distinctive soul can “depart” from the body, having
been united with it for some earthly years, and presumably go elsewhere. This
soul has continuity and participates in giving continuity to the body, because
when it departs, the body becomes action-less and soon decays.
In every way, “soul” is a very serviceable metaphor with which a sense of
continuity and differentiation can be achieved. It encompasses duration: The soul
remains constant over time as the body changes from infancy to childhood to
adulthood. It remains so, somewhat qualified, no doubt, by its experiences, after
the demise of the body and escapes into the great unknown, to be disposed of in
one way or another and remain eternally. Further, each soul had a unique
destiny: It is different from all other souls and is assured of a unique
dispensation after death, though some Christian sects promise that families of
souls would reassemble in the hereafter. In the latter case, in addition to a
Christian identity, the identity by descent and kinship are assured by the Church
of Latter-day Saints. The soul, then, is a metaphor for identity that allows an
individual to objectify his or her self and confer on it a sense of continuity and
difference.
The second “anecdote” that we can use to investigate the poetics of Christian
identity is the incident in the garden and Eve’s encounter with the duplicitous
serpent. The serpent, representing the Devil, is God’s counter. Though there is no
record of God having created him, he is dramaturgically necessary, as Judas is in
a later anecdote. Thus certain contrasting themes can be made to act against each
other and the grand narrative of human existence on earth given its substantive
form and shape in various actions and interactions. In Burke’s words: “If action
is to be our key term, then drama; for drama is the culminative form of
action. . . . But if drama then conflict. And if conflict then victimage” (1966b:
54–55). The anecdote of the garden sets up then two victims: Adam and Eve and
their putative descendants on the one hand and the Devil himself on the other.
On the instruction of the serpent, “the woman saw that the tree was good for
food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one
wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband
with her; and he did eat” (Gen. 3:6). This leads to a curious consequence: “And
the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and
they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves aprons.” Unclothed and
uncovered they were at the beginning when they were innocent, but after eating
from the tree of knowledge, they lost their “innocence” and felt shame and had
to cover themselves. Clothing, albeit an apron of fig leaves, becomes recognized
as a marker of identity here, the genitals having now become “shameful.” What
did Adam and Eve learn from the “tree of knowledge”? Here what we have is an
elaborate metaphor for the act of identification of self and other, in that they can
feel shame in each other’s presence and know themselves and the other. From
the tree of knowledge each learned the knowledge of his or her self and of the
other. Adam entered Eve and they both discovered the difference between them
and, since they were different in essential ways, they sought to hide the
differentiating member under fig-leaved aprons. The knowledge they acquired
after feasting on the forbidden fruit was the knowledge of their selves, which
they now are able to identify, in their differences, as man and woman. This is the
final act in the identification of men and women that began with the narrative of
Creation.
The woman’s identity is once again being defined with these rhetorical moves.
She has, along with the serpent, become a metaphor for disobedience and
duplicity, while the man is honest and noble and is a victim of woman’s
treachery. The myth in fact contributes a metaphor for the identification of
women as well as dialectically for men: Men are dupes, easily led astray into sin
and disobedience by women, though some modern theologians have discounted
this interpretation of the myth. Nevertheless, Mary Daly opines, “The fact is
however that the myth had projected a malignant image of the female-male
relationship and of the ‘nature’ of women that is deeply embedded in the modern
psyche” (1973: 45). It is not so much the psyche that it influences as the
discourse of identification—not only of the more fundamentalist churches but
also the general discursive culture of Judeo-Christian civilization. Long ago
Tertullian could say of women, “You are the devil’s gateway. . . . How easily you
destroyed man, the image of God, because of the death you brought upon us
even the son of God had to die” (In Daly 1973: 44). Tertullian is of course
punning: gateway=woman. Bringing sinful humans into the world through
vaginal copulation and birthing, as well as by Eve’s original actions, opened the
gateway for human suffering.
Though it is Eve, the woman, who is tempted by Lucifer and is the primary
cause, Adam, having acquiesced on the breaking of the covenant with God, is
also held responsible. As a result both “man” and “woman” are expelled from
Eden and they and their descendants are alienated from God. Every man and
woman, then, everyone irrespective of personal experiences, of class, caste,
creed, age, and wit, is guilty of the primal sin and will not be redeemed until
God sends a messenger. In one metaphorical swoop all humankind is equalized
into one logical class, one identity: original sinner. Each human has a separate
soul, but each soul shares with other souls the sin of the primal disobedience and
will be collectively redeemed by God through his Messiah. In Burke’s words,
“the conditions for such a doctrine of ‘original sin’ are set up when our ‘first’
parent who commits the crucial sin has a name at once individual and generic, a
name that can be translated either as ‘Adam’ or ‘man.’ Thus, in his sin as Adam,
he can personate mankind in general” (1961: 176).
The identity of a Christian is taking shape now. He was created by a creator
who gave him dominion over a territory with all its contents; she was created to
be his assistant in exerting this dominion and to be the subject of his dominion;
each was also given an “inner essence,” or a “vital principle” that was
independent of the body, which was created from the dust or from the bone, a
soul which was immortal. Second, a hierarchy of identities was also established:
man and woman over the animate and inanimate environment, and man over
woman who was further degraded as being particularly evil and untrustworthy.
Beings that by nature respond to symbols can use these metaphors to constitute
identities for their particular selves to the extent they come to know them, either
directly or indirectly, and the vast majority of people in the Christian world did
come directly into contact with them, or indirectly in their manifestation in other
narratives (secular or religious), sermons, and exhortations of other kinds.4
Man and woman, thus created and put to trials, punished, and promised
redemption sometime in the future, are enforced to go forth and create more men
and women on their own. These new men and women go forth and do as they
are told to, pass through numerous other trials, and in the third great moment of
a Christian identification, discover the redeemer. The third event that provided
the poetics for a Christian identity is the birth, rebirth in baptism, crucifixion,
and resurrection of Jesus.
This is no doubt the most central event that provides the rhetoric of Christian
identity. The other two “anecdotes” described earlier are ones that are shared
with the Jews and the Muslims. The advent of Jesus, initially given to us by
Matthew, sets an ancestral justification for his special status “the generation of
Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham. Abraham begat Isaac; and
Isaac begat Jacob; and Jacob begat Judas and his brethren” (Matt. 1: 1,2). The
line is traced in detail, connecting Jesus to the founders of the ancestral religion.
Jesus is the son of David, a son of Joseph, too, in a manner of speaking, and “the
only begotten son of God” as well: “Now the birth of Jesus Christ was on this
wise: When as his mother Mary was espoused to Joseph, before they came
together, she was fecund with child by the Holy Ghost” (Matt. 1:18). Being a
patriarch, Joseph is upset at this development and secludes her from others but
an angel appears to Joseph in a dream and announces “Joseph, thou son of
David, fear not to take unto thee Mary, thy wife: For that which is conceived in
her is of the Holy Ghost. And she shall bring forth a son and thou shalt call his
name Jesus: For he shall save his people from their sins” (Matt. 1:20,21). Jesus
comes to save “his people,” and he is also the son of God. A believer is thus
given a double metaphor of identification: He or she is already a child of God
and can identify himself or herself as such because he or she is descended from
Adam. Now there is also another child of more awesome bearing because he is
born of woman, but fathered by God and he has sent him especially to save “his
people.” Being already a child of God, a believer can add a new dimension to his
or her identity by accepting Jesus by an act of will, no less.
Jesus grows up and has to face another transformation: baptism. To enable this
to happen, the gospels give us a precursor, since Christ cannot have himself
validated by baptizing himself, and so came “John the Baptist, preaching in the
wilderness of Judea” (Matt. 3:1). In his early baptisms, John announces, “I
indeed baptize you with water unto repentance: but he that cometh after me is
mightier than I, whose shoes I am not worthy to bear: he shall baptize you with
the Holy Ghost and with fire” (Matt. 3:11). John, however, baptizes Jesus after a
narrative episode that captures the contradiction that this act represents: Jesus is
the son of God and without sin or impurity and does not need to be cleansed by
water and reborn. Nevertheless, says Matthew,
Then cometh Jesus from Galilee to Jordan unto John, to be baptized by him. But John forbad him
saying, I have need to be baptized of thee, and comes thou to me? And Jesus answering said unto him,
Suffer it to be so now: For thus it becometh us to fulfill all righteousness. Then he suffered him. (Matt.
3:13, 14,15).

Suffer it to be so now, Jesus said; that is, let it be for the time being; it is true that
I am mightier than you, and I am without sin; but baptize me for now. Once John
baptizes Jesus, “the heavens were opened unto him and he saw the spirit of God
descending like a dove, and lighting upon him: and lo a voice from heaven,
saying ‘This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased’ ” (Matt. 3:16).
Jesus is surely reborn here in a double sense: He is born out of the waters of
Jordan and is born again to the multitudes assembled on the banks of the Jordan
by the announcement from heaven with God claiming him publicly as his son.
The first announcement was private; now it is public made by God himself about
an adult Jesus. The primal event in the construction of a Christian identity is in
fact the ceremony of baptism. In this ceremony all the sacerdotal and
mythological claims of Christianity as a distinct religion and one that is radically
differentiated from its ancestors are affirmed just as the beginnings of the
individual in a Christian identity is confirmed. One may say that the very notion
of a Christian identity begins with a baptism—the baptism of Jesus by John.
John the Baptist was a dramaturgical necessity: He had to come before Jesus not
only to announce publicly Jesus’ imminent arrival, but also to publicly baptize
him and make him a Christian with God as a witness. Jesus was the Messiah and
he was to found a new religion, or at least make a break with the old one, and
indeed say: “Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time . . . but I say unto
you . . .” (Matt. 5:21, 22). Nevertheless, he too needs a beginning—a biological
one and a sociological one. This is handled by the theory of “unpolluted” birth:
He is “born without sin,” i.e., without the benefit of copulation with an earthly
being. This story assures his break from the patriliny of Joseph, the husband of
his mother Mary. On the patriliny, the important line, he has a new beginning.
Once he grows up and is ready for his mission, he is given another beginning as
a spiritual being. To achieve this one needs a telling ritual and the ceremony of
cleansing by water accomplishes this. He is born again from the waters of the
sacred river Jordan.
Joachim Jeremias, writing on this topic, notes, quoting from the gospels of
Matthew, Mark, and Luke, “These claims diminish Jesus’ stature because they
imply that he was himself with sin and needed to be cleansed and that Jesus was
subordinate to John the Baptist. This was hard for the early church to accept”
(Jeremias 1971: 45). This conundrum, however, was a necessary one for the
creation of a specifically Christian identity: It provided a potent metaphor for it,
in fact. The baptism of Jesus was not a mere purification but a symbolic
separation, or break between the old religion and the new. The ceremony of
baptism initiates one, including Jesus himself, into a new identity. He is now the
one who was not so much purified as separated from earlier identities by the
immersion in the waters and by being born anew to a new identity. Baptism is a
handy and dramaturgically effective ceremony by which new Christians could be
identified to themselves as to others. It was easily reproducible and can be
readily and parsimoniously enacted with all the relevant metaphors of identity
given play.
And every time it is reenacted, it endows the supplicant with an identification
with one who was baptized first. The newly baptized becomes a kin of Christ, a
brother or a sister, and joins the holy family, the church, the brotherhood of
believers, and those born again into a new identity. It is after the immersion in
the water by John that God publicly claims his son and indeed announces that he
is well pleased with him. Every time a human is baptized this event is
symbolically reenacted and the baptized becomes a putative son or daughter of
God, a metaphor for Christ. The ceremony of baptism becomes a rite with which
an individual is given a new identity, one by which he or she is identified with
others who have undergone similar ceremonies as well as to the one who was
baptized by John the Baptist.
In some sects of Christianity, children are “Christened” in the presence of a
“godfather” and “godmother” for the young child who could not very well
consent to being identified as a Christian. The child is also given a name that
connects him to the biblical tradition and simultaneously connects it to the
current membership of the church through the godparents. They become
“sponsor” of the new Christian and ostensibly are standbys promising to raise
the new Christian in the traditions of the religion if the parents are unable to do
so. However, they are also witnesses to the new identity of the baptized child (or
adult) and, as members in good standing of the functioning church, communal
validators of the new identity. Of course it must be said that if an individual is
baptized as a child, as happens in some denominations, an identity is being thrust
upon him or her, whereas if it is done as an adult (as among those calling
themselves the Anabaptists) identity was being acquired.
The new name, the new membership in a more or less institutionalized
community of believers, the new witnesses and validators, and the fresh attitudes
mobilized by these activities and the symbolism of water (always used for
cleaning in the secular world) then marks the termination of an old identity and
the emergence of a new one. Scriptural allusions and justifications and parallels
and the communal and institutional participation ensure that it is above all a
social identity that is being constituted. The scriptures, it can be seen, provide
the necessary poetics, the needed metaphors, with which this identity was to be
constituted.
Once Jesus is baptized and his identity is announced by the sound from
heaven, he goes forward to preach, gather his disciples, and undertake a series of
mass conversions as well as various dramatic demonstrations of his
extraordinary power. The miracles that he performs are rhetorical moves
guaranteed to elicit respect and devotion from the multitudes and affirm his
status as the son of God. All these activities and the eloquent words from the
sermons were to provide rich poetics of identity to generations of believers.
However, it is the ending of Jesus’ life that was to provide the most potent and
abiding set of metaphors for Christian identification: Christ the persecuted,
Christ the sufferer, Christ the victim and scapegoat. The following themes can be
extracted as features of this phase of the religion:

(a) There is the son of God who came among his people to save them.
(b) He undertook various good deeds and spoke loving, compassionate, and
forgiving words.
(c) He showed both his love and compassion, as well as his divinity, by
performing deeds that no one else could do.
(d He gathered a dozen close disciples.
(e) One of them betrayed him to the state, another denied him, and yet another
doubted him.
(f) He was arrested, tried, tortured, humiliated, and then hanged on a cross.
(g) He was buried in an open grave.
(h) Three days later his disciples went to the grave and found it empty.
(i) The disciples took this as confirmation of his prophecy that he would be
resurrected from the dead, go to heaven, and return to God his father.

This is not just another anecdote from the vast corpus of such anecdotes about
Jesus but one that, in its narrative richness and complexity, can function as an
extended metaphor for all individuals in the mundane world. It is primarily a tale
of suffering, suffering with great forbearance, suffering the betrayal by friends,
suffering misunderstanding and persecution from enemies, suffering mockery
from the ignorant, and finally suffering an unjust and cruel demise, end, and
denouement. As such it provides the most complete instrument for the
fashioning of an identity for humans as can be imagined. Every human being,
however successful he or she may be in the mundane world, can experience one
or more of the events that befall Jesus in the end. He or she could suffer betrayal,
denial, and doubt from significant others, he or she could be justly or unjustly
persecuted or mocked, and he or she could be subject to extreme forms of
punishment. To a human facing any or all of these eventualities Jesus, as a
metaphor, suggests humility and acceptance: Do as he did and you too will be
resurrected and find a place in heaven, “the last shall be first.” The tribulations
that Jesus experienced in his later life, “the time on the cross,” then, could
become a fertile source of metaphors for the constitution of identity. Some parts
of it may be selected and used to define a particular experience in one’s life with
the claim: It happened to Jesus, the son of God, the risen Lord, why would it not
happen to me?
The last days of Christ’s life also function as a generalized metaphor for the
construction of an equally generalized identity. To quote the lines attributed by
Shakespeare to a non-Christian: “Sufferance is the badge of all our tribe.” For
Shylock, suffering is the badge of his Jewishness as well as his lot as a
descendant of Adam and Eve driven from Eden. For the Christian, there is
double source of suffering as a badge of his or her tribe: alienation from God on
account of Adam and Eve and from Jesus who suffered for “our sins.” To
rejoice, to enjoy the secular world, to submit oneself totally to epicurean or
dionysian, or for that matter tantric, joys would be to betray Christ again. The
believing Christian, the true believer, should cultivate an identity of denial,
rectitude, patience, a thriftiness of emotions, a commitment to the idea that life is
suffering. The narrative of Jesus Christ, in the end, reinforces the routinization of
alienation and suffering, a state from which there is no escape in the immediate
moment. For the Christians in general the theme of the persecution of Jesus
provided the poetics of Christian identity and it also provided a reward for those
who used these poetics with conviction: resurrection and life everlasting, an
identity that transcends the earthly body and earthly environments. The entire
poetics of Christian identity in fact is a play on the metaphor of birth: Humans
are born with a soul, are reborn in baptism, and even death is transformed into a
rebirth into life everlasting. Jesus himself, who is born to woman, then is reborn
in baptism, is crucified, enters the tomb, is reborn from the womb of the tomb to
life everlasting, and becomes the paradigm for Christian identity.
The cycle of metaphors with which a Christian identity could be constructed is
now available. God creates man, breathes his soul into him, and then creates
woman as his helpmate. He also creates other creatures and the environment as
aids and scenes for man and his helpmate to function. He then arrives at a
covenant with both man and woman. Man and woman break this covenant and
experience the primal alienation from God. Later God sends his son to save man
and woman, and he comes and provides further metaphors of identity, but he is
betrayed and made to suffer and this too provides metaphors for identity. The
Christian, then, is all of the following: As a human being, he or she is endowed
with an immortal soul; he or she is alienated from God; he or she is to be saved
by Jesus Christ, if he or she accepts him and allows himself or herself to be
baptized and identified with Jesus himself; and he or she conducts his life as far
as is praticable, in the way in which Jesus conducted his.
The soul is not a substitute word for self, it is clear; rather the “soul” is a
metaphor with which the continuity of self and its separation from others is
identified in given eschatologies. It denotes an entity that exists independently of
the body and continues to exist after it leaves the body. In the Christian poetics,
it is able to achieve a complex of meanings with which a discursive individual is
able to conceive both this worldly presence for the self as well as other-worldly
ones.

Hindu Identifications
One can best begin an analysis of the Hindu poetics of identity by examining its
creation myth. The Hindu version of a creation myth occurs in many early texts
with some variation, but with certain central themes that are consistent. Stanley
Tambiah summarizes them as follows:
The universe first existed in the “shape of darkness;” then the divine self-existent Svayambhu
appeared as “creative power.” He created the waters by his thought and placed his own seed in them;
and in that golden egg (hiranyagarbha) he was born as Brahman, the progenitor of the whole world.
Thus was formed the first male Purusha famed under the name of Brahman.
The divine one divided the egg into two halves, the heaven and earth, together with the middle of
space and the waters and so on. And from himself he created the mind and organs of sensation, the
elementary particles, out of which again, by joining with particles himself, he created all beings: gods,
the eternal sacrificial fire, wind and sun, time and divisions and seasons, mountains and rivers, speech,
merit and demerit, pleasure and pain, and so on, and the four varnas from his own mouth, arms,
thighs, and feet. (1976: 20)5

He then not only creates the natural world and its essential features, and does
not create a man and a woman as in Judeo-Christianity, but creates the four
segments that constitute the Hindu social order—the four varnas. The Brahmins,
who were to teach and study the scriptures “sprang” from his mouth; the
Kshatriyas, who were to protect the people, “sprang” from his arms; the Vaisyas,
those who were to tend cattle, “sprang” from his thighs; and the Sudras, those
who were to serve others, “sprang” from his feet.
The physical body, insofar as it was the body of the original human Purusha,
becomes the basic metaphor for conceiving the social order itself as hierarchy
and a division of labor. In anticipation of Emile Durkheim’s argument, the Hindu
theory of a division of labor adduces an integrated social order in which each
segment is connected to the others as parts of a body that are connected and
create a harmonious whole. What can be more perfect a functioning whole than a
human body? And, therefore, what can be questioned about a social order that is
similarly organized? Each individual member of this order is also able to derive
an identity from his membership in the order and accept the society that results
as divinely ordained and unchangeable. It provides the basic metaphor for Hindu
identity because every Hindu, as a matter of course, has a varnic terminology of
identification. One does not really become a Hindu; rather one is born into being
a Hindu. Such birth, defined as a continuation from earlier lives, always delivers
an individual into an already existing social structure with a definite identity: He
or she has a gender, he or she has a place in a birth order, and he or she has a
place in a status hierarchy, caste (varna or jati). Each of these various identities
are determined by one’s conduct in earlier lives; one is born a woman, younger
sister, or brother of lowly status because one had accumulated negative karma.
Each member of these varnas has in him an atman that is eternal, a
“transcendental immanent principle” as Agehananda Bharati calls it (1985: 189).
It is also often called brahaman and is really a representation of the original
creative principle in each individual’s body. It is this atman or brahaman that
undergoes experiences in this world, accumulates merit or demerit (karma), and
is reborn in new forms and statuses. The animating principle of the created being
is this atman–brahaman, which experiences the world in many incarnations and
eventually returns to its roost in the godhead. This transformation from one
manifestation in one lifetime to another occurs to this atman: It is this
phenomenon that abandons one body at death and sooner or later enters another
and begins a new life. Atman is a code for an entity that transcends time and
body and is said to be returned to the godhead after a cycle of births and deaths.
One is in fact born with an atman whose worth or value is also given to it at
birth: If it is born into a higher varna or as a male, it has a higher karmic value,
and if it is not it has a low karmic value. The varna scheme is in fact a measure
—one invented and disseminated by a patriarchal and braminic culture—of the
karmic status of the atman, but a measure that can be changed by the manner in
which he or she comports himself or herself in the current incarnation. It is also a
measure of each individual’s separation from others and continuity with his or
her self. During its sojourn in this world in its present varna status, the atman is
enjoined, above all, to maintain the integrity of its identity. The most vivid and
poetically distinguished version of this recommendation can be found in the
Bhagavatgita. This text occurs at a critical moment in the narrative of the
Mahabaratha, one of the two Hindu epics that enshrines fundamental Hindu
themes. In this epic, two great armies are poised for battle and the leader of the
good side, variously called Arjuna, Partha, and so on, hesitates, is filled with
doubt about the morality of the conflict, and refuses to fight. In refusing to
engage in battle Arjuna had given expression to thoughts that were dangerous to
social order:
 It were better that without slaying my gurus I went begging instead for alms in this land
Than by slaying my covetous gurus
Indulge in the joys that are dipped in their blood. (van Buitenen 1981: 73)

God, in his incarnation as Krishna, tries to change Arjuna’s pacifist posture on

the battlefield:
Look to your Law and do not waver, for there is nothing more salutary for a baron than a war that is
lawful. It is an open door to heaven, happily happened upon, blessed are the warriors, Partha, who find
a war like that!
Or suppose you will not engage in this lawful war: then you give up your Law and honor, and
incur guilt. (van Buitenen 1981: 77)

The contrast between two polar identities in Hindu thought is thus set: The
Kshatriya, the warrior or “baron” in van Buitenen’s translation, and the
renouncer, who abandons his varnic identity and becomes a mendicant. Krishna
advises Arjuna against such a step that not only must the barons maintain the
integrity of the society by maintaining the “law,”—that is, the laws of varna and
karma, just as the barons must maintain their identities by following the law:
“Either you are killed and will then attain heaven, or you triumph and will enjoy
the earth. Therefore, rise up [Arjuna], resolved upon battle! Holding alike
happiness and unhappiness, gain and loss, victory and defeat, yoke yourself to
the battle, and so do not incur evil” (in van Buitenen 1981: 77). Such an
identification of their selves becomes the basis of their respective actions. The
atman is manifest in action, albeit actions that are varna-specific. Krishna tells
Arjuna,
a person does not avoid incurring karman just by not performing acts, nor does he achieve success by
giving up acts. For no one lives even for a moment without doing some act, for the three forces of
nature cause everyone to act willy-nilly. He who, while curbing the faculties of action, yet in his mind
indulges his memories of sense objects is called a self-deceiving hypocrite. (van Buitenen 1981: 8–83)

This advice—indeed an exhortation—is ostensibly meant for Arjuna but is really

meant for everyone. It is repeated in other texts of the religion and orally
disseminated in countless proverbs, religious discourses in temples, and in
fictional and dramatic presentations. It is not only Arjuna and the kshatriya
barons who must follow this advice, but everyone who claims to be Hindu must
do so. Everyone—be he or she a Brahmin, a Kshatriya, a Vaisya, or a Sudra—
has a varnic identity that is really an index of his or her karmic identity.
There is only one way in which a Hindu can escape his identity as varnic self
and that is by renouncing the worldly life and becoming a sanyasin, i.e., a
mendicant. Indeed to become a sanyasin is to abdicate varna as an identifying
feature of one’s self, and be reborn as a “dead” person. To renounce one’s self as
a varnic identity is also to renounce all other identities that were accepted along
with the varnic one: householder, sexual being, domestic partner, breadwinner,
father, brother, son, and so on, all of which are contingent on one having a varnic
identity.
The details of the act of renunciation—a “poetics of action” in Burke’s phrase
([1935]1965: 247–255)—makes this clear. This act of renunciation is a staging
of an elaborate ceremony in which the “death” of the man in question is enacted
and then a renouncer is “born.” Such a transformation of identity involves three
features: fire, water, and clothes. Fire is an important element in the rituals of the
Vedic Hindus. All the sacrifices are offered to the fire and a head of a household,
when he establishes his home, creates a domestic hearth as a sacred place.
Olivelle writes in a study of the Hindu texts that deal with renunciation and
asceticism.
The abandonment of that ritual religion by the renouncer is symbolized by renunciation of, or more
exactly his ‘depositing within himself of the sacred fires, which is clearly the central and the most
important part of the renunciatory rite. . . . The theology of renunciation that underlies this rite,
however, considers the abandonment of fire not as a rejection but as an internalization. The external
fires are deposited within the renouncer, who continues to carry them internally and, therefore, in a
more perfect and more permanent manner. (1992: 86)

The “abandonment of fire and its internalization” in the body are really the
means of abandoning “home and hearth” ritually or poetically. Olivelle notes
that the “domestic fire was the focal point of domestic religiosity.” It was not
only a ritual center of the domestic life, but was also the practical center of such
a life: Food was prepared here according to ritually prescribed ways by ritually
clean women and in the commensality that followed such a rite the domestic unit
as a sacred one was affirmed and reaffirmed. In abandoning such uses of fire and
“internalizing” it, the sanyasin is using the fire as a metaphor of domesticity and
sociability and renouncing both. The fire is not to be used for domestic purposes
anymore, and having contained it within himself he does not have to depend on
“woman” to tend it and use it for his bodily needs. The act of renunciation is
taken to mean the death of the original individual and the “rebirth” of another.
Olivelle writes, “Renunciation was considered the ritual death of the renouncer;
that the renouncer is a ritually dead person, even though he is physically alive, is
a significant aspect of Brahminical theology of renunciation” (1992: 89–90). In
the act of renunciation, the would-be-renouncer participates ritually in his own
funeral. “Several elements of the rite of renunciation bear a striking resemblance
to Brahminical rites associated with dying and death,” says Olivelle. One of the
rites that a male householder is expected to perform on a regular basis is to offer
oblations to his great-grandfather, grandfather, and father, thus affirming his
identity as a descendent of a patriline. In the rite of renunciation, however, the
would-be renouncer offers these oblations for the last time, to his grandfather
and to his father, dropping his great-grandfather, whose place is now taken by
himself. He is now counted among the deceased relatives (Olivelle 1992: 90).
This rite by itself becomes a poetic of transformation: By including himself in
the ritual of oblations to dead ancestors, he is able to define himself as one of the
dead. Even his legal and social status is redefined. As Olivelle puts it, “As at a
man’s death, so at his renunciation his marriage is dissolved and, according to
some sources, his wife is permitted to remarry; he is freed from contractual debts
and his property is partitioned among his heirs” (1992: 90).
Once he is thus ritually “killed” he is born again into a new identity. Writes
Olivelle,
As the earlier part of the rite symbolically expresses the death of the renouncer, so several elements of
the second part expresses the new birth of the renouncer. At the conclusion of the first part, the new
renouncer takes off all his clothes and becomes naked. The Sanskrit term is jātarūpadhara, which
literally means “having the form one had at birth.” The renouncer now becomes a new born infant.
(1992: 96)

In some sects at this stage the renouncer enters a body of water and after
immersing himself returns to the shore and is given a new set of clothes, a new
name, and a set of objects that define the life of the sanyasin. Olivelle
comments,
The later documents of our collection expect the new renouncer to place himself under the control of
an experienced renouncer, who becomes his teacher and father. It is the teacher who gives him a new
name and hands over to him the articles that are emblems of his new state. (1992: 96)

These new objects that define his new identity are staff, waterpot, waistband,
loincloth, and garment. Each of these is accepted by chanting the following ritual
formulas:
Staff: Protect me, friend,
You who are my strength and my friend.
You are the bolt of Indra, slaying obstructions.
Be my refuge and banish all that is evil.
Waterpot: You are the life of the world!
You are the vessel of life!
Like a mother, you who are all gentle,
Always give me counsel.
Waistband: Waistband the support of the loincloth, Om.
Loincloth: Loincloth, cover of my private parts, Om.
 Garment: Garment, the sole guardian of the body, protecting against cold, wind, and heat,
Om.
(Olivelle 1992: 97)

The poetic transformation of identity is now complete. Having abandoned real

human associates, these objects now take their place: the staff has now become
his friend, the waterpot has become his mother, and the garment has become the
“sole guardian.” One individual is metaphorically killed and is reborn and given
new metaphorical kin.6
Once he has been made into a sanyasin, he gives up all earthly desires and
possessions as a result of which he is now qualified to be released from the
“cycle of rebirths.” He will not be born again to this world, which itself is
defined as an abode of suffering and pain. The atman is released from its karmic
causation and it will reach the godhead without further difficulty or interruption,
because the act of renunciation has achieved a break in the karmic cycle. The
assumption here is that the atman has a continuous existence over several
incarnations, and that at each such incarnation it achieves certain merits and
demerits that are tallied and used to determine the next moments in the soul’s
destiny. What, then, is the atman? What in fact is its use in the language? There
is no doubt that it is a metaphor for a presumptive continuity of identity over
time. When a child is born, it is identifiable with an earlier state of its atman. As
it continues in this life, this same atman acquires qualifications to it which
accumulate and are balanced off against each other, which balance is now
featured in the next moment of the atman, that is, its next birth. Furthermore, to
the extent that each atman has a separate and karmically differentiated past,
present, and future, it is differentiated from all other atmans, the ones of those
with whom an individual is living with at the moment or from the future ones.
Atman then, to the extent that the individual accepts it and his or her social
circles validate it, is a perspective on identity, a metaphor with which to
constitute a continuity of self over time and to differentiate it from other selves.
Atman is a poetic device of identification.
Once these theories of the continuous and differentiated identity represented
in the atman are inculcated into an individual, accepted by his or her social
circles, become elements in the discursive acts of everyday interactions, and are
periodically enacted in ceremonies—weddings, funerals of kin, astrological
consultations, rites at temples, and so on, they assume the proportions of an
encompassing perspective and become the basis of actions and responses in
everyday life.7
Buddhist Identifications
The poetic functions of atman become clear when one examines its uses in
Buddhism. One of Buddhism’s fundamental theses is the denial of the existence
of any entity or process the Hindus called atman—a concept that is also
described, in Pali, the language of Buddhism, as atta. Hence Buddhism is said to
be founded on the doctrine of antatta—loosely translated as “soullessness” and
sometimes confusingly as “self-lessness.” Buddhism in fact emerged as a
countertheory to that of Hinduism and very correctly the Buddha perceived that
the heart of Hinduism was the assumption that there was a continuous and
differentiated atman that moved into this world from a past existence and would
then move into another existence after death, and perhaps into further existences
through rebirths. As the atman made these transformations it carried the weight
—karma—of its antecedent earthly existence so that its next stage was
determined by this weight. The atman was the instrumentation with which this
weight of one’s past life was carried, the sign that represented it—as argued
earlier. In other words, the merits as well as the demerits achieved by living
“correctly” or “incorrectly” needed a vehicle in which it could be vested and the
atman was that vehicle.8
Hinduism’s central social structure was the caste system and it functioned on
the basis of this continuity of atman: one is born a Brahmin and fulfills his or her
role as a Brahmin and his atman achieves nirvana; one is born a Sudra, and
fulfills the duties appropriate to his or her varna, and in the next incarnation, his
or her atman may be elevated to that of a Vaisya. This theory can function
logically only if there is a transcendental atman, and unless this theory can be
logically defended, the entire Hindu system would collapse.
The Buddha sought to challenge these doctrines. In fact, he sought
understanding first among the Hindu mystics and did not find it. They believed
that the atman was immortal, bore the marks of a previous existence, and would
continue into the further incarnations, bearing marks from the earlier lives. If one
accepts this theory of atman, there is no immediate end to suffering; it is merely
recycled until one final moment of liberation. Further, from the Hindu
standpoint, the degree of distance from such liberation is represented and
articulated in the varnic scheme: The higher one’s position in the varna, e.g.,
Brahmin, the closer one was to liberation. This means that a substantial portion
of the populace, at least their atmans, must go through several incarnations,
before they see the end of their suffering. It was clear, therefore, that not only is
the belief in the atman the source of selfishness, desire, hatred and so forth, but
that the idea of atman promotes continuous suffering. Furthermore, it defended
the hierarchic varna system and placed the Brahmin not only on top in the
earthly domain but also in their closeness to redemption from suffering. Clearly
a religious path that sought to eliminate suffering immediately had no use for the
metaphor of the atman.
The Buddha could challenge and refute this system by denying the continuous
existence of an atman and he did it with logical rigor. There is no continuous
existence of an atta or atman; there is only a succession of “instantaneous
being.” Scherbatsky quotes the Buddhist logician Kamalasila on this:
We indeed are perfectly aware that by proving the instantaneous character of Being in general, these
(metaphysical) entities would have been aeo ispo repudiated. We therefore will proceed to expatiate
upon the arguments in proof of this theory in order to (once more) repudiate those entities . . . viz God,
Matter, Nature, the Soul, as it is established in different schools. (1962: 80)

The Buddha, however, accepts the varna scheme as a description of the

organization of society but adds an important proviso that enlarges on the
Buddhist metaphor of an ongoing changing phenomenon. “Both bad and good
qualities, blamed and praised respectively by the wise . . . are distributed among
each of the four classes,” quotes Tambiah from the Agganna Suttanta and
observes “that is, varna status does not determine the ethical achievements of
individuals” (1976: 10). Individuals in the Buddhist conceptualizations are “free
standing” entities whose ethical status is not defined by membership in a varnic
strata. He or she can alter whatever ethical status he or she was born with by
undertaking his or her own steps.
The rejection of atman by Buddhism is then ultimately related to its rejection
of the Hindu social system of which the concept was the foundation. In other
words, it was a rejection of varna (caste) hierarchy as related to salvation. “The
whole enterprise” of the Buddhist rejection of atman, says Mus,
definitely rested on the Brahminical use of the theory of the atman in its sociological and constructive,
rather than just psychological and philosophical aspect. This will make it easier to understand why and
how Ancient Buddhism, which has substituted its own Moral code and Cosmic Law (dharma) for the
abstract brahman of the Brahmins and the personal Isvara (god) of the Hindus, denounced so radically
the practices of the established religion as an instance of the Fallacy of the Self. (1964: 21, quoted in
Tambiah 1976: 34)

Buddhism then sought to reject both caste and ritual—the “sociological

aspect” as Mus calls it. Max Weber gives an admirable summary of this
sociological aspect of Buddhism:
Buddhism, as well as Jainism, first ascended with the support of the city nobles and, above all, the
bourgeois patricians. The refusal of priestly knowledge and the intolerable ceremonious rules and
regulations for living, the substitutions of the folk language for the incomprehensible dead Sanskrit
 language, the religious devaluation of caste relations for connubium and social intercourse, bound up
with the replacement of the unholy secular priesthood and its power of the keys by strata of holy
seekers pursuing an earnest holy life—these were all features which must have gone far to meet lay
culture halfway. (1958: 234)

Rejecting ritual, caste, and the dominance of Brahmin priests, Buddhism had
to reject the doctrine of the atman as well, because the ritual, caste, and
Brahminical dominance depended on the existence of an atman that continued
from one incarnation into another. If there was no atman there would be no
varna because varna measured the ethical status of the atman; if there was no
atman, there was no need for rituals and priests because they catered to the
atman; if there was no atman there is also an end to Brahminical dominance,
since Brahmins achieve and maintain their dominance by performing rituals.
In fact, a close examination of the doctrine of anatta in Buddhism would
reveal that this doctrine is systematically expressed in a vocabulary that is a
contrast to the ones that define the Hindu atman. Since the Hindu atman was a
metaphor for representing the individual and his or her relationship to a
particular social order, the Buddha creates the metaphor of anatta or anatman by
adding a negativising prefix to the Hindu word, to represent an individual and
his or her relationship to a different social order. In the presumptive Hindu social
order, the atman lives continually and carries the social order with it. In the
presumptive Buddhist social order the individual experiences a succession of
“instantaneous being” and, compared to the Hindu, is able to achieve a
comparatively instantaneous salvation as well.
One Buddhist text, the Visuddhimagga, gives a striking image to contain this
very complex, seemingly contradictory presence of a continuous and changing
phenomena:
While the flame of a lamp does not move over from one wick to another, yet the flame does not,
because of that, fail to be produced; so too, while nothing whatever moves over from the past life to
this life, nevertheless aggregates, bases, and elements do not fail to be produced here, with aggregates,
bases, and elements in the past life as their condition, or in the future life with [those] here as their
condition. (quoted in Steven Collins 1982: 187)

Nothing moves over from the past life, nothing that can be defined as atta or
atman, but, nevertheless, “aggregates” of the meaning of the actions in one’s life
passes into another. Identity in Buddhism is conceived as a flame that flares from
moment to moment, bearing both a connection to an earlier moment as well as a
uniqueness in a new moment. It is truly the most perfect image of a dialectical
approach to the apprehension of self and world that can be conceived.
The “not-soul,” i.e., not-atman or not-atta, is then a system of signs that are
defined by opposing them to those that denote “soul,” i.e., atman or atta and are
as semiotical as the latter. They are both given expression in the forms available
to the culture and are equally trapped in the structure that all human conceiving
has to take—that is, according to Peircian rules of thought. Insofar as the self is a
product of the discursive practices of the society, these practices are used to
identify a self for the acting individual, i.e., a set of terminologies by which he or
she can make an object of himself or herself. Such an identification can be done
at the first level in opposition to other objects that are tangibly concrete and
easily defined; at the second level, it can even be done with imaginary but
nevertheless semiotically realized objects like devils, demons, spirits, and souls.
In the Buddhist case, anatta, it turns out, is a metaphor for identity, a poetics for
conceiving a special kind of identity. The concept with which self is identified in
the language game of the Buddhists. The existence of “self” may be denied
doctrinally, yet the denial must be accomplished discursively, thereby achieving
a semiotic self. Annatta in Buddhism is like the zero in mathematics: It
represents both a “nothing” and the semiotic presence of the “nothing,” the
presence of an absence, as it were.
The concept anatta, or anatman in other words, denying as it does the
existence, presence, availability of a continuous entity that transcends time,
nevertheless becomes a description of the social self of a believing Buddhist,
albeit a self that is in a process of constant formulation and reformulation. It is a
metaphor for the identity of the Buddhist as one who repudiates karma-based
hierarchies of caste and gender and implies a capacity to achieve liberation by
one’s own efforts in this world. It is a metaphor that represents the view that the
human individual is inescapably an ongoing process in which the will of the
individual determines his or her destiny. In contrast then to the Hindu view of a
settled soul that carries karma and is defined by it, the Buddha uses anatta to
represent a constantly moving and originating facility.9

Psychoanalytic Identifications
In modern times, the psychological mode of identifying the self and accounting
for its presumptive continuity over time and differentiation from others has
become dominant. Among these, the Freudian poetics has been very influential
—either in its pristine form or in various revisionist versions. Even in the
revisions, while some details have been changed or recast, the poetics remain
essentially unaltered. They are really variations on central Freudian themes.
What, then, are the elements of a Freudian poetics of identity? Here is a
representative vignette from Freud:
 We have arrived at our knowledge of this psychical apparatus by studying the individual development
of human beings. To the oldest of these mental provinces or agencies we give the name of id. It
contains everything that is inherited, that is present at birth, that is fixed in the constitution—above all,
therefore, the instincts which originate in the somatic organization and which find their first mental
expression in the id in forms unknown to us. (1949: 14)

In Freud’s thesis the mind is, from the beginning itself, described as consisting
of “provinces or agencies”: The latter term, not denoting the capacity of an
individual to initiate action, but an organization that manages the provinces—
perhaps like the “Indian Agency” that used to manage the affairs of Native
Americans at one time. By designating the mind as consisting of “provinces,”
Freud has given a spacious but subdivided territory with which an individual is
constituted as an identity. Furthermore, this territoriality is present at birth—i.e.,
it is inherited like property. The spatial organization is reinforced by the claim
that the id “contains” everything that is inherited. The individual now has at his
or her disposal the image of a spacious province in which the instincts are
contained. This metaphor of a “container” and the phenomenon that is
“contained” has already been defined as a “psychical apparatus.” The Freudian
believer becomes a container or a spatial arena with other inner areas, all of
which constitute an item in the apparatus of his or her mind. This province of id,
however, is subject to a certain, shall I say, governance, because of another item
in the apparatus. Here is the original version:
Under the influence of the real external world which surrounds us, one portion of the id has undergone
a special development. From what was originally a cortical layer, provided with organs for receiving
stimuli and with apparatus for protection against excessive stimulation, a special organization has
arisen which hence-forward acts as an intermediary between the id and the external world. This region
of our mental life has been given the name of ego. (Freud 1949: 15)

The id is a special “portion” and “region” that, has been transformed into the
ego, and will now act as an “intermediary” between the id and the external
world. The spatial metaphor reasserts itself here only to give way to that of a
diplomat. The id and “the world” are in a state of conflict and the ego emerges as
a mediator who will, if not actually eliminate the conflict, serve to contain it.
The poetics of containment, of suppression, and of a state of tension between
differing forces is carried further in the description of the activities of the ego:
It has a task of self-preservation. As regards external events, it performs the task by becoming aware
of the stimuli from without, by storing up experiences of them (in the memory), by avoiding excessive
stimuli (through flight), by dealing with moderate stimuli (through adaptation) and, finally by learning
to bring about appropriate modifications in the external world to its own advantage (through activity).
(Freud 1949: 15)

The imagery of conflict and of territorial invasion is systematically

embellished in this description of the ego: One stores up experiences in the
memory, but for Freud after that one has to flee from excessive stimuli and adapt
to moderate stimuli. The stimuli from the external world, then, are not
essentially friendly because they demand either flight or adaptation. Even the
third alternative—bringing about appropriate modification—implies an a priori
unfriendly world that has to be changed to one’s own advantage.
The “internal” processes of the ego are no less driven with conflicts and
constraints. Here is Freud on the subject:
As regards internal events, in relation to the id, it performs that task by gaining control over the
demands of the instincts, by deciding whether they shall be allowed to obtain satisfaction, by
postponing that satisfaction to times and circumstances favorable in the external world or by
suppressing their excitations completely. Its activities are governed by consideration of the tensions
produced by the stimuli present within it or introduced into it. The raising of these tensions is in
general felt as unpleasure and their lowering as pleasure. (1949: 15–16)

The id and the ego are in conflict once again and experience “tension” in their
relationship with the ego endeavoring to suppress the id—a revolt of the
instinctual forces, so to speak.
The id gives up a portion of its province to the ego, which in turn, gives a part
of its province to the superego. Here is Freud’s description of this:
The long period of childhood, during which the growing human being lives in dependence upon his
parents leaves behind a precipitate, which forms within his ego a special agency in which his parental
influence is prolonged. It has received the name of superego. Insofar as the superego is differentiated
from the ego or opposed to it, it constitutes a fluid force which the ego must take into account.
Thus an action by the ego is as it should be if it satisfies simultaneously the demands of the id, of
the superego and of reality, that is to say, if it is able to reconcile their demands with one another.
(1949: 16–17)

The superego is a “third force” that is both differentiated from the ego and
opposed to it. It is also a precipitate, a residue of the social experiences of the
individual that is deposited in the ego. The superego is, in this way, part of the
province of the ego but acts as a force within to control and oppose the ego as
well. Once again we have an imperious id and superego making demands, acting
like a creditor or rent collector and being essentially unforgiving. The provinces
of the individual’s mind are in a state of perpetual conflict, one making demands
on the others, often needing diplomatic intermediaries.
The imagery of a primordial id and its relationship to the ego and superego is
a dynamic one as well as one that evokes containment and suppression. The
superego controls and manages the other two, suppressing them whenever
necessary. One has here a system of provincial administrative units—the id
supervised by the superego as the supreme legislative council or a monarch. It
suppresses rebellions and insurrections but is always aware that these rebellious
forces are lurking in the provinces and that they would periodically erupt into
public attention. Internally, then, there is this series of containers and the
contained, all of them of course being contained in the individual, and insofar as
the contained are dynamic and contentious “agencies,” the individual must feel
jostled a lot.
It is with these images that Freud depicts the socialized human being, and it is
these images that become metaphors for the identification of self for adherents of
Freudianism. These images constitute—their empirical validity or invalidity
notwithstanding—the metaphorical structure of the Freudian identity. Once they
accept these poetics of identity, it is an easy next step to constructing identity for
self and perhaps for any other hapless individual who may inhabit their social
circles. Once this topography of the mind is semiotically constructed it can be
readily used to describe and explain the beingness of humans and their actions.
Nevertheless, this particular topography of regions and provinces, of segments
and enclosures, it appears, needs additional forces to make them move and act.
Once a spatial metaphor has been constructed, it must be followed through and
filled with a content that will make it full of something. Here Freud delivers the
notion of “wishes”—conscious and unconscious—with which these “agencies”
were to act. Literate and imaginative as Freud undoubtedly was, his poetics of
identity produce a reconfiguration of Greek myths as an elaborate metaphor on
which these wishes are hoisted. The Freudian poetics of identity now takes a
decidedly romantic turn. Freud writes:
In my experience, which is already extensive, the chief part in the mental lives of all children who
later become psychoneurotics is played by their parents. Being in love with one parent and hating the
other are among the essential constituents of the stock of psychical impulses which is formed at that
time and which is of such importance in determining the symptoms of the later neuroses. It is not my
belief, however, that psychoneurotics differ sharply in this respect from other human beings who
remain normal. (1965: 294)

Freud first discusses this discovery in a letter to Fliess. It is described by

Ernest Jones “as more than incidental to the theory of dreams since it vividly
illustrates the infantile roots of the unconscious wishes animating all dreams”
(1965: 226). Freud himself writes that the discovery of the Oedipus complex is
“confirmed by a legend that came down to us from classical antiquity: a legend
whose profound and universal power to move can only be understood if the
hypothesis I have put forward in regard to the psychology of children has any
validity” (1965: 294, my italics). He then recounts the Oedipus myth as it is
rendered in Sophocles’ plays.
 The action of the play consist in nothing other than the process of revealing, with cunning delays and
ever-mounting excitement—a process that can be likened to the work of psychoanalysis—that
Oedipus himself is the murdered of Laius, but further that he is the son of the murdered man and of
Jocasta. Appalled at the abomination which he has unwittingly perpetrated, Oedipus blinds himself
and forsakes his home. (1965: 295)

The legend is said to “confirm” the “discovery” of the love of one parent and
hatred of the other parent and the play itself becomes a metaphor for
psychoanalysis. However these various theories are inescapably metaphors with
which a therapist and his or her patient, a layman or laywoman who reads these
theories and is convinced by them, a social scientist doing field work, or a
mythographer analyzing myths and even literary critics, can construct an identity
for the individuals in whom they are interested. The theories of Freud, with their
rich mythological underpinnings, become then an inexhaustible source for the
poetics of identity that any imaginative theorist can use to explain any one’s life,
times, and the acts thereof.
Many observers of Freud’s work have examined the theory of the unconscious
and its Oedipal character and rejected it on the grounds that it was unscientific
(see von Eckart 1982, McIntyre 1958, Grunbaum 1984). The scientific validity
of his interpretation is quite irrelevant in understanding its use in the constitution
of identities. Rather, its mythic power, its poetic complexity, and the institutional
power that the therapist is able to bear over the patient are enough to elicit a
transformation of identity. Consider the essential features of this poetics: (a) It
has a very concrete conceptual framework: The story of Oedipus, Jocasta, and
Laius, a story whose essential elements others have been able to discover in
other narratives as well, not to speak of Freud’s own discussion of Hamlet; (b) It
contains strong emotive elements—even if an individual has no romance with
one parent, unconsciously or consciously, and does not hate the other, to be told
so by someone in authority, learned and certified, is enough to create strong
emotions of many sorts. These features of the theory and the fact that anything
one does or says—accidental moves, “slips of the tongue,”—can be given an
Oedipal twist, carrying both narrative complexity and emotional leverage as it
does, allow it to become as complete and thoroughgoing poetics of identity as
one can fashion. For anyone sitting on the edge of Burke’s abyss and facing a
discursive nothingness, Freudian poetics provides a richly textured and deeply
“feelable” identity. Further, to people already disenchanted with religious
sources of identity, Freudian poetics is particularly appealing, because it also
provides an effective instrumentation for debunking religious poetics.
Nevertheless, what Freud achieved was a replacement of one poetic with
another.
 METONYMIES OF IDENTITY

Burke describes metonymy as follows:

the basic “strategy” in metonymy is this: to convey some incorporeal or intangible state in terms of the
corporeal or tangible. E.g. to speak of “the heart” rather than the “emotions.” If you trail language
back far enough, of course you will find that all our terms for “spiritual” states were metonymic in
origin. (Burke 1969a: 506)

In metonymy something that is convoluted, or evanescent and unsubstantial, is

transformed into something simpler and substantial. One can find the uses of
metonymy in the constructions of identity, in the organization of kinship
relations, and in the naming of individuals. Just as each kin-term of address and
reference are identifying vocabularies, so are the names given to individuals and
each such usage transforms intangible and complex theories into concrete forms.
Anthropologists have studied kinship relations as systems that represented
structures of relationships that encoded patterns of rights, duties, and obligations
and used the prohibition of marriage between certain selected kin as the key to
the maintenance of the system. However, one can also consider the kinship
system as a source of tropes with which identity is constructed by members of a
society.
Take for instance the fact of siblinghood: some people can trace their
generation to the same set of parents. These people grow up and get married to
those outside the immediate family and generate children of their own. This
development demands the use of various tropic strategies to construct an
identity: Children of siblings are rendered as “cousins” to each other. In some
societies, however, these cousins are further divided into those who are
“brothers” and “sisters” and cousins who are not “brothers” and “sisters.” This
means that cousins who are children of siblings of the opposite sex are said to be
marriageable to each other while children of the siblings of the same sex are said
to be unmarriageable to each other because they are brothers and sisters.
Anthropologists refer to the former as cross-cousins and the latter as parallel-
cousins. This arrangement has important consequences to the structure of social
relations in communities that practice it as well as to the transfer of property
(Fortes 1969: 13–15). It also confers differential identities on the selves of those
who are brotherly cousins and sisterly cousins and those who are cousinly
cousins. To achieve this, cousins who are brothers and sisters would treat each
other as in fact siblings. The terminologies of address as those of reference and
reflexivity and answerability will reflect these principles. In this delineation of
cross-cousins and parallel-cousins, the idea of “shared blood” will not
differentiate their identities; both kinds of cousins have the same “blood”
because they have the same ancestors. It is possible, however, to metonymically
depict each of them as sharing “blood” from only one parent, the male one. This
would mean that children of the siblings of the same sex would have one type of
“blood” and children of siblings of the opposite sex would have a different type
of “blood.” In the first case they would be said to have similar “blood” while in
the second case they would be different “blood.” Ergo, the latter can get married
to each only while the former cannot without violating the rules of incest.
In other words a brother and sister have the same “blood,” but once the latter
gets married and leaves the ancestral home and lineage, she ceases to share in
this “blood” and begins to share the “blood” of her husband’s lineage. Hence her
children can get married to her brother’s children insofar as they no longer share
the same “blood.” Kenneth David, in a study of the marriage customs of the
people of Jaffna, Sri Lanka, discusses this issue thoroughly and quotes an
informant thus: “With my sister I share natural substance until marriage do us
part.” David observes, “Before marriage she is identical in natural bodily
substance with her natal family; during the ceremony, she becomes physically
identical with her husband and his kinsmen” (1973: 52). If what the sister shares
with her brother can be transubstantiated by the wedding ceremony, it was not a
natural substance at all, but a symbolic one. Indeed the notion of “bodily
substance” or “blood” was being used metonymically to indicate structural
relationships and alternating identities. Among the Kabyle of Algeria, as
described by Pierre Bourdieu, parallel-cousin marriage—that is, in this case
between children of brothers—is officially “preferred” and justified by using
“blood” once again metonymically:
There is praise for the result peculiar to marriage between parallel-cousins, the fact that resulting
children (“those whose extraction is unmixed, whose blood is pure”) can be attached to the same
lineage through their father or their mother. (1972: 44)

A complex structural principle of the kinship system that determined the transfer
of property while at the same time constructing communities united and divided
by marriage is converted metonymically into a “corporeal and tangible”
phenomenon: differentiated blood. The concept of blood becomes a metonymy
with which cross-cousins are given separated identities in their relationships to
each other while parallel cousins are united. It is not necessarily the case that
people literally believe that there is a difference in blood between the people in
question. Indeed, at the time these rules of marriage were made there was no
theory of genetics or hematology available to the people who constructed these
theories. And to all appearances the blood and other bodily fluids of these
people, however related to each other, would have looked similar. It was not
really the physical substance of blood that was the referent in this discourse of
kinship, marriage, and incest; rather, blood becomes a trope with which
structurally necessary distinctions are made.
Kinship systems, then, are social constructions of structures of relations that
given cultures make, but they manifest themselves in the life of individuals as
identities on the basis of which they select the various acts with which they
conduct themselves through a lifetime. The kinship theory of each such culture,
in other words, provides a poetics of identification, a poetics that the individual
ignores at his or her peril.10
The names given to individuals as they start their passage through life are
typically not chosen arbitrarily; rather, they delineate a poetics of identity and
are collapsed representations of elaborate theories of self and world. Often these
are religious theories, but secular ones abound too. Theories about beginnings of
a self, its “rebirth” in this world, ideas about spirituality and continuity of the
soul from one life into another life, or, for that matter from a previous life into
this life, are all symbolized in the names given to individuals, thus conferring on
them by poetic means a selected identity.
The naming process, and the indications of a connection to a genitor or
genitrix, indicates a particular representation of descent: This is the son of X.
The metaphoricality of paternity can be easily gauged by the fact that the son
could have been bought, stolen, or simply adopted and given the identity of the
son of this particular father. Or else, for all he knows the biological genitor may
have been the gamekeeper. But for all that, the son will bear the father’s name in
a patrilineal society and inherit his property. The son’s identity will be
constituted by the tropicalization of a relationship, with biology rendered
irrelevant. Not yet knowing who he or she is, even what it is, a human child is
told who he or she is and this knowledge is a poetical construction. In a nicely
emblematic study for this argument, Michael Mbabuike has described the
naming practices of the Igbo of Africa as making “philosophical statements” to
society. He summarizes his thesis as follows:
Igbo personal names can consist of words, phrases, wishes, and prayers. They not only signify
individuals, but also place the bearer in a particular family lineage and mark a relation to the gods,
ancestors and cosmos. Names show dedication to a god or goddess and reflect the achievements of the
family. (1996: 47)

From knowing one person’s name alone he or she, or an other, can identify him
or her with all these details.
Similarly in Hindu societies, names represent not only gender and caste
identity but also allusions to particular religious sects and to local gods or
goddesses. In a particularly striking instance of metonymic identification, a
cobra-worshiping cult in India names children, under certain special
circumstances, after the cobra. In communities that practice snake worship, a
childless couple will take a vow to install a serpent shrine in their garden if they
are given an offspring. This ceremony, “consists in having a figure of a serpent
cut in a stone slate, placing it in a cell for six months, giving it life . . . by
reciting mantras over it and then setting it up under a pipal tree,” writes William
Francis (1906: 102). Overlooking the Freudian poetics involved in this worship
of a snake so as to have children, it appears that if a child is born after these
efforts, the child is given a name that alludes to its connection to the cobra
—naga or sesha. The male child will be called for instance, Nagappa,
Nageswara, or Seshachalam. The names using sesha are double allusions: to the
cobra that was worshiped as well as to the myth of the god Vishnu who sits on
the head of a serpent called, in fact, adi-sesha, the primal serpent. A name like
Nageswara or Sheshachalam becomes a reduction of both myth and practice.
Further, among the Tamil Hindus of Sri Lanka and among the Tamils of
southern India, the grandson is given the name of the grandfather.
Metonymically the grandfather’s identity is being recycled and a sense of
patrilineal continuity is being registered. In fact grandfather and grandson are
referred to as peran—a word derived from the Tamil word for name—peyar, or
per. Grandson and grandfather are both referred to as peran—a reciprocal
identification, signifying that each bears the other’s name and is a continuation
of the other.
National and ethnic identities can also be seen to be dependent on metonymic
processes. One of the commonest forms of identity is that conferred by ethnicity
and nationalism. Some of these types of identities evolved over time and
manufactured poetics crescively over the years, while others had to be
“invented” more deliberately. Hugh Trevor-Roper has shown, for example, how
the identity of a “Highlander” was constructed as part of the construction of
Scottish nationalism. The “Highland tradition” was an “invented tradition,” as
Hobsbawn and Ranger (1983) oxymoronically put it, and the invention included
a poetics of identity.
This poetics, it appears, defined the Scots as a distinct ethnic group with the
custom of wearing distinct kilts that define a clan, with a bardic literature, and
with defined territorial limits. This was accomplished in three stages, argues
Trevor-Roper:
First there was the cultural revolt against Ireland: the usurpation of the Irish culture and the rewriting
 of early Scottish history, culminating in the insolent claim that Scotland—Celtic Scotland—was the
“mother nation” and Ireland the cultural dependency. Secondly, there was the artificial creation of new
highland traditions, presented as ancient, original and distinctive. Thirdly, there was the process by
which these new traditions were offered to, and adopted by, historic Lowland Scotland: the Eastern
Scotland of the Picts, the Saxons and the Normans. (1983: 16)

The inventors of the Scottish tradition seemed to have constituted a past for
the Scots, a romantic identity as “noble savages” in the years after the
suppression of the rebellion of 1745 when they were denigrated as recalcitrant
barbarians, as well as constituting a political and military history. Perhaps the
most interesting example of the procedures by which an artifact of identity was
constituted is Trevor-Roper’s account of the emergence of the kilt or “philibeg”
as the traditional costume of the Scots. It appears that it was in no way connected
to a Highland past. Trevor-Roper observed,
unknown in 1726, it suddenly appeared a few years later; and by 1746 it was sufficiently well
established to be explicitly named in the act of Parliament which then forbade the Highland dress. Its
inventor was an English Quaker from Lancashire, Thomas Rawlinson. (1983: 21)

Once it was thus “invented,” it was given a general status by being adopted by
the newly formed Highland regiments, a move initiated and encouraged by the
elder Pitt, Prime Minister of England. Trevor-Roper writes, “Having been
invented by an English quaker industrialist, it was saved from extinction by an
English imperialist statesman. The next stage was the invention of a Scottish
pedigree. This stage was at least undertaken by the Scots” (1983: 26).
The Scottish “inventors,” John McPherson and James McPherson, the Quaker
Rawlinson and the elder Pitt—the former two wittingly and the latter two
unwittingly—metonymically constituted the identity of the “Highlander Scots.”
One, they created a past and a pedigree: The Highlanders were descended from
an ancient and savage, but noble, people fiercely independent and proud. A large
and complex and contradictory past was reduced to the “noble Highlanders.”
Two, they were given a physical presence and a collective self by the invention
and use of a special form of appearance through clothing: the philibeg
henceforth would stand for the noble Highlander Scots. Three, a demarcated
territory was constituted as Scotland by overlooking—i.e. reducing—various
recalcitrant elements of the past and connecting this land to the new identity.

SYNECDOCHES OF IDENTITY

Synecdoche, Burke notes, encompasses

 such meanings as: part for the whole, whole for the part, container for the thing contained, sign for the
thing signified, material for the thing made . . . cause for effect, effect for cause, genus for species,
species for genus, etc. All such conversions imply an integral relationship, relationship of
convertibility, between the two terms. . . . “The noblest synecdoche,” the perfect paradigm or
prototype for all lesser usages is found in metaphysical doctrines proclaiming the identity of
“microcosm” and “macrocosm.” In such doctrines, where the individual is treated as a replica of the
universe and vice-versa we have the ideal synecdoche. (1969a: 507–508)

Among the many synecdochic identificatory processes, I will discuss the acts
by which the whole is represented by a part or, to put it differently, a single term
that summarizes a complex whole is used to identify an individual.
This kind of identification occurs routinely in everyday speech. Claims to
being a “Christian” or “Buddhist” or “Jew” are really synecdochic forms of
identification. In these single terms and simple words, an individual’s religious
life, ritual life, values, the food he or she may eat, whom he or she is likely to
marry or eat with, when he or she may eat, perhaps where he or she lives in
some cases, and various other characteristics are denoted and an identity
conferred on him or her. Conversely, insulting and belittling terms use
synecdochic processes to identify individuals. One of the most widely used
synecdoches of identity in this regard is in the abusive terminologies of everyday
life. In denoting another either in anger or contempt, individuals often resort to
calling him or her by allusions to sexual organs. Ethnic insults too often reduce
an individual’s complexity to particular racial characteristics. Stigmatizing
identities of every kind are in fact synechdochic identifications: homosexuality,
criminal acts from the past, or insane episodes confer an identity on an
individual that obliterates all other attributes of his or her self, and he or she
becomes reduced to being a “queer,” a “con,” or a “nut.” The essential quality of
this process of identification is the use of a selected singular aspect of the
individual to overshadow the rest of his or her self. A man may be convicted of
embezzlement once in his life; he may serve a period of time in jail and may
even make good on the money he had embezzled. Nevertheless, he will be
identified for relevant purposes as an embezzler and convict. Goffman expresses
this with his usual flair:
In all of these various instances of stigma . . . the same sociological features are found: an individual
who might have been received easily in ordinary social intercourse possesses a trait that can obtrude
itself upon attention and turn those of us whom he meets away from him, breaking the claim that his
other attributes have on us. . . . We construct a stigma-theory, an ideology to explain his inferiority and
account for the danger he represents sometimes rationalizing an animosity based on other differences
such as social class. (1963: 4–5)

The trait is first isolated and then used to cover his or her entire self: i.e., a
part of the individual is used to cover the whole. This is apparently in stark
contrast to the identificatory process among the Chinook Indians. If a man kills a
child in most civilizations, he will be referred to as “a murderer,” a “bad man”
who killed the “poor child.” The Chinook, however, would render this
identification as follows: “The man’s badness killed the child’s poverty,” Boas
reports (1911: 657). Levi-Strauss uses this example to support his claim that
“primitive people” are, after all, capable of abstract thought (1966: 1). However,
this case from Boas illustrates something else as well: The Chinook way for
identifying a man who has committed what would be considered murder in
certain other societies is by attributing its causation not to his whole self but to
some element in it called “badness.” The Chinook attribute his act to a part of
him, his “badness” implying that there are other aspects to his self, even perhaps
some “goodness.” The act of murdering a child, a violation of the norms of the
society, is not overlooked or forgiven but the causal source is found, not in the
total individual, but discovered in a reduced aspect of this totality. A complex
phenomenon—the murder—is attributed to a simple source—badness. His self
would not be coterminus with this act. Hence condemning the person to death—
that is the whole person to die—would be unthinkable for the Chinook. In the
synecdochic identificationary process in Western society, the one act will be
allowed to define his whole self—indeed his “personality.” The single act will be
taken as representing his whole person and he will be conferred an identity with
its help. He may be executed on the basis of this act. If he is not executed he will
be imprisoned and every aspect of his life henceforth will be affected by this act.
His social circles will remember this act and use it in their relationship with him.
In Chinook society, the whole is broken into casually significant parts, whereas
in modern Western society the part is taken to represent the whole. Synecdochic
identification often occurs in individuals diagnosed as being mentally ill. Here is
a succinct description of this reported by Kaysen:
The patient suffered an episode of depersonalization on Saturday for about six hours at which time she
felt she wasn’t a real person, nothing but skin: She talked about wanting to cut herself to see whether
she would bleed to prove to herself that she was a real person. She mentioned she would like to see an
X-ray of herself to see if she had any bones or anything inside. The precipitating event for this episode
of depersonalization is still not clear. (1993: 105; emphasis added)

This an excerpt from the doctor’s report on Susanna Kaysen that she
reproduces in her wonderfully observed and stylishly recounted description of
the months she spent in a mental institution. The report talks of her
“depersonalization.” It should also have mentioned her “repersonalization” as
merely skin, of her reduction of her whole self and body to “nothing but skin.”
 If this patient experienced this synecdochic depersonalization and
repersonalization unwittingly, occasioned by an unrecognized precipitating
event, there are others who reduce their identities more deliberately. In certain
religious discourses one can find claims that the human is “only” a soul, the rest
as irrelevant or unnecessary or illusory. Here is Appar, a medieval Hindu saint
and poet giving us two versions of his identity:
1
When I consider this vile human life,
Wasted in filling up the stomach
Which is like a bottomless pit of the sea,
I cry out in pain.

2
Five fools dwell inside me,
driving me to despair—
I, your servant, cannot live with these,
Oh, lord of the Mūla am shrine in Ārur.
(Peterson 1989: 253)

Here, a devotee of Siva, the deity at the Mūla am shrine, is appealing to him
for release from the earthly cycle of existence. He describes his self,
Here, a devotee of Siva, the deity at the Mūla am shrine, is appealing to him
for release from the earthly cycle of existence. He describes his self, identifies it,
as a “body,” and the body itself is defined by the appetite for food so that he is
really only a “stomach,” a “bottomless pit.” He then expands the description of
his self to include the “five fools”—that is, the five senses. He describes himself
reductively as consisting of the five senses that dwell inside him and drive him
to despair. Here is another such verse of identification from Appar:
There is nothing to hold together
This worm-infested frame
Covered with skin, with nine leaky holes.
Five rogues sit within
And torment me.
Utterly ruined, I cannot live with them any more,
Oh Lord of the Mūla am shrine in Ārur!
(Peterson 1989: 253)

Here again the poet is identifying himself with only the five senses and
alludes also to a claim that his body is nothing but “skin” and “frame” with
nothing inside them but the five hated senses. The irrelevance of the body in the
cosmic scheme of identification in Saivite Hinduism is rendered synecdochically
in these verses. Self, consciousness, the passions, and existence, are all reduced
to the five senses from which the devotee seeks an escape for his eternal atman.

IRONY AND IDENTITY

Burke writes about irony as follows:

Irony arises when one tries, by the interaction of terms upon one another, to produce a development
which uses all the terms. Hence from the standpoint of this total term (this “perspective of
perspectives”) none of the participating sub-perspectives can be treated as either precisely right or
precisely wrong. They are all voices, or personalities, or positions, integrally affecting one another.
When the dialectic is properly formed, they are the number of characters needed to produce the total
development. (1969a: 512)

In the formation of identity, too, this ironic relationship of one voice, one
position, or personality is used poetically to establish a dialectic with other
voices, positions, and personalities. The relevant identity emerges as a contrast
and displacement of another identity, a challenge, and a refutation that criticizes
the other as it defines itself in opposition to it.
While the construction of such identities can occur in everyday life, I will use
examples from three different but connected arenas: the carnival, the circus, and
the medieval court. In carnivals one will often find a performer who can be
identified as the “fool,” in circuses one invariably finds “clowns,” and in the
medieval court one would encounter a “jester.” Though these terms—the fool,
the clown, and the jester have been often used interchangeably, I will use them
here to refer to ironic performers in each of these arenas. The comments about
one, however, may apply to the others as well in many instances.

Fools
Carnivals were mass participatory events in which all sectors of society
participated. “Carnival is not a spectacle seen by people; they live in it and
everyone participates because its very idea embraces all the people,” wrote
Mikhail Bahktin in a pioneering study of the phenomenon (1984: 7). For him the
carnival was part of a larger structure of folk culture that included the following:

(a) Ritual spectacles—carnival pageants, comic shows of the marketplace.

(b) Comic verbal compositions—parodies, both oral and written, in Latin and
in the vernacular.
(c) Various genres of billingsgate—curses, oaths, popular blazons. (1984:5)
 All of these elements of the folk culture challenge, by ironic means, the
official culture. Bakhtin continues,
As opposed to the official feast one might say that carnival celebrated temporary liberation from the
prevailing truth and from the established order; it marked the suspension of all hierarchical ranks,
privileges, norms and prohibitions. (1984: 10)

One of the ways in which the established order was put in ironic perspective
was in the pageants that were presented. One standard figure in these pageants
was the fool. Who is a fool? A fool is one who systematically, in verbal and
visual presentations, makes comments on the established order. In fact, he
represents disorder, refutation, parody, and unseriousness to a world of
seriousness and orderliness. Among the many manifestations of the fool in
carnivalesque pageants, the one that has elicited the greatest attention is the
“Lord of Misrule.”
One characteristic of the Lord of Misrule was that he was expected to
challenge standard roles and conventions. One easy approach to handle this
reversal of rules and roles was to dress up as a woman and act like one or adopt
clothes that were unusual and striking in comparison to the clothes usually worn
by the people of the community. The appearance of people and the types of
clothes that they were expected to wear was not a matter over which an
individual had too much freedom of choice in the medieval period. In medieval
European society a person was expected to wear clothes appropriate to his or her
rank. This was defined by what were known as “sumptuary laws” and strict
punishment was meted out to those who disobeyed them (Baldwin 1926).
To defy these laws and customs and wear the costumes of the bishop or the
pope or that of king, as many did during carnivals, constituted a parody, an
ironic comment on the real institutions of the church and the monarchy. The
costuming and the words and the general performance of the “Lord of Misrule”
was a parody of the real lords and bishops and in fact succeeded in defining their
roles and rules more vividly for the masses. The ironic reversals emphasized the
real roles and implied the consequences of the absence of these roles: misrule,
anarchy, disorder.

Clowns
The clowns in a circus again are ironic identities that define an antithesis by
managing and seemingly mismanaging words, gestures, and moves. The very
world and structure of the circus represents a circle, the endless line, the cosmic
circle, the container of the things of the world. Within this circle one finds
represented a multitude of phenomena from the real world. To begin with, there
are the animal acts: Animals are displayed but always under varying degrees of
submission to humans. There are the elephants: huge but docile and obedient,
and performing picturesque tricks on command from keepers. Then there are the
tigers and lions, baring their teeth, snarling in anger but still under the control of
a human being.
Second, there are the acrobats and high-wire artists. They display great
balance and coordination and seeming indifference to the dangers of falling and
getting maimed or killed. The very existence of the bipedal human is a triumph
of balance and coordination and the acrobats and high-wire performers display
this and celebrate it with wonderful impudence.
In fact, in the circle of the circus one finds represented the human mastery of
the world, a synecdoche of the dominion that the Judeo-Christian God gave to
man. It also represents the evolutionary emergence of the human as the captain
of the world, the triumph of culture over nature, the celebration of willful acts of
balance, and even control and defiance of the pull of gravity, by adroit
manipulations and coordinated moves.
It is in the midst of these manifestations of control, management and mastery,
and order and decorum, that the clowns make their appearance. They represent
the grotesque, the presence of which in cultures has been noticed by many
scholars. Sowers has identified three basic forms of the grotesque: the monster,
the orifice, and the maelstrom. It is the maelstrom that the clown represents, a
representation manifest in his clothing. Nelson quotes Sowers’s description of
the maelstrom.
as a condition or situation, full of chaos, claustrophobic jamming, nightmarish atmosphere, dark
background, all sorts of contrary, extremely unpleasant, disordered conditions which suggest a world
of depravity and disorder. (Nelson 1981: 202)

Whereas all these adjectives may not apply to the clown, some of them do—for
example, chaos, jamming, disorder. These words describe the activities of the
clown and this is represented, to begin with, in his costume. The clown
represents the grotesque antithesis of the man and woman on the high-wire. He
does tricks that are reversals of the organized world. He is lewd and indecorous
at times, and he keeps falling down often, showing that is he is unable to keep
his balance. And he looks disordered, disproportionate, violating the ratio of
color and design and shape. In fact, everything about his presence is exaggerated
and out of kilter.
The artists on the high-wire are different from this: Their acts are not magical
or mysterious and do not defy conventional logic. They are decorous, orderly,
never lewd, often romantic, and above all, they keep their balance. They are
triumphant and orderly human beings, arrogant in their various masteries, always
in control. This is recreated in their attire: light leotards, chest-hugging and
form-fitting vests. They are simple, efficient, parsimonious, and in harmony with
the contours of the human form.
The clown and the acrobat in the circus are presentations that challenge and
refute the other and manifest in their respective acts and appearances, disorder
and order respectively. The ironic challenge and refutation posed by the clowns
to order and its refutation is, however, merely superficial: At a structural level
they help define order and bring it into relief.
Clowning, however, is not confined to circuses: It is found in the theater and
cinema as well. Among modern clowns, the supreme ironist is Charlie Chaplin.
He claimed to have represented the average man who does not cut a
dashing figure as he blunders through a drab and commonplace existence. . . . Then he sees me
shuffling along in my baffled and aimless manner and a spark of hope rekindles. Here is a man like
himself, only more pathetic and miserable, with ludicrously impossible clothes—in every sense a
social misfit,

wrote Chaplin about his own art (in Bowman 1931). Charlie Chaplin may well
appeal to the masses because he represents the vicissitudes that such a man faces
in everyday life, but Chaplin’s theme in the movies he made were ironic
critiques and satirical comments on the society of his times and his very
appearance was made to indicate this. To begin with, his jacket is always too
small for him and his trousers are always too large. He wore a tie and carried a
cane. In using these items Chaplin on the screen is not an average man but one
aspiring to be a gentleman, perhaps even a dandy. His ill-fitting clothes and his
aspirations establish the first set of ironic contrasts, an internal one in respect to
his clothes and an external one in respect to the accouterments of a well-dressed
gentleman: His clothes are disproportionate, but “correct.” Second, he sets up
another violation of ratios by presenting himself as one with courtly manners and
graceful and elegant mannerisms—a tramp with grace and courtliness. This
again sets up a dialectic with his appearance internally and with manners and
mannerisms of a gentleman externally. His shuffle is often in contrast to his
dancelike movements at other times: Here is an elegant gentleman who is at
odds with a society that spurns him, denies him his fulfillment as a father, lover,
adventurer, and machine-worker.
The ironic representation of the identity in effect “speaks” to the other
identity, by the “interaction of the terms” of the two identities—the clownish one
and the serious one, to produce a “development,” to use Burke’s words (1969a:
512). The difference between the clown—down and out, seedy, pathetic—
Chaplin seems to be saying, and the real gentleman dandy is after all a small
one. The dignified tramp was truly the tramp as a dandy, conveying the emergent
signification that a tramp was perhaps only recently a dandy and that the dandy
may well become a tramp soon.

Jesters
The work of Norbert Elias has demonstrated the inner structure of medieval and
early modern European courts. Such households, for example the one of Louis
XIV, was grand in every sense of the term. The Chateau of Versailles contained
10,000 persons, including servants and soldiers. The nobility lived in apartments
close to the king’s chambers and insofar as the nobility itself was organized on
the principle of hierarchy the relations among them were carried on the basis of
elaborate etiquette and ceremony. Elias considers such etiquette and ceremony
themselves as functions of the power structure of society. One feature of this
etiquette was the costuming of the members of the court in terms of such power
and status. A good description of the manner of costuming and its connection to
decorum comes from the chronicles of another court—that of Henry IV. A
would-be-courtier is told:
You require a doublet made of four or five layers of different taffetas; stocking, such as you see, frieze
and scarlet, accounting I assure you for eight ells of cloth at least; then you need boots, the flesh side
outermost, the heel very high and the spur slippers also high. . . . The spurs must be gilded. . . . When
thus attired you have arrived in the Louvre courtyard—one alights between the guards you understand
—you begin to laugh at the first person you meet, you salute one and say a word to another. . . (Elias
1983: 231)

The costuming at court was an essential move in the choreography of status

and honor that was essential for it to function smoothly. This elaborate visual
dance of status and honor achieved a number of significations: It recreated in
miniature a social order that was based on hierarchical differentiations; it
mimified the nuances and subtleties of differences in status and honor among the
members of the court, and it functioned to maintain the interaction order.
In this society of people with orchestrated appearances there were a few,
usually one or two, who were dressed in strikingly different styles. These were
the jesters and in Enid Welsford’s words, they were apparelled in a way that
emphasized folly. In the manner of clothing there was great variety; red and green seem to have been
favorite colors and were frequently arranged in checks and it is possible that Haincelin was sometimes
dressed in conventional motley suits. ([1935]1966: 119)
This suit, a long petticoat-like garment that came to be called “the jesters coat,”
was adopted widely, and is mentioned in the journal of another famous medieval
jester in the Stuart King James’s court—Archibald Armstrong, also called
“Count Archie.” A writer of the period described Archie as follows: “The bright
eye-dazzling mirror of mirth, pump of pastimes, spurt of sport, regent of
ridiculous confabulations” (Welsford 1966: 174). It is clear that a coat of many
colors is being described and the term “jesting coat” identifies the liberties that
the wearing of the garment confers on the wearer. If in his verbal thrusts he
engages in a “licensed impudence” (Welsford 1966: 173), in appearance, too, he
displays the same impudence. In addition to this motley coat, the jesters also
wore “eared caps” and caps with a cockscomb, also known as the foolscap, and
carried bells and other such objects with them. Nevertheless, the jester’s role was
essentially a discursive one. He was adept in the manipulation and management
of words to good effect. His style was in fact discursive impudence, a systematic
violation of the rules of decorum, civility, face values, honor, role, while the
courtiers were defined by the observance of these very rules. The
correspondence between rules of speech and rules of costuming become clear:
Impudence in speech is paralleled by impudence in clothing and accessories.
Here too, the differentiation between the orderly and decorous on the one hand
and that of the disorderly and impudent on the other enables a hierarchy to
emerge with orderliness defined and established as a high value for the society.
The jesters participate as the other, the differentiating feature, that establishes a
hierarchy between the king and the subject.
In everyday life today, as in earlier times, these poetic devices are
systematically used to constitute ironic and rebellious identities. Perhaps the
most striking use of such poetics of identification to reject and satirize
established societies in recent times was undertaken by the “peace movement” of
the 1960s, which soon crystallized into lifestyle under the rubric of “hippies.”
Their lifestyle was characterized by passionate commitment to be different from
the people of the established order, and one of the ways in which they sought to
do this was to look different and talk differently. A poetics of identity was used
systematically to ironize the members of the established order and define a self
by the management of clothing, hairstyles and language.
The established order they were challenging and repudiating was one that still
bore the marks of American Protestantism and the ethic of efficiency and
parsimony, of restraint and discipline, that successful business demanded. The
women’s clothes were of somber colors, trimly cut, and not given to extravagant
frills and bounces. The men wore “business” suits that used dark colors, thin ties
and, more often than not, button-down shirts—all representing a decorous
restraint and emotional control. These were in fact the poetics of Protestant
identity, features of what John Murray Cuddihy (1978) has called “Protestant
Taste.” While the appearance of these people was a far cry from the one that
Robert Motherwell painted in “Homely Protestant,” there were vestiges of this
Protestant plainness and simplicity in the business attire of the dominant
Americans. While many in the society flouted it, the dominant value-system or
rather the value-system of those who dominated government, business and
academia, accepted it.11
For the peace movement and the hippies it was these values that took the
United States into the war; it was these people who were urging them to go and
fight, kill, and die overseas; it was the institutions that these people created and
ran that discriminated against black people, exterminated Native Americans, and
so on. The life style, appearance, and identity were all equated with oppression,
warmongering, greed and self-aggrandizement.
The need of the hour then was for a new set of values and a new identity that
demanded a new poetics of identification. Does the establishment preach
restraint? Let us have profligacy, licentiousness, lasciviousness, freedom. Does
the establishment practice sobriety in everyday life? Let us drink, get stoned,
turn on, tune out. Does the establishment wear somber clothes, neutrally shaded,
disciplined, corsetted, and buttoned-down? Let us have a mad rush of colors,
shapes, and designs that are eye-catching and sexually suggestive and inviting,
loosely structured, and flamboyant. Does the establishment indicate control and
restraint by cutting the hair short, often to a military shortness, to a crew cut,
keeping it “groomed” and “orderly”? Let us have long hair, luxuriant and
seductive, representing mad passions and wild ecstasies. Does the bourgeoisie
live controlled and disciplined lives? Let us then live without control and
restraint; let us live orgiastically. Does the establishment use “decorous”
language, avoid allusions to bodily functions and sexuality? Let us make
allusions to them as adjectives, adverbs, and nouns as often as we can. Orgiastic
living was paralleled by orgiastic language.
These strategies of identification, then, represented a critique and a rejection
of the established order by a visual and verbal poetry and the production of an
ironic alternative. The everyday speech of the rebels in fact constituted a
rejection of the standards of “decorum” and “good taste” that the establishment
had prescribed and used to define itself. The rebels, now liberated from these
constraints, were free to use obscenities and scatologies in their everyday
discourse in public and private. Political and religious blasphemy were also now
accepted as part of the discourse. For instance, a radical weekly published a
cartoon of a number of policemen pulling down the Statue of Liberty and raping
it. The flag of the United States was demeaned in many ways: It was burned,
made into underwear, and thereby desecrated. In rendering the flag into
underwear, the poets of identity were using an ancient technique. Bakhtin calls
this practice “grotesque realism,” whose
essential principle is degradation, that is the lowering of all that is high, spiritual, ideal,
abstract. . . . To degrade is to bury, to sow, and to kill simultaneously in order to bring forth something
more and better. To degrade also means to concern oneself with the lower stratum of the body, the life
of the belly and the reproductive organs, it therefore relates to acts of defecation and copulation,
conception and pregnancy and birth. (1984: 19; 21)

Wearing the flag of the United States as underwear and displaying it to an

audience constituted an ironic challenge to the sanctity of the flag. It also defined
the wearer as an outsider and a critic, as the costumes of the fools of the carnival
did.
These verbal infelicities and blasphemies have earlier parallels, too. During
the upheavals associated with the Protestant Reformation, anti-Catholics would
go into churches and perform various acts that were meant to repudiate religious
doctrines. Robert Scribner reports one telling incident that occurred on the eve of
Ash Wednesday in 1560:
During Mass, the local innkeeper had run into the church dressed in a fool’s costume. He took up the
holy-water vessel, placed it on the altar and “made his offering in it,” perhaps a euphemism for
urinating in it. As each person approached to take communion, as was customary, he struck them on
the buttock with a whip. (1988: 122)

Similarly during the English Reformation, cults known as the “ranters” emerged
who used blasphemy and sexual liberties to reject the established system. Jerome
Friedman summarizes their views:
Religious institutions were a sham and God was within you. There was no heaven, no hell, and hence
no need to live as if there were. All governance and property were theft, corruption and extortion. All
institutions emanated from and fostered class dominance and were thus of no significance to the poor
Englishman. There was neither licit or illicit forms of behaviors, just deeds. (1987: xi)

Rejecting established practices of worship and domestic life, Richard Coppin

preached against all institutionalized forms of worship and domesticity. Abiezer
Coppe, another ranter, advocated sexual libertarianism and denied that anyone
has a right to practice “sexual exclusivity” as in marriage and monogamy
(Friedman 1987: 75–96). The challenge to the established order was complete.
Nevertheless, the new identities being cultivated by these practices were
dependent on the established ones and were essentially ironic reversals of them.
The ranting and blasphemies were ironic reversals of the sanctity and awe with
which certain words and practices of the church were treated by the faithful.
These, then, were strategies of identification of self, achieved verbally and
materially. The hippies in this country, as others in earlier epochs, sought to
constitute themselves by establishing a dialectic of irony with established values
and practices. In medieval pageants and courts and circuses, the fools, jesters,
and clowns were one, or a few, among many. The hippies, however, constituted a
social movement of jesters, encompassing masses of people who made ironic and
dialectical rejection of a society’s established values into a style of living. The
establishment, however, had the last, no doubt ironic, laugh: it co-opted many of
the features of the movement into a style and bourgeoisiefied it.
Ironic constitution of identities then bears a dialectical relationship to an other
and speaks in many voices simultaneously. It speaks the voice of rejection of the
other while simultaneously helping to define the other in sharper contours by
offering a contrast. It speaks the voice of excess and arbitrariness while also
exposing the value of restraint and discipline that the other represents. It also
voices approbation and exultation in its excesses while implicitly and explicitly
criticizing the other. The styles adopted by the ironists for their clothing and hair
and the stylization of the diction used in everyday conversations provided the
poetics by which complex attitudes and emotions could be articulated.

NOTES
1. For a discussion of Sanskritic theories of meaning, see Kunjunni Raja (1963). Tzvetan Todorov has
discussed Abhinavagupta’s work in his examination of symbolism and interpretation (1982). For a
contemporary study of the “rule of metaphor” see Ricoeur (1981). Richard Harvey Brown has also argued
very forcefully that sociology itself was entrapped in its own “poetics” (1977).
2. In using “representative anecdotes,” Burke observes “Men seek vocabularies that will be faithful
reflections of reality. To this end, they must develop vocabularies that are selections of reality. And any
selection of reality must, in certain circumstances, function as a deflection of reality” (1969a: 59).
Nevertheless, he explains, “One should seek to select, as representative anecdotes something sufficiently
demarcated in character to make analysis possible, yet sufficiently complex in character to prevent the use
of too few terms in one’s description” (1969a: 324). I think the creation myth, the story of Jesus’ birth, his
baptism, and his death meet these criteria for being representative anecdotes.
3. All quotations from the Bible are from the Authorized King James version, published by the New
American Library.
4. Perhaps all narratives in the Christian world, major ones or trivial ones, that feature an interaction
between men and women represent a version of the Eve and Adam and serpent myth: from Samson and
Delilah to Anna Karenina, to Madame Bovary, to Rebecca and to various movies and sitcoms. It was
certainly not a fit of absentmindedness that made the writer of a Hollywood movie about a scheming and
manipulative protagonist name her “Eve” in a movie that was called “All about Eve.” See Daly (1973) for a
trenchant analysis of the implications of this myth.
5. “Hindu” and Hinduism are of course broad summarizing terms for what is really an array of beliefs
and practices, some of them complementary with each other and some not, accepted and used by people
living in India. The words brahaman and brahmin refer to different entities, the former to the progenitor in
the creation myth and the latter to the highest caste among the Hindus. Often certain authors spell these
words in the same way.
6. Many contemporary sects do not perform these rituals of renunciation today in all their completeness.
Swami Yogananda, in his autobiography, reports that the last two stages were not practiced in his
renunciatory process. The guru accepted him, gave him a new name, and a new set of yogic garments
(1977).
7. One place where this poetic of identification is displayed vividly, or one may say is enacted, is in the
consultation that a devout Hindu periodically undertakes with an astrologer. The astrologer will ask for his
time and place of birth and sometimes he would study his palm as well. From this information, the
astrologer will produce a document that was originally inscribed on palm leaves but is now available in
print, a record of the atman’s past lives, his present one and how it is going to unfold in the immediate
future, and its destiny after death. The atman is the continuous factor in this transmigration. One’s body
changes from one’s birth to death but atman remains the same and participates in experiencing a continuous
identity. See Perinbanayagam (1982) for a study of astrology and its relationship to the karmic destiny of
the atman.
8. The Sanskrit term for this entity is atman and Sanskrit is the language in which Hindu texts were
composed. Pali is the language of Buddhism and, though it is a derivative of Sanskrit, it contains many
variations in terminology. The word that is equivalent to atman is atta. Putting a negativising prefix to these
two words will give us anatman and anatta. In my discussion of Buddhist identity I have chosen to use both
in order to avoid confusion and to suggest that they are related concepts.
Buddhist logicians would no doubt hold this semiotization of anatta as evidence of “avidya”—
ignorance. For Buddhism there is an absolute separation between language and reality. Fabio Rambelli
notes, “According to a well established traditional doctrine, quoted in some Buddhist sutras, the words of
ordinary language are i) related to superficial aspects of phenomena. ii) uttered in dreams. iii) conditioned
by fallacious attachment to wrong ideas. iv) forever conditioned by the seeds of suffering” (1995: 11).
Logically, such an understanding of ordinary language would have to exclude the discourses of the Buddha.
It was claimed that “the Buddha does not speak, and conveyed his experience in a non-linguistic way,” and
“that the Buddha, on the basis of his states of consciousness, uses a peculiar language consisting in special
systems of signs, which is possible to know and understand” (Rambelli 1995: 11). This exclusion of the
Buddha’s words from semiotic imperatives is but another example of the casuistry in which Indian mystics
and logicians were very adept.
9. There is a certain similarity between the Buddhist view of the self as an ongoing process and those of
the American pragmatists. Kalupahana (1987) has investigated this connection but he focuses exclusively
on the work of William James, whereas the work of G. H. Mead would have proved more fruitful. Sue
Hamilton has examined the textual material of early Buddhism and concluded that the constitution of the
human being “is understood and thought by the Buddha in terms of processes and events” (1996: 194). She
also notes, “I would like to suggest here that the doctrine of anatta is not intended to be a denial of being as
implied in the English, ‘There is no self’ ” (1996: 195). For an account of the beginnings of Buddhism that
situates its emergence in a sociohistorical context, see Kogen Mizuno (1982).
10. Pierre Bourdieu (1980: 143–209) has also shown how different transformations are involved in
organizing marriages between parallel-cousins and the varied and complex social uses to which these
“poetics” can be put.
11. See John Murray Cuddihy (1978) for further discussions of what he calls “Protestant Taste” and
“Protestant Etiquette” and comments on the Motherwell painting itself.
 III

The Self in Action

 Chapter 5

Speaking of the Self

May my speech be one with my mind, and may my mind be one with my speech, O, thou my self-
luminous, Brahman.

The Upanishads

Human individuals who enter into interactions with others have a history and
complex memories and are, typically, neither amnesiacs nor aphasics. They are
able to identify, not only others but themselves as well, and enter into
conversations as selves. Individuals, on the basis of this knowledge of their
selves and whatever knowledge they have of the others with whom they are
interacting, make what are usually well-founded assumptions and open and
conduct conversations on that basis. Not only are they able to identify the other,
but are able to assess the relative standing they have vis-à-vis the other and
conduct the opening and the subsequent business accordingly. By “standing” I
refer here to two features of interaction. First is, the relative social, economic,
and political status of the participants, the “social space” they happen to be
occupying (Clark 1990). In every human encounter, one participant is of higher
status—stands bigger, taller, stronger, more articulate, more powerful politically,
richer, prettier, older, younger, and so on than the other. Further, in each
encounter one may know the other very well, only slightly, or be totally
unacquainted with him or her. If the speaker ignores these factors as he or she
opens the conversation and fails to incorporate them into his or her opening
gambits and keep faith with them during the ensuing proceedings, he or she
would not be able to conduct a successful conversation. Indeed, to ignore them
blatantly one would receive negative sanctions—including the label of insanity.
One can say that such statements would lack the requisite addressivity and
would not be able to elicit the commensurate answers. This knowledge that one
has of the other is also typically colored by emotionality: The earlier encounters
may have been pleasant and warm and fulfilling, in which case the opening may
be easier, or else it may have been unpleasant, insulting, or cold, and the opening
becomes more problematic.
Further, in opening a conversation there is always the issue of who is to make
the first move. While this poses no difficulty with people who know each other
well, when individuals of slight acquaintance come together this problem does
arise. In some societies this is settled by rules based on gender and social status
—women, servants, or lower-class people have to wait for the higher-status
person to open the conversation. If these rules do not dictate the opening move,
it can be made by either party. Once the conversation is opened, the one who
opened it faces certain risks. He or she may be ignored, rebutted, openly
insulted, or even assaulted. On the other hand, the opening gambit may elicit
validating responses, but they may be either “barren” ones or “fertile” ones. In
the former, the response is lukewarm, conceptually impoverished, and
discouraging of further conversational moves, while in the latter the response
invites further conversation (Perinbanayagam 1991:83–84). In other words,
when one opens a conversation he or she puts a self into play and the manner in
which it is received has consequences to it. Every move in a conversation is
aimed at allowing the other to enter the perspective of the initiator and inviting
the other to allow the initiator to enter the other’s perspective. This creates the
conditions for the emergence of the objective reality of perspectives—including
the objective reality of the selves involved. Such a reality is remembered and
shared with others, who remember it too, and used to conduct the affairs of
everyday life.1
Once an individual has opened a conversation and put his or her self on the
line the implications of the ensuing talk to the self are magnified—the self can
be diminished or enhanced (Goffman 1967:37–38). It is in such encounters
where talk is exchanged that a human lives and dies. “Talk,” as Boden and
Zimmerman put it unchallengeably, “is at the heart of everyday existence. It is
pervasive and central to human history, in every setting of human affairs, at all
levels of society, in virtually every social context” (1991: 3). An individual is
present in the world in fact in and through conversations—though not all such
conversations are dialogical. It is in such conversations that an individual
becomes and continues to remain a self. It is the talk that he or she makes and
receives, the conversation to which he or she is a party, that gives a presence to
an individual’s self. When one speaks, he or she is speaking a self and when one
listens, he or she is listening as a self and to a self. In such speakings, one gives
“voice” to the self, and a dialogic voice at that, since the discursive acts that an
individual produces will take account of the other and anticipatorily and
reflexively incorporate the other into the acts. He or she does not, indeed cannot,
speak as an unmemoried and isolated individual insofar as that the very words
that he or she would be obliged to use are already socially and culturally
constituted ones (Bakhtin 1981: 294).
To be present in the world of others, to be socially and interactionally alive
and to be a self in a community of others, one must present discursive acts and
receive them, listen to them, attend to them, and, sooner or later, provide a
returning act. If he or she is unable to do this, then it can be said that he or she is
socially and interactionally absent, unselfed, socially dead. If he or she is
allowed to present only a minimal number of such acts, he or she is only
minimally present and, conversely, those who dominate conversations are
present in a maximal way. An individual can then be said to be able to speak a
self into presence, have it validated, listen to others, validate the selves of the
others, and feel the presence of self in varying saliences and outspokennesses
and emotionalities, obtaining thereby a place for itself in the world. Such a
presence can be discovered by examining the semiotic import of the verbal
productions that are carried in the syntactic, structural, and, wherever possible,
phonological arrangements.
Such a place for the self is obtained by using conversational moves—the
initiation of conversations, their conduct and continuation, and their termination
—to form interactions, groups, and communities. Interactions, groups, and
communities can be discovered as existents by an observer but, for all that, they
have to be systematically constituted and conducted by their various participants.
Such associational forms are strategies that an individual uses to get through the
day and get through a life, adjustive instrumentations for these purposes. Indeed
an individual may have as many such associations as the life-purposes he or she
wants to pursue and in each association he or she must act to first construct it
and then maintain it. This is accomplished by speaking to the others, by entering
and sustaining and terminating conversations. An individual does not, needless
to say, open conversations, introduce a topic, interrupt the other or allow him or
her to have his or her turn, overlap with it, and close a conversation for any other
purpose than to construct interactions, relationships, and communities. These
features of a conversation—what may be termed its armature—discovered and
analyzed by conversation analysts over the years can be shown to readily have
such a purpose. Every conversation is rooted in a relationship: One presumes a
relationship that already exists or anticipates creating a new one. Further, the
very act of opening a conversation—its character, style, form, intonation—aeo
ipso defines a relationship, one that is either validated or rejected.2
One opens a conversation, it can safely be said, in order to enter into a
relationship, fleeting or otherwise, with the other, and opens it in one manner
rather than another to ensure that the other does respond in a manner that is
agreeable to the initiator. Once the opening has been made, one introduces a
topic so that the other and the initiator can continue the interaction. If no topic is
available, the interaction will wither and each participant will have to go his or
her separate way or remain silent, thwarting or truncating the emergence of
intersubjectivity. If they do find a topic on which each could disquisition, they
can continue the interaction. As the interaction proceeds each will have
opportunities to interrupt the other or overlap the other’s remarks. If one does
interrupt the other more frequently than the other does, and the other allows this
to happen, then one party has established himself or herself as the dominant one.
If, on the other hand, one of them protests the other’s interruptions, the other
may acquiesce and join in establishing a more egalitarian relationship. If he or
she continues to interrupt, a quarrel may ensue and the interaction may be
sundered. In closing a conversation again there are prescribed ways to do it: If
one is closing it after an interaction in which there was no quarrel, one
articulates standard phrases, the implications of which are that there will be
further interactions. If one closes a conversation after a quarrel, the issue of
resuming further interactions is left open. If one does close a conversation in the
culturally prescribed manner, interactions will be resumed on later occasions.3
It is a series of such interactions that constitute relationships of the one with
the many and of the many with the one that become communities. In the
conversations that are conducted in standard, routine, everyday interactions, it
may be said that participants harmonize their remarks with those of the others:
Each participant typically understands his or her “instrument” and makes his or
her contribution, verbally and gesturally, to the emerging music. This is not a
mere mechanical role-playing so much as the nuanced hermeneutic coordination
of sounds, gestures, timing, and response to each other and to either the implicit
or explicit leaders of the interaction. The coordination of these activities leads to
the emergence of “social solidarity” in the interactional order. In fact, as Randall
Collins (1988) has noted, the analysis of conversations has taken us back to
Emile Durkheim. The taking and allocation of turns is truly the practice of the
division of labor in the organization of interactions. The warranted practice of
turn-taking in conversation leads to the creation of solidarity, as does the
invocation of an interactionally efficient topic and the practice of decorous
openings and closings and construction of relevant addressivities and
answerabilities—not to speak of the maintenance of the proper demeanor and
deference. The practice of unwarranted interruptions, the failure to generate
topics of mutual interest, indecorous openings and closings, and the failure to
invest proper addressivities and answerabilities in one’s talk will surely create
anomie—as anyone who systematically breaches these rules of conversations
will soon discover.
The conversational transactions are, however, conducted with
instrumentations that are notoriously unstable and unfinished in their signifying
capabilities. This instability has led some to the extremes of nihilistic ecstasy
and others to despair. One can, however, approach these instabilities of
signification as practical problems in everyday interactions with practical
solutions. That is, however imperfect the medium and however subject to
uncertainty it is, individuals go about the business of everyday life, using it to
construct acts by addressing remarks to each other, eliciting answers, and
constructing workable meanings out of them, and using such meanings to
constitute selves interactions and relationships.

THE ANSWERED SELF

A dialogic self in fact is allowed to emerge by the interlocutions that are

constructed by the participants. Interlocutions reflect already constituted selves
of the participants as well as create new dimensions to them. Each such
interlocution enables the individual to objectify himself or herself as well as
enables the other to objectify himself or herself. When people assemble together
and conversation flows, opportunities are provided both to give presence to the
self and locate oneself more or less firmly within the interactions that occur, to
find a place for the self in the ongoing flow. It follows, of course, that if one
doesn’t say anything—or is not allowed to say anything—his or her self is either
absent or is present in only a minimal way. One finds a place and anchors his or
herself in the interlocutory flow that is defined by addressivity and answerability.
Such anchoring of the self by processes of addressing and answering involves
many moves and countermoves each of them oriented to the other. Such
orientations may occur as opening remarks, ongoing discourses, interruptions of
such discourses, and as additions to them—leading to the orchestration of the
interactions and the emergence of opportunities for the selves to play together.
In the following excerpt from a recorded discussion of a meeting of a book
club, one can see this process of presenting and anchoring occurring. The
assembly of people, ostensibly to discuss a book they have all been assigned to
read, produces ready-made topics on which selves can be hoisted. The assembly
consisted of four women: Ann, Mary, Judy, and Susan. They would meet every
two weeks in the home of one of them and spend the evening talking, drinking a
little, and munching on various snacks.4
The book they had decided to read and on which the following disquisition
developed was Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal Dreams:
Mary: A kid in the Southwest, uh, in the Southwest, um, who, um, and I’m not sure when it
takes place. I think it’s not contemporary. It seems more like the ‘50s but maybe I could
be wrong about that and he, uh, just leaves home and like travels into Mexico and then
out of Mexico and a lot of things happen to him. It’s, uh, what, what makes it a nice
book is it’s kind of very perceptive and, uh, and you get a real, yet again real feel for
place and time.
Anne: It’s in the Southwest?
Mary: Yeah, and Mexico.
Judy: Another rediscovering the heartland book?
Mary: Well, rediscovering the Southwest . . .
Moving away time and again. But it, but it’s similar, but it’s also, you know
the . . . about seventeen, eighteen years old so its also kind, kind of coming of age.
Judy: A, uh,. . . .
Mary: But I liked it.
Judy: Um, do we need a contrast? Something terribly witty and brittle, civilized.
Susan: Do you know any books like (laughing).
Judy: Well, we can always read Emma or something (laughing).
Mary: The last one I read was Outcast of the Islands by Joe Conrad which is . . . which I have
to tell you was difficult to get into but it was fabulous. I loved reading it, because it was
just the language and everything. It’s just, I think that really. . . .
Susan: Is it very long?
Mary: No, it’s a little pocket book about that big. Let’s do it. It would be interesting. Also
because it’s about this man who’s really a loner and an outsider and then he meets this
woman and it is one part of the book and like they’ve stuck and it’s like it’s sort of a
disastrous feeling but it’s very good. It’s interesting and the most fabulous part of the
book is the language.
Judy: Outcast of the Islands.
Mary: Yeah.
Susan: What is it again, Mary?
Mary: Outcast of the Islands.
Judy: It’s by Joseph Conrad.
Mary: And you get it, I got it in the library and it’s, it would take you maybe like two days to
read it. It’s really not long.
Judy: If it is short enough, maybe we should read that and the Heart of Darkness.
Mary: I never read that.
Judy: Maybe we should.
Susan: I never read it either.
 Judy: You can read that for extra credit.
Susan: Right, OK.
Judy: had, I think, I had to, I read it in school. I don’t remember it. Which is the film
that . . . Vietnam . . . that’s Heart of Darkness where the one that had Marlon Brando.
Mary: That’s Apocalypse Now.
Judy: Uh, Apocalypse Now. That was . . . but in this Outcast of the Islands.
Anne: Is that right?
Mary: It’s yeah, yeah, yeah, it’s very interesting.
Anne: I never knew that it was based on that?
Mary: Yeah, yeah. Well in Outcast of the Islands . . . the island you can see that the way they
described the natives, did we all see Apocalypse, it’s just that feeling of oppressive like
heat and jungle and people and it’s-sort of like something that you know, never
encounter. It’s also interesting that . . . I think it’s interesting to hear nineteenth-century,
to read anything where nineteenth-century people talk about other cultures with that
kind of unconscious white man’s burden stuff, that is. . . .
Judy: Right.
Mary: Extraordinarily offensive now. You know there are no such things as primitive cultures.
I mean these are stupid people talking, you know there are cultures that are different,
it’s like language. There are no impoverished languages—they just have, they’re just
different.
Susan: Would Conrad be stupid like that?
Mary: Yes, they are all stupid. They refer to these people as really not developed at all, um,
you know, along the evolutionary chain.

(Book Club Transcripts)

It is Mary who begins the proceedings by providing a summary of the book.

She chooses to use the word “kid” as a description of a character who is young
and is about seventeen or eighteen years old. This is a colloquialism that is
typically used to indicate younger children but by extending its range Mary had
chosen to suggest a nonrigid, indeed informal, colloquial character to her self.
The “I” that she deploys here is not a mere shifter: It comes to the others as
qualified and enriched, even from the beginning. It also assumes that the
audience would understand her specialized use of the word “kid.” Further, it
places Mary’s age relative to the character: Compared to her the young man of
seventeen is a kid. She then asserts her authority: “I think it’s not contemporary.”
She is presenting her ability to understand periodization of novelistic materials.
Yet, she adds a qualification to this claim of authority: “I could be wrong about
that.” Once again she claims a fluid self—nondogmatic as well as nonpedantic.
She also makes a judgment and claims responsibility for it and for having
fulfilled her assignment to read the novel and make a valid comment about it. In
the course of the short statement she is also able to indicate that she is distinct
from others: She spoke in a particular voice and the details of her discourse
establish herself as unique and individuated. Mary uses “I” explicitly in this
passage a few times and it is implicit in a number of other instances. When she
uses it, it is an “I” that the others would recognize as Mary’s “I,” the Mary who
is a student of literature, who is known to be well read. Mary’s presentation of
the I of her discourse stands for this distinctive Mary: She knows that she is a
student of literature and that she has read widely, and she also knows that the
audience knows that she has.
When Anne interposes a question, “It’s in the Southwest?” the “I” does not
begin the utterance—overtly. The full sentence that Anne implied, however, was
really: “I would like to know whether you said that the novel was set in the
Southwest.” And Mary answers, “Yeah and Mexico.” In this exchange a new
element of Mary’s biography had entered the “you” that Anne addressed: the one
who spoke earlier, the one who has read the novel, the one who has spoken about
the provenance of the novel, the one who is knowledgeable about literature.
Once again, then, it is not an empty pronoun, but a detailed and developed self
that Anne addressed as “you.” Mary continues and is able to define the locale of
the novel more precisely; she underlines her earlier statement, “What makes it a
nice book is it’s kind of very perceptive and you get a real, a real feel for the
place and time.”
Judy asserts herself at this stage: “Another rediscovering the heartland book?”
She claims her self as the one who knows the field of literature or novels and is
able to classify this one readily. She achieves her own distinction by choosing to
present herself in this fashion and indicating also a cultivated weariness in
saying, “It is another one of those novels.” Mary is now able to distinguish
herself from Judy with minor irony: not the “heartland,” just the Southwest. She
also adds a detail to show, as different from Judy’s characterization of it, it is
also a novel about a seventeen- or eighteen-year-old “coming of age.” This is of
course an allusion to another genre of writing and stands opposed to Judy’s
“rediscovering the heartland” genre. Judy seems to enter a mild demurral
indicated by the sound “A, uh,” but Mary is firm: “But I liked it.”
Judy faces the need to save herself from this mild defeat. She announces once
again a broader claim for her self: “Do we need a contrast? Something terribly
witty and brittle, civilized?” Susan responds to this inquiry, with mild laughter,
and Judy is able to display her breadth of perspective: “We can always read
Emma or something.” Judy also laughs, but she had introduced a contrast with
the novel of the evening, a work by one of the leading novelists in the English
language.
It is evident here that if one had certain information, knowledge, and
competence, in areas that are relevant to the topic of the ongoing conversation, it
could be used to create a stronger presence for the self. If this knowledge is
authentic the others in the interaction will be forced to acknowledge it and grant
the other’s claim to this self. Of course Judy is not merely talking about Emma
and Jane Austen but is achieving a distinction for herself, and the mild sparring
with Mary has accomplished that.
Mary interposes herself here and is not going to allow Judy to run with the
telling literary allusion: “The last one I read was Outcast of the Islands by Joe
Conrad which is . . . which I have to tell you was difficult to get into but it was
fabulous. I loved reading it, because of the language and everything. It is just, I
think that really. . . .” She is interrupted by Susan: “Is it very long?” This
interruption is not really an assertion of power but a recognition that Mary had
her turn and had imparted sufficient information. It in fact is a contribution to the
collective objective of the group—finding a book to read and reading it in time
for the next meeting. Further, it enables the conversation to move along and
contributes to the maintenance of its tempo. Susan is making a distinction here: I
have not read Conrad, while the two of you have, and I don’t even know whether
it is a long novel or short one. Mary is willing to oblige her with an answer,
further distinguishing herself as the one who knows about Conrad.
“No it’s a little pocket book about that big.” And she continues presenting
herself:
Let’s do it. It would be interesting. Also because it’s about this man who’s really a loner and an
outsider and then he meets this woman and it is one part of the book and like they’ve stuck and it’s
like, it’s sort of a disastrous feeling but it’s very good. It’s interesting and the most fabulous part of the
book is the language.

She confirms her claims to distinction as the one who knows her Conrad, is able
to author a statement about it and take responsibility for this knowledge and for
making suggestions that would affect the lives, however minimally, of those she
is addressing, and shows both commitment as well as passion. The emotivity is
evident even without the sounds of her speech: “Let’s do it,” she commands, “It
would be interesting,” she continues, and gives her justification for thinking that
the novel would be interesting. Besides, the story, she says, had a “fabulous”
aspect, the “language.” The use of the hyperbole and the metaphor in the
adjective “fabulous” defines the emotionality of the address.
Once Mary’s speech is done, Judy produces a noncommittal line: “Outcast of
the Islands.”
The repetition of the title of the book indicates a lack of enthusiasm but not an
outright rejection. Mary says, “yeah,” and Susan who is still a little lost asks:
 “What is it again Mary?” And Mary answers her. Judy displays her knowledge
and has her own input:
“It’s by Joseph Conrad.”
Mary is not done with the presentation of her self: “And you can get it, I got it
in the library and it’s, it would take you maybe like two days to read it. It’s really
not long.”
Judy makes a suggestion that is an implicit challenge to Mary: “If it is short
enough, maybe we should read that and the Heart of Darkness.”
This is a subtle move to undermine the ascendancy that Mary had acquired
thus far: You may know your Conrad and the Outcast of the Islands, but I am not
totally ignorant either. I know about another Conrad work.
Mary concedes that she is not familiar with all of Conrad’s works: “I never
read that.” Mary’s position of ascendance is somewhat diminished now, and
Judy continues to assert herself: “Maybe we should.”
Susan once again announces unwittingly that she is a little out of this league:
“I never read it either.”
This also expresses solidarity with Mary and puts Judy alone there wanting
the second novel included in the reading assignment. Judy introduces a joke and
blunts the edge off the sparring: “You can read that for extra credit.”
Susan acknowledges the joke: “Right, OK.”
Judy presses her advantage and authors new details—about her relation to it
and the novel’s relation to current events and popular culture:
“I had, I think, I had to, I read it in school. I don’t remember it.” She then
jumbles her words, but the significance is clear: “Which is the film
that . . . Vietnam . . . that’s Heart of Darkness where the one that had Marlon
Brando. . . .”
Mary intervenes with her: “That’s Apocalypse Now.” This interruption aids
Judy’s discourse and once again helps the conversation to proceed apace. Judy
acknowledges the aid to her recollection:
“Uh, Apocalypse Now. That was . . . but in this Outcast of the Islands. . . .”
She is interrupted by Anne who wants confirmation of the point about
Apocalypse Now:
“Is that right?”
This is followed by a number of overlapping observations and Anne
announces her outsider status anew:
“I never knew that it was based on that?”
The pronouns here have no antecedents in the sentences she has produced but
they are clear enough nevertheless: Was Apocalypse Now based on Heart of
Darkness?
This is followed by a long discourse by Mary. She answers Anne’s questions
about Heart of Darkness and recaptures her role by reverting to the topic of an
An Outcast of the Islands: “Yeah, yeah. Well in Outcast of the Islands you can
see that the way they described the natives, did we all see Apocalypse, it’s just
that feeling of oppressive-like heat and jungle and people and it’s sort of like
something that you know, never encounter. It’s also interesting . . . that I think
it’s interesting to hear nineteenth-century, to read anything where nineteenth-
century people talk about other cultures with that kind of unconscious white
man’s burden stuff, that is. . . .”
Judy encourages her along with an interjection:
“Right.”
This provides a dramaturgically effective break in Mary’s rambling statement.
Mary resumes:
Extraordinarily offensive now. You know there are no such things as primitive cultures. I mean, these
are stupid people talking, you know there are cultures that are different, it’s like language. There are
no impoverished languages—they just have, they’re just different.

Susan intervenes with a question, “Would Conrad be stupid like that?”

And Mary has an answer, “Yes, they are all stupid. They refer to these people
as really not developed at all, um you know along the evolutionary chain.”
Mary’s long statement once again displays very clearly aspects of her self. To
begin with, she brings the conversation back to An Outcast of the Islands and
provides another description of its contents. The description of the heat and the
oppressive vegetation that Conrad uses, both as a metaphor and as an instrument
to create a location, are recalled by Mary and then, using the earlier discussion,
she provides her own metaphor: If you have seen Apocalypse Now, you would
have seen the same thing. This is an aid to her audience to enable them to
visualize what she is describing now, what Conrad created in his novel. She then
introduces a sociopolitical theme: This novel, like other nineteenth-century
novels, contains dated and scientifically unacceptable views about cultures. A
strong, well-informed, and literate self is presented and reaffirmed by Mary.
Distinctions are indeed made, responsibility claimed, authority asserted, and
emotivity displayed, and all are done by making various choices along the way.
Mary’s presentation of the new novel to read, and her disquisition on Conrad’s
other novel having begun as a casual introduction of something to read next,
however, soon elicits the commitment of her self to it. She is loath to let it go,
meets all challenges to its selection, however muted, and becomes identified
with the position. Even on matters that are not central to one’s self at the
beginning of an interaction, an individual can get drawn into a commitment and
an investment of self as the interaction proceeds and others react to the initial
positions and the individual in question reacts to it in turn.
The most striking impression of the conversational inputs by the various
characters in the foregoing discussion is that, after certain initial sallies, the
novel that they were set to discuss was forgotten and an entirely new series of
topics was introduced. It really did not matter, it seemed, what novel they talked
about, so long as they, trusted and interdependent selves that they were, gathered
and discussed something and gave presence to their selves. The discussion, the
discursive acts in them, announced and validated the various selves and gave
them each a presence in a social arena. Each articulation by an individual was
addressed generally to the other members of the group and was answered.
Indeed, the entire proceeding was a series of moves that complemented each
other. In giving presence to their selves, the various individuals started speeches
and often completed them, but often they were also not allowed to finish their
turns. Others cut in and finished the speaker’s remarks or started a new utterance
of their own. These should be considered, not so much as interruptions, but as
elements of an orchestration of the conversational process so that a general motif
could be constituted. Each individual in the group was contributing her own
element, her own noise, to the emergence of a harmony. No doubt some degree
of domination was sought by one individual or other but, overall, the mood of
the conversation was to get ahead with the topic at hand and get along with each
other and experience the presence of their own selves and that of the others.
An examination of a different set of conversational transcripts reveals further
information about the addressive and answerable presence of self in speech. This
is a recording of a conversation between two people made remotely with the
help of a hidden microphone.
Alex: You’re going out in the field.
Bertie: Yeah, always.
Alex: Good. It’s going to be a good day today.
Bertie: Oh really.
Alex: Beautiful day.
Bertie: Oh beautiful, beautiful.
Alex: Beautiful day.
Bertie: So you have everything under control?
Alex: Yeah . . . all right. Bertie, all right.
Alex: See you later on or what?
 Bertie: No I won’t come. . . . I will come later. . . . Please don’t.
Alex: Yeah.
Bertie: Oh wait, wait, I came to you. . . . All kidding aside. . . . This guy I called . . . he doesn’t
have the experience, he doesn’t have it.
Alex: Okay.
Bertie: I don’t know what these fuckers are asking. They gave me insurance before . . . what.
Alex: Okay, okay.
Bertie: That’s why I gave a copy.
Alex: Good. I’ll send it back saying he has no ratings.
Bertie: Good he understands that I didn’t do anything extraordinary? He mustn’t think that.
Alex: Woe.
(Office Transcripts)

This exchange, between Alex and Bertie, is conducted on a substratum of

knowledge of who each is by the person himself as well as by the other. Alex
comes into the conversation knowing who he is in all its relevant details as well
as who he is in relation to Bertie. He knows the role that he has to play with
Bertie, how he is to present his self and with what shadings and colorings such a
presence is to be made available. The same could be said of Bertie: He, too, is a
remembered self that is projected into the interaction and defined and redefined
in the course of it.
The opening gambit itself captures this nicely: “You’re going out in the field.”
For Alex to address Bertie as “you” he must know him and his own relationship
to him; to be able to assume what Bertie was going to be doing that day and
claim the right to ask this question Alex must remember at least one aspect of his
self, just as he must know that Bertie is the relevant self to which this question
can be addressed.
And what does Bertie do? He provides an immediate answer: “Yeah, always.”
He does not challenge Alex, he does not reject the question or repudiate its
implications. Rather, he acknowledges Alex’s self by implicitly accepting Alex’s
right to ask the question as well as the relationship such a question subsumes.
Alex in fact assumes, gently but clearly enough, his role and his self as someone
who is in a superior position in the hierarchy of the bureaucracy from the
opening gambit itself, a presence that is developed as the conversation proceeds.
He comments on the quality of the day with Bertie. It’s going to be a good day
today. This again can be considered as an affirmation of his higher position in
the bureaucracy: It is a person in such a position who is given the right to make
observations about the weather—the right to bring irrelevant matters into the
conversation.
Bertie, however, is not keen to let his official subordination be given more
underlining here than was absolutely necessary. He produces an irony: “Oh
really?” Insofar as that he has to go out in the field whether it was a good day or
not, it matters little to him that his supervisor thinks that it was going to be a
good day. The phrase “beautiful day” is repeated like a motif in a musical piece
in the next few exchanges, one of them using it to maintain domination, and the
other subtly undermining it. Bertie abandons the beautiful day theme and asks,
“So you have everything under control?” Alex may be hierarchically dominant,
but Bertie’s work depends on Alex doing his bit well. Hence, Bertie asks this
question and once again it is only knowledge and recollection of Alex’s
responsibilities that can allow this question to be asked. The “you” in this
encounter is a remembered self of the other, a memory that not only captures the
other’s relevances but also one’s own vis-à-vis the other. The conversation could
not have proceeded along these lines otherwise. This impression is reinforced as
the interaction moves along. Bertie acknowledges Alex’s “all right” with his own
“all right” and then Alex says, “See you later on or what?” On the face of it this
is an innocuous enough question. “See you later” is in fact a conventional
parting gambit in American society. The added conjunction “or” changes the
significance: It is not a conventional closing of the interaction but suggests a
time when a new meeting was to take place. The “or what?” reinforces the
impression and gives a slight edge to the interaction by implying that Bertie may
not honor the expectation of the later encounter. Bertie rejects Alex’s request and
adds a plea, “Please don’t.” The emotionality of the interaction has changed and
suddenly there is an element of threat in Alex’s “see you later.”
In the opening moments of the encounter between Alex and Bertie, Alex’s
domination over Bertie was maintained by subtle moves. This domination
increases perceptibly in the later moves, where, with a series of masterly
interjections and phrasings, Alex is able to bring Bertie to a state of a certain
abjectness. Indeed, the economy with which Alex was able to induce a fearful
state in Bertie is noteworthy. The “or what” phrase and the preposition “on”
before that are able to impart extraordinary significance to Bertie. The one word
“Yeah” from Alex is enough to induce a slight panic in Bertie as well: he goes
into the “Oh wait, wait” move. The “yeah” from Alex that induced this response
from Bertie is not just a colloquial form of “yes”: it carries with it, in the usage
here, suspicion, doubt, the suggestion of disbelief. Bertie pleads, “Wait, wait”
and goes into an explanation: “I came to you.” This is offered as a testament to
his dependability. The broken sentences and the self-interruptions of the onward
flow of the discourse displays some agitation just as does the repetition of the
word “wait.” The implied threat from Alex is dismissed: “All kidding aside.”
Nevertheless, Alex has in fact subtly undermined Bertie’s self with these moves:
from being a mere subordinate in the earlier stages of the interaction, he has now
become an abject, supplicatory one.
The “you” that Alex is dealing with now is slightly different from the one with
which the exchange began, just as is the “me” of Bertie. Bertie’s next move is to
recover some of his lost honor. To another ominous “okay” from Alex, Bertie
proffers, “I don’t know what these fuckers are asking. They gave me insurance
before.” This claim contains a factual statement and an obscenity. Obscenities
are typically used by those of equal status, as an index of the camaraderie that
exists between them or by a superordinate to indicate his disdain for
conventional standards in the company of his subordinates. Using the noun
“fuckers” to describe his contacts, Bertie seeks to regain some honor but is not
spared. He receives a patronizing “Okay, okay” from Alex—a patronization
achieved by repetition, a strategy that recalls a mother pacifying a child. To
further explanations from Bertie, Alex finally produces a fuller response and
seemingly accepts the explanation: “Good. I’ll send it back saying he has no
ratings.” Bertie produces further explanations and Alex produces, surprisingly,
the single word “Woe.”
The interlocution between Alex and Bertie is a carefully orchestrated one that
resonates with the relative status and power of the participants. Nearly every
addressive statement that Alex directs at Bertie speaks of power and status, and
Bertie’s answers define his subordination and even at times a note of seeming
panic. This micropolitics of everyday life, as Clark (1990) calls it, is managed by
managing the addressivity in one’s conversational inputs and their answerability
and putting given emotionalities into them.

THE UNANSWERED SELF

In the presencing and validation of a self through interlocution, often one of the
participants must reject the other’s proffered self, either subtly or crudely, and
seek to elicit, with grace or force, a different one. He or she can refuse, that is, to
answer the proffered self and guide the other in such a way that he or she
produces an alternative self, one that can be more readily answered. While this
can occur in everyday relationships, it is more vividly seen in therapeutic ones,
police interrogations and examinations, and cross examination by advocates in
courts of law.
In the following episode, the selves of the participants are constituted and
given presence by rather complicated maneuvers: The selves of the interactants
are constantly moving and shifting as they talk and get finally defined in the last
stages of the episode. The conversation is between a patient and her therapist,
with the patient resisting one address and granting another to the therapist and
the therapist refusing to acknowledge the presence of a particular self of the
patient in the first part and collaboratively constructing another in the second
part.
Doctor: Dona Jurema!
Patient: Mama. (whining)
Doctor: Dona Jurema!
Patient: Mama, what is it my child?
Doctor: Dona Jurema, let’s talk a little bit.
Patient: What is it you wish to know?
Doctor: O.K.?
Patient: Madam, my mother, don’t you already know everything?
Doctor: mmm.
Patient: Has she not shown you everything?
Doctor: Tell me your full name.
Patient: (baby talk) There is no need to cause the doc, doc, doc, the doc papa papa papa
papa papa papa P-a-u-l-o de A-z-e-e-v-d-o Mu-ti-nho (chanting and baby talk) you
yourself know quite well, better than I, better than anyone, when I get to my ward
I’m gonna tell, I’m gonna tell, this was, this was, this was my secret, this was my
secret, this was, this was, and this was.
Doctor: Dona Jurema!
Patient: My secret.
Doctor: DONA JUREMA (Forcefully)!
Patient: (Singing and baby talk) My dear husband knew very well, he did not come to help,
his dear, dear wife but it does not matter, his good luck will not last that is all I can
wish on him with all my heart.
Doctor: Dona Jurema, how long have you been in the hospital?
Patient: [New tune: church hymn] All dressed in white she appeared bearing round her
waist, the colors of the sky (whining) Hail, Hail, Hail Mary, Hail, Hail, Hail Mary.
What more do you want umh?
Doctor: Dona Jurema (half smiling).
Patient: Umh? You know that I can’t.
(Ribeiro 1994: 3–5)

Branca Telles Ribeiro, from whose study the excerpt is taken, discusses these
exchanges between the doctor and Dona Jurema in terms of the rule of turn-
taking and the processes of Goffman’s “framing” (1974). One can also see these
words from Dona Jurema as a presentation of a self. In this case, an adult had
presented a child self to the doctor, because it can safely be claimed, her usual
adult self had become, for one reason or another, unbearable. The anxiety and
panic that the adult self induced—perhaps because of the failure of her husband
to “support” her—has made her adopt the self of her childhood. She is singing
and chanting and doing baby talk and hailing Mary and the addressing to papa
and mama as a way of handling the anxiety. In classical psychoanalytic terms
this would be called a regression. Harry Stack Sullivan’s reconfiguration of it,
however, seems a more fitting explanation. He argues that in the developmental
history of an individual he or she passes through three basic stages: the
prototaxic, when the newborn is able to communicate only with its body and the
sounds it can make with its mouth; the parataxic, when it uses a rudimentary
language of phrases; and the final syntactic stage, when it is able to use the full
language. In some forms of mental disorder, an adult will often present his or her
self by using the chronologically inappropriate form: He or she will refuse to
speak, but crawl and gesticulate and use other forms of nonverbal techniques of
communication. This would be a presentation of self in which the adult
individual adopts the role of an infant: He or she indicates this self by the
performances he or she presents. When the individual uses words, phrases,
verbal mannerisms and gestures that are appropriate to a child, we have a case of
“parataxic distortion” (Sullivan 1956: 200–202). When a patient has a series of
disasters following the major one, they manifest, Sullivan observes, “a more or
less characteristic distortion of personality, distortion of communication,
distortion of observation of the other fellow and so on” (1956: 202). Such
performances are in fact the presentation of the self of a child and an invitation
to validate it. In Dona Jurema’s case this is exactly what was occurring: She
presents the words and mannerisms of a child and even when she is talking about
her husband, she chants the words and uses “baby talk.”
The discourse that Dona Jurema presents here and the self that she defines and
for which she claims a presence is that of a child, a self that the psychiatrist
steadfastly refuses to acknowledge and validate. A self is presented verbally and
gesturally, but it is not answered. Dona Jurema’s discourse is a manifestation of a
reflexive self. She does not actually use a noun or a pronoun; she does not say I
at the beginning of a sentence, but her discursive allusion and the use of
childlike locutions and mannerism are presentations of the self, are indeed
extended nouns and pronouns. She does not say “I am a child” or “I, Dona
Jurema, is a child” but by using various verbal techniques and strategies she has
in effect made such a claim.
The therapist refuses to accept this definition of self that Dona Jurema had
proffered and proceeds to treat her as an adult patient. This apparently succeeds
because she is soon facing the discharge interview:
Doctor: You were born on what date?
 Patient: On January 11. (nods)
Doctor: Of what year?
Patient: Of 1921. (nods) I am sixty-one. (nods, smiles)
Doctor: You have a son, don’t you?
Patient: I have a son.
Doctor: What is his name?
Patient: Francisco Ferreira de Souza.
Doctor: And he is how old now?
Patient: He’s about forty-two. (looks away, looks at Doctor and smiles)
Doctor: Mmm, you also have a granddaughter, don’t you?
Patient: I have a little sixteen-year-old granddaughter. (raises head;
smiles)
Doctor: Ummm.
Patient: She’s my life.
(Ribeiro 1994: 13)

This is a conventional “discharge interview.” In it the doctor recites the facts

about the patient that are known to him and patient and seeks to discover
whether the patient remembers them and acknowledges the facts of her
biography. In the interview, however, more than that is being accomplished.
Dona Jurema is being recalled to her identity as well as being given significant
details of such an identity: she was born on such and such a day, has a son, was
married, has a granddaughter. In other words, she is being allowed to identify
and classify her self as an adult, wife, mother, and grandmother. She
acknowledges them all, often with a touching alacrity, and introduces a certain
emotionality to the details of her life. She smiles when she tells her age—
perhaps recalling her childlike behavior in the earlier phase—and smiles when
she acknowledges her son and recalls her granddaughter; with magnificent
economy she gives her emotional response to the child: “She is my life.”
She had rediscovered her self, abandoned the one she created when she was
admitted to the hospital, and has now acknowledged all the details that went with
her old being. She now chooses to be the grandmother and mother, Dona Jurema,
taking responsibility for the words she produces by providing coherence to them,
authoritatively claiming her son and her granddaughter, and using these details to
claim distinction from others: she is now Dona Jurema, sixty-one years old, born
on January 11, 1921, mother to no less a person than Francisco Ferreira de Souza
and has, as “her life,” a sixteen-year-old granddaughter. The psychiatrist has
achieved here for Dona Jurema a return to her former identity and made her
abandon the acts and moves of the child self that she had assumed. She is now in
charge of the details of her self, addressively charted for her by the therapist, an
extended you that encapsulated her age, date of birth, motherhood, grandmother-
hood, and a special relationship to her grandchild.
In summary, one can say that these conversational interactions proceeded
under the following parameters: (a) Each participant presented a string of words,
with a presumptive or actual “I” in it and addressed it to the other; (b) These
strings of words contained within them, explicitly or implicitly, indicators that
functioned to define the self of the other so that interactions could proceed
further; (c) Each string of words was uttered by an individual who was
responsible for them and answerable to them; (d) Each speaker was able to
assume knowledge of his or her relationship to the other in order to address him
or her as a you; (e) The reflexive self, the I, and the addressive self, you, kept
changing as the interactions proceeded, indicating that these pronouns are really
summaries of complex and evolving selves; (f) Each string of words was a
product of choices made of the particularized self that was to be presented,
distinctions made in the course of the interaction as to which particular of the
self was present, responsibility and authority claimed for the significance and
effects of the words, and a certain emotivity indicated by them, too.

THE IMPLICATED SELF

Commenting on his work on the emergence of “mind,” G. H. Mead writes that

he was concerned with “cooperative conduct” as it occurred in the “conversation
with others, in conversation with one’s self, and in the significant symbol and in
the appearance of substantive meanings” (1938: 150). More recently Paul Grice
has developed the idea that conversations as such proceed apace as each
participant accepts and practices “the cooperative principle.” He writes,
Our talk exchanges do not normally consist of a succession of disconnected remarks, and would not be
rational if they did. They are characteristically, to some degree at least, cooperative efforts; and each
participant recognizes in them, to some extent, a common purpose or set of purposes, or at least a
mutually accepted direction. (1989: 26)

Grice goes forward with this “cooperative principle” and develops certain
“maxims” by which it is put into practice. The maxims that establish and
advance cooperation in conversations are arranged by Grice into four categories:
quantity, quality, relation, and manner. These maxims, he argues, have certain
“logical implicatures” and, after a discussion of these, Grice considers the
implications of deliberately violating these maxims. If these maxims are
followed when participants in a conversation talk to each other a certain
cooperation between them will occur and the conversation will move smoothly
and efficiently, if perhaps a little uninterestingly. A participant may, however,
refuse to accept one or other of the maxims and opt out of the cooperative
principle. He or she may violate one of them, experience a clash between one
maxim and another, choose one rather than another, flout a maxim, and, finally,
may exploit one or another of the maxims and use such moves to announce or
imply a self that fulfill his or her own purposes.
In addition to the logical implicatures of following or violating the maxims of
conversation, and in spite of Goffman’s dismissive treatment of them for being
“culture and context free” (1983b: 25), one can find uses for them by supplying
the context and the necessary culture. Indeed these logical implicatures, when
supplied with context and culture, seem to have social and interactional
implications.
To the extent that selves are constituted and maintained by conversational
interactions, a certain minimum of cooperation, and, as Goffman showed in his
studies of face work, deference and demeanor (1967), an interactional contract,
seems necessary. There certainly is a social contract to be found in the workings
of a social order and it is most vividly present in the micro-processes of
everyday life. In such cooperative activities, selves are given presence and
sustained. Conversely a participant can refuse to cooperate, fully or partially, and
reject the contract and thereby create consequences for the selves of the
participants. If each of the maxims is considered with sufficient context and
culture, it will be seen that by either fulfilling the demands of the maxim or by
violating them, selves of a particular character are given presence, overtly or by
implication, and a particular kind of interaction is constituted and conducted.

The Maxim of Quantity

For this maxim, Grice provides two submaxims:
(a) Make your contribution as informative as is required (for the current the purposes of the exchange).
(b) Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.
(1989: 26)

A question that arises is: Why? Or rather what are the consequences of violating
these maxims? Grice gives an example in which one of the submaxims is
violated:
A: Where does C live?
B: Somewhere in the South of France.
(1983: 32)
 The answer from B is less informative than is required. If A wants to go and
visit C or write to him, of course further questions can be asked and this
vagueness rectified. However, consider the following exchange:
Ardyth: I called your office several times today and couldn’t get you. Where were
you?
Brendon: Out.

Brendon has certainly violated the maxim of quantity. Ardyth’s statement and
the subsequent question had the following implication: Ardyth had the right to
call the office and good reason to expect Brendon to be at the office and
furthermore had the right to ask this question now because she is his wife. The
response from Brendon, while violating Grice’s maxim, also violates Ardyth’s
rights that she can justifiably claim in mainstream American culture. His
laconism is a rejection of Ardyth’s claims to know where he is at a given
moment during his working day and also a challenge to her right to ask questions
about his whereabouts. In other words, the violation of the maxim of quantity
here is deliberate, purposive, and socially significant: It denies Ardyth’s
addressive presence here and indicates that her claim to a self based on the right
to address a husband in this manner is being refuted. It defines the self of the
respondent very clearly: You are not to ask these questions and if you do, I will
not give you satisfactory answers.
Brendon could have answered his wife’s inquiry with the following locution:
“I was in the warehouse all morning, and I went out to lunch with Mr. Simpson
and then in the afternoon I went to the bank at the instruction of Mr. Simpson
and later I went to the gym and then back to the office at three.”
Is this a violation of the second principle of the maxim of quantity? It is
certainly a more detailed answer with a particular attention to time, and it could
be said that Brendon has been “more informative than was required.” However,
that is only part of the story. Brendon had in fact produced an ingratiating self
here, one that is rather afraid of any imputation that his wife might be inclined to
make about his absence from the office. His answer establishes a particular self
for him in the interaction and defines a relationship with his wife in a particular
way. This may be a violation of the maxim of quantity, but it is a purposeful and
consequential violation, designed to produce narrative verisimilitude to his
answer.
In the first laconic response, Brendon undermined and redefined Ardyth’s self
while in a more voluble response he defined his self in rather abject terms. In
everyday interactions, the effective control of the information given and the
management of one’s own verbal productions are used to define the selves of the
participants and the nature and destiny of the interaction. In the following
episode Michael, by giving away as little information as possible and providing
as little discourse as was necessary, is able to addressively define the self of the
other in the interaction. Indeed Michael achieves a certain invalidation of the self
of the other, a positive undermining of it in the interactional encounter. George is
speaking to Michael. They both work in the same office but Michael is of higher
rank. George begins with an account of his movements.
George: I am on my way down there now, in a little while, to check out to see what he is doing
with my jobs.
Michael: What brings you in today?
(Office Transcripts)

George has in fact anticipated one of the implications of Michael’s question,

which in fact comes after the account is given: why are you here rather than at
the other place, checking? He is here, George says, “to see what he is doing with
my jobs.” And George personalizes the relationship immediately:
George: I just came by to say hello. . . . you know, I haven’t seen you for awhile, you know I figure
we go for coffee one of these days.
(Office Transcripts)

George sounds like a supplicant with the phrases “you know” interjected here
and there. He also did not just “come” to the office, he “came by.” The
subjunctive phrasing, the use of the preposition “by” after “came” all indicate a
certain degree of deference and diffidence. To say “I came to see you” would
indicate a directness and an expectation that Michael would indeed see him. The
addition of the preposition “by” indicates here that George came in the hope of
seeing Alex without the latter having an obligation to see him. It is indeed a
subdued and deferential self that is present here. But Michael does not give any
quarter to George:
Michael: Yeah . . . Give me a call. This week’s difficult.

Michael in fact shows no enthusiasm for this coffee encounter with George.
Not only does he refuse to make a date then and there, but asks George to call
him again and, moreover, not this week. He in fact is violating the maxim of
quantity by not giving enough information to George. Even before Michael
could finish, George interposes:
George: Next week sometime.
 Michael: Next week. Call me early in the week and we will set something up.
George: Okay, great.
(Office Transcripts)

Michael is still controlling the situation and indicates when George should call
and George could barely contain his enthusiasm. It was indeed okay and great
for him that, though his self was somewhat undermined, all was not lost since
Michael had agreed to have coffee with him, “sometime next week.”
No doubt the cooperative principle was at work here too: Michael and George
cooperate by giving presence to their selves in their respective discourse.
Michael by being stingy addressively presences a subordinated self for George
and a dominant self for himself while George by being voluble does the
opposite. These selves were carried over from earlier conceptions and indicated
the relevant statuses of each in larger structures of relations.

The Maxim of Quality

In the course of ordinary conversations, as one speaks and gives presence to his
or her self, the other typically has to take these words and the self that is
presented as substantially true—at least for the time being. In this case, the
auditor can operate under the belief that the speaker is following Grice’s maxim
of quality, which is expanded into two submaxims:

(a) Do not say what you believe to be false.

(b) Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.
(Grice 1989: 27)

Insofar as every statement that one makes to the other embodies a claim about
the self of the speaker and the listener, a lie—defined here as a statement that the
articulator knows to be untrue, insupportable with evidence—makes it difficult,
if not impossible, to conduct an interaction. Such a lie in fact creates a
disjunction between the “I” of the speaker and the “me” that he or she is
creating: The other will grant him or her a self that he or she knows to be false to
the extent that the other does not know that he or she is being told a lie. The
initiator can operate in the interaction and the relationship on the basis of the self
he or she has created by providing ill-founded criteria to the other. However,
there is always the danger that the other will find out, sooner or later, the false
basis of his or her relationship to the individual and alter the character of the
relationship in one way or another.
If, however, the speaker offers a lie to the other to his face, and the other
knows it to be a lie, he or she has one of two courses left open to him or her: (a)
He or she can challenge it then and there, i.e., refuse to answer the proffered self,
refuse to confer on the speaker the me that he or she has sought and face the
consequences. The liar can then change his or her claims and substitute a
different one that the other may accept, although by then this too will be under
suspicion. Nevertheless, the self of the speaker will remain damaged and the
interaction and relationship between the liar and his or her other will also remain
problematic or else the liar can stick to his or her account and further
transactions between him or her and his or her interlocutor will be terminated.
(b) The recipient of the lie can pretend to believe the speaker, thus saving the
speaker’s face and perhaps one’s own as well, and proceed with the interaction
and use this experience to influence his or her relationship with the liar in the
future. This liar will now have a referential self that will influence his or her
relationship with the one to whom he lied as well as the others to whom the latter
would communicate his or her findings.

The Maxim of Relation

For this maxim, Grice provides only one recommendation: “Be relevant” (1989:
27). Grice expands on this as follows: “I expect a partner’s contribution to be
appropriate to the immediate needs at each stage of the transaction” (1989: 28).
One obvious conclusion of being less than relevant is that the self being
presented or addressed is not being fully realized in the interaction. One
addresses the other in vain, and the addressor either gives up the interaction or
changes the topic in order to draw the self back into the conversation. In more
extreme cases, irrelevance in conversational exchanges is taken as a symptom of
“mental illness” or neurologic disturbances. In such cases the self becomes
absent or irrelevant to the ongoing proceedings. Indeed, one way to absent one’s
self from the ongoing proceedings is to deliberately violate the maxim of relation
and ask in the midst of a monologue from the other, “What were you saying? I
was not paying attention.” Another way is to say something that was totally
unconnected to the preceding statements and change the topic. Grice’s example
makes this point:
“At a genteel tea party, A says Mrs. X is an old bag. There is a moment of
appalled silence and then B says The weather has been quite delightful this
summer hasn’t it? (1989: 35)
With this maneuver B has disassociated himself from A’s remark, indeed from
A’s self and its addressive imputations, refused to be answerable to it, and moved
his self into a new position and in a different direction.
 In either case—that is when one provides unwittingly an irrelevant remark,
one that is unconnected narratively to the earlier one, as well as when one
deliberately disconnects the relationship to the earlier remark—the relation to the
self is evident. In the first case, the self could be said to have been absent insofar
as it was not connected to the earlier remark and in the second case one
particular self was rejected and a new one substituted. The controlling of
relevance, it appears, is managed by self and other in various ways: One brings
the other by one or more remarks back to relevance, deliberately ignores the
other’s remark to make a point, or else one disattends the other’s remarks and
proceeds to the important business at hand. The latter can be seen in the
following excerpts. The participants are selecting a date for their next meeting:
Susan: I am not back from vacation until July 10th.
Mary: I am leaving on the 17th.
Susan: I am gonna read those two books on vacation.
Anne: Isn’t that funny. The 10th and the 17th. I have two things none of which would interfere,
one is the dentist . . . and that is during the daytime. (laughing)
Mary: How about the 12th?
Judy: Is Wednesday the 12th?

(Book Club Transcripts)

Anne’s statement here violated the maxim of relation: The two things she has
to do between the 10th and the 17th of July in the daytime are of no consequence
to the meeting of the book club. Her statement is routinely ignored by the next
two speakers, who in fact set the date for the next meeting between the 10th and
the 17th when Anne had the two things to do. Lacking relevance, and therefore
lacking addressivity, she is not answered, essentially canceling her self, for the
time being at least.

The Maxim of Manner

By the category of manner, writes Grice,
I understand as relating, not . . . to what is said, but how what is said is said, I include the super-
maxim—”Be perspicuous”—and various sub-maxims follow such as:

1. Avoid obscurity of expression.

2. Avoid ambiguity.
3. Be brief (avoid unnecessary prolixity).
4. Be orderly.
 (Grice 1989: 27)

The implication of these maxims for the presencing of self are manifold.
Obscurity of expression when it is directed at the other in a conversation will
make it difficult, if not impossible, for the recipient to define the self of the
initiator and address it in return. In fact, the addressive self of each participant
will be diminished if not actually absent, making interactions and relationships
difficult to sustain. And certainly the nuanced and graded self that emerges in the
course of ongoing conversational interactions will fail to emerge. The extreme
case here would be someone whose language is foreign to the recipient of the
communicational moves so that he or she understands little or nothing. In such
encounters, it is safe to say, only fragmented selves emerge interactionally and
addressively and even referential and reflexive selves may be affected adversely.
Consider the case here of the Japanese exchange student Yoshi Hattori in
Louisiana who dressed in a Halloween costume and in the company of an
American friend went looking for a party on Halloween. Here is a summary of
the description of the events of the night by Yoshi Hattori’s friend at the trial:
We knocked on the side door and hid in the bush. A woman opened the door. We jumped out of the
bushes and scared her. She screamed and shut the door. After that, I told Yoshi that maybe we were at
the wrong house. So, we turned and started to walk back toward the car and then we saw a light come
on and heard the door open again. I told Yoshi that maybe this is the right house. We turned around to
face the side door and a man came out. The man yelled “freeze,” but Yoshi continued dancing and
jumping toward the man in a fast pace. I suddenly noticed that the man held a gun in both hands with
it pointed toward Yoshi. At that point I got real scared because I knew Yoshi didn’t understand English
that well. Yoshi got within a few feet of the man, and he shot Yoshi. Yoshi fell backwards. The man
lowered the pistol, stepped back into the house and shut the door.
(Vanderhoof 1997)

The occupant of the house sees an unusually, perhaps alarmingly, costumed

young man who could not explain his presence. He could only speak a phrase
about the party. The occupant shoots the young man, killing him. He is later
acquitted on charges of manslaughter. The addressive presence of the young man
was ambiguous to the occupant: Visually he looked strange and threatening, his
manner was exuberant, and he was present in a territory to which he was not
entitled. These anomalies could have been obviated by a verbal explanation that
he, being not fully tutored in English, could not provide nor could he understand
the imperative “freeze.” It is clearly in one’s best interest to claim the right self,
reflexively and addressively, by using the appropriate locutions to avoid
ambiguity.
Interactions in which one elects to remain silent can also be taken as extreme
examples of obscurity: The self of the person is unavailable for interaction.
Examples of such elective silences, the consequent absence of self-presence, and
the erroneous or undesirable imputation of self, are those who are accused of
crimes and choose not to reveal crucial information. Julius Rosenberg, it was
believed, would have had his death sentence commuted to life imprisonment if
he had elected to reveal the members of his coterie of spies (Pilat 1952). If he
had done so, he might have saved his life and that of his wife Ethel, but he
would also have changed the presence of his self: He would have acknowledged
that he was in fact an agent of the USSR and a member of a coterie of spies. He
remained silent and obscure and years later people were debating the nature of
his self.
Grice’s interest in ambiguity and its implications for conversational
interaction are confined to those that are deliberate and intentional. We must
consider, however, both forms of ambiguity, the intended and the unintended. To
take up the first, in such presentations of ambiguity, a self is achieving its
presence as one familiar with the nuances of language as well as one possessing
complex attitudes. Grice’s own example indicates this: the general who captured
the province of Sind in India for the British sent a message to the Foreign Office
in London with just one word in Latin “Peccavi,” which can be translated as “I
have sinned.” He had reason, no doubt, to believe that those in the Foreign
Office knew enough Latin to understand his code. The pun involving two
languages, however, also reveals something about the general’s attitude: The
taking of the Sind was not a totally noble enterprise and that, though he and the
British may now have Sind, they have also sinned. Further, it also reveals a
general given to wordplay and hence to play, a self that is both or alternately
(ambiguously?) religious and playful.
In producing deliberate ambiguity in one’s communications he or she can also
intend to deceive the other and claim a self that is not warranted. A man having
spent his last five years in jail may well answer the query about his whereabouts
with “I was out of local circulation.” This can signify that he was (a) traveling
overseas, (b) living in another part of the city or country, (c) in a mental
institution, or (d) in prison. The recipient of this statement may choose not to
probe further and demonstrate his tact or choose to probe further and
demonstrate his inquisitiveness. There are, however, special relationships in
which the latter course of action is mandatory—for example, in interviewing
someone for a job in which the history of the self of the applicant is relevant.
Unintended ambiguity results from either careless use of locutions or, in the
use of certain phrases that are inherently ambiguous, being interpreted in one
way rather than another. A burglar is holding a gun to a policeman and the
policeman says, “Give that thing to me” and the burglar’s accomplice, standing a
few feet away from the burglar himself, says, “Let him have it, Chris.” Chris, the
burglar with the gun, shoots the policeman and he is wounded. A few minutes
later Chris shoots and kills another policeman. In the trial of the two men—Chris
Craig and Derek Bentley—Bentley’s lawyer argued that the phrase “Let him
have it, Chris,” was a response to the policeman’s request, “Give that thing to
me,” and was a conciliatory move. That Bentley was also standing apart from
Chris, was already in the custody of another policeman, and did not make any
move to be either aggressive or to escape indicated circumstantially that Bentley
could have signified to Chris to surrender the gun. The prosecution, however,
argued—and police witnesses claimed as well—that Bentley had in fact
“incited” Chris to shoot the policeman. The jury, with strong incitement from the
Lord Chief Justice of England, who presided over the trial, convicted both for
murder. Chris Craig, who had in fact pulled the trigger and killed the policeman
and who was also the leader of the other, was sentenced to life in prison, because
he was sixteen years old, while the slightly older Bentley was sentenced to death
and eventually hanged.5
In this instance, an ambiguity that was not intended and was a result of a clash
of the colloquial significance of an expression and the literal one resulted in the
conviction of Bentley. Colloquially, “Let him have it” can signify, “Let him have
the works” and be taken to be a demand that Chris Craig kill the policeman. In
this case, however, Bentley’s usage was a continuation of the policeman’s
demand, “Give that thing to me”: the “have” in Bentley’s expression
reciprocating the policeman’s “Give” and the “it” in Bentley’s expression
referring to the “that” of the policeman. The plausible interpretation here was
that Bentley, having already surrendered to the police, was asking Chris Craig to
surrender the gun as well as himself. In the circumstances in which he found
himself—gunfire around him, police officers in control of him and of the
proceedings—Bentley also had to be brief, all too brief as it turned out. The
expression he used came to be taken as an expression of an aggressive,
rebellious, and murderous self, a self of a proletarian character with no respect
for property and its ownership, as the Lord Chief Justice defined him for the
jury.
The relevance of Grice’s observation becomes more apparent when we
examine what he describes, in a later paper, as “further reflections about the
proliferation of the senses.” As an antidote to the unhappy consequences of such
proliferation, Grice notes,
I would like to propose for acceptance a principle which I might call Modified Occam’s Razor: Senses
 are not to be multiplied beyond necessity. Of course the application of this principle would depend on
what was to be counted as necessity. (1989: 47)

If only Bentley had used a noun, instead of a pronoun . . . yet, I do not want to
claim that Bentley was hanged for using a pronoun . . . or do I?
In the less momentous encounters—in everyday conversations, courtship,
discourses, quarrels and so on—clarity and the production of the “senses” of
words and sentences that are subject to Occamite principles may present and
display selves with which it would be easier to cooperate. Nevertheless, there is
no doubt that such precision is difficult to achieve in everyday encounters. In
such encounters, unlike the case with Bentley, there is the chance for the other
interlocutors to ask for clarification, specification, and so on if and when
necessary and if the imputation of a particular identity to the self is made
addressively, it can be denied in the response and a new attribution elicited.
This can occur in ongoing discursive interactions as they proceed with various
bumps and grinds. Each input into the conversation uses various words that the
other can take to signify a subtly different meaning than was evident on the
surface, either reject it or expand on it on his or her own, and redefine the
ensuing communication as well as the selves involved in them. These
ambiguities provide opportunities for individuals to shade their selves in varying
colorations and contours as the conversational interactions proceed. These plays
of differences do not so much obviate the presence of self as give it the means
for the implying of a complex and variable self.
In the following discussion in the book club there are seven participants, but
only a few of them speak—Judy, Mary, and Anne.
Anne: Mary, is this going to be our last meeting for . . .
Mary: I am not. . . .
Anne: For the season?
Mary: This is a democracy; this isn’t my agency, for Christsake.
Judy: This is the first time we have talked about there being a leader.
Anne: Well, we assumed.
Mary: You assumed too much.
Judy: Who is the co-ordinator then?
Anne: The cat wants its dinner.
Judy: We have had meetings in the summer, or later.
Mary: Yeah.
Judy: I remember wearing sandals.
Anne: It will be kind of fun. In the other book clubs I have belonged to, there is a leader, the
leader you know first reads the book then might do some research about the author and if
we are reading a period piece you know, you might do a little research about what’s
 going on in at that time and it is kind of fun.
Judy: I have been in a book club like that. I like that.
Anne: Which is kind of fun, so it gives you a kind of reference.

(Book Club Transcripts)

Anne’s question, “Is this going to be our last meeting?” is addressed to Mary
and this imputes to Mary a leadership role. The mere putting of the question
addressed to Mary is enough to allow this imputation to be made. Mary counters
with “This is a democracy; this isn’t my agency for Christsake” and rejects the
imputation. Not only has Mary interpreted the question as one that regarded her
not merely as a leader but as a dictator or autocrat. This is the absent word that is
signified by the alacrity with which Mary jumps to the word “democracy”—a
word with rich implication in American society. In the usage adopted here, it
does not refer to an organized political system but to an egalitarian and
consultative pattern of relationships in everyday life. Mary is keen, in fact, to
indicate that her self is not either a dictatorial or autocratic one, but a democratic
one, a standing of her self achieved by using one word and then qualifying it by
saying “This is not my agency,” with additional emphasis provided by the
blasphemy “Christsake.”
Judy retracts the imputation of autocracy, if indeed there ever was one in
Anne’s question, by using the word leader in her locution: “This the first time we
have talked about there being a leader.” Anne rushes in with “Well, we
assumed.” Mary is once again quick to shield herself, this time, of being even a
“leader”: “You assumed too much,” she says and continues to shade her
presence. Judy continues to save the situation by using a more, shall I say,
democratic title now: “Who is the co-ordinator then?”
A cat has wandered in and is demanding attention. Anne changes the topic by
referring to the cat. The remark about the cat is of course irrelevant to the topic
at hand, but the visible presence of the cat and the fact that it was making a noise
makes the remark acceptable and will not indicate either a deranged or absent
self for Anne. Far from that being the case it turns out to be an adroit move by
Anne to divert attention from the uncomfortable moment that is developing. In
fact, it indicates a coloration of Anne’s self as one that is attentive to her
surroundings and concerned with maintaining decorum. Judy gets back to the
main topic: “We have had meetings in the summer.” And she remembers
wearing sandals. Anne enters the scene now with a long statement that addresses
the remark with which this entire episode began—her question to Mary that
made her a leader: “In the other book clubs I have belonged to, there is a
leader. . . .” This statement speaks to the earlier remark, justifies it, and seeks to
persuade Mary, or someone else, to become a leader, because it was “fun.” Anne
had redeemed herself as one who does not deliver ill-advised questions, but as
one who knew what she was doing; she has reshaded herself into this by giving
significant detail about the leader’s role and responsibility in the other book club.
Further, this move softens the situation by introducing “fun” as the reason to
have a leader rather than a desire for an autocracy. This is consistent with her
earlier interjection about the cat as a means of diffusing conversational tensions.
It is clear that the presence of variations in the interpretation of the texts that
are available in the course of interactions allows for the emergence of shading in
the construction of self, shades and shifting differentiations that result from the
existence of multiple significance of words. An individual can use this property
of discourse to introduce ambiguity deliberately and achieve an incoherence to
one’s self, or to both accept an imputation and alter it to one’s advantage by
deliberate shadings. This can be seen clearly in the following exchange. It is a
point in a telephone conversation that Joseph and Sam were having.
Joseph: The reason I called, I’m gonna be in the city office tomorrow so you won’t reach me.
Sam: I thought you go on Thursdays now.
Joseph: I’m gonna alternate. I’ll take the day Thursday, you know Thursday is a bad day for
me because I have school Thursday night. Normally it would be okay ‘cause I can
leave. I’m downtown already, but, I tried the last time and I got there like an hour
and half, two hours early and there was nothing to do. I was just wasting time.
Sam: Oh, okay.
(Office Transcripts)

Sam is subtly asking Joseph for an explanation of Joseph’s movements, and

the change in the normal routine of his duties. Joseph colors his explanation with
a lot of details about his condition: his “school” in the evening, the waste of his
time. To his explanation, Sam says, “Oh, okay.”
Joseph goes on and introduces another shade by an apparent case of stuttering
—a self that is uncertain, apologetic:
Joseph: Well, I don’t I’ll I’ll probably do it tomorrow. I am I’ll, I’ll. . . .
Sam: I figured you go on Thursdays.
Joseph: Yeah.
Sam: Your leg still bothering you?
Joseph: Yeah. It cleared up for awhile and then it flared up again because I keep walking on
it when I had gout. I just forced myself. I pulled a tendon in my foot so it is very
irritating.
Sam: Can you drive?
Joseph: I can drive, because it is my left foot.
Sam: I know.
 Joseph: Because I have to use the elevator, I can’t go where there are stairs.
Sam: Yeah.
(Office Transcripts)

It can be seen in this exchange that each participant was seeking to create a
presence with his discursive acts, but a presence that was subtly varied as the
exchange proceeded: It begins with Sam as a demanding and uncompromising
boss and then abruptly shifts to a Sam who is solicitous about Joseph’s health.
This, too, is shaded presence: on the one hand it shows concern and on the other
it is a question about Joseph’s capacity to continue the work he has been
assigned to do. Sam is able to present himself as aloof and interested, solicitous
and calculating, domineering and compassionate within the confines of a brief
interaction. Joseph, in turn, gives answers that are detailed descriptions of his
physical condition, saying that in fact he is handicapped, but qualifying it by
saying that as long as there are elevators, he can still do the work. The subtly
shaded implications are accepted by Joseph—who is after all in a subordinate
position—and it is reshaded by him in equally subtle ways.
Shading a self is an ongoing activity that results from the multiple significance
that words have and acquire in given situations and interactions. This shading
can occur spontaneously in ongoing conversations, or they can be used with
forethought so that a vivid self is not made available to the other. Such shadings
are used to imply a self for the other as for the individual himself or herself.
The submaxim “be brief” brings in the idea of parsimony again and indeed
overlaps with the maxim of quantity. Grice expands it with “avoid unnecessary
prolixity.” In other words, there is a socially and situationally determined
measure of necessary prolixity in discourses. Consider the following exchange,
the concluding moments of the discussion in a book club. They are discussing
the date of the next meeting:
Mary: How about the 12th?
Judy: Is Wednesday the 12th okay?
Mary: Yes.
Susan: Oh, I think.
Mary: OK, where?
Judy: 1350, 174th Street.
Susan: 174th?
Judy: 174th.
Susan: Could you repeat the address?
Judy: 1350 174th Street.
(Book Club Transcripts)
 Clearly there was no unnecessary prolixity in this discussion: parsimonious, to
the point, and the social and situational purposes of the discussion were fully
realized. Consider an alternative:
Susan: I am not back from vacation until July 10th. John and I and the kids are going to Crete.
We were there last year too and we want to see Knossos again. The kind . . .
Judy: Okay, It is the 12th then.

It would have been appropriate for Judy to have cut Susan off at this stage and
brought the discussion back to the main topic even though Susan’s discourse was
an attempt to give some color to her self by giving details about her vacation
plans. Insofar as the topic was the date of the next meeting, Susan’s detailed
description of her vacation was unnecessarily prolix. If indeed the topic on the
table was Susan’s vacation plans, her discourse was necessarily correct and
parsimonious: It gave details of where she and her family were going and
answered the implicit question of why they were going to the same place they
visited the previous year. That is, the prolixity or brevity of the discourse
depends on the self that is suitable to be presented at defined occasions.
The last of the submaxims, be orderly, however, depends on the degree of
orderliness that one can expect in a conversational discourse. Needless to say, a
certain degree of orderliness is necessary so that the other can answer the
discourse intelligently and fruitfully. However, conversational analysts have
discovered many structures to discourses that on the surface may seem
disorderly but do nevertheless fulfill a variety of pragmatic purposes. These
structures of everyday discourses, discovered and painstakingly documented by
the conversation analysis—topic generation, turn-taking, interruptions, overlaps,
side-sequences, embeddedness, preliminaries to conversations and preliminaries
to preliminaries, corrections by others and corrections by self, repairs of
conversational inputs by self or by other, listing, and closings—add complexity
to interactions and achieve rich communicative goals. They in fact
systematically qualify the self of the addresser and addressee and shade their
respective presences in the interaction. Yet, one can take this complexity of
structures in one’s discourse to extremes and prevent the other from answering
him or her. Indeed, if one is thoroughly disorderly, it would be taken as a
symptom of mental illness. Consider this:
Losh, I don’t know what it is, you see—she says I don’t’ know, I’m sure. There is Cinderella. There is
a much better play than that. “I don’t know” I said. He is an awful idiot. Oh dear God, I’m so stupid.
That is putting two and two together—saying I really don’t know—saying Cathie, and so I observe—
and flowers.
 (Henderson and Gillespie, 1944; in Abse, 1971:55)

The allusions, the side-references, and the pronominal references are all in
such disarray that no commensurate answers could be provided for this
discourse. Compare this to a discourse from a member of the book club:
I went to that Monticello, which has been really fixed up, beautifully restored a few years ago and I’ve
read a lot of these things that he had written and there is no question that he was a racist. On the
other hand that was one of the most interesting places I have even been. He was so incredibly
brilliant. I mean the breadth of his mind and the things he did. He was a philosopher, and you know
this, a scientist who did all these real innovations in terms of farming techniques. He is an art
collector. He’s it is just amazing, in Monticello. A wonderful house.

(Book Club Transcripts)

A long disquisition on Thomas Jefferson and his famous home, and it is

without a doubt a rather disorderly one. After the initial announcement of her
visit to Monticello, Susan says, “which has been fixed up; beautifully restored.”
This is on the surface a disorderly redundancy but on close inspection it will be
seen that the second phrase introduces additional qualifications to the first:
“fixed up” is a colloquialism more properly used to work on a small scale, on an
unimportant place, whereas “restored” alludes to major and significant
enterprises. The word often occurs in conjunction with art and sculpture, and
archeology; a damaged work of art is restored, broken sculpture is restored, the
palace at Knossos was restored by Arthur Evans. With the adverbial qualification
of restored by “beautiful,” the Jeffersonian home has been elevated in stature to
that of a work of art or an archeological find. The redundancy here succeeds
superbly in conveying significant information and, above all, the attitude of the
speaker. Immediately, however, she adds another qualification to her attitude:
“No question that he was a racist.” She may well admire Jefferson and his home,
but she must acknowledge, by using another disorderly intrusion, that she knows
that he was a racist and that she does not condone that: “No question,” about
that. Again this intrusion indicates another of her attitudes. But she is off again
indicating her admiration for Jefferson by cataloguing, not in the simple form of
listing them, but by a series of sentences with a number of qualifying terms, the
extent of Jefferson’s achievements: brilliant, breadth of mind, philosopher,
scientist, innovator. The disorderliness of this discourse functions to indicate
both the contradictoriness of the man about whom the address is being made and
the complexity of the attitudes that the speaker had toward him—indeed the
complexity of her self.
In formal exchanges, such as the examination and cross examination of
witnesses in courts of law, these embedded structures will not be allowed. Any
disorderliness, going into side-sequences and giving embedded answers, would
be, typically, truncated and the witness brought back to the main thread. A
minimal self is all that is required in these interactions: I was there, this is what I
saw, not what his friend thought about what he saw and not what his friend’s
wife, who is a doctor, thought about it. No doubt, however, that orderliness of
one’s utterances—that is, productions that are not embedded with allusions, side-
sequences, and conditionals and contractions, not to speak of contradictions and
syntactical, semantic, prosodic, and metaphorical infelicitous—need to be
avoided. To violate this maxim systematically is not only to achieve obscurity of
communication, but it also makes one become socially ineffective and to absent
one’s self from the felicity of being in a world of others.
To conclude, to debate whether the self exists and if so what is its “form” or
“shape” and ask whether it has a content and, if so, what is the nature of the
substance that is its content, are questions that betray an entrapment in
substantivist metaphors. Phenomena can exist in the world without having to
possess a finite shape or a finished form, without being a container in which
various items are stored or concealed. Some phenomena, or perhaps all
phenomena, exist as moments in ongoing processes of definition and
redefinition, their contours and boundaries changing and rearranging themselves,
but always subject to logic of differentiation. The self is such a phenomena: An
individual gives it presence by various acts, discursive and otherwise, and others
respond to it. In the course of such transactions a self, of varying shades and
contours to be sure, is constituted and sustained, with various degrees of
efficiency and success. Such a presence for the self is achieved by the discourses
that the individual has with himself or herself as with the others. Insofar as any
given individual is always in communion with himself or herself, as with the
others, presumptive or real, a self is always present.
Such a self exists as the relational positing of a subject vis-à-vis an other in a
verbal and visual drama of human relations. It is a relational position because it
is achieved only in the presence of others, real or imagined, and, with their
cooperation and support, may have to be surrendered, sooner or later, and be
replaced by another. As such, the self is not a mere center of the discourse and
does not claim any a priori privilege. Such claims would lead to solipsism.
Rather, an individual speaks and expects to be heard and answered as he or she
hears, and listens to, and answers the speeches of the others. As one speaks he or
she expects to be not only heard but answered as well, that is, supported or
rejected, accepted or contradicted, with varying shades in between these binary
opposites.

NOTES
1. In recent years the individual as an amnesiac has become the favored version in some theoretical
perspectives. In ethnomethodology the individual is viewed, as a matter of policy always in his or her
situated capacity and accomplishing a reality in the situation itself all by himself or herself—though even
these pronouns may be unsuitable in this context. John Heritage (1984: 242), in his discussion of
conversations as “context-shaped” and “context-renewing,” conspicuously disprefers, if I may say so, a
discussion of context-remembering, not to speak of situation-remembering. Boden and Zimmerman express
this situational specificity of ethnomethodology very succinctly as follows: “Structure . . . is accomplished
in and through the moment-to-moment turn-taking procedures of everyday talk in both mundane and
momentous settings of human intercourse” (1991:17) and advance the view that one can consider social
structure only in this manner. It is no doubt true that structures are “accomplished” in this manner. However,
the people who do all these “accomplishments” are irrefutably minded creatures who know their places in
the relevant structures before they begin all their momentous and mundane accomplishments and remember
them and use them. Not only do they use their recollections, they use them in cognizance of the
consequences of the particular uses to which they are putting them. If there is no remembering there can be
no generalization and continuity of action with the past.
In a discussion of Giles Delueze’s and Felix Guattari’s theories of the subject, William Bogard too
argues for a view of the human as “body” that attends to the immediate context of its “desires” in the world
and thereby becomes a “subject.” He puts it this way: “And the whole problem of the subject—its genesis
and historical development—is a problem of how desire is actualized (segmented, ordered) on the surface
of bodies, that is, as the sense of bodies” (1998: 56). If desire is actualized in this way in the genesis of a
subject, it still will presumably remember it and allow it to influence the next actualization. From Bogard’s
rendition one gathers, however, that in facing a new situation, this “body” will not remember that he or she
was a subject in an earlier one and will have to start all over again and become a new subject insofar as it is
only a “body.” This view of the subject as being born, again and again, to suit the “desires” of every
situation leads Bogard to an egregious misrepresentation of the work of G. H. Mead and Herbert Blumer.
Bogard opines, “Deleuzian (and Guattarian) ‘subjects’ are not the selves of interactionist and constructionist
theories, which magically conjure themselves into existence in the process of speaking or communicating”
(Bogard 1998: 65). There is neither magic nor conjuring involved in the presencing of selves in interactions;
rather, each individual remembers his or her past “desires” and remembers the meanings they elicited and
gives presence to them as his or her self, verbally and gesturally. The claim here is that any given infant (as
a body?) enters an already constituted society and is transformed into a self, that is, endowed with a rich
memory as it undergoes various experiences, a memory that is both emotional and cognitive.
To deny the presence of a remembered self is to commit one’s theories to a position that can only be
described as solipsistic fascism: every man and woman his or her own dictator constructing a world without
attending to his or her own memory and the memory that is shared with others in the shape of institutions
and history. The approaches to the “subject” that Bogard recommends and to “structures” that Boden and
Zimmerman recommend so enthusiastically are truly awesome in their virtuosity—like the tricks performed
by Houdini. They initially put various constraints on themselves with what may be termed epistemological
locks and chains and fight their way out, impressing themselves and a few others. In dealing with the nature
of the subject this procedure consists of inventing certain a priori conditionals and then showing how one
particular theory does not meet these conditions and then proposing another theory. These procedures are no
doubt excellent as tricks, and amusing too, but quite unnecessary and unproductive in the work of
sociology.
 2. These features of conversations—openings, topics, turn-taking, interruptions, overlaps, closings—are
derived from the work of Harvey Sacks, Emmanuel Schegloff, and Gail Jefferson. They have been
described variously as the “technology” of conversations and as “devices.” I am using these devices here to
investigate the pragmatic consequences of their occurrence in interactional talk. The work of Sachs,
Schegloff, and Jefferson is described and discussed in Heritage (1984), Boden (1994), and Boden and
Zimmerman (1991).
3. In fact in many societies the ritual phrases used in closing a conversation express goodwill or suggest
that there will be further interactions. In English “goodbye” has been used from at least 1709 to leave
someone and “cheerio” has been used in England from 1910 to say farewell, I gather from the dictionary.
“Farewell” itself indicates the required sentiments for leave-taking. “Good day” and “good morrow” again
express the wishes of the leave-taker for the other. If one leaves the other with these sentiments, he or she
can hope for and expect a resumption of interaction in the future. In the Indian subcontinent and Sri Lanka
one leaves an interaction by saying “I will go and come back”—often contracted, interestingly enough to “I
will come now.” In Tamil for instance it is “nan varan” and in Sinhalese it is, “mama gihan eneva.” In
Marathi, it is again “I will come back”: “mi yeto.” In these rituals and their vocabulary, then, the solidarity
of the interactants and their hope of continuing the same are expressed and affirmed. This is nicely
paralleled in the American “see you later” and “see you soon.” In French “adieu” again expresses goodwill
and fare wellness with the help of God, while “au revoir” indicates further interactions. One can, of course,
leave the other by using hostile forms. He or she can say, “drop dead” or “fuck off” or “damn you” or the
Shakespearean “away, slight man,” and obviate further solidary connections.
4. In this chapter, I am using three kinds of conversations: one made up by me to make a point, recorded
conversations made at an office of law enforcement, and the discussions at a book club. The latter two are
reproduced in italicized form, while the made-up examples are in standard type. The excerpt from Ribeiro is
reproduced in the same form as the original.
5. This is a famous incident that occurred in England in 1953 and has been made into a film, Let Him
Have It (Vermillion Productions, Peter Medak, Director). It has also generated a number of books, songs
and a social movement dedicated to clearing Bentley’s name even after these many years. In late 1998 he
was exonerated by a judicial commission. An authoritative account of the case can be found in Yallop
(1990).
 Chapter 6

The Plays of the Self

So I wish you first a

Sense of theater; only
Those who love illusion
And know it, will go far:
Otherwise we spend our
Lives in confusion
Of what we say and do with
Who we really are.
W. H. Auden

A dictionary provides a column describing the various significations of the word

“play.” Among these, I would like to choose a few to indicate the meaning in
which I want to use the word in association with self. To begin with, to play is
“to perform or act (a role or part) in a dramatic performance.” The dictionary
gives the following significations:
To pretend to be; mimic the activities of: The boys played cowboy. To compete against in a game or
sport. To take advantage of (another’s attitudes or feelings) for one’s own interests: He played on her
sympathies. Activity engaged in for enjoyment or recreation. A move or action in a game. The
condition of a ball, puck, or similar object in active or legitimate use or motion. Used in phrases in
play or out of play. Action, motion, or use: the play of the imagination. (American Heritage
Dictionary of the English Language, 1973: 1005)

One can take these varied meanings of play and claim that a self is in play
while it is being performed. Not only, however, can the self be in play, but it can
also be put into play either in the sense of a ball or puck being put into play or as
in the sense of the play of the imagination. In such plays, the self can be said to
be in action and use insofar as it is an objectified feature of the minding
processes of the individual. Such a conception indicates that not only is a self
performed but it is put into play by moves of differing deliberativeness and
purposiveness by the minding organism. That is, in putting a self into play in the
performance of a role and keeping it in play, an individual is seeking to achieve
certain fulfillments and consummations just as he or she may be seeking to
control others in his or her own interest.
Putting the self into play is not, then, the same as performing a role. In
interactions one surely performs, but he or she also puts a selected aspect of his
or her self into play. Such plays of the self can occur in one’s encounters with the
material objects in his or her world or the human ones. In an extensive
discussion of what he calls the “contact experience” of objects, distant or near,
Mead argues that the “perceptual function” of the self is able to take the role of
the material object itself and imagine and anticipate the nature and quality of the
object:
When the individual assumes the attitude of pushing a heavy object, its character as ponderous is more
than stimulation to exercise effort. It is a sense of the pressure or inertia which the body will exert
upon the individual. It is true that memory images of past expenditures of effort upon it or like objects
may arise, but these images will be of the efforts expended aroused by the stimulation of what we call
the resistance of the object. They do not of themselves carry with them the location of the resistance in
the object, nor is this location of the resistance given in the definition of the boundaries of the objects
through sight and touch. What has taken place is the “feeling one’s self into” the object. (1938: 310,
my emphasis)

One feels one’s self into the object, or one puts one’s self into it, assuming the
quality of the resistance it will offer initially and then actually experiencing it
when contact occurs.
One, then, identifies the mere stimulation to exercise more effort with the expenditure of force on the
part of the object because this playing of the role of the heavy object has excited one’s response in
advance of the actual contact with the object. (Mead 1938: 311)

How do these observations apply to the mundane tasks of everyday life? One
can in fact extend Mead’s argument here to suggest that in all encounters in the
world, whether with distant heavy objects or immediate light ones, and whether
they are ponderous, inanimate objects or animate humans of varying degrees of
ponderousness, an individual confronts them in similar ways and puts the
feelings of his or her self into it. Indeed, he or she puts his or her self into play in
such encounters. Consider a human who encounters an automobile or, even more
mundanely, a toaster. Let us construct a scene: A man comes down to breakfast
and his daughter says, “Daddy the toaster is broken.” He says “That’s okay, I
will take my tools and repair it.” He proceeds to do so. In undertaking these acts
the man has put into play many of the moves that Mead had described for the
heavy object that his man encountered. With these moves, the man has
objectified his self as one who can repair a broken toaster and put his self into
play: In his imagination he has assumed the resistance the task will offer and is
able to say to himself that he could handle it. This play can have one of two
outcomes; he can successfully repair the toaster and enhance the standing of his
self in his eyes and the eyes of his daughter, or else he can fail and feel the
commensurate effects on his self. In his encounter with the toaster he not only
put the “feeling of his self,” in Mead’s words, into the object, but also put his
self into play by seeking to repair it. Indeed, contact with all and any material
object in the world gives a human a chance to put his or her self into play.
In interactions with humans, too, one not only performs a role but also puts a
self into play. Consider again a simple example: A man is introduced to a woman
he finds attractive at a gathering and he has to decide what to do next: Does he
do the cool, aloof, and formal bit? Does he do the warm and friendly bit? Does
he do the aggressively flirtatious and erotic bit? Does he do the indifferent and
contemptuous bit? Each of these is a performance, but with each of these moves
he is putting a self into play. Each such move will meet its own destiny in the
responses from the other with commensurate reverberations to the self of the
man in question. He may be cool and aloof and formal, but the woman may
decide to be aggressively flirtatious, thereby making him develop either a new
set of acts or continue in the original role. If he has originally acted warmly, she
may in turn act aloof and contemptuous, and if he has sought to be flirtatious and
erotic, she may rebuff him. In each of these acts the individuals are putting their
respective selves into play and expecting return acts in a state of uncertainty.
Putting the self into play is then a gamble, as Goffman has described in many of
his essays on the rituals of interaction (1967), always a signifying moves
characterized by uncertainty and dependent for its meaning on the return moves
of the other. In other words, the resistance to the efforts one puts into these acts
comes from the return acts of the others. Each partner in such encounters can be
said to have put a self into play and waited for the outcome.
In putting a self into play, what Mead calls the “I” is acting and the responses
that the acting elicits become incorporated as the “me” of the individual in
question, bringing at least the possibility of novelty, creativity, and initiative to
an action. (Mead 1934: 177–178). The “I” then, in Mead’s view, allows for a
creative and structurally untrammeled act to be executed by a conscious self. In
these acts, a self, constituted in earlier acts, is put into play and the consequences
of such playing experienced and used subsequently to define further aspects of
the self. In such moves, the self is put into play, just as a ball may be put into
play or a pair of dice, and the consequences of the act are cognized and felt and
accepted as a meaning for the self. An act is then initiated and as it is initiated it
carries the fate of the self with it; as the act matures, it can be expanded,
qualified, truncated, jettisoned prematurely, or allowed to run its course. It can
also be frustrated, thwarted in its course, qualified, and amended or allowed a
consummation by the acts of the other or by the obdurate material world. This
capacity of the plays of the self to elicit responsive plays from others and create
obligations for the initial player to respond to them is an essential element of the
interactive process. These plays occur in a trajectory as a continuum of
commuting variables. At each moment in the continuum the play can either
increase the emotional intensity of the self and its social value or diminish it.
It is in this capacity to put the self into play that one will find the intimate
relationship between emotions and the self. Indeed one individual puts his or her
self into play by introducing it into the self of another and inducing various
emotional responses and reactions from it. In such proceedings the initiator may
have control at the beginning, as well as choice and authority, but there is always
the chance that the emotions generated may not be the ones that were wanted
because the other has control over his or her responses. The fact that each
individual puts his or her self into play by choosing one response rather than
another means that the emotions and the character of the play that ensues cannot
be predicted with any certainty. Emotions are not immanent and self-existing
phenomena that can be reduced to given basic forms, nor are they “constructed”
in the abstract or independently of situations. Rather, they are constituted in and
through situated interactions and become manifest when selves are put into play
in structures of experience—either imaginary or overt.
The agentic capacity of the individual, his or her ability to take action, accept
or resist the power and influence of external structures, and thereby exist as a
person in his or her own right, is manifest as plays of the self. Agency is an
essential ingredient in the ontology of the human individual, a feature of his or
her being as a sociolinguistic creature. If through labor a human being creates
this world and also creates himself or herself, such “life activity,” as Marx (1963:
127) called it, is really a manifestation of his or her agentic capacities. The
obstacles to agentic expressiveness are social and cultural ones and socially and
culturally constituted psychological ones. To be an agent is to be a self,
conscious and cognizant of one’s presence in a world and a community of others
and having the capacity to act, to put a self into play, if not always the
opportunity to do so. For a human individual, being is doing, and if he or she
does not get the chance to “do” he or she may be forced to find some secondary
substitutes—light a cigarette, get a drink and yet another drink, knit, crochet,
play cards alone, watch somebody else act, and so on.
In putting the self into play, then, an individual involves it both cognitively
and emotionally in a field of others by means of various acts. He or she puts his
or her ideas, images, and conceptions of self into play and awaits validation or
rejection. Similarly, in putting a self into play, an individual is also putting his or
her emotions into play and awaits their development, and consummation or
frustration. Conceptions of self, as of emotions, then, are not owned as such but
used, put into play, in an ongoing series of acts, each act extending or truncating
earlier ones.
The proceedings in which individuals put their selves into play and experience
the consequences are ubiquitous ones in social life. An individual, in putting his
or her self into play, typically draws another into it and the ordinary moments in
life then are characterized by a series of plays—however unobtrusive they may
be at times and however muted the emotions generated by them may be. In other
words, there is a fundamentally agonistic quality to human acts, and it may be
found in all social acts. In some it is the central motif of the encounter—for
example, a quarrel or a debate or a transaction between a salesman and a
customer, while in others it may only be a leitmotif, as in a sociable
conversation. Further, one can also distinguish between routine acts, with only a
minimal capacity to offer resistance and to excite emotional resonances, and
extraordinary ones where there is greater resistance and the possibility of
complex emotional resonances. The former may be put on one end of a
continuum labeled ennui whereas the latter may be put at the other end and
called ecstasy, with most human acts falling at points between the two.
A good example of ennui, an absence of the quality of the agonistic in one’s
experiences of life, is the worker in a modern assembly line. His or her work
consists of repetitive performances on a moving platform and it is always the
same series of acts. The worker, says Harvey Swados, who lived and worked
among automobile workers in Detroit, hates his work because it “is mindless,
endless, stupefying, sweaty, filthy, noisy, exhausting, insecure in its prospects
and practically without hope of advancement” (1962: 111). The job is
“mindless” and “stupefying” because it lacks the agonistic element, does not
offer a sufficient degree of resistance, and one repeats the moves “endlessly,”
i.e., without dramatic development or a possibility of a denouement. Ennui sets
in and the worker finds the job and the products he is making hateful and
degrading.
True ecstasy, of course, occurs but rarely and most human experiences may be
only a few short degrees away from ennui, though occasionally they may move
toward the pole of ecstasy. In such moments of ecstasy, one puts a self into play
and feels its presence in heightened moods and differing shades and colors. Here
is a description by Fanny Trollope of a state of ecstasy that she witnessed in
nineteenth-century Cincinnati:
And now in every part of the church a movement was perceptible, slight at first, but by degrees
becoming more decided. Young girls arose, and sat down, and rose again; and then the pews opened,
and several came tottering out, their hands clasped, their heads hanging on their bosoms, and every
limb trembling, and still the hymn went on; but as the poor creatures approached the rail, their sobs
and groans became audible. . . . Young creatures, with features pale and distorted, fell on their knees
on the pavement, and soon sunk forward on their faces; the most violent cries and shrieks followed,
while from time to time a voice was heard in convulsive accents, exclaiming “Oh Lord!” “Oh Lord
Jesus!” “Help me, Jesus!” and the like. ([1832] 1997: 63–64)

Ecstasy is a state of feeling, an experiencing of intense emotionality in which

mind and body participate jointly, often giving the mind extraordinary powers of
perception and intuition, or, in the converse, blindness and dullness, and the
body unusual strength and vigor. Ecstasies are the processes of stepping out of
the routine states of being, of leaving our current selves for a time and entering
another such state or phase of the self. The “stepping out” leads to the creation
of the new phase, and once it is created it may take a life of its own and
determine the subsequent moves of the individual.1
The reaching of different states of feeling is achieved by the acts of putting the
self into play. Typically, once it is put into play and the emotionality achieved
and experienced, there is an end to it and a return to a state of normality. The
reaching of a peak experience of emotionality and its resolution is what writers
from Aristotle to Kenneth Burke have called “catharsis,” a “purging” or
“releasing” or “relieving” of the emotions. For Aristotle, as for others since,
catharsis meant the purging of emotions by vicarious participation in the
enactments of a tale, a safe involvement that does not present any real physical
danger to the participant. Jonathan Lear has argued, with textual support from
Aristotle’s writings, that catharsis is the experience of
tragic emotions in an appropriately inappropriate environment which, I think, helps to explain our
experience of relief in the theater. We imaginatively live life to the full but we risk nothing. The relief
is thus not that of releasing pent-up emotions per se; it is the relief of releasing these emotions in a
safe environment. (Lear 1992: 334).

Such “theaters” to use Lear’s expression, are not found only within the
confines of a theater, but can be found wherever humans foregather. In these
theaters of everyday life individuals put their selves into play and achieve
catharsis even in environments that are safe only in varying degrees. The
catharsis is achieved by a deliberate act of the self, by in fact putting the self into
varying degrees of danger and experiencing the aftereffects.
Werner Stark (1987) has argued, however, that catharsis is a recurrent release
or suspension from social constraints. Religious rituals and carnivals, which
provided such release in traditional societies, he notes, have been replaced in
modern societies by dances in discotheques, music concerts, and sporting events.
If the cathartic events in traditional societies amounted to continuous orgies for a
number of days, as in carnivals, the modern forms, Stark notes, are “splintered
orgies”—periodic indulgences for a few hours in an evening in a dance hall,
auditorium, or stadium. These are the new theaters for cathartic experiences.
The concept of putting the self into play does not actually occur in Erving
Goffman’s monumental work, but many aspects of it nevertheless imply it. One
can examine his early monographs on the presentation of self in everyday life
(1959) and his analysis of role-distance (1961), then move to the essay on where
the action was to be found (1967) and see a natural progression in which putting
the self into play from routine events to slightly unusual events to events
bordering on the ecstatic are described. In the first work Goffman argues, “When
an individual appears before others he knowingly and unwittingly projects a
definition of the situation, of which a conception of himself is an important part”
(1959: 242). This claim occurs at the end of a long study in which he gives
examples of the many ways in which an individual projects a “conception of
himself.” Among the many such examples, I will first select his citation from a
fictional account because it captures neatly the notion of putting the self into
play in ordinary life.
Preedy is an Englishman vacationing in Spain and undertakes various moves
to convey different impressions of his self.
If by chance a ball was thrown his way, he looked surprised; then let a smile of amusement lighten his
face . . . looked around dazed to see that there were people on the beach, tossed it back with a smile to
himself and not a smile at the people, and then resumed carelessly his nonchalant survey of space.
But it was time to institute a little parade, the parade of the ideal Preedy. By devious handling he
gave any who wanted to look a chance to see the title of his book—a Spanish translation of Homer, a
classic thus, but not daring, cosmopolitan too—and then gathered together his beachwrap and bag into
a neat sand-resistant pile (methodological and sensible Preedy), rose to stretch himself (big cat
Preedy), and tossed aside his sandals (carefree Preedy, after all). (Sansom 1956, in Goffman 1959: 4–
5)

In each of the actions that Preedy took, he put his self into play and added a
new dimension to it so that in the end he emerged as a very complex character:
kindly, methodical, “big cat,” carefree. Putting a self into play is then an active
and deliberate and self-conscious move. In a later essay on roles and role playing
Goffman describes individuals who strive to show a certain detachment from the
roles in which they are currently engaged. For example, he describes a group of
middle-class schoolgirls who go to a park while on a vacation and “do horse-
back riding.” By using a variety of moves, they are able to put the self of a “non-
horsey set,” “non-upper class,” “inexperienced rider” into play to the audience.
“The six I observed,” Goffman writes,
came in clothing patently not designed as a consolidation of the horsewoman role: pedal-pushers,
cotton leotards, ball-type flats, frilly blouses. One girl, having been allotted the tallest horse, made
mock of the scene by declining to get on because of the height, demanding to be allowed to go home.
When she did get on, she called her horse “Daddy-O,” diverting her conversation from her friends to
her horse. (1961: 111)

In Goffman’s investigation of “where the action” was to be found (1967), he

finds it in gambling and in various other activities in which individuals took
chances, put their “character to the test,” engaged in contests, and experienced
their “consequentiality” and “fatefulness.” These plays are designed to produce
extraordinary meanings for the self, generate more intense emotions, and achieve
novel and complex signs with which an individual can define his or her self.
With these moves selves can be put into play and the risks of victory and loss—
of face, property, life—experienced. If the uncertainty is confronted and the risks
taken, there is of course the likelihood of winning new esteem for the self. It is
this phenomenon that Georg Simmel, who originated inquiry into acts of this sort
in the mundane life, calls “adventures.” He writes,
One of two experiences which are not particularly different in substance, as far as we can indicate it,
may nevertheless be perceived as an “adventure” and the other not. The one receives the designation
denied the other because of this difference in the relation to the whole of our life. (1971: 187)

That is, a sexual encounter will not be an adventure for a prostitute but for an
adolescent having his first sexual experience it certainly would be one because
he would be crossing a “threshold.” Simmel writes,
Viewed purely from a concrete and psychological standpoint, every single experience contains a
modicum of the characteristics which, if they grow beyond a certain point, bring it to the threshold of
adventure. Here the most essential and profound of these characteristics is the singling out of these
experiences from the total context of life. (1959: 255)

In stepping over the threshold, in crossing a boundary, a self steps out of its
routine presence into another moment, another presence for itself. These are
“liminal” events, to use Victor Turner’s reworking of a concept from Arnold von
Gennep. “Liminality,” Turner notes, “is marked by three phases: separation,
margin (from limen—the Latin for threshold) . . . and reaggregation” (1974:
231–32). Turner finds such liminality in major transformations in the trajectory
of a life. However, it is possible to find such liminality in lesser occasions as
well. In the liminal moments in an ongoing trajectory of the individual’s life, he
or she is called upon to put his self into different arenas or differently defined
interactions and experience heightened emotionality. Such “liminals” are
experienced for awhile, and then the individual returns to the routines of
everyday life.

Simmel compares the adventurer to artists and writers:

For the essence of a work of art, is, after all, that it cuts out a piece of the endlessly continuous
sequences of perceived experience, detaching it from all connections with one side or the other, giving
it a self-sufficient form as though defined and held together by an inner core. (1971: 189)

Like the artist the adventurer also has to take charge of the situation, even if he
or she does not always initiate it himself or herself, and has to use it to put the
self into play and anticipate the consequences. These adventurous moves—the
acts of putting the self into play and experiencing the fruits thereof—achieve for
the individual heightened emotionalities of varying duration and intensity. Once
the moves are made, the individual is able to also experience spontaneity, since
the next move has to be made without much aforethought and circumstantiality
—that is, responding to the acts and moods that emerge from the situation.2
In these plays of the self not only are selves presented but they are constituted
and reconstituted, the character of the self defined and redefined, and its
emotionalities given an objective standing in the responses it is able to receive
and feel. Further, the self is conferred an identity: champion, hero, winner, one
who did not yield, fearless, courageous and so on, or loser, cheat, incompetent,
one who yielded and so on. The individual’s identity becomes qualified with
new adjectives or restated in new noun-phrases and is used as the sign of the self
for further relationship with others. From these observations one can see that the
various acts of putting the self into play and the experiencing of the emotions
that accompany them move seamlessly from ones that are characterized by low
problematicity and intensity of emotion and then cross the threshold to very high
ones in a continuum. At each moment in this trajectory, there is always the
possibility of one trivial act or series of acts developing into more serious ones
with high emotionality and exploding into extreme intensities. These
developments are dependent on the responses each act elicits from the other and
are results of the ongoing interaction of the acts and the selves involved in them.
 PRACTICAL PLAYS

Individuals put their selves into play either in direct ways in which their minds,
selves, and bodies get involved, often with real physical effects on the latter, or
in their imaginations. In practical plays an individual actively undertakes moves
that connect him or her to other individuals and physical objects as well as the
environment, eliciting responses from them all and incorporating them as a
meaning for the self. These may be called practical plays and may be
distinguished from imaginative plays or fantasies. In fantasies the individual
puts his or her self into play only in his or her mind but nevertheless experiences
emotional involvement. Practical plays can be further divided into encounters,
contests, duels, combat, and hunts.

Encounters
Encounters are occasions in which individuals engage in “focused interactions,”
as Goffman, who first used the term in this context, puts it (1961). In focused
interactions individuals address each other as social objects and seek to influence
each other. While Goffman focuses on human interactions, I would include
interactions with material objects and animals in this category. In such
encounters humans put their selves into play but there is neither an overt conflict
nor do they typically generate extremes of emotionality. Encounters have two
moments to them: one, routine encounters, and two, adventurous encounters.
Often routine encounters of everyday life can be made to generate novelty and
uncertainty and heightened emotionality and can be transformed into
adventurous ones. One may escape from the ordinary into a liminal duration in
such encounters, experience the self at play, and return to the routine.
One arena in which various encounters become transformed into adventurous
plays of the self are those ubiquitous gatherings known as parties. Parties are of
many kinds and some are organized to enhance and solidify the identities of the
official life. There are also parties, the more frequent types, which are organized
to be breaks from the routine organization of everyday life, and various licenses
are given to the participants to engage in conduct that is different from those of
everyday life. Parties are liminal moments in the life of an individual: Typically
they separate the individual from earlier roles, rules, regulations—indeed a self
—and draw a boundary between them and the new moments of the party. Once
the party is over, he or she returns to the original state, albeit somewhat altered.
Parties in everyday life are thus comparable to medieval carnivals. In carnivals a
day or two are set apart from the normal functioning of everyday life. In Mikhail
Bakhtin’s words a carnival is
A boundless world of humorous forms and manifestations that opposed the official and serious tone of
ecclesiastical and feudal culture. In spite of their variety, folk festivities of the carnival type, the comic
rites and cults, the clowns and fools, giants and dwarfs and jugglers, the vast and manifold literature of
parody—all these forms have one style in common: they belong to one culture of folk carnival humor.
(1984: 4, emphasis added)

Not only do they have one style in common, but the activities of a carnival are
also defined by their opposition to the religious and political institutions of the
day. In other words, carnivals are parties of the large-scale, more complex and
loose at the same time, marking nevertheless a liminal moment. Social parties of
course are not “boundless” as carnivals are and may not have all the features of a
carnival; rather they are carnivals on a small-scale.
Parties as a social form can be described as a gathering of individuals, some of
whom are known to each other whereas others may be newcomers who hope to
find friends. The people come to parties on the basis of invitations, others may
come as friends of the guests, and some may even force themselves into the
gathering. Usually alcohol and various consumables will be served at the party,
the alcohol serving to relax people and enable them to interact in less inhibited
ways. It is within this frame that individuals come together and engage in
various activities in which the self is put into play. In parties then, definitionally
an individual has to put at least certain aspects of his or her identity away and
typically present one that bespeaks unseriousness, ludicity, and, at times,
foolishness. Further, one has to thrust oneself forward, initiate conversations,
participate in them, say appropriate words, and engage in witty banter, in joke
telling, anecdote telling, flirtations, seductions—all of which are achieved
conversationally. All of these are activities in which and through which selves
are put into play and various emotionalities expressed and experienced.
Typically in such gatherings a certain mix of gender is arranged so that the smell
of sexuality is present—to be sure of varying degrees, depending on the nature
of the party and the age of the participants. Furthermore, many people in the
party will seek to play roles and present selves that are different from the ones
they did in earlier occasions and will again on later ones. Like a carnival, a party
can find itself with fools, clowns, and jesters—with one or more of the guests
either electing to or being induced to play one or more of these roles. In other
words, they suspend their usual selves and put a new self into play—for the time
being.
It does not mean, however, that this occurs in all parties. In some parties, one’s
power and status and prestige from elsewhere may be put into play all over
again, and put to the test though in a different setting—including one’s sexual
power and attractiveness, social graces and interpersonal skills, and so forth.
Simmel calls this kind of phenomena a “social game” and contrasts it with other
kinds of “sociation,” commenting:
All the forms of interaction or sociation among men—the wish to outdo, exchange, the formation of
parties, the desire to wrest something from the other, the hazards of accidental meetings and
separations, the change between enmity and co-operation, the overpowering by ruse and revenge, in
the seriousness of reality, all of these are imbued with purposive contents. In the game, however, they
lead their own lives; they are propelled exclusively by their own attraction. . . . To the person who
really enjoys it, its attraction rather lies in the dynamics and hazards of the sociologically significant
forms of activity themselves. (Simmel 1950:49–50)

Social games are ends in themselves, played only for the sake of sociability, of
playing, of enjoying the interactions and interrelationships and agonistics as
such. The social game that Simmel uses as an example is coquetry and is
described as follows:
This freedom from all gravity of immutable contents and permanent realities gives coquetry the
character of suspension, distance, ideality, that has lead one to speak, with a certain right, of its “art”
not only of its “artifices.” (1950: 50–51)

In engaging in coquettish behavior an individual undertakes various acts whose

task is to engage the attention of a male. Simmel notes, “The nature of feminine
coquetry is to play up, alternately, allusive promises and allusive withdrawals—
to attract the male, but always to step short of a decision, and to reject him but
never to deprive him of all hope” (1950: 50–51).
In these moves an individual can be said to be putting her self into play,
awaiting a completion in the acts of the other:
Yet in order for coquetry to grow on the soil of sociability . . . it must meet with a specific behavior on
the part of the male. As long as he rejects its attractions or, inversely, is its mere victim that without
any will of its own is dragged along by its vacillations between a half “yes” and a half “no,” coquetry
has not yet assumed for him the form that is commensurate with sociability. (Simmel 1950: 51)

Nowadays coquetry may not be played with the artfulness with which it was
done in earlier centuries; nevertheless, in parties one does put a particular self
into play, does play “social games,” and does wait for the consequences to
develop. Here is a young woman describing an experience at a party. I have
deliberately chosen, employing a Durkheimian strategy, the most ordinary of
encounters with none of the elements of a grand passion or a serious romantic
quest—to show how even here a self is put into play, a threshold crossed, and an
adventurous moment created. The following is an account given by a student in
one of my classes:
 Upon my arrival at the party I was greeted by my friend at the door. As I walked in I had an awkward
feeling that I was the center of attraction. Not knowing where to look, I stuck myself to a wall and
looked down. Later on when I began to relax I was able to glance around the room and take in some
old faces as well as new ones. Suddenly my eyes focused upon this person whom I had seen a few
times in the neighborhood. I felt as though I were in a movie and the crowd seemed to disappear as all
my attention was focused on him. But soon I snapped back to reality, aware of the fact I was not alone.
He did not see me looking at him, which gave me a sense of safety and control. He appeared not to
know very many people, and the people he knew I did not know. My heart began to slow down as I
kept telling myself that I would probably never meet him. At the same time I was hoping that someone
I knew, knew him. The party seemed to be dragging along while I still watched him from the corner of
my eye. Then I saw him walk over to the closet and get his coat. All my hopes had faded. I knew now
that I would never meet him and I was angry at myself for letting my fears win. I felt even more
defeated and depressed as he walked out of the door. About half an hour had passed and I danced a
few numbers with a friend of mine. I was just getting ready to leave when he walked through the door
again. I felt such a relief that I had the urge to run up and hug him but I contained myself. He sat
across the room from me and again I felt the excitement. I realized the things I liked about him, he was
a casual dresser and from what I could see a comfortable person to be around. A few minutes later a
friend of mine walked through the door and came over to me. I explained to her my predicament and
to my surprise she knew him. Before I could say another word he was standing directly in front of me.
She introduced us and all my fear faded away because I realized in talking to him he was not my
knight in shining armor that I imagined. We talked like we had been old friends. He told me he was
from California and he would be returning in a couple of days. We had lunch together the next day and
that was the last I saw of him. All the things I had felt before I met him had vanished and other
feelings of regret and sadness had taken over.
The assumptions I made were based on feelings not yet confirmed by the other. Like many people
I was taken strictly by appearance. Later, through communication I was able to know more about the
person and realize that it would be simply a friendship and nothing else. This being the first time I
experienced this particular situation, I could understand the misleading signals that occur between two
people. The assumption on my part was that I felt as though once in his presence he would
automatically feel as I did. Hoping that something permanent was to come of this, I was deeply hurt to
find out differently.
The experience I described is a common one. But it is important in life to take chances and many
times expressing your true feelings can be the biggest chance of all.

In this description a young woman initially experiences, shall I say, a

nothingness, where she is able to perform no acts of her own nor to be a party to
someone else’s acts. The situation soon changes and she is able to put her self
into play and reap certain consequences, even though they were not the ones she
had anticipated. Her feelings were heightened and her self given a presence as a
result of her attraction to the young man, the encounter with him, her sense of
disappointment when she thought that he had left the party, and the relief she felt
when he appeared again. The encounter continued the following day and the
upshot was her realization that nothing worthwhile would “come of this.” She
was “deeply hurt” at this discovery. Needless to say, there could have been more
of the adventurous in it had he been more attracted to her, but this quasi
adventure was good enough for the time being: It broke the routine for the young
woman and put her self and her emotions into play.

Contests
When individuals encounter each other they relate to each other in terms of their
respective selves. Gesture, appearance, and words present each self, identified
according to relevant particulars, to the other and anticipate commensurate
responses from the other. Such encounters are typically managed by the rules of
decorum, honor, status and by the exercise of implicit or explicit moves of
power. Often such encounters become overt confrontations between the selves of
the participants and can emerge as contests for control and domination by one or
the other. In such contests, individuals put their best selves forward, either with
verbal skills or with physical prowess. At times, such displays of verbal skills
will lead to physical attacks. A striking example of contests can be found in the
various verbal games that black young men play with each other. There seem to
be a great variety of these games—”signifying,” “rapping,” “to hip,” “the put
down,” “playing the dozens,” and “joning” (Hannerz 1969; Abrahams 1974:
240–241). Hannerz, in a field study of some of these games, describes joning as
follows:
The exchanges can occur between two boys who are alone and it is even possible for them to jone on
some third absent person, usually one of their peers, but the typical situation involves a group of boys:
while a series of exchanges may engage one pair of boys after another, most members of the crowd
function as audience, inciters, judges—laughing, commenting upon “scoring” and urging the
participants on. . . . (1969: 129)

These contests, whether it is of the playful sort described by Hannerz or not,

are ubiquitous in social life. Consider the following episode described in Hans
Toch’s fine study of violent men. He recounts an incident between Jimmy and a
police officer that eventually leads to a situation of confrontation and conflict. In
this interaction Jimmy and the officer have both put their respective selves into
play, with each seeking to best the other. The initial move is made by the police
officer who refuses to admit Jimmy to a dance in the school. The school dance is
no ordinary dance; rather, it is a special occasion for an adolescent in which he
or she can display a self and its social and sexual presence, an arena for the
gathering and garnishing of honor.
It is into this charged arena that Jimmy sought entry, and a policeman refuses
to let Jimmy enter it. Jimmy in turn seeks to avenge himself, challenging the
professional self and honor of the officer by singing a song that questions the
manhood of the police. Jimmy describes these events on a later occasion as
follows:
Interviewer: So you wanted to show him that you didn’t like him; so you put this can down.
And is that when you started singing?
Subject: Yes.
Interviewer: Can you give us a little demonstration of how you were singing?
Subject: Well, it wasn’t nothing, you know, that I could . . . I remember all the words,
you know . . . but I was.
Interviewer: What were the lines about?
Subject: No . . . I will tell it . . . you know, this song about his son, you know. A
song . . . “fuck” and all that, you know. “Got jumped on . . . his daddy’s a
police, you know. His daddy’s a punk.” All that you know. But he couldn’t
hear . . . he could hear me singing but he couldn’t hear the words.
Interviewer: Could he hear it now and then, like “son,” and “police” and “punk” and key
words like that?
Subject: He could probably hear something like “police” possibly. . . . I say it out loud
“police are sissies.”
Interviewer: So he did have an indication that this song you were singing might have
something to do with him, huh?
Subject: Yeah. He might have, you know. It was . . . it was against the police department,
you know. So, well, I guess since he’s a part of the police department, he gotta,
you know . . . so I told him, “It ain’t nothing, anyhow.”
Interviewer: But so far, you think this is all pretty amusing?
Subject: Yeah. I knew it was irritating him. That’s why . . . that was my purpose of doing
it.
Interviewer: How did he show that he was irritated?
Subject: Well, when he hit me, you know, it showed that he was irritated. I hadn’t
provoked him to hit me by . . . I mean, I didn’t swing at him, and I didn’t say
nothing to him directly that would provoke him like that, but you
know . . . What I was saying, I guess, that could have provoked him, when I
kept on singing and “shining” him on, knowing that he was walking aside of
me, and he kept on telling me to shut up and I wouldn’t shut up, cause I was off
the school grounds. He had no . . . I mean freedom of speech, you know.
Interviewer: Let’s get this game a little bit in detail. You start singing and he was showing
that he doesn’t like this singing?
Subject: Yeah.
Interviewer: And he’s showing this by what? By telling you to stop?
Subject: Yeah.
Interviewer: In a tone of voice that kinda gave you the feeling that . . .
Subject: He didn’t like it.
Interviewer: Did your volume increase or decrease?
Subject: Increase as soon as I passed those gates.
Interviewer: Your volume increased as soon as you’d passed through the gates, and he kept
on telling you to stop? Then what? He didn’t hit you right away . . . he told you
not to walk?
Subject: He told me to shut up.
Interviewer: He told you to shut up . . . and certainly you weren’t doing that.
 Subject: No, I wouldn’t shut up.
Interviewer: So then what was his next move?
Subject: He said, “Come here,” and I said, “Man, well, I’m going home.” You know,
like that. And he said, “What are . . .?” He said something funny, he said,
“Well, this’ll teach you to shut up.” Or something like that. And that’s when he
hit me, you know. It just glanced off and you know, and tears started coming
down my eyes.

(Toch 1969: 68–71)

Here, Jimmy is describing in detail his contest with the police officer. At every
stage in this contest Jimmy takes the offensive and, using various provocative
techniques, put his self into play: A courageous young man, with a certain
degree of verbal felicity and poise who could, despite his youth and
inexperience, handle a mature agent of officialdom, indeed, a policeman who
represents authority and manhood in his own presence. Every discursive act that
Jimmy addressed to the other was an assertion of his self, a move that puts his
self in to plays that demanded a particular answer—one that he eventually
obtained. The contest proceeds in various stages, each stage characterized by
Jimmy’s increasingly provocative playing of his self and getting satisfaction
from the observation that the other was irritated and angry. Nevertheless he is
surprised that this contest led, crescively, to a violent response from the other.
Jimmy thrusts his self into play in very overt and direct ways, whereas the
policeman was responding to them with parries and glances until the last violent
thrust.

Duels
Duels are also contests in a very general sense but duels are governed by
systematic and formal rules. In their classical form they were contests that were
defined by elaborate rules of etiquette and decorum in which the honor of an
individual was put on the line. It was an activity undertaken by an elite and was
designed, V. G. Kiernan argues, to defend the esteem of an individual as well as
to protect the status of a class. He writes:
Gentlemen must be ready to fight but with decorum and dignity, not like the noisy plebeians they often
resembled. Everything in the ceremonial of the duel was of a kind to stamp it as the affair of an elite.
(1989: 136)

The rules by which these duels were conducted were many and admitted many
regional variations. Nevertheless, they were all derived from the medieval
tradition of chivalry. One must defend one’s “honor” (i.e., the self) at the risk of
one’s life, face death with equanimity and poise, display an indifference and
emotional control, as well as observe the strict rules of procedure in the actual
confrontation. These rules, drawn from many regions, were collected and
codified by the Irish aristocracy in 1777 and came to be known as the “Twenty-
six commandments” (Kiernan 1989: 145).
In such contests an individual employs swords and guns to wound or kill
another in order to gain esteem for one’s self. In duels there is a presumptive
equality between the participants. Indeed, in the classical European duel, the
parties must be of equal rank in every dimension before they will agree to
engage in a duel (Kiernan, 1989). In my usage of the concept of duel, there is no
claim that an equality of social rank is needed; rather there must at least be an
equality in the capacity of the other to retaliate and participate in the “good
fight.” Hence a contest between an adult and a child cannot be called a duel, nor
can one between an old and decrepit man and a strong young man. One may in
fact look upon duels as interpersonal confrontations, subject to certain rules,
between individuals in which one presents the other with various tokens—
words, gestures, appearance, space—and challenges the other to provide
commensurate responses. In such encounters, he or she puts a self forward,
announces its presence in various ways, and anticipates it being treated with the
proper rites.
In everyday life an individual faces many instances of such duels. For
example, there are the formal debates that are staged according to well-defined
rules. In courts of law, again, there are duels between opposing counsel as well
as between the witnesses and counsel. In various social gatherings individuals
often engage in informal debates that are also subject to various rules of
decorum. Interactions between members of formal committees often take on the
character of duels as well. In all these encounters selves are put into play and
various consequences are recorded. The games that individuals play may be
considered duels too. There is no doubt that in and through them, selves are put
into play by adhering to certain definite rules.
It has been customary in both philosophy and the social sciences to use
“games” as metaphors and exemplars to either illustrate or to elucidate a
problem. G. H. Mead uses games as a metaphor for the type of regulated
interaction that children experience and use to constitute their selves (1934). For
others games represent the height of rational and calculated behavior (Gibbons,
1992). In Goffman’s work on “where the action is,” he also uses games as a
model with which to understand “character contests” in everyday life (1967). In
Wittgenstein’s philosophical investigations, games play their part as a model for
the uses of language: Language is used, he argues, according to certain more or
less precisely defined rules within certain parameters that make them into
“language-games” (1958). In each such usages of the notion of a “game” there is
an assumption of what exactly a game is: while Mead and Wittgenstein address
its rule-bound nature, the game-theorists and Goffman stress their
confrontational character. To be sure, both of these features distinguish games:
They are constituted by precise rules and they are contests.
While these features make them useful as metaphors for a variety of purposes,
one can nevertheless investigate the uses of games as such—rulebound and
confrontational structures that they are—in everyday life. The use of language,
that is, may be like a game of cricket but what of cricket itself? Insofar as games
themselves are defined by precise rules that are expressed in carefully phrased
commandments, one can of course say that while the use of language and the
construction of meaning is like a game, games themselves are dependent on
language. Cricket and tennis and football themselves become not only games of
skill, but also language-games in themselves in which action is based on the
interpretation of these commandments.
In these games, there are engagements between two individuals or two teams
that are conducted on the basis of these rules. These rules are often enforced by
the players themselves but more frequently there are officials whose task it is to
enforce the rules. These engagements are essentially contests in which various
stratagems and techniques are used by the players to put their respective selves
into play and simultaneously demean, undermine, and outplay the self of the
other. In such contests blood is typically not spilt nor overt physical violence
perpetrated—except in boxing and wrestling—but selves are nevertheless put
into play and tokens of self won or lost. The striking feature of the games of skill
is that the participants can get involved in them physically, emotionally, and
intellectually. Indeed, these games are truly wondrous structures for the symbol-
using animal: The body, mind, and self are simultaneously implicated in them.
Further, the plays that are made within the game are addressed to various others:
fellow players, antagonists, fans, and one’s primary groups. Not only, then, are
the self, mind, and body unified into the acts of the game, but the social is also
addressed through them.
In tennis how the ball is to be hit, the place where it is allowed to land, the
system of scoring, and the manner in which the score is to be accumulated are
the elements of the game. The manner of handling these elements becomes a
token for the self, a handling that can be readily counted and used as a measure
of the self: If one gets a certain number according to a certain pattern, he or she
is endowed with an enhanced self, and conversely the one who does not obtain
the magic number experiences a diminishment. In successfully executing these
moves and countermoves the player puts his or her self into play against an
opponent who is more or less evenly “matched.” Every move he or she makes is
one that carries the fate of his or her self with it and the outcome of each move
becomes a measure of it. These moves are surely analogues of words and
gestures used in everyday life with the advantage that they are more precise and
clear in their significations, devoid of ambiguities and uncertainties, and readily
and immediately accessible to both initiators and respondents. One can see this
clearly in the following description of a move in tennis. Describing the opening
serve in a tennis game Linda Bunker and Robert Rotella describe a process that
should be familiar to anyone who has read G. H. Mead:
The serve is the stroke that you have complete control over. You and you alone can decide when,
where and how you will put the ball into play . . . In this situation, you initially need a broad external
focus before you serve so that you can bring together all the important information. Ask yourself
which serve your opponent would rather return? Are more errors being produced on the backhand or
forehand side? What will my opponent expect from me? If I shift to the backhand corner of the service
box where is the return likely to come? (Bunker and Rotella 1982: 48–49)

While in Mead’s work the aim is to explain how successful communications

and interactions are constructed by taking the role and attitude of the other, it
takes a more complex turn in the above quotation. No doubt, the player wants a
successful game to occur and continue as he or she makes the moves, but he or
she also wants to ensure that, while he or she takes the role of the other, the
capacity of the other to take the role of the server is diminished: The receiver can
anticipate the angle of placement, spin, and velocity of the serve only within
certain boundaries because the server would take pains to disguise them. The
serve is presented in such a way so that the other cannot successfully predict its
angle, placement, velocity, and spin.
Once the ball is served and put into play, all the rational calculations made
about the execution of the move and the responses that can possibly be made by
the receiver recede into the background and an opportunity for quick judgment
and spontaneous movement presents itself to the one who receives the ball: The
ball may bounce in unexpected directions depending on the forcefulness and
tightness of the racket that sent it, spin in an unpredictable way, and be
influenced by the quality of the surface on which it was bouncing. All of these
contingencies must be handled readily and with alacrity, a condition that gives
the game the necessary element of unpredictability. Nevertheless, tennis gurus
advise preparing oneself for the return to limit the unpredictability. Bunker and
Rotella say,
 As you wait for the oncoming serve, all the pressure is on you. You must watch the ball leave the
server’s racket. You must simultaneously be aware of subtle changes in racket position, react to the
speed and spin of the serve, and then execute the stroke which will place the ball in the desired place
on the opponent’s court. (1982: 55)

That is, the server takes the role of the receiver and will serve in such a way that
the receiver will find it difficult to return it. Conversely, the receiver takes steps
to predict the nature and placement of the serve so that he or she can return it in
such a way that the server will find it difficult to return it. Each is watching for
the thrust of the other so that he or she cannot only parry it, but also thrust in
return.
In tennis, and in many other games, the emotions that are generated during the
course of the game need to be kept under a strict control and discipline if a
successful outcome is desired. Indeed, one can say the moment one player gives
in to an excess of emotions, his or her performance would be impaired. In other
words, the acts that have to be executed would suffer in efficiency and
effectiveness. The consequences of not being able to manage one’s emotions are
described by Bunker and Rotella as follows:
On important shots, hands and feet turn cold; on important serves I rush my shot even though I am not
set; if I lose the first few games, I tend to have great difficulty throughout the match; if I have to hit a
backhand overhead, I cringe before I even hit it. (1982: 75)

To be able to overcome these problems, a player has to systematically practice

a form of emotional discipline. Such a discipline of emotions does not, however,
involve only the emotions that can detract from one’s performance; rather, other
emotions are garnered to enhance performance as well. Bunker and Rotella
write,
When you are happy and excited about your progress, your emotions can be a great source of
motivation. But when you are having problems, your feelings can really work against your continued
motivation. You must learn to use your emotions to help you when they are useful and block them out
when they can hinder your continued improvement. (1982: 75, my emphasis)

In addition to the play of emotions during the game itself, there are the
emotions generated by the winning or losing of a point, a set, or the whole game
and match. In each such moment of a game, one or other emotion is generated
and felt and given play—all of them achieved by putting the self into play. The
tokens of self that were put into play during the game, or rather the plays of the
self that were executed by means of these tokens, are counted as measures of the
self and used by the individual himself or herself as by the others to measure the
self. As measures of the self, they have currency within given primary groups
and social circles—not to speak of their capacity to elicit the other more
universal currency, money, when one becomes a professional player and meets
with even a modicum of success. They in fact become markers of identity, labels
of distinction: champion, winner, loser, two-time loser, “always a finalist, never
a champion,” “a good loser,” or a “sore loser,” and so on.3
These games in fact are duels, played according to a strict code, in which
selves are put into play, emotions generated and felt, and various effects
experienced for the continued presences of the selves involved.

Combat
These are confrontations, not between two individuals as in duels, but between
two groups that are presumptively equal. The “rumble” between two street gangs
is an example of combat, as is a confrontation between supporters of different
soccer teams in England. The key process in combat is the identification
between given individuals with each other and often with something “external”
to them. In old-fashioned warfare there were “platoons,” or “squads,” of soldiers
who identified with each other, and perhaps with the larger units of the army and
the “nation” or “country” on whose behalf they were putting their lives on the
line. Shils showed in an analysis of “primary groups” in the American Army
(1950) and (with Janowitz) in the Wehrmacht (1948) in the Second World War
that such identifications were important in maintaining morale and commitment.
In a study of the latter, they write,
When the individual’s immediate group, and its supporting formations met his basic organic needs,
offered him affection and esteem from both officers and comrades, supplied him with a sense of power
and adequately regulated his relations with authority, the element of self-concern in battle, which
would lead to disruption of the effective functioning of his primary group, was minimized. (1948:
281)

It is this minimalization of “self-concern” that I call identification with the

group. In the typical organization of street gangs there is also identification with
each other, while each gang identifies itself in relation to a neighborhood, street
corner, ethnicity, or religion. Such groupings typically contain males and
constitute a bonding of like-minded individuals, peers who hang out together,
share territory, emblems, and insignia of membership, and develop fierce
loyalties.
In engaging in combat against other platoons—as they may be called—
whether they are military units on the offensive or street corner gangs or ethnic
or neighborhood assemblages, each member is able to put into play several
aspects of his or her self. To begin with, for gang-based platoons, there is the
identification of self based merely on belonging to a group who are related by
being close in age and by living in the same neighborhood. Each member of the
platoon is known to each other for sufficiently long periods of time and this, by
itself, confers an identity on the self of the member. Second, those members who
live in the same neighborhood are very likely to belong to the same
socioeconomic class, which automatically grants them a shared identity as well
as a structure of individuals, values, neighborhoods, opportunities, and
institutions to which they are opposed. In addition, there is often an ethnic and
religious identification of self as well. Finally, there is the gender identity:
Maleness as an identity as defined in many societies demands certain types of
conduct, predicated on a certain type of self. In a study of violence by spectators
in soccer matches in England, Eric Dunning, Patrick Murphy, and John Williams
call this “aggressive masculinity,” and describe it as follows:
One of the effects of [the circumstances under which lower-class children are raised] is the conferring
of prestige on males with a proven ability to fight. Correlatively there is a tendency for such males to
enjoy fighting. For them and their peers who strive to emulate them, it is an important source of
meaning, status, and pleasurable emotional arousal. (1986: 257)

Such meaning and status and arousal as they experience in engaging in combat
with fans of the opposing side, however, are achieved not only by giving
expression to their “aggressive masculinity” but by giving play to a self of many
dimensions. In addition to the masculine and aggressive self, the individual who
performs in such acts of violence does so as a member of a larger structure that
he recognizes and acknowledges. Furthermore, these acts are performed in the
presence of his significant others and in antagonism to a group that is
collectively hated by his relevant associates.
This is also true for soccer “hooligans,” as Dunning et al. call them (1986).
While soccer hooligans are not gangs in the conventional sense of the term, they
nevertheless share certain characteristics with them. Soccer fans are, to begin
with, an amorphous assemblage of people who identify with one team or other.
Immediately before and during games some of them break away and coalesce to
form a platoon and engage another platoon that supports the opposing team. This
enables each member of a platoon to share feelings of identification with each
other. In participating in combat of this sort, English soccer fans are able to
experience ecstasies of identification, not only with one’s “mates” from one’s
neighborhood but also with hitherto anonymous fellow supporters of “their”
team. To this may be added the element of social class—always a significant
feature of English social life—and we have a potent brew that can induce
ecstasies of identification. In one fell swoop a fan is able to put many aspects of
his self into play by his violent maneuvers—class, race, gender, region, and
neighborhood. Such acts of self-play take many forms in soccer matches in
England. Here is Dunning’s, Murphy’s, and Williams’s summary of such acts:
Football hooligan confrontations take a number of different forms and they can take place in a variety
of contexts besides the football ground itself. They can, for example, take the form of hand-to-hand
fighting between just two rival supporters or between two small groups of them. Alternatively, they
can involve up to several hundred fans on either side. In the most serious incidents, weapons—
lightweight and easily concealed Stanley knives are favored at the moment—are sometimes used.
Football hooligan confrontations can also take the form of aerial bombardments using as ammunition
missiles that range from innocuous items such as peanuts, bits of orange peel, apple cores, and paper
cups, to more dangerous, even potentially lethal ones, such as darts, metal discs, coins . . . broken
seats, bricks, slabs of concrete, ball bearings, fireworks, smoke bombs and, as happened on one or two
occasions, crude petrol bombs. (1986: 246–247)

Each such occasion on which any of these moves were made were ones in
which certain identities were claimed and confirmed and relevant selves put into
play. And each of the instruments used—from the fists in the hand-to-hand
combat to the peanuts, from the apple cores to the petrol bombs—were semiotic
instruments used as much to achieve certain effects in the other as in the self:
They affirm the identity of the self and put it into play. Such moves often lead to
ecstatic and agonistic moments of an extreme sort—point of culmination of the
self at play, as can be seen in the following description by a fan:
I go to a match for one reason only: the aggro. It is an obsession, I can’t give it up. I get so much
pleasure when I am having aggro that I nearly wet my pants . . . I go all over the country looking for it.
(Harrison 1974: 604)

In combat then, a group of members, arrayed as a platoon, engage another

group that is similarly arrayed and put their individual selves into play, along
with the collective identity of the platoon itself and its external relevancies, and
achieve certain emotional and personal fulfillment, sometimes leading to
moments of ecstasy.

Hunts
Hunts are plays of the self in which an individual or a group of individuals seek
a victim and engage it in order to achieve esteem for his or her or their selves. In
hunts, unlike duels, there is a definite want of balance between the parties:
Hunters have more advantages, to begin with, than the hunted. The hunted are
often animals or humans defined as animals; outsiders, aliens, enemies. In fox
hunting, for example, the gentlemen-hunters mounted on horses, aided by
plebeian and canine assistants, pursue a lone fox, “run it to ground,” and destroy
it. In other forms of the hunt, big-game hunting for example, the advantages are
all on one side, too. In both kinds of hunts there is a boundary that is very
important: It is the human world against the animal world, it is the masters of the
world, the chosen ones of God, the ones to whom God gave dominion over the
earth and for whose benefit, in Judeo-Christian mythology, the animals were
created, pitted against these animals. The hunt is in fact a reenactment of the
relationship between God and man on the one hand and the animals on the other
that is depicted in the Judeo-Christian scriptures.
Such hunts, however, are not confined to the pursuit of animals: Humans of
particular sorts can be defined or redefined as “animals,” i.e., huntable creatures,
and like the fox in English hunting, not full members of the moral community.
Consider an incident in Howard Beach, New York, in which three black men,
after experiencing a breakdown of their car, walk to a nearby shopping center,
call a repairman, and sit down at a pizzeria to eat. They accomplish all of this
without incident or comment from an all-white community. In the meantime,
however, a number of white young men are at a party and someone comes in and
says that there are a “couple of niggers” at the mall—the very word defining the
outsider, the alien, the huntable. The young men take umbrage at this, gather
various weapons, get into cars and reach the black men. They find them and
chase them in their automobiles as they run. One of the black men runs into a
passing vehicle and is killed. For a large group of men to best a much smaller
group in a fight is not typically considered heroic or honorable, and little esteem
can be garnered from it—except when the victim is perceived as an outsider and
an alien. In such cases the hunters are defenders of the boundaries between
insiders and outsiders. That is to say, violating the rules of chivalry,
sportsmanship, and decorum, outsiders—outsiders of color or religion and those
insiders who become outsiders by violating some cherished rule of the group—
can be readily assaulted or killed and the selves of the hunters embellished by
the signs that these acts would generate.
In many ways, this violence by the many against an outsider, one or a few, is
similar to head-hunting. Head-hunters are players who go outside the community
and find the means of generating emotions and achieving esteem among the
insiders by killing these others. In such contests the outsiders are not likely to
honor the winner, and the signs that are thus generated have currency only
among the insiders. Consider the facts of the case among the Ilongot of the
Philippines, described by Michelle Rosaldo. Among the Ilongot, she argues, the
self, its presence, and esteem in their world, is defined by liget. It can be
translated as “anger, energy, passion,” she notes, and has been used by Ilongot in
the following locutions:
(a) (When hunting) I am impassioned when game nears and my heart thumps.
(b) It’s the women who are, in a sense, the angry energetic ones in the household, because they are
always getting up.
(c) When we headhunt, we don’t eat sugar cane, so that our anger will not be cooled.
(Rosaldo 1980: 247, my emphasis)

In social life among the Ilongots as among others, there are many
opportunities to feel these angers, energies, and passions. Once they are felt and
expressed, the act and the responses they elicit become features of the self.
Sometimes these features are negatively valued: if a young man bests his
grandfather or grandmother in a fight, there may be only dishonor and disesteem
in it; if he bests a member of his own group of equal strength, there may be some
esteem. If, however, he bests a common enemy or outsider, there is much to be
gained. The Ilongot, for instance, distinguish between a proper head-hunting raid
and the storming of alien households and the improper killing by stealth in a
supposedly friendly household (Rosaldo 1980: 208). They elicit different
degrees of honor and esteem.
Head-hunting, therefore, becomes a perfect arena in which liget can be felt
and articulated and its effects experienced and incorporated into selves. In the
head-hunting expeditions, the elders tutor, guide, and finally allow the
youngsters to take a head and achieve honor, esteem, and status. Second, head-
hunting becomes the sign that separates the elders (those who have heads) from
the youngsters (those yet to win a head) and the Ilongot (those who take heads)
from the outsiders. Rosaldo sums up the consequences of head-hunting as
follows:
Headtaking, as a moment of great emotional release and expansive and transcendent satisfaction,
represents, for Ilongots, the point in the human life cycle when vitality is at its fullest, limited neither
by childish constraints of “fear” and lack of “knowledge” nor by the deterioration of “energy,” skill,
and independence that accompanies marriage. . . . By taking heads young men revitalize the working
rhythms of their homes and think as well of fame that will keep “shame” and “fear” from limiting their
voyages abroad, of ornaments that communicate to all the new and forceful liget in their
hearts . . . commanding distance, calling hearts, cutting others while remaining safe from danger.
Headhunters typify Ilongot ideals of potency, productive health, and beauty—and in their songs,
ornaments, boasts, and dance, they show that, “angered” and renewed by a fresh victim’s life, men can
turn disturbing facts of daily worlds into the substance of a collective and transcendent joy. (Rosaldo
1980: 148–149)

While these examples of the hunt involved groups of people attacking others,
hunts can be undertaken by single individuals. Often the quest may be individual
but the hunter may have a staff to help him or her: Big-game hunters, for
example, have various others facilitating the process. At other times, the quest
for self-fulfillment and emotional play may be a lonely one, but the rewards in
agonistic ecstasies are real enough. Here is an example from a study of violent
criminals by Lonnie Athens:
I was just cruising around with some friends of mine drinking wine, smoking dope, and eating a few
reds. We came to an intersection and slowed down to make a turn when this black dude in a
Thunderbird coming the other way cuts us off in the middle of the intersection while he made a turn.
Then he drove by us with a big grin on his face throwing the bone. The friend of mine who was
driving just turned and started going the other way, but I suddenly said to myself “that dirty jive nigger
flipping me off and grinning—now he thinks he’s one bad nigger. Then I grabbed the wheel and said,
“Turn around and catch that nigger driving that Thunderbird. “We started following him, but after he
made a couple of turns, we lost him. . . . I said, “Well, he’s got to be somewhere in this neighborhood
so let’s just keep driving around here until we spot that Thunderbird, because I’m out to book that
nigger.” I could still see his big grin when he shot us the bird, and it was driving me up a wall. There
was just no way that I was going to quit looking for that motherfucker. I was outright determined to
have his ass one way or another.
Finally I spotted his car in a driveway in front of a house and told X who was driving to pull over
and park in front of the house. Then I snapped my shotgun together and loaded it. One of my friends
said, “Hey, what the hell is your trip?” I said, “It’s just my trip” and jumped out of the car. I didn’t care
about anything but having that nigger’s ass. All I thought was, “I’m going to kill this punk.” I walked
up to the house and knocked on the front door. He answered the door, but as soon as he saw it was me,
he slammed it shut in my face. I ran through the house after him and jammed him as he was climbing
over the back fence. I leveled the barrel of my shotgun at his head and said, “Nigger, get off that
fence.” After he did, I said, “Head back into that house.” I wanted to fuck him up in the house so
nobody would see it, but when we got to the back door, he stopped and said, “Man I haven’t done
anything to you, please don’t hurt me.” His sniveling made me madder. I shoved the barrel into his
back and said, “Man, go into that house.” He still wouldn’t go in, but just kept begging me not to
shoot him. This pissed me off even more. I lost all my patience and said “Fuck it” and shot him right
where he was standing. (Athens 1989: 29–30)

In this incident the self that the protagonist had put into play and the identities
claimed are multifaceted. To begin with, there is the identity of the man who is
outraged by an injustice: His car was illegitimately “cut off” in the middle of the
intersection. This is accompanied by the identity of class: The other fellow is
driving an expensive and ostentatious car. In American society an automobile is
not just a form of vehicular transportation. It is rather the symbol of power and
domination, of wealth and status, of masculinity and assertiveness. The bigger
the car and the more expensive it is, the greater the value it will mobilize as a
sign of the self. Furthermore, this other man is audaciously provocative: He
makes the standard gestures of contempt and challenge, he grins and “throws the
bone”—the uplifted middle finger. Finally, he is the classical outsider and
scapegoat of American society: “The dirty jive nigger flipping me off and
grinning—now he thinks he’s one bad nigger.” “Bad nigger,” of course, is code
for “uppity,” arrogant, and overly self-confident black man, the exquisite
anathema of all white racists.
Multiple identities of the self are put into play in this hunt: a man, a driver
with rights on the streets, a man of honor who does not overlook slights or take
challenges lightly, a man, moreover, who is no doubt aware of his membership in
a dominant race, which is entitled to certain privileges but is nevertheless
deprived of certain identity-defining consumer goods like expensive
automobiles. The pleading from the black man creates further emotionalities: It
annoys the protagonist even more and impels him into immediate action. This
hunt, while not that of a group against another one, nevertheless has all the
elements of what will be acknowledged in many social circles as a heroic
presentation of self. It defines the protagonist as a man who stood his ground and
was willing to fight for what he considered was right: No one has a right to
humiliate the other overtly. Yet, the agents of the society in which he lived,
unlike the ones of Ilongot, did not recognize the “heroism” in it and sent him to
jail for aggravated assault, since his victim survived the gunshot.
The third example I would like to use here is the phenomenon known as
“wilding.” In this kind of activity a group of young men who habitually hang out
together select a target and attack it, often committing rape and murder. There
were a spate of such attacks during the last decade. The defining feature of
“wilding” is the calculated selection of a weaker target, usually a woman, and
the ritual violation of the person without any provocation from her or him. There
is no violation of territorial rights in acts of wilding, no property is taken from
the victims, and no immediate acts of the victims are taken as calling for revenge
and retaliation. There is no issue of defending the honor or esteem of a member
of the gang or of the gang itself. For instance, in Atlanta, Georgia, six men and a
boy went on a “wilding spree . . . resulting in the gang rape of a woman and the
slaying of a man who begged them not to attack his wife” (Scruggs 1991: C;1).
Similar attacks have been reported in Boston and Los Angeles and most
famously in New York. In this incident a group of black teenagers saw a young
white woman jogging, accosted her, held her captive, and some of them raped
her while the others beat her and then they left her. No property was taken, she
was not known to any of the assailants, and she had not invited their attention in
any way. What elements of self and emotion were put into play by these young
men in this attack? To begin with, there was the thrill of experiencing solidarity
in the joint participation in a venture with members of one’s primary group. The
venture itself had the smell of both power and sex: One could overpower this
woman and have sex with her. All the assailants were both young and black,
making the slightly older white woman an alluring target: She was, from their
point of view, aloof, rich, fit, and white—a socially distant and culturally
forbidden fruit. While sexual activity occurred, it was quick, violent,
unreciprocated. It was more a collective ritual of violation than a fulfillment of
sexual desire. It was indeed a hunt, emotion-laden, intensely active, risky, but
endowed with the qualities of pursuit and the possibilities of reinforcing one’s
feeling of fellowship simultaneously within age strata (the gang), ethnic strata
(black), and social class. Indeed it would be a mistake to take this incident as
merely a racial one; rather, many aspects of the respective selves of the
participants were put into play in these acts, many selves were given presence
and validated. There was male adolescent braggadocio and sexual quest in the
assault and the affirmation and celebration of gang solidarity; there was ethnic
and class resentment and assertiveness. Sexuality, class, race, gender, and group
solidarity mingled to create an explosive mixture. Had they been able to get
away with it they would have provided material for future boasts and bragging,
leading to further opportunities to put their selves into play. As it happened, the
attackers in the park were arrested and most of them sent to prison.4

FANTASIES

In addition to these practical forms in which selves may be put into play, it is
possible to put them into play in one’s imagination. These may be termed
fantasies. “Fantasies” are a more inclusive category in that engaging in
“fantastic” plays of the self, one can also duel or hunt or engage in combat and
even have adventurous encounters. The distinguishing feature of plays of the self
in fantasy is that they are imaginary exercises in which the body of the
individual is only minimally involved. They are acts in which the individual
participates vicariously and, nevertheless, is able to achieve both dramatic
realizations of their respective selves and ecstasies and catharses.
In such actions and involvements, selves are put into play by a process of
identification. In an extensive study of what he called “the range of rhetoric”
Kenneth Burke argued for supplementing the term “persuasion” in theories about
rhetoric with the concept “identification” and sought to show that successful
persuasion is achieved through the managements of the processes of
identification. In a striking analysis of John Milton’s Samson Agonistes, Burke
showed how the poet in his composition of the long poem identified with
Samson:
 A prisoner chained “eyeless in Gaza . . . blind among enemies” because he could not keep “the secret
of his strength” . . .
himself his “sepulchre” . . . himself his own “dungeon” . . .
his sightlessness in captivity a “prison within a prison”
enraged with himself for having,
divulged
The secret gift of God to a deceitful
Woman.

For having given up his “fort of silence to a woman” he hugely laments his
“corporal servitude” (1969b: 3–4). Since Milton himself had suffered certain
vicissitudes in his own life at this time—though not as a result of betrayal by a
woman—he then can be said to be identifying with Samson’s plight, vicariously
experiencing both his own blindness and social isolation. Such processes of
identification occur here in an act of composition wherein various literary
devices—rhyme, rhythm, imagery, various tropes, plotting, characterization, and
so on—are used to create what Burke calls consubstantiality with the object
being written about. He describes this as follows:
A is not identical with his colleague, B. But insofar as their interests are joined, A is identified with B.
Or he may identify himself with B even when their interests are not joined, if he assumes that they are,
or is persuaded to believe so. Here are ambiguities of substance. In being identified with B, A is
“substantially one” with a person other than himself. Yet at the same time he remains unique, an
individual locus of motives. Thus he is both joined and separate, at once a distinct substance and
consubstantial with another. (Burke 1969b: 20–21)

Another way of describing the exercises that Burke has presented here is to
say that Milton in his composition of the poem cast his self into a drama drawn
from the defining text of his civilization and allowed his self to be identified with
that of Samson and participate in all the trials and tribulations that Samson
underwent—indeed, he appeared to experience a vicarious ecstasy by the
composition itself, just as he may have felt similar emotions on later reading it.
The process by which this identification is achieved is the placing of the self in
one category or another and experiencing the perquisites that go with it. Fantasy
here involves the imaginative projection of the self into a story and participating
in the characterizations and feelings and developments in it as they occur in the
text. The identifying subject finds a place and a role for himself or herself in the
acts that are performed within the text and in the evolving plot they constitute
and feels the emotions that are generated in and through them. In submitting his
or her self to this process of identification, an individual experiences a
transformation of the self. Milton, by identifying with Samson and his fate,
including the fact that while destroying his enemies by bringing the temple down
he killed himself too, was using this “murder-suicide” motive, as Burke argues,
as “terms for transformation in general” (1969b: 11) insofar as death is the
ultimate transformation. Identifying with another, while composing a text, or
while reading it, one in fact achieves a transformation of self, however
temporary.
In such a process of identification the rhetorical move is to persuade, not
others, but the individual himself or herself that the action being construed or
seen somehow involves its own self. Identification as conceived here is not a
“psychological” event, not a subjective thoughtway, but an act that an individual
undertakes and with which he or she enters into a dialogue with the text he or
she is construing, or for that matter, an event he or she is watching, or an object
that he or she is apprehending. Bakhtin wrote in one of his early essays that a
“life is a responsive, risk-taking, open, act of becoming.” And it is with these
risk-taking acts that an individual deals with the world.
For my participatory consciousness it [the world] is an architectonic whole, and is arrayed around me
as around a singular center from which issue my acts: it locates itself with respect to me to the extent
that I go out of myself . . . in my visualization-act, thought-act and deed-act. (Bakhtin in Roberts 1989:
121)

The “world” that we are interpreting, all the texts that we read, then have an
architectonic—a subtle and systematic interrelation of its various elements, and
it is this architectonic that elicits responses. The rhetoricity of a text, then, is
intertwined with its architectonic with certain arrangements of a text eliciting
given responses and readings while others elicit differing ones. This
architectonic exists prior to the act of interpretation having been set up by other
processes. There is no immaculate text or world, rather an arranged world, an
addressed text. A text, in other words, is not a passive and inert entity. Rather, it
is active in the sense that its form and structure can be taken as the
representamen of the author’s designs. The various elements of the text are signs
produced by the author that a reader considers in confronting the interpretive
tasks at hand.
This process of interpreting texts—responding to their rhetoricity or
architectonic—and identifying with one or more of the characters in them and
with the stories that they are made to enact may be termed narrative semiosis:
the acts of composing a text out of other texts, as Milton did in his Samson
Agonistes, or the acts of reading a text and responding to its rhetoric and
architectonic. In such semiotic exercises an individual constructs an interpretant
to a sign, to be sure, but both sign and interpretant are complex and dynamic
functions and the processes of semiosis are ongoing constructions. This involves
the construing of the elements of the narrative—the characters, their
interrelations, and the developments they were undergoing, the ideas and
emotions they were generating, the times and spaces and locations in which the
actions were occurring, and the motives and themes they were enacting—as
signs and responding to them in complex ways.
These moves may result in a masterpiece like Milton’s, of course, but I want
to extend this kind of exercise to include a variety of processes that are more
mundane as well as decidedly less majestic than Milton’s. That is, while some
narrative semiosis or compositional activity may result in sublime fields of
identification, all humans engage in some form of semiotic activity in which
they put their selves into play and enjoy the fruits thereof in responding to either
enacted or written texts. These activities can be creative acts in their own right,
as Milton’s was, or else they can be imaginary acts of putting one’s self into play
through texts, written or enacted, texts that are already in existence, or are being
performed.
In reading a novel, for example, an individual achieves his or her satisfaction
by identifying with one or more characters in it, disidentifying from others,
participating vicariously in the development of the plot, and savoring its ultimate
resolution. Similarly, when watching a play or a movie or a football match one
puts one’s self forward in his or her imagination, identifies with one or more of
the characters, disidentifies with others, and participates in the ongoings of the
event. In reading a text or watching an event one also participates in the
generation of the various emotions, feels them, and savors them as well. In
successfully achieving these results, an individual must engage in various steps
that are tantamount to composition: He or she must recognize the logic of the
plot that is unfolding and be able to respond to it, identify the characters, and
recover and incorporate the acts the characters undertake into his or her own
intelligible universe. In short, the reading of certain texts involves the
construction by the respondent of an answering narrative to the one with which
he or she is presented, and casting his or her self in it. Such a reading involves a
certain empathy with one or more of the characters in the story, with their
experiences and destinies, the justice or injustice of their acts and fates, the
fitness of the denouement, and the general plausibility of the entire proceedings.
Not only do we read a narrative but constitute our own version of it—shifting the
emphasis in some places, bringing the characters to our own measures, rendering
their motivations intelligible according to our own worldviews.
When one writes a novel, a narrative poem, a play, or a movie script, he or she
is undertaking a composition, and in reading one, too, one composes complex
structures of meaning in which the self is put into play by means of acts of
identification. In composing Samson Agonistes, Milton identified with Samson;
in reading it, one may identify with Samson too, or in special cases, identify with
Samson and Milton. Other mortals, however, may be able to identify only with
Hercule Poirot and Agatha Christie. Edmund Wilson ([1946] 1974) dismissed
the whole genre of detective fiction by asking “Who Cares who Murdered Roger
Ackroyd?” alluding to a popular novel by Agatha Christie. The answer, of
course, is that many do, many more in fact than care about the murderer of old
Hamlet or old Laius.
The meaning of a text, its cognitive and emotional import, to use Susanne
Langer’s word for the complex content of artistic forms (Langer 1953), is
apprehended in the dialogic interaction between the cognitive and emotional
competencies of the reader and the significations of the text. The reader is able to
identify with all or some of the features of the text and enter into a dialogue with
an active text because it possesses, in Burke’s terms, a certain rhetoricity and
what Bakhtin calls an architectonic. The architectonic will guide particular
interpretations, indeed provide limits, accounting for similarities of interpretation
among a variety of readers. In each such case, the text’s architectonic may guide
one particular interpretation or other but the influence of the identity of the
reader cannot be discounted. Norman Holland puts this very well. The
similarities of interpretation, he argues,
come from similar hypotheses applied to the same text, hypotheses formed by gender, class,
education, race, age or “interpretive community.” The differences come from differing hypotheses out
of individual beliefs, opinions, values, neuroses, in short one’s identity. (1994: 1–2)

It is not necessary, however, to give priority either to the text or to the reader.
Rather, one can conceive of a simultaneity and a situatedness of the connection
between the architectonic of the text and the identity of the reader, a dialogue
between them.
One must accept the independent facticity of the text and the valences of its
constitutive details in eliciting certain given responses from the reader, just as
one must allow the reader to participate actively in constructing the meanings of
the text, a process that I have called narrative semiosis. In these compositional
activities a reader brings the details of his or her biography, the stresses and
tensions it has undergone, the emotional definitions and socialization to which it
has been subjected, and the religious, philosophical, and ethical principles the
individual has accepted and made a part of his or her identity, not to mention the
theories of character, motivation, and plot that he or she may have learned or
invented. Such an individual takes the material given to him or her and uses the
material, composes a dialogic response in which and through which he or she
puts his or her self into play by means of identification. Indeed, in developing a
theory about the interaction between reader and text, one needs, as has been
argued (Fish 1980; Holland 1992), an enriched definition of the reader: An
active and complex individual, a member of not only an “interpretive
community,” but also of other more mundane communities, competent in
linguistic and social skills, one with a history, one who knows his or her history
and, above all, one with an active and imaginative cognitivity of his or her own
self and its identifying loyalties.5
The rhetoricity and architectonic of a text may be found in the way in which a
text has been organized. That is, events in real life follow a certain temporal
order, but a writer can rearrange this order to achieve particular effects. Gerard
Genette calls this anachronies. Further, in the narrating of a story, events that
occur later can be anticipated in the text, a phenomenon that Genette calls
prolepses. Stories have a duration within them: Joyce’s Ulysses traveled only for
a day, but Homer’s did for several years. In telling a story, the narrator can either
compress the duration or elongate it as it suits his or her narrative purposes. In
narrating a story, a writer also has the freedom to allude to an event just once or
call attention to it again and again to some purpose. Genette calls this frequency.
Stories can be told with a certain closeness to the narrative by the narrator or
from a certain distance and Genette, drawing on the usage in grammar, calls this
the mood of the narrative: “One can tell more or tell less what one tells and one
can tell it according to one point of view or another; and its capacity and
modalities of its use are precisely what our category of narrative mood aims at”
(1980: 161–162). The final element of narrative discourse that Genette identified
he calls voice. This is a description of the narrator’s relationship to the story
being told and the moment of its telling and the development of these
relationships as the story evolves. Genette describes three types of narrating
voice: prior narrating or predictive narrating, where narrating precedes the story,
simultaneous narrating, where the narrating occurs as the story unfolds, and
subsequent narrating, where a story that has already happened is recounted. In
the literatures of the world often all three are used in varying combinations
(Genette 1980: 217).
Genette, having described the elements of narrative discourse with the above
formulation, develops its implications further. The major consequence of
narratives having these features is that they enable the authors, be they writers
and composers of narratives that are claimed to be “factual,” “fictional” or
“mythical,” to have a relative freedom to arrange and rearrange events and
characters in order to develop particular themes and purposes: That is, to give
them a particular architectonic so that they possess a certain rhetorical power and
elicit one set of responses and reading rather than another. Yet, there is no
gainsaying the claim that this will not guarantee success to the author: The
reader still has the power to interpret these architectonics and either fulfill the
expectations of the author completely or partially or subvert them or thwart
them. Writing a “subsequent” narrative an author can treat two unrelated events
that happened in separate temporal sequences as causally related ones and
impute a purposiveness to the unfolding story of a destiny being fulfilled. The
atypical birth of a child can, for example, be related to the subsequent heroic
activities of the grown man as causally related sequences. In “prior” narratives,
the same purpose can be achieved: By selectively arranging various observations
and writing them into a thematic relationship, various social and political
purposes can be fulfilled. Science fiction and utopian and distopian novels as
well as religious tracts do this and present various selected versions of a future.
“Simultaneous” narratives enable an author to give disciplined analysis and
comparative examination of the ongoing events and explicate the themes as they
unfold.
These and other architectonic features of narratives, intrinsic to the texts
themselves, all or many of which can be found in all narrative forms, bring an
organization and a discipline to the texts, certainly. They also enable satisfactory
identifications to occur by managing the unfolding of the narrative in such a way
that they are able to engage the emotions and the intellect of the reader and
elicit his or her emotional engrossment and cognitive commitment. In other
words, the features of narratives that Genette has identified are rhetorical
instruments designed to elicit particular responses, within a certain range of such
responses, that will lead to successful identification by the reader.
In reading these constructed texts, as a reader moves along the story, the first
significant entry of the self into narrative is to cast himself or herself as a
participant or an interested observer. Such an entry may initially be that of a
mere voyeur or a discoverer. Once such an initial move is made, he or she may
come to identify with some of the complex roles in the plot. He or she may
become, more relevantly, a protagonist in the narrative, a vicarious actor. He or
she can now be a hero or heroine, suffer the passion and the anguish of the
character or characters chosen for identification, enjoy the triumphs, bemoan the
defeats, suffer the injustices, and celebrate with the just, the proud, and the
beautiful, not to speak of participating in their loves, lusts, and unfulfilled
desires. Or else he or she, being a competent reader in other fields and having
loyalties and commitments to other perspectives, may consider the rhetoric and
the architectonic of the texts, its narrative discourse, and evaluate them in terms
of these fields and perspectives and stand aloof from the text in question. That is,
he can become a “critic,” an “ethicist,” and “moralist,” or even perhaps an editor,
and read it accordingly.
The ubiquity of such narrative semiosis on the part of the reader is attested by
the fact that, while the responses of readers to a text may vary, the variations are
about the interpretation of the common elements of the text. The variations in
interpretations are usually about the different weight to be given to the various
elements of the text, their collective import and significance, and their derivative
relevancies. Nevertheless reading a novel—however complex its theme,
structure, and plot, or however simple, involves the reader casting himself or
herself into the narrative and participating with varying degrees of involvement
in it. These moves would enable him or her to give play to his or her self
vicariously and participate empathetically in the emotionality of the developing
sequences. Yet, however much the self gives itself play by these acts of narrative
semiosis, it is the elements of the text that draw these responses and induce the
interpretations. There is in fact no gainsaying the claim that the relationship
between a reader and a text is a dialogic one. To use Bakhtin’s terms once again,
the texts that a reader encounters are invested with addressivities that elicit
particular answers—though not always the same answers, from different
readers.6

Reading the Self

I would like to examine Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in the light of these
observations in order to indicate how different selves are put into play in the
reading of it. In this much-discussed novel, written in the last years of the
nineteenth century, Conrad has a character go out to middle Africa in search of
Kurtz, an adventurer, who had gone into the interior of the country and never
returned. He has apparently abandoned his post and his mission and gone “mad”
or “native.” The narrative of these events is recounted to a group of sailors
assembled on a ship that is stranded in the Thames estuary in London, waiting
for the tide to turn in their favor. Marlow is the narrator of the story of the
expedition to Africa but there is also another narrator who narrates Marlow’s
narrating of it. Marlow narrates his own story, narrates the story of Kurtz, draws
the “moral,” not to speak of the political, implications of the events, and has the
assembled crew enthralled and involved in various ways with the story. They do
not play their customary game of dominoes but choose to listen to Marlow’s tale
—as indeed the reader will too.
He or she will put aside his or her game of dominoes and play, with Marlow,
his game. By having Marlow narrate a story in which he himself plays a part and
having another narrator narrate Marlow’s telling of it, Conrad has, from the
beginning itself, trapped the reader into an engagement. The carefully arranged
scene in the stranded ship, the waiting for the tide to turn, and the interrupted
game of dominoes can apply to any potential reader: He or she is also waiting
for something interesting to happen to him or her, he or she is also waiting,
playing a game of dominoes to while away the time. It is easy, given these
settings, for a reader to assume that he or she is also on the ship like the narrator
and the sailors, smoking a cigar and listening to Marlow. Marlow begins to tell a
story that has already happened—a subsequent narrative—but in the course of
the telling, it becomes a simultaneous telling as Marlow describes his own
experiences and then pulls back to comment on them as in a subsequent
narrative, thereby giving the reader very complex identificational opportunities.
He or she can identity with the listeners to Marlow, on board the ship that is
stranded in the Thames, can switch to identify with Marlow, and return back to
the ship in the Thames estuary again.
In a commentary on the novel Paul O’Prey discusses the play of the
metaphors of “dark” and “light” in the opening lines of the novel. He notes,
In the opening scene, the sky is a “benign immensity of unstained light” and the only darkness is over
Gravesend and the city of London, “a mournful gloom, brooding, motionless”; and the familiar ground
of London assumes a sinister and unreal nature as the sun falls “from glowing white changes to a dull
red without rays and without heat, as if about to go out suddenly, stricken to death by the touch of that
gloom brooding over a crowd of men,” as Marlow suddenly announces into the carefully prepared
silence, “And this also . . . has been one of the dark places of the earth.” (O’Prey 1989: 7)

Marlow is about to tell the assembled associates about his trip to the heart of
darkness in the Congo and he announces, with a daring touch of cultural
relativism, that England, the fount of civilization and the very source of
enlightenment to many Englishmen of those times, was also a “dark continent”
or at least a dark island, when the Romans came there two thousand years or so
earlier.
A little further into the text, Marlow finds himself in a city across the Channel,
presumably Brussels, which Marlow says, “makes him think of a whited
sepulchre.” In this, a double metaphorization is involved: A modern city with its
white-washed walls can be fruitfully compared with a sepulcher with white walls
to it. There is also a biblical allusion here: A white sepulcher is also one that is
outwardly clean, that is “white,” but inwardly corrupt, that is, “dark.” One reader
may catch only the first metaphor while a second reader may catch both. The
second reader, in catching and savoring both, is able to put an authoritative and
knowledgeable self into play and agonistically enjoy the catch that the author has
surreptitiously sent his way. This sensitivity to the play on words, on light and
dark, black and white, the physical and literal light and dark, the metaphorical
lightness and darkness, continues throughout the work. O’Prey observes,
In the story Conrad further exploits the imagery of black and white, “light and dark,” in a number of
ways. Darkness is night, the unknown, the impenetrable, the primitive, the evil. Yet, when he reaches
Africa the colors of skin invert the accepted associations of the contrast. “White” is above all ivory,
the beautiful luxury of civilized man which is the root of all evil in the darkness, and which obsesses
the white men until they, like Kurtz, come to resemble it. (O’Prey 1989: 9)

The reading of these allusions and verbal refractions, the reflections and
interpretations they elicit from the reader, and the alertness to them, constitute a
compositional activity, in itself, involving a play of the reader’s self by the
choices it may make. The self of the reader manifests itself in the authoritative
sensitivity to the multiple meanings of the material that is presented to him or
her. Such a deconstructive reading of the text is undertaken—can be undertaken
—only by a self that is conscious of its powers and capacities to interpret it this
way rather than another way, one that in fact is putting a self into play in
achieving these interpretations. For these alert and informed interpretations are
not, after all, solipsistic exercises: They are communicated by the self to itself, in
a shared and public vocabulary, as an I to a me, and their qualities appreciated
and enjoyed and then, sooner or later, communicated to others. The interpretive
responses to these plays on words and the reconstruction of the implicit allusions
in them is very much like the response to riddles in everyday life: A puzzle, a
verbal and intellectual problem is constructed by an author that is unraveled by
an auditor. A self is given presence to itself and to whoever else may be around.
O’Prey’s reading of the novel can be contrasted with that of Johanna Smith.
She reads Heart of Darkness as a textualization of two interrelated ideologies—
the ideology of imperialism and the ideology of patriarchy. Her essay is an
extremely detailed and intricate analysis of the work, and I will give here a short
quotation that exemplifies her reading:
By examining the women in Marlow’s narrative, we can identify the patriarchal-imperialist blend that
requires the kinds of women he creates . . . Such rethinking about the Heart of Darkness reveals the
collusion of imperialism and patriarchy: Marlow’s narrative aims to “colonize” and “pacify” both
savage darkness and women. (1989: 180)

Imperialist enterprises convert the people they conquer into a subjection and a
dehumanization, she argues, just as on the domestic front males conquer and
colonize women and dehumanize them. For Smith there is a parallel between the
imperialistic construction of the “savage” and the patriarchal construction of the
“woman,” and in Conrad’s novel they are splendidly integrated. This reading
puts Smith’s self, as an ardent anti-imperialist and feminist, into play. It is her
feminist, liberationist, and progressive self, besides a critical one, that she is
putting into play and giving expression in her own text. The roles that are
depicted in the novel, the plot, theme, and characterization, are inescapably
masculine in nature. The activities depicted in the novel define the male role in
certain cultures: daring, courage, adventuresomeness, enterprise, initiative, work
in the outside world, confronting the wilderness (as opposed to the feminine
domain of the home). Furthermore, Marlow, after having confronted the
wilderness and the wilding of the European Kurtz and its “horror,” comes back
to the domestic front and reports untruthfully to Kurtz’s “intended” that the last
words on Kurtz’s lips were her name. Marlow’s lie restores the validity of the
domestic life: From the farthest reaches of “civilization” and amidst all the
“horror,” Kurtz’s memory is that of the “girl he left behind” and all that it
represents. Women—other than those with the self and consciousness of a
Johanna Smith—can no doubt read the novel and understand women’s role in
that particular culture: allow your men to go out on the hunt, wait patiently for
their return, and pay a price for it in loneliness, and at times abandonment.
There is no doubt, however, that both males and females may be able to put
their selves into play in Conrad’s work, but they will find different places for
their selves in the worlds it creates, making literature also a powerful instrument
of socialization into customarily accepted roles. The text reinforces the
connection of the male as an adventurer and go-getter and the woman as the
stay-at-home, entertaining patiently, and no doubt chastely, romantic fantasies.
The intricacies of the identifying processes, and the roles with which one can
identify are such, however, that they are girded only by the limits of one’s
imagination. It is possible for women also to identify with Marlow, or the entire
imperialist mission, or with the “white man’s burden,” and achieve ecstasies and
catharsis.
Other selves can also be put into play in reading this novel. Another reader,
Chinua Achebe, has called attention to the rampant racism in the work. The
Africans in the novel, he contends, are dehumanized, denied the power of
speech, and made out to be “frenzied,” practicing “barbaric rites,” and “waiting
silently for a chance to eat one or other of the people they encounter.” Achebe
writes, further, that in the novel
Africa as a setting and backdrop . . . eliminates the African as a human factor. Africa is a metaphysical
 battlefield devoid of all recognizable humanity, into which the wondering European enters at his peril.
Can nobody see the preposterous and perverse arrogance in thus reducing Africa to the role of prop for
the breakup of one petty European mind? The real question is the dehumanization of Africa and
Africans with this age-long attitude which has festered and continues to fester in the world. (1989: 12)

Achebe is reading the novel as a modern African intellectual who is informed

with the intellectual and social and political history of European colonialism and
racism. It is this self that he is putting into play in this reading.
One can ask, however, to whom was Conrad addressing the novel when he
composed it? And who was this Joseph Conrad, intellectually speaking? Conrad
was addressing his work to the English and the Europeans, and he was no doubt
giving expression to a particular view of social and cultural psychology and
history current in Europe in his time and considering its implications and
contradictions. This theory held that human communities can be put on a scale in
which complexity, and simplicity, heterogeneity and homogeneity of structure
were the measures. Societies on the complex end of the scale were considered
“civilized,” while those on the simple end were considered “primitive.” The
foremost exponent of this view, Herbert Spencer, says, “The change from
homogeneity to heterogeneity is multitudinously exemplified; up from the simple
tribe, alike in all its parts, to the civilized nation full of structural and functional
unlikenesses” (Spencer, 1898; reprinted in Parsons et al. 1961: 143). From this it
followed that psychologically, too, the members of “primitive communities”
were wanting in some or many ways. They were in fact inferior to those who
lived in complex societies, which had themselves evolved from earlier primitive
forms to their current status as civilized forms. “Evolution is an integration of
matter,” Spencer writes, “and concomitant dissipation of motion; during which
the matter passes from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a definite,
coherent heterogeneity, and during which the retained motion undergoes a
parallel transformation.” Martindale quotes this from Spencer and comments,
“This formula was believed to apply to the universe, to the evolution of the
earth, and to the development of biological forms, the human mind, and human
society” (1960: 66).
Conrad’s view of the Africans and Europeans as depicted in this novel, as in
some others, is truly a representation of the view that Europeans were higher on
the evolutionary scale and Africans—the very people whom the Europeans were
seeking to exploit and dominate—were lower, and moreover, needed to be
controlled and managed by the higher life-forms. Spencer gave expression to
these views in scores of books, and they were avidly consumed by the
cognoscenti of England. Lewis Coser notes the widespread success of Spencer’s
works and observes,
 His evolutionary theory provided the solution for a dilemma that faced men of ideas at the time. His
theory made it possible to reconcile the newly discovered variety of human behavior in different
cultures with the principle of the psychic unity of mankind. (1971: 121)

We are all human beings, that is, but some are not as fully evolved as others.
This theme of the return to the antiquity of the human species and its world
represented by Africa is depicted metaphorically by the river that Marlow
traverses: “Going up that river was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings
of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings”
(Conrad, 1989: 66).7
Spencer’s theories provided the ideological justification for the imperialism
and the patronizing racism that engulfed Africa after Europeans came into
contact with it. The question of interest for us here is the response of the reader
imbued with Spencerian theories to Conrad’s work. He or she would be able to
put this Euro-self into play, his or her social-Darwinian self, imperialist self, and
white supremacist self, too, and achieve emotional and cognitive ecstasies by
immersing himself or herself in the narrative and identifying, not only with
Marlow, but the entire thematics that Marlow narrates, illustrates, and analyzes
in eloquent prose. The response here is not merely that of an informed reader,
but one who is able to use the information to illuminate larger themes and serve
grander purposes. Such readers were rampant in Conrad’s time, and they are not
sparse even now. And Conrad’s exquisite craftsmanship provides ample
opportunities in the details that the novel contains—its architectonic—for them
to allow their respective selves to wallow in them.
What were these contemporary reader s able to get out of the readings? In
Conrad’s text, there are “savages” performing various “barbaric rites,” given to
cannibalism and quite incapable of interacting with Europeans. As Achebe
pointed out they are denied the “power of speech,” rendered voiceless, and they
become available to the reader only through the observation of the Europeans.
The Europeans in the novel are aggressive and in control—features highlighted
by the fact that one of them lost control and went “native” with horrific
consequences. A white supremacist, as an ordinary European, would find all this
very gratifying and would be able to identify his self with one or the other of the
European characters or identify with the larger themes, give play to it in his or
her imagination.
Nevertheless, it is possible also to read Conrad’s novel as an ambiguous and
ironic text that, on one level, represents the European interest and attitude to
Africa and the Africans and, on another level, raises questions about them. The
Europeans whom he presents in the novel—with the exception of Marlow—are
not quite exemplary characters and they are depicted as being uncomfortable, out
of place, and out of sorts. Murfin cites Edward Garnett as having written an early
review of Conrad’s novel claiming that it was about the “immorality of whites in
Africa” (Murfin 1989:98). Conrad himself said that his novel was about
“criminality, of inefficiency and pure selfishness when tackling the civilizing
work in Africa” (Murfin 1989: 98). That it was a civilizing mission was never in
doubt in Conrad’s mind. For him, the white man’s burden can, at times, be borne
by unworthy representatives. The destiny of Kurtz himself is no model for other
European adventurers to emulate. Indeed, it could very well be a warning to the
ivory-colored people to stay away from Africa and the Africans and from the
seductions of the ivory trade and dreams of colonization unless they had the
purest of motives and the most sterling of characters. The lie that Marlow tells
Kurtz’s “intended,” that her name was on his lips as he lay dying, may be said to
depict the deceit and hypocrisy on which patriarchal and imperialist adventurism
were based and a female reader—or for that matter a male one too—would have
seen it for what it was. The lie speaks to the fiction on the basis of which male
adventurers left home and wife to seek fortunes: It was for the sake of the wife
and children. Once again there is an ambiguous and nuanced representation of
both patriarchy and imperialism: Imperialist patriarchs are liars and deceivers.
Indeed both the imperialist and patriarchal postures may be said to be exposed as
hollow and devious in Conrad’s work, ones that lead to betrayals and self-
destructions.
Insofar as the same text evoked, or can evoke, such a variety of responses, the
question that arises is this: Did the text determine these interpretations, extract
them as an imperious existent? Or, did the reader respond to it in his or her own
free-enterprising individualistic ways? “Neither” seems to be the correct answer.
In fact, Umberto Eco calls a commitment to one or other of these positions
“epistemological fanaticism” (1990: 24). There are limits to the interpretational
freedom of the reader just as there are such limits to the significance that an
author can put into his or her text (Perinbanayagam 1982: 12–17; Eco 1990).
Conrad’s text provided the basic structures, the architectonics, to which the
readers addressed their own selves and produced a responsive interpretation,
which were varied because the selves that addressed them were varied. In
Peircian terms, the text was a complex sign-system that had power of its own to
which the readers produced their interpretants, each selecting certain aspects of
the original sign-system to address. The variety of responses that the sign-
system, which the Heart of Darkness is, has been able to elicit demonstrates that,
while the text sets definite parameters, in reading it and responding to it the self
of the reader is put into play. When an individual puts his or her self into play in
fantasies, it is not as a subjectivist activity; rather it is a dialogical activity in
which a reader uses the structures available in the text to experience the ecstasies
of his or her self.

Watching the Self

One of the most ubiquitous of human activities is to watch others play, in two
senses of the word: play games of skill and strength and play parts in enacted
dramas. The watching of dramas on stages or screens and the watching of games
in arenas or on screens, too, can elicit both cognitive engrossment in the ongoing
proceedings and emotional involvement. Such spectatoring is also an
inescapably dialogic process in which the rhetoricity and architectonic of the
drama or the game—their respective structurings and characterizations, temporal
and spatial ordering, and other elements of a narrativization—elicit particular
cognitive and emotional responses. The performances on the stage or the arena
are thus able to allow the spectators to identify with the proceedings presented to
them, identify with the characters, plot, and theme of the performed text, and
experience various degrees of ecstasy by engaging in narrative semiosis.
Such a semiosis and interpretive responses in which the self gets full play
occur frequently in the watching of sporting contests. Today millions of people,
often on a worldwide scale, watch certain games—soccer, for example, and at
times cricket. In the United States, football has become a sport that millions
watch on a weekly basis during the season. Some of this watching is done in
stadiums and arenas, but most people nowadays watch the games on television.
Such watching is indeed an active and involved pastime and demands that the
audience read the game as it progresses. In watching games, in getting actively
involved in them, a spectator puts his or her self into play and experiences both
emotional engrossment and intellectual engagement. Such a semiotic activity, to
be at least minimally successful, demands a number of a priori conditions. A
spectator must know the game, understand it, and indeed engage in certain
activities that may be termed “preparatory work” to participate in the ongoing
game. The first task that he or she must accomplish is to master the rules of the
game. Indeed it could be said that baseball, cricket, football, soccer, tennis, and
so on are not merely games that are played with bats or rackets and balls but are
structures of activity through which rules are put into play. Those who play the
games, as well as those who watch them with the necessary understanding and
appreciation, are participating truly in an affirmation and celebration of the rules.
The rules become alive and manifest in the moving flesh and bones and brains of
the players. And for the spectator the rules define the meaning of the moves on
the arena. On a very general level these rules establish a system of acceptable
and unacceptable moves, each of them defined very precisely. They also define
the moves by which one side in the game can gain or lose advantage over the
other, advantages that are once again very precisely measured. Further, these
rules also define the way time and space are to be handled in the course of the
playing of the game. Games are played within given spatial limits and, in certain
games, the game must be played within given time frames. Second, a spectator
must know the teams that are playing in the game, their respective lore and
history, the particular character and competencies of the players and the place of
this particular game in a series of other such games.
One can take American football and examine how certain rules about roles,
moves, space, and time are put into play through the deployment of various
human agents and how they are able to elicit engrossment and emotional
involvement. The game is arranged as a pattern of roles that define given
relationships with each other. The hierarchy in these roles is limited with the
quarterback occupying a certain superiority in power and control. Nevertheless,
everyone is presumptively equal to one another and every role is crucial to the
game. A division of labor is achieved in its most pure form in football—a
division that leads to what Durkheim called organic solidarity, thereby solving
the problem of social order within the team. Thomas Hobbes notes,
Nature hath made men so equall, in the faculties of body, and mind; as that though there bee found one
man sometimes manifestly stronger in body, or of quicker mind then another; yet when all is reckoned
together the difference between man, and man, is not so considerable, as that one man can thereupon
claim himselfe any benefit, to which another may not pretend, as well as he. (Hobbes in Leviathan
1651; reprinted in Parsons 1965: 99)

To ensure that these claims are enforced, humans enter into a “contract” with
each other and create a state to accomplish it. In the real world a man or woman
may pretend to such benefits as another, but typically he or she cannot get away
with it because he or she is circumscribed by the facts of caste, class, ethnicity,
gender, and other variables of stratification. They limit, a priori, the benefits that
a person can claim. In football, however, these limitations are eliminated. On the
field everyone can claim the benefits. The contract holds and everyone is subject
to its provisions—though the referee functions as the state to ensure that serious
departures from the contractual obligations are corrected. It is in football, as in
other games, that one finds such a contractual order in the most perfect form:
Everybody is, a priori, equal and has an important contribution to make to the
total effects of the organized activities. In the event, some of the members may
be found to be making a bigger contribution than others, but there is nevertheless
a presumption of equality among the role-players. There are no classes, castes,
and estates within the team, only roles that contribute to the well-being of all.
A system of rules that are clear and unambiguous defines and executes the
relationship between the various roles. These are statements made in the form of
imperatives by either a body of individuals or transmitted over the years by
members of larger and more nebulous organizations. Officials specifically
appointed for the purpose, as well as members of an organization in interactional
situations, enforce them. They exist as forms of shared knowledge—even the
usually unarticulated behavioral rules can be put in the form of a statement—and
have a systematic quality to them. The existence of this knowledge bespeaks, in
fact, the existence of a social organization.
In the case of football the rules were made by a body of individuals and are
enforced by officials. The rules are imperatives of what is permitted and what is
forbidden in the field of play. If a player accomplishes one of the negative
imperatives, his team will be penalized, and if he accomplishes one of the
positive imperatives, the team will be credited. Interpretation and enforcement
are swift, immediate, and typically unchallenged and unappealed. There are no
grounds for complaining of the “law’s delays and the contumely of office.”
Offenses against the collective conscience—the rules of the game—are punished
by small penalties against the whole team and sometimes by big penalties of the
offender being expelled from the game. The errant player, the persistent offender
against the collective conscience, is exiled and made to suffer the consequences.
The game begins with one team kicking the oval-shaped ball to the other side.
One member of the opposing team retrieves the ball and runs with it toward the
other end of the field. Usually he is interrupted soon after, and after this the
quarterback and his offensive team take to the field, take the ball, and seek to
advance it to the opposing end. The quarterback passes the ball or hands it to one
member of his team, the latter tries to catch and run with it, until he is
interrupted by members of the opposing side. If he is not interrupted he runs to
the other end of the field and scores a “touchdown.” Often the quarterback is
prevented from passing the ball at all by being “sacked” by members of the
opposing team. Besides the interruptions by the opposing side, the game can
come to a halt if the officials espy a foul and call it. However, if the quarterback
successfully passes the ball and the receiver takes the ball and is interrupted
before he moves ten yards, the side gets three more chances to move the ball the
requisite ten yards. If the side succeeds in moving the ball the requisite ten yards,
it gets another such chance until the goal line of the opposite side is reached.
This final moment is called a “touchdown,” whereas the earlier ones were called
“downs” with numerical qualifications “first down,” “second down,” and so on.
The game in fact consists of episodes that are begun and certain narrative
developments achieved and then terminated, only to begin another episode with
an interval between the episodes. Each episode and their fruits develop further
into whole plots with a denouement at the end. The activities that occur in each
episode, even the most minute event within it, are defined and made existentially
possible and given value and importance by the operation of the rules of the
game.
The rules that define the roles and relationships of each player are operational
within very precisely articulated space-time coordinates. The game is played
within a bounded arena of a given length and breadth. This arena is marked with
various spatial coordinates: there is the outer boundary within which the game is
played, and within this area space is marked in terms of yards. In addition, there
is an area marked as the “end zone” in which all the moves made earlier come to
a consummation and a rest.
Time is fundamental to the game—time broken formally into quarters and
halves, the time of the entire game, the time between a move by the quarterback
and the moves by the receiver or the interrupters, the time between the
quarterback receiving the ball and passing it, the last two minutes of each half of
the game, and periods called “time-outs,” which are not counted as part of the
overall time of the game. It is not only rules that are put into play in a game, but
so is time. The vast open-ended nature of time’s unfolding is contracted into
measured units with precise endings, a halftime, the full time preceded by the
last two minutes, defined and announced to all, and other subunits within them.
The game in fact is organized to provide the spectators with both contracted and
delimited timings in which their selves may be put into play, retrieved for the
time being, and reactivated again. In such plays of the self, time itself is
experienced sensuously and viscerally as fleeting moments that are soon arrested
only to begin again.
Consider a single episode in the game: The quarterback gathers his players in
a “huddle” in which the next move in the game is presented to the team, with
each player assigned a particular task. They move to the line of play and the ball
is passed, shall I say, to a receiver. He catches it and runs with it for a few yards,
dodging and ducking the defenders from the other side, until eventually he is
tackled and his run ended. The game comes to a standstill at this moment, albeit
temporarily, and the entire proceedings begin all over again. A spectator
identifying with the defending team can feel fear that the move will be
completed and, if it is in fact completed, can have this fear reinforced and
experience the disappointment of the defending team as his own, just as one
identifying with the advancing team can feel elated if the move is successively
completed. The episodic structure of football is such that each spectator can
experience these emotions successively or alternatively, giving ample
opportunities to put the self and the attendant emotions into play.
The systematic use of certain elements of narratives—order, duration, mood,
and voice—serves to ensure engrossment and emotional play and the
commitment of a self to the proceedings on the field. Unlike more conventional
narratives, football follows a simple linear order: no anachronies or prolepsis. Its
progress is however nonlinear: It is interrupted often and the narrative line reset
after every such interruption, particularly after an interruption in which a score
or an interception or fumble has occurred. The game’s most fundamental
narrative feature is the frequency with which each move is repeated. In fact, it
could be said that the central motif of the game is the repetitive structure of the
moves, with each repetition, however, having a different value in the overall
narrative scheme: Something is added to it or subtracted from it. Mood, too, is
important in eliciting an audience’s response to the game. In narrative theory
mood is defined as the point of view from which a story is told. One must
manage, that is, the degree of distance from the details of the narrative that is
being unfolded as well as appreciate the perspective from which the narrative is
being presented (Genette 1980: 161–162). In football games, the mood is simple:
The story the game tells is from the point of view of the quarterback, his
defenders, his receivers, and their attackers. His are the main scoring moves and
he gives shape to the narrative line of the game. In following and appreciating
his moves a spectator truly gets very close to the narrative that is unfolding on
the field and views it from his perspective. Occasionally the perspective shifts to
a goal-kicker or punter, but the focal point of the game is the quarterback. If it is
the quarterback of the team one is supporting, then one follows his moves with
anticipations of advancing on the space of the field within the allotted time and
effecting a score and with a fearful anticipation that he may be thwarted. If on
the other hand the ball is being maneuvered by the quarterback of the opposing
side, then one watches in fearful anticipation that he may score and in hopeful
anticipation that he may be interrupted. The voice in which the game is narrated
is an immediate presentist one: It is happening in front of one’s own eyes and the
action that is seen is seen to be related to the actors on the field and read or heard
as such. There is no intervening process and no other narrative voice. The time
of the narrating is identical to the narrative time. It creates no unusual
complexity and follows a linear, albeit interrupted, pattern. In short, the
unfolding is no doubt a narrative unfolding, but characterized by a classically
simple line.8
While the focal perspective of the spectator is on the quarterback, he or she
can nevertheless shift his or her point of view by following the movement of the
ball. Each such moment of the plays in time and space is fraught with a dizzying
alteration of the point from which the moves on the field can be viewed. To
begin with, there is the moment of the throw: The spectator sees the move from
the standpoint of the quarterback. This is changed soon after this to the point of
view of the receiver and from that of the receiver to that of the players who are
trying to tackle him or chase him if he has eluded the tackle. Each such
perception places the spectator in a unique point, and, depending on the
identification that he or she makes with either the attacking team or the
defending one, unifies the perception and emotion. If the spectator identifies
with the attacking team, his or her perception and emotion would begin with the
quarterback’s moves and then shift to watch the ball’s parabola as it moves into
the hands of the receiver and feel elation when it is caught and moved further
toward the goal line. This final denouement will be experienced as a feeling of
emotional consummation developing out of earlier moments of elation when the
quarterback and the receivers executed their moves successfully.
The coordination of time and space enables a spectator to see the moves of the
players and the ball in their “simultaneity, to juxtapose and counterpose them
dramatically . . . to get one’s bearings in the world,” and “to conceive all its
contents as simultaneous and to guess at their interrelationships in the cross-
section of a single moment,” as Bakhtin says, discussing the relationship
between time and narrative in Dostoevski’s poetics (1984: 28). In these games,
time is transcended and space traversed, making the game into what Bakhtin
calls a “chronotope.” He writes, “We will give the name chronotope to the
temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in
literature . . . in the literary artistic chronotope, spatial and temporal indicators
are fused into one carefully thought-out concrete whole” (1981: 84). James
Joyce’s Ulysses, for example, embodies the chronotope of a single day and the
streets and public areas of a single city, while Conrad’s Heart of Darkness
embodies several years and several locations in different cities, villages, rivers,
and continents. The time of the novels and the space in which they are situated
speak to each other and the characters find their presence and achieve their
dramatic realization in these times and within these spaces. There is a union
between time and place and the moves of the characters serve to define them. In
football, too, there is an organic fusion of time and space in which various
characters, i.e., players, perform their roles in accordance with the specific time-
space coordinates that are watched by the spectators and experienced as such.
On each occasion in which an episode is watched by a spectator, its full import
understood and appreciated, his or her self is put into play in and through these
space-time coordinates. The constantly shifting point of view and the placement
of the perception in the particular locale by the spectator’s self allows it to
achieve a potent mixture of emotion and identity.
These proceedings can be best understood by using St. Augustine’s discussion
of temporality, which has recently been refurbished by Paul Ricoeur to develop a
theory about the narrativity of time and the temporality of narratives. Ricoeur
writes, “Time becomes human to the extent that it is articulated through a
narrative mode, and narrative attains its full meaning when it becomes a
condition of human temporal existence” (1984: 52). Claiming that “there is no
pure phenomenology of time in St. Augustine” (1984: 83) Ricoeur quotes from
Augustine’s confessions: “The mind ‘performs three functions, those of
expectation [expectat], attention [adtendit; this verb recalls the intention
praesens], and memory [meminit]’ ” (Ricoeur 1984: 19). From the spectator’s
point of view in football there are the following temporal and narrative stages:

(a) The preparations by the quarterback and the team—Augustine’s

“expectation.”
(b) The quarterback’s pass and reception and run by the receiver—Augustine’s
“attention.”
(c) The interpretation of the moves of the receiver and ending of this
sequence, allowing the spectators to recall and reconsider the earlier moves
—Augustine’s “memory.”

In each of these latter two moments there was the possibility of the moves
being either fulfilled or thwarted. If the moves were fulfilled, the spectator
would have been able to experience emotions of consummation and fulfillment;
if the moves were thwarted by the other side, there would have been the feeling
of sorrow and disappointment to be experienced. Both these feelings are only for
the “time being” because a new move is about to begin that will open the
opportunity for the further experiencing of expectation, attention, and memory.
The expectation phase in the experiencing of football has another enriching
element to it: The possibility of peripeteia. Ricoeur has observed that one
element of a narrative unfolding is the possibility of peripeteia—the occurrence
of “reversals” in the plot. “To follow a story,” Ricoeur writes, “is to move
forward in the midst of contingencies and peripeteia, under the guidance of an
expectation that finds its fulfillment in the ‘conclusion’ of the story” (1984: 66).
In football with the “interception” and the “fumble” that is recovered by the
other side, one has the perfect example of such peripeteia. Here is a spectator, all
filled with the memory of the previous move and its outcome, attending to the
current moves of the quarterback, expecting him to consummate a pass to his
receiver, and suddenly an antagonist catches the ball and runs in the opposite
direction and scores a touchdown. The story is interrupted, the conclusion
postponed, the destiny reversed, but if there is still time, there will be
opportunities to remember, attend, and anticipate and, above all, there may still
be further opportunities for another reversal or re-reversal. The result is that, in
Augustine’s words, “the future, which it expects, passes through the present to
which it attends, into the past, which it remembers” (Ricoeur 1984: 19). The
remembered past and the anticipated future occur in the nowness of the attentive
moment. It is the human mind, capable of functioning with “signs, rules and
norms” that is then able to narrativize experience this way. Remembering,
attending, and anticipating are in fact the temporal modes of the self’s presence.
The self, however, needs external narrative structures in which to give it this
presence. In football, watching it and interpretively responding to it, the
spectator is able to narrativize the self’s presence by using the structures
provided by the game itself.9
The simplicity of the narrative line in football enables spectators of varying
personal styles and complexities to identify their selves with the proceedings on
the field. Yet football has other characteristics that make it a suitable field of
identity in certain societies. The watcher is typically a male and in American
society, football, the playing of it, the understanding of it, the watching of it, the
talking of it, and the appreciation of it, is a sign and measure of one’s
masculinity. It is the occasion for being with other males, it is a topic of
conversation with them, and it is an instrument for constructing personal
loyalties and commitments. These become features of the self of the watcher,
and the watching becomes an occasion for putting this self into play. Above all,
football represents one of the prime responsibilities of maleness: putting one’s
life and limb at risk for one’s own benefit as well as for the common good. No
doubt the audience—predominantly male—identifies with the strong, classically
proportioned players and their activities almost totally. Clifford Geertz, in his
study of the Balinese cockfight, notes that among the Balinese males there was a
direct identification between the cock, the bird, and the cock, the penis (1973).
They play with their birds as fondly as they may play with their cocks and as
Geertz puts it, the fact that cocks are “masculine symbols par excellence is about
as indubitable, and to the Balinese about as evident as the fact that water runs
downhill” (1973: 418). I have no evidence at this stage to claim that football
spectators have this complete an identification between the ball and their
penises. Nevertheless the sensuous fondness with which young boys and young
men handle the ball while playing “catch” in backyards, frontyards, and streets
makes one wonder whether this elongated object, soft and yet hard, is a symbolic
equivalent of the cock, an “ambulant genital with a life of its own” in Geertz’s
potent description of the cock in Balinese society (1973: 417).10
The maleness itself that football represents is a mixture of a variety of traits—
not all of them connected to roughness and insensitivity. In a remarkable study
of the culture of football, Michael Oriard cites different aspects of manliness that
different observers found in football from the very early days of its emergence:

(a) To bear pain without flinching, and to laugh at the wounds and the scars of
a hotly-contested game, is very good discipline, and tends to develop
manliness of character. (1892, Frank Leslies’s Illustrated Weekly, quoted in
Oriard 1993: 189)
(b) The manly qualities which are necessary to the building up of a successful
player call forth the best class of college men, and the wholesome
attributes which the game itself promotes are shown in the splendid
examples of mental and physical manhood found to be among football
men. This is true only if the game is played in the proper spirit. (From
Outing 1901, quoted in Oriard 1993: 189–190)

Here we have two versions of “manliness,” as Oriard calls it and he adds

many others as he proceeds in his discussion: “manly” qualities of temperance,
patience, self-denial, and self-control (1993: 193). Articles in periodicals and
newspapers in the early days of football, Oriard argues, reinforced these notions.
“Implicit in many of them lay the idea that football offered a rite of passage into
manhood. As a cultural text, it dramatized all the uncertainty and competing
possibilities in the male’s metamorphosis from youth to adulthood” (1993: 198).
This metamorphosis involves months of practice and training.
The “manly” self that a typical watcher brings to the game may not have all
the aspects of manhood described here—and that self is not one that is
committed to brutality or mindless violence. There is a science in it and a craft in
it and the violence is really mindful violence, and a training to endure hardship
and defeat, pain and suffering. And in an afternoon of watching, a self that bears
some or many of these aspects of manhood can put them into play and
experience varying degrees of ecstasies. Nevertheless, there is no gainsaying the
claim that these very “manly” qualities are the ones necessary to be a successful
warrior—soldier, sailor, or marine, a thug, bully, or marauder—and conduct wars
of territorial aggrandizement, national or personal pride and prestige, and
genocide or individualized acts of violence against the weak and the powerless.
The “space” of football and the members of the opposing team can be readily
transformed into territory to be won or lost and enemies to be killed or captured,
honor and prestige to be gained or lost, with the “tackles” and “sacks” becoming
the weapons.
This is not all there is to the self that watches the game. He or she is also a
“fan”—that is a fanatic follower of a team, one who identifies with its fame and
fortune or lack thereof. Such “fanning” of a particular team is a characteristic
feature of identifying processes in modern society. There are many American
males who in the course of a their lifetimes change jobs, houses, cities of
residence, and wives but stay rooted in the loyalties to the teams of their
childhood. This process of identification is both emotional and cognitive and
material: enjoying its victories and feeling it in one’s bones; sorrowing over its
failures in “one’s heart”; gathering information and “stats” about individual
players, the team’s history, and its legends and lore; collecting objects that
represent the team—caps, shirts, cards, buttons, and so on.
Yet, ultimately such identifications are played out in the moments of play. It is
the arena in which the identities are manifested and the self that bears these
identities are put into play. Often a fan is unable to go to the arena and is forced
to watch it on the screen. He or she is aided in this project by the dramatic and
narrative skill of the commentators who “call” the game on television. To call a
game is in fact to narrate the game as it occurs, emphasizing the meaning of
every move and providing analysis, whenever necessary, of the character of the
individual players and officials, their social background, piquant stories from
their respective pasts, and so on. The commentators in fact play a Marlow to the
viewers at home. Furthermore, the technology is able to enrich the memory
phase of the watching by providing “instant replays” of the moves on the field
and the attention phase by shifting the focus of the camera very precisely to the
movement of the ball. All these factors can make the home viewer, even without
the smell of the crowd and the noise of the cheering, feel a sense of intense
participation. Here is a rather poetic and perhaps extravagant description of the
cognitive, emotional, and behavioral manifestation of this process of
identification achieved through watching a game on television:
Each weekend I traveled fifty odd miles from Glacial Falls to Watertown, where I spent Friday night
and all day Saturday in some sustained whiskey drinking, tapering off Sundays with a few bottles of
beer at The Parrot, eyes fixed on the television screen, cheering for my team. Cheering is a paltry
description. The Giants were my delight, my folly, my anodyne, my intellectual stimulation. With
 Huff I “stunted” up and down the room among the bar stools, preparing to “shoot the gap”; with
Shofner I faked two defenders “out of their cleats,” took high swimming passes over my right
shoulder and trotted, dipsy-doodle-like, into the end zone; with Robustelli I swept into the back fields
and with cruel disdain flung the flat-footed, helpless quarterbacks to the turf. (Exley 1968: 2)

Watching a game in a stadium or on a screen, then, enables a spectator to put

his or herself into play, as his or her emotions, and experience both exstasies and
catharses. The episodic structure of football also enables the spectator to
experience catharsis in ways that are unique to it. Catharsis must not be viewed
as a simple hydraulic process in which certain emotions are “released” or
“purged” but as processes in which various emotions are given play. Emotions
are not unitary and readily classifiable elements in the internal and interactional
life of an individual but are rather intricate and multivalent feelings that are often
mixed-up and interact with each other. In watching a drama or a game the
spectators may be said to be putting their emotions into play, activating them and
experiencing them rather than merely releasing them—the varied emotions of
joy and sorrow, awe and dread, fear and security, love and hatred and pity and so
on.
In tragedies and other literary forms the emotions are stirred, given play, and
then lead to what Kenneth Burke calls a “final resolution” (1959). In football
there are a number of small resolutions that lead to a final one. In each move in
the game the quarterback raises the emotionality, and then either dashes the
hopes of the watchers or fulfills them. In either eventuality there is a resolution
and settling of the emotions, a small expressivity, a release, a purging if you will,
but also the alternating feelings of joy and sorrow, elation and frustration, pity
and fear. And, very carefully, the structure of American football creates the
opportunity, in its episodic structure, for the watchers to identify or dis-identify
with a “victim” in it. “Catharsis,” writes Burke, again expanding on Aristotle,
involves fundamentally purgation by imitation of victimage. If imaginative devices are found whereby
members of rival factions can weep together, and if weeping is a surrogate of orgiastic release, then a
play that produced in the audience a unitary tragic response regardless of personal discord otherwise
would be in effect a transformed variant of an original collective orgy (such as Dionysian rites from
which the Greek tragedy developed). (Burke 1966c: 186)

In the watching of football, spectators can be said to be “weeping together” if

their team was losing and “laughing together” if their team was winning. The
structure of the game enables this to occur in what may be termed “uncertain
succession.” One group of supporters may watch the ball that was passed by
their quarterback, interrupted by either an interception, or a block short of the
necessary yardage, leading to a weeping and identification of self as victim.
Simultaneously, supporters of the other team may feel joy and fulfillment and
become victimizers. This situation can be reversed by the next move and the
victims become victimizers and victimizers become victims. The availability of
these alternating structures of experience within a short compass enables
watchers to give play to a variety of emotions and give it a thorough airing. The
episodic structure of football is such that each spectator can experience various
complex emotions—including “fear” and “pity” that figured so prominently in
Aristotle’s work (Nehamas: 1992), successively and alternatively, giving ample
opportunities to put the self and the attendant emotions into play.

NOTES
1. Peter Berger has a different take on the meaning and significance of ecstasy in everyday life. He
opines, “As soon as a given role is played without inner commitment, deliberately and deceptively, the actor
is in an ecstatic state with regard to his ‘world taken for granted’ ” (1963: 136). I am using ecstasy here not
only as an act of stepping out of oneself but of actively stepping into another self with attendant
emotionalities. There is no deception involved, no performance in “bad faith,” as Berger argues, but a
transcendence, with varying degrees of intensity from one self into another or from one emotionality of the
self into another such emotionality.
2. Stanford Lyman and Marvin Scott (1975: 147–158) have expanded on Simmel’s concept and given
various contemporary examples. See also Charles Axelrod (1977) for an excellent statement that places
Simmel’s essay on adventures in the body of his sociological concerns.
3. Games of the kind in which individuals engage others in agonistic contests—whether they are verbal
ones “like playing the dozens” (Abrahams 1974), where wit, verbal dexterity, narrative inventiveness, and
emotional control are put into play, or physical contests where bodily and psychological skills are put into
play—are instruments with which children are socialized into the management of emotions. “Poise,” “self-
control,” “graciousness” in defeat and in victory, and a general capacity to bring one’s emotions into a
disciplined relationship to the situation in which one finds oneself, are learned in these games. See also
Elias and Dunning (1986) for a study of the role of sport and leisure in “the civilizing process.”
4. The “hunt” practiced by the English aristocracy moved through the local territory. This pursuit of the
fox was, besides being a sport, about claiming and enforcing the right to move over the local territory by the
aristocracy. The chase measured these rights and announced them to the local populace. Elias sees the
emergence of fox hunting as part of the “civilizing process,” insofar as the hunter does not actually do the
killing himself but allows the hounds to do it (1986: 149–174). This claim may well be true—but only as far
as it goes and it does not go far enough to consider the class structure of the hunt. Letting someone else do
the “dirty work”—whether peasants and serfs, foot soldiers or hounds is—after all, the standard form of the
relationship between the elite and the proletariat. In the hunt in Howard Beach, the claim that was being
enforced was the right to exclusive dominion of a territory by a racial category. See Charles Hynes and Bob
Drury (1990) for a detailed description of the events in Howard Beach.
5. However, Norman N. Holland goes further. He writes, “Readers make meaning, indeed construct the
whole experience by exploring a passive text with schemas” (Holland 1994: 64).
The problem with this view is that there is no such thing as a passive text and the relationship between a
text and a reader is a truly interactive one where each speaks to the other and establishes a series of
dialogical moments. The text itself, as a sign-system has powers of its own, “sign-power,” as Ransdell puts
it. He writes,
 Sign powers are in the signs themselves, and any changes in these powers, or the accruing of such
powers to objects not previously having them, are due primarily to the signs themselves and their
actions not to people’s actions (though the action of people is usually contingently instrumental in
this respect). (1980: 151)

Holland’s theory of “reader response” to texts, and the views of the doconstructionists, despite the many
differences between them, share an attitude that may be described as “fear of the other”—or even fear of the
author. In seeking to escape the extremism of “text-active” approaches to the problems of interpretation in
literature, Holland seems to have slipped into an untenable solipsism by claiming that the reader is a
sovereign I, even in his rendition of him or her as a “Critical I” (1992).
6. For an analysis of fantasy and its place in everyday life and its connection to political economy see
Farberman (1980).
7. John Savesson (1972) has discussed the Spencerian influence in Conrad’s early works, Almayer’s
Folly, An Outcast of the Islands, and Lord Jim. He finds strong evidence of Spencer’s evolutionary
psychology, described in the latter’s Principles of Psychology, in Conrad’s characterizations. Strangely, he
does not find any affinity between the contrasts that Conrad draws between Africans and Europeans and the
evolutionary sociology of Spencer in Heart of Darkness. For another reading of Conrad’s work from an
antiracist and anti-imperialist standpoint—i.e., by an anti-racist self—see Edward Said (1993).
8. See Holquist (1990) for a very perceptive discussion of time, narrative, and point of view and their
relationship to the theory of relativity, as they occur in Bakhtin’s work.
9. Michael Oriard discusses the narrativity of football too in a multifaceted study. His approach to its
narrativity is different from mine but is compatible with it, nevertheless. Oriard also calls attention to the
importance of written accounts of given games appearing in newspapers and magazines as providing a sort
of secondary narrativity to the game. John Caughey has discussed the emergence of “imaginary social
relationships” between fans of sports figures. He describes spectators having relationships with sports
figures that range from admiration to fantasy (1987: 19–33).
10. Geertz also argues that the cockfight draws on almost every level of Balinese experience: “animal
savagery, male narcissism, opponent gambling, status rivalry, mass excitement, blood sacrifice. . . .” (1973:
451) What cockfights do for the Balinese, Geertz argues, is to catch up “these themes—death, masculinity,
rage, pride, loss, beneficence, chance—and, ordering them into an encompassing structure, presenting them
in such a way as to throw into relief a particular view of their essential nature” (1973: 443). All of this may
well be true of American football, too. No one actually dies on the field nor is the sacrificial element overt,
but the calculated violence that occurs on the field and the severe injuries that occur often no doubt bring
the themes of death and sacrifice into the game. The plays and the players enshrine the theme of the male
role as that of being specialists in violence who confront death for the sake of securing territory for the
tribe. In addition, football presents vividly the theme of sexuality. The men display their muscularity,
strength, aggressiveness, and dexterity while the cheerleaders—representatives of the feminine—cavort
seductively on the sidelines when the team scores or is in need of encouragement, displaying their limbs
and underwear. The activities of the “robust” males on the field and those of the “delicate” females on the
sidelines together constitute a dance of symbiotic eroticism.
 Epilogue

In seeking to understand and explain human existence, it is not “being” or “self”

as such that one must begin with but the social act. As each individual, whether
he or she is a philosopher or a scientist, an artist or an artisan, observes himself
or herself and the others around him or her, he or she will see only the moves
and countermoves each makes. It is the acts that these individuals prosecute,
however simple or complex, that become the criteria with which each of them
will construct an image and a theory of each of them—including himself or
herself. In addition, an observer of his or her own acts would discover that these
moves are nearly always thought-full and delayed actions, moves that would
consider the significance of the act to himself or herself, the context and
situation in which the act is occurring, and the probable consequences of the act.
The observer in prosecuting these acts in these ways has in fact become a self.
The self is then discovered in the act. Once it has been thus discovered it is given
presence in further activities. Act and self are inseparable, coterminous,
intertwined, and they live and develop and will finally die together. One is not
prior to the other either in an existential or logical sense though the act is prior to
the self in its emergence. Once the self has emerged, act and self exist in a dural
and practical simultaneity.
Such a consciousness of self and the significance of its acts is an essential
feature of the human condition as a linguistic creature, an element of its
condition as a species. To be a linguistically competent creature is to be able to
use words and sentences to observe, refer and classify—exquisitely and
systematically—one’s own presence in the world and that of others. Such uses of
language enable an individual to allow the meanings of the various acts it
prosecutes, as well as the meanings of the acts it encounters from others, to be
sedimented and organized into a concept. This concept of a self will be featured
in the consciousness and memory of the individual and used to influence the
performance of further acts—performances that would immediately and directly
affect the self.
 Selves, and the identities they bear, are defined and given presence in the
discursive activities that occur between individuals and in communities. These
discursive activities are able to achieve twin ends: one, they are able to name the
entity, classify it, attend to it, and feel for it—in short, to objectify and identify it;
two, they enable others to objectify the self of the individual with whom they are
dealing. Such discursive activities convert the identification of self, the naming
and classification, i.e., the identification, into a logical, rhetorical, and poetic
process.
In the absence of the logical resources of the language, intelligible interactions
between individuals will become impossible. To become a self is also to
understand one’s separation from others as well as to recognize one’s continuity
over time. The dictionary says that “self is derived from Latin ipse and signifies
a concordance with the subject or pronoun to indicate emphatically that the
reference is to the person or thing mentioned and not to some other” (The Oxford
English Dictionary 1989:905). The grammatical use of the word, then, is to
indicate identity in a logical sense, the claim that one—in this case a fleshly
body with the capacity for thought and action—is to be differentiated for all
essential purposes from another such entity. Each such self, and the entity in
which the self is embodied, has, for all practical purposes, a separate and
independent trajectory through time, and such a trajectory constitutes a life. Such
a self is placed in categories and classifications that are, to begin with, external
to the individual and eventually become meaningful to the self.
The notion of the identity of the self, identity as a logic of separation, is
fundamental to any conception of a self that can emerge. Such an imperative of
identification demands a system and process of naming so that such
identifications can be used in discursive processes by an individual. A human
individual is a self in relation to others and acts as a self in such a relation where
it is able to treat itself as an I and me, as the situation warrants, and treat the
other as a you, and in turn is treated as a you by the other. Once its identity
becomes meaningful to the self, he or she would be able to use it to identify the
self in various moves. As an individual undertakes these acts, he or she identifies
himself or herself, just as others do, and in this simultaneity, the self finds its
presence. A self always has an identity, though it may selectively vary as the
time and place changes, and such identities affect the acts that are undertaken.
Insofar as an individual, in his or her interactions with others, has to
successfully appeal to the other to enable him or her to be, just as he or she must
respond to the appeals of the other and allow the other to be, interactions, and
the selves that are enmeshed in them, become involved with rhetorical activities.
Further, insofar as rhetorical activities involve all the resources of language, they
also make selves and interactions poetic enterprises. Wherever there are selves
and interactions there also will be rhetoric and poetry.
Such selves are not static conceptions but are given play and continue to exist
as eddies in the ongoing current, poised tremulously on the edge of an abyss or a
plateau, either to fall or to advance. This gives the self a narrative character—
one that the individual recognizes and plays and performs accordingly. In fact
the individual finds himself or herself in twin narratives: one in which he or she
is the protagonist and another in which he or she is able to identify with a
protagonist in various religious or secular narratives and experience varied
emotionalities. In the former, he or she puts his or her self into play in practical
ways and in the latter it is done in the imagination.
In sum then, a self is not a thing that can be measured, nor is it a sponge that
can become saturated, nor is it an entity that can be abandoned and reclaimed or
made to vanish by changing historical, social, cultural, or calendrical
circumstances. Rather, it is a logically and poetically and rhetorically constituted
concept that a linguistically minded individual puts into play whenever it acts, in
its consciousness as in the external world. A theory of mind, self, and society, in
fact, must begin with a philosophy of the act.
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 Index

The index that appeared in the print version of this title was intentionally removed from the eBook. Please
use the search function on your eReading device for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that
appear in the print index are listed below

Abduction
Achebe, Chinua
Act(s)
constitution of
continuity of
dialectic of
grammar of
of identity
identity and
as interpretant
and others
phases of
risk-taking
and self
social, biology and
stages of
Act concept
Addressivity
ambiguity in
categories of identity in
definition of
and familial identity
markers of
process of
rhetoric of
types of
Adventures
Alienation, Christianity on
Ambiguity
Anachronies
Anatta
Anderson, Dave
Anderson, James
Anderson, Leon
Answerability: definition of
denial of
lack of
process of
Answered self
Answering narrative
Apel, Karl-Otto
Appar
Architectonic
Aristotle
Association, and identity
Athens, Lonnie
Atman
Attention
Augustine, Saint
Austin, J. L.
Authority

Backstage
Bakhtin, Mikhail
on addressivity
on answerability
on carnival
on grotesque realism
on interpretation
on poetics
on risk-taking
Balanced self
Barash, David
Barbu, Zevedei
Barker, John
Barthes, Roland
Beard-Williams, Diana
Behavior, and act
Bentley, Derek
Berger, Peter
Bergmann, Jorg
Bharati, Agehananda
Bickerton, Derek
Biology, and social acts
Birth: Christianity on
Hinduism on
Bogard, William
Boler, John
Book club interactions: answered self in
manner in
relation in
Bourdieu, Pierre
Brahaman
Brahmins
Breach
Brevity
Brinnin, John Malcolm
Buddhism: and individualism
metaphors of identity in
Bunker, Linda
Burke, Kenneth
on catharsis
on fantasies
on irony
on metaphor
on metonymy
on narrativity
on original sin
on poetics
on rhetoric
on synecdoche
on uncertainty principle

Callinicos, Alex
Carnival
Caste system
Catharsis
Chaplin, Charlie
Childe, Gordon
Chinook people
Choice
constraints on
versus deconstruction
Foucault on
and self-description
Christianity: metaphors of identity in
narrativity in
Chronotope
Closings
Clowns
Coady, C. A. J.
Co-evolution
Colapietro, Vincent
Collins, Randall
Combat
Conduct: cooperative
rules of
social structures and
Conrad, Joseph
Constraint, types of
Construction of identity
Consubstantiality
Consummation
Contests
Continuity: of acts
of self
Conversation: cooperation in
features of
maxims of
and relationships
Cooperative conduct
Coppe, Abiezer
Coppin, Richard
Co-relational theory
Coser, Lewis
Craig, Chris
Creation myths: Christian
Hindu
Crisis
Critical space
Cuddihy, John Murray
Culler, Jonathan
Culture: definition of
and individualism
and testimony
Czikszentmihalyi, Mihail

Daly, Mary
Daniels, Jessie
Danto, Arthur
Danzig, Sarah
David, Kenneth
Deacon, Terrence
Debates
Deconstruction: versus choice
logic of
Depersonalization
Derrida, Jacques
Dialogic acts
 definition of
Différance: definition of
and self
Differentiation: of identity
of self
Dinka people
DuBois, W. E. B.
Duels
Durham, William
Dynamisms

Eco, Umberto
Ecstasy
Ego
Elias, Norbert
Ellison, Ralph
Emotion: and acts
identity and
Encounters
Englishness
Ennui
Erikson, Erik
Ervin-Trip, Susan
Esterson, A.
Ethical dimension, of acts
Ethnicity: and emotion
and identity, metonymy and
and insults
Expectation

Family: Freud on
and identity
insults regarding
metonymy in
Fantasies
definition of
Feeling one’s self into object
Fields, definitions of
Fields of identity
familial
nation
race
therapeutic
Fodor, Jerry
Fools
Football
Foote, Nelson
Formal addressivity
Formal testimony
Foucault, Michel, on self
Francis, William
Free play, of language
Frequency
Freud, Sigmund
Friedman, Jerome
Frontstage

Games: football
as metaphor
and socialization
as such
Game stage
Garnett, Edward
Geertz, Clifford
Generalized other
Genette, Gerard
Gentry, George
Gibbs, Raymond
Goffman, Erving: on addressivity
on answerability
on conversation
on encounters
on games
on interaction order
on other
on play
on props
on synecdoche
Gossip
Grammar: of acts
of self
Greeks, ancient, and individualism
Grice, Paul
Grotesque, types of
Grotesque realism

Hamilton, Sue
Hamlet (Shakespeare)
Hannerz, Ulf
Heart of Darkness (Conrad)
Helgerson, Richard
Henley, Ernest
Henry, Jules
Herder, Johann
Heritage, John
Hinduism: Buddhism on
metaphors of identity in
naming in
synecdoche in
Hippies, as jesters
Hobbes, Thomas
Holism
Holland, Norman
Holquist, Michael
Hunts

“I”: as aspect of self

reflexivity of
I-centric self
Id
Identification
and fantasy
of
in reading
in watching
with
Identity
acts of
and emotion
familial
fields of. See Fields of identity
and individualism
irony and
logic of
metaphor and
metonymy and
national
poetics of
purpose of
race and
signs of
social structures and
synecdoche and
therapeutic
transformation of
Identity claims
Identity work
Igbo people
Ilongot people
Implicated self
Incapacities, Peirce on
India, culture of
Individualism: in Buddhism
identity and
possessive
Insults
ethnic
familial
racial
and synecdoche
Interactional others
Interaction order
Interdependence
Interlocution
Interpersonal relationship
Interpretants
Interpretation
Irony
definition of
and identity

Jaffna people
Jefferson, Gail
Jeremias, Joachim
Jesters
Jesus Christ
Jones, Ernest
Jones, William

Kamalsila
Kaplan, Abraham
Karma
Kaysen, Susanna
Kiernan, V. G.
Krishna
Ksatriyas

Laing, R. D.
Langer, Suzanne
Language
characteristics of
development of, stages in
and identity
and nationality
and race
 sociality and
Law courts: ambiguity in
duels in
social drama in
testimony in
Laws
Lear, Jonathan
Lee, Dorothy
Legisign
Lemert, Edwin
Levi-Strauss, Claude
Lienhardt, Godfrey
Liminality
Logic: and acts
of deconstruction
of identity
social
Lowe, E. J.

MacPherson, C. B.
Malcolm, Norman
Mallory, J. P.
Manipulation
Manner, in conversation
Martindale, Don
Marx, Karl
Masculinity
Master tropes
Mbabuike, Michael
McCarthy, Doyle
McCorkel, Jill
Mead, G. H.
on addressivity
on aspects of self
on games
on identity
on individualism
on language
on mind
on objects
on other
on phases of act
on putting self into play
on reflexivity
on remembered self
on signs
 on sociality
“Me” aspect of self
Me-centric self
Memory
Merton, Robert
Metaphor
definition of
games as
in Heart of Darkness
and identity
Metonymy
definition of
and identity
Micklin, Michael
Milton, John
Mind: emergence of
Mead on
and reflexivity
Mladic, Ralko
Morris, Charles
Muller, Max
Murfin, Ross
Mus, Paul

Naming: and categories of identity

in Christianity
and familial identity
and identification
and identity
metonymy and
terms of address
terms of reference
Narrating voice, types of
Narrative semiosis
Narrativity
in Christianity
in football
reference in
socialization and
and time
National identity
Natural testimony
Nelson, Benjamin
Newport, Frank
Nicknames
Oakes, Guy
Objects: in Hinduism
and identity
sign-power of
Obscurity
Oedipus Rex (Sophocles)
Office interactions: addressivity in
answered self in
manner in
quantity in
Oppositions, simultaneity of
O’Prey, Paul
Orderliness
Oriard, Michael
Otherations
Others
acts and
and constraint of choice
taking attitude of
taking role of

Parataxic stage
Parsons, James
Parties
Patriarchy
Peace movement, as jesters
Peirce, Charles S.
Pinker, Steven
Play(s): and ambiguity
definition of
of differences
and emergence of self
of language
practical
of self
Play stage
Poetics: definition of
of identity
Possessive individualism
Predictive narrating
Presence
Pretext
Pronouns
Props, and identity
Protestantism
Prototaxic stage
Psychoanalysis, metaphors of identity in
Psychological darwinism
Putting one’s self into play

Qualisign
Quality, in conversation
Quantity, in conversation

Race: and answerability

in Heart of Darkness
and identity
insults regarding
and law
Rambelli, Fabio
Reading, identification in
Reciprocal identity
Recollections
Redress
Referentiality: definition of
process of
Reflexivity: definition of
process of
of utterance
Reintegration
Relation, in conversation
Relevance
Religion: and emotion
and individualism
and jesters
and metaphors of identity
and narrative
and synecdoche
on women
Remembered self
Representamen
Rhetoric: of addressivity
devices in
and self
Rhetoricity
Ribeiro, Branca Telles
Ricoeur, Paul
Rochberg-Halton, Eugene
Rohde, David
Rosaldo, Michelle
Rosenthal, Sandra
Rotella, Robert
Rules: of conduct
in football
Russell, Robert

Sacks, Harvey
Sampson, Edward
Sansom, William
Sanyasin
Schegloff, Emmanuel
Scherbatsky, F. T.
Scottish nationalism
Scribner, Robert
Seidman, Steven
Selectivity, and identity
Self
acts and
answered
Buddhism on
Christianity on
Derrida on
Foucault on
grammar of
Hinduism on
implicated
Mead on
plays of
psychoanalysis on
rhetoric and
speech and
strength of sense of
unanswered
Shakespeare, William
Shapin, Steven
Significant others
Sign-power, of objects
Signs
Silence
Simmel, Georg
Simpson case
Simultaneity of oppositions
Simultaneous narrating
Sinsign
Smith, Johanna
Snow, David
Social act
Social agents, as generalized other
Social dramas
Social game
Sociality
Socialization: versus biology
games and
and narrativity
Social logic
Social object
Social process
Social self
Social solidarity
Social structures, and conduct
Social subject
Sociation
Solidarity
Sophocles, Oedipus Rex
Sortal terms
Soul: Buddhism on
Christianity on
synecdoche and
Spacks, Patricia Mayer
Spectating, and identification
Speech, and self
Spencer, Herbert
Sports
Stark, Werner
Starkey, Thomas
Stereotyping
Stone, Gregory
Stout, David
Strauss, Anselm
Structural relationship
Structural social psychology
Subsequent narrating
Substantive addressivity
Sudras
Sullivan, Harry Stack
Superego
Swados, Harvey
Symbolicity
Symbolic transformation
Synecdoche
definition of
and identity
Syntacticity
Syntactic stage
Szasz, Thomas

Tactile and visual signs

Taking the attitude of the other
Taking the role of the other
Tambiah, Stanley J.
Tamil people
Temporality, dimensions of
Terms of address
Terms of reference
Tertullian
Testimony
T forms
Therapeutic identity
Therapeutic interactions, unanswered self in
Thick now
Thomas Aquinas
Time: and act
in football
and narrativity
Toch, Hans
Trevor-Roper, Hugh
Trollope, Fanny
Tuan, Yi-Fi
Turner, Victor

Unanswered self
Uncertainty principle
Utterance, reflexivity of

Vaisyas
Varnas
Veblen, Thorstein
Verbal signs
V forms
Volosinov, V. N.
von Gennep, Arnold

Wang, Zhigang
Watching, and identification
Weber, Max
Weiss, Paul
Welsford, Enid
Wheeler, John
White, Harrison
Wilding
Wilson, Edmund
Wilson, Edward
Wintu people
Wittgenstein, Ludwig
Women, religion and
Woods, Tiger
 About the Author

Robert Sidharthan Perinbanayagam received his early education at the

University of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and later obtained his M.A. and Ph.D. in
sociology and anthropology at the University of Minnesota. He is on the faculty
at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
He is the author of The Karmic Theater: Self, Society and Astrology in Jaffna,
Sri Lanka, Signifying Acts, and Discursive Acts. His articles have been published
in various scholarly journals in sociology, anthropology, and psychiatry. In 1998
he was awarded the G. H. Mead Award by the Society for the Study of Symbolic
Interaction.