Ph.D. General Examinations
Contextual Area Exam (Prof. Judith Donath, Examiner)
Xinyu Hugo Liu
Submitted August, 2004
Exam Questions
1) The language metaphor is often invoked in the sociological
literature of identity; however, it may not be a particularly good
metaphor for understanding many communicative systems.
Address the ways that fashion, etc. are communicative systems that
are different than language - and how and why they differ. Like
language, they do enforce social boundaries, and talk about how
they are similar in this goal.
2) In "Metaphors We Live By," Lakoff and Johnson suggest that
language and thoughts are grounded in metaphors, and that the
way in which something is grounded shapes our understanding.
In the identity literature, theories are grounded as well. Signalling,
for example, is grounded in theories of evolution. The question
here is as we go on to look at the theories about objects, fashion,
media, etc. is: Are they grounded? And if so, how. Do the author's
attempt to ground them? Some do, but end up with a circular
definition. Others do not. So for this essay, do start by defining
what you mean by grounding; then discuss the clearer examples of
“Metaphors We Live By” and Signalling; then discuss the more
interpretive cases - the others do not explicitly say "here is where
we are grounded" so you will have to interpret more.
3) Simmel states that "we cannot know completely the individuality
of another," nor can we comprehend our own individuality in its
totality. The only way to approximate an understanding of a
person's identity is to use "prototypes" to conceptualize people.
Simmel's prototypes happen to heavily relate to social roles -bureaucrat, police officer, and businessman. Looking at the gamut
of treatises on identity in the literature, how does each fall within,
augment, or contradict Simmel's prototype theory of identity?
Breakdown of the Language Metaphor
Introduction
Throughout much of the sociological literature on identity,
language recurs as a tempting metaphor for the characterization of
communicative systems. Perhaps this is because our most
prominent prototype for social communication is speech and the
written word; therefore, natural language will always be the de facto
analogy we turn to when trying to understand communicative
systems. Understanding, after all, requires building an analogical
bridge from the new system to some known system, and this is a
position which has been aggressively advocated by Lakoff and
Johnson in Metaphors We Live By (1980). As we examine how the
language metaphor has been applied to various theories in the
literature, we discover that it is usually an approximate metaphor
which fails to account for, and oftentimes even contradicts other
parts of the same theory. McCracken, in particular, has criticized
the over-application of the language metaphor to explain
communication systems such as clothing and possessed objects
(1991, ch. 4).
In this paper, I first sketch out what the language metaphor means,
which then allows us to better understand how and why it is illsuited to the description of most sociological systems in our
literature. Second, having identified the weaknesses of the
language metaphor, I propose four thematics which I have
identified from the literature as being more specific and suitable
metaphors for understanding communicative systems: fashion,
liminality, patina, and gestalt. Each thematic is compared to
language and their differences are highlighted. Although the four
thematics differ nuancefully from the language metaphor, they do
share some functional goals, such as the enforcement of social
boundaries, and the signalling of identity; all this is discussed in
the final section of the paper.
Characteristics of the language prototype
The language metaphor has been a dominant force in sociology
because natural language -- speech and the written word -- are
humanity's most prized example of a communicative system. Why
then, should the metaphor not be employed freely to understand
theories about other sociological systems? Admittedly there are
some very appealing properties of language such as the
compositionality of its meaning, its infinite combinatorial capacity,
and the memetic stability of its signs which may indeed help to
explain aspects of some other sociological communicative systems.
However, language often fails to account for, or produces
contradictory accounts of many marginal and more nuanceful
aspects of communicative systems.
We see evidence of this throughout the literature. For example,
Davis, in Fashion, Culture, and Identity (1994) begins his treatise by
proposing that clothing is governed by a linguistic "code" with
"meanings evoked by the combinations and permutations of the
code's key terms (fabric, texture, color, pattern, volume, silhouette,
and occasion)" (p. 5). However, soon after planting the language
metaphor in the mind of the reader, Davis admits that the clothing
code does not behave like most languages because the meanings of
the codes are constantly shifting. In fact, throughout the rest of the
book, the idea of a sartorial language directly contradicts many
other aspects of Davis' account of fashion. For example, whereas
the rules of language are public, stable, and well-understood, the
rules of communication through fashion are hard to formalize,
ever-shifting, and ill-understood. Whereas meaning in language is
primarily a product of combinations of linguistic tokens, combining
various pieces of clothing is not as outstanding a source of sartorial
communication as ambiguity, irony, or subtlety. Perhaps it is for
these reasons that Davis disregards the rhetoric of the language
metaphor soon after the initiatory mention.
In order to understand the implications of the language metaphor
for our understanding of social communicative systems, we need to
recognize the explicit prototype which any mention of language
evokes. Lakoff and Johnson advocate that each metaphor has an
essential prototype which is the basis of its understanding, citing
Rosch's experiments on human categorization which finds that
"people categorize objects, not in set-theoretical terms, but in terms
of prototypes and family resemblances" (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980, p.
71). So sparrows and robins are prototypical birds because they fit
well within our prototype/stereotype of a small creature which
flies and sings. Even though chickens, ostriches, and penguins are
birds, they do not fit within the prototype of what a bird is, and
consequently we usually think of them as peripheral members or
exceptions. The implication of prototype categorization theory for
the language metaphor is that even though languages do shift and
change and have many manifestations, when we evoke the
language metaphor to understand a communicative system, we
tend to only project the most generic stereotype of language unto
the target system.
So what constitutes the language prototype? Lakoff and Johnson
suggest that our prototypes come from our most early experiences
with a subject. In the case of language, the formal models of syntax,
grammar, and spelling constitute are our most early experiences
with the concept of language. These inevitably lead us to think of
language as being structured with explicit and formal rules, and
that words and grammar of a language are known quite
universally throughout the speakership of that language, whose
dialects only differ in minor ways. We are also led to think of
language as being fixed, with a priori definition. Language is
completely public, and it is easy to reproduce. Anyone is allowed to
speak and write language, and all adults are presumed to be able to
understand language in the same way. In short, the prototype of
language we form very early on is that it is public, unchanging,
expressible and intelligible by everyone, governed by formal rules
and objectives, and whose dialects differ in minor ways.
As innocuous as the language prototype may seem, when we
project this prototype onto some of the communicative systems in
the sociology literature, it can become a major source of
misunderstanding and distortion. Many attributes of the prototype,
namely its fixity and universality, stand at odds with the spirit of
heterogeneity, dynamicity, and nuancefulness inherent in many of
the communicative systems. In the following section, we overturn
the monolithic language metaphor and identify four rather
aspectual metaphors which recurrently surface in theories in the
literature. These metaphors are: fashion, liminality, patina, and
gestalt; while none of these metaphors can explain the whole of a
communicative system, each does successfully characterize some
nuanceful subset of sociological communicative systems.
Four alternative metaphors for communicative systems
Raking through the various theories about clothing, objects,
consumption, and media in the identity literature, four metaphors
stood out to me as major themes of communicative systems:
fashion, liminality, patina, and gestalt (alternatively, we could
think of them not as metaphors but as communication modalities).
Each metaphor differs markedly from the language metaphor and
better supports the nuances presented in many of the literature's
theories. It is important to understand that these metaphors are
complementary rather than competitive, each highlighting some
salient aspect of how identity is communicated.
Fashion. Although fashion embodies many ideas, the most
fundamental prototype of fashion is that of change. Fashion is
characterized by a cycle. In the beginning, new objects such as a
new season of clothing are imbued with cultural meaning. The
significance of objects in this stage are known only to the avantgarde and some early adopters, and the exclusivity of objects at this
point in the cycle make them highly desirable. As these objects
become increasingly known, they become more and more
commodified and thus less and less meaningful and desirable. At
some point, when the objects are widely known, their aesthetic
dies. All the while, new object-meaning combinations are
constantly being born and flowing through the fashion cycle.
The fashion metaphor is relevant to many sociological systems
discussed in the identity literature. Davis (1994) explicitly invokes
the fashion metaphor to describe the shifting signification of
clothing and its effect on signalling identity. Veblen (1899)
implicates fashion as being a governor of conspicuous consumption
suggesting that social status is measurable by one's subscription to
the good tastes of the day, whose dynamicity weans out those we
aren't able to dedicate the necessary resources for the upkeep with
fashion. For Thornton (1996), members of the underground club
culture define themselves by their place in a fashion cycle. Their
aesthetics must lie at a point outside (and usually before) the
mainstream, and the whole cachet associated with the
underground culture, which Thornton calls "subcultural capital" is
premised on the exclusivity of their interests and tastes, which is
the same exclusivity had by the avant-garde in fashion.
If we take a single snapshot in time of the progress of fashion, this
snapshot looks like a language with some peculiar features. First,
certain symbols -- corresponding to new objects -- having more
ambiguous or tenuous meanings. Davis terms this "undercoding."
Other symbols -- corresponding to old objects known to all the
masses -- have more definite meaning, though their meanings
usually carry more mundane and pejorative connotations. When
Davis implies that clothing is like a language, he is most likely
trying to argue that a given snapshot in time of the progress of
fashion resembles some kind of language. However, by
emphasizing the snapshots rather than the animation of fashion, we
lose many valuable insights. One of which are the resource
demands required to maintain a place in the fashion cycle. In the
Language Prototype, language is not lost once it is learned;
however, in the Fashion Prototype, resources must continually be
dedicated to keep up with what's new in fashion. Thus, an
individual's place along the fashion cycle -- be it designer, avantgarde, early adopter, trendy, mainstream, classical, or nonfashionable -- signals to a degree, the prowess of their time and
money resources. Having a privileged position along the fashion
cycle means that one is able to afford time to maintain
contemporaneous good tastes and to afford money to purchase
pricey goods. Veblen, for example, cites the resource demands of
fashion as a reason why fashion serves as such a good sieve for
membership in the leisure class.
Fashion is not only more dynamic than language, but arguably, its
purpose is to fight entropy toward language. The purpose of
language is communication, and in the Language Prototype, an
ideal language is one that everyone can speak and understand;
however, being fashionable carries cachet only because not
everyone is able to "speak" or "understand" fashion. Fashion
changes and turn over precisely because it does not want to be
understood by everyone. If there is anything unchanging about
fashion, it is not the meanings of garments, but rather the goal of
staying "different" and some techniques and prescriptions for
achieving this goal.
Successful communication through language is to minimize
ambiguity and maximize clarity, but successful communication in
fashion is to often possess ambiguity and irony. This is because an
ambiguous or ironic statement will raise more questions and attract
more interest than a definite statement, and attracting attention is
often the modus operandi of a participant in a fashion system (like
a peacock wants to draw attention with its feather display). In the
early stages of fashion, the meanings of objects are only partially
articulated and not quite definite, yet it is only in these early stages
where objects possess a strong "aesthetic code," as Davis argues.
Also, there is skill in producing an ambiguous or ironic statement
(usually only those who live in the earlier stages of fashion cycle)
and this in and of itself is a derivative signal about the subject.
A further point of difference is that whereas language is usually
thought of a symmetrical act between speaker and receiver, fashion
is more asymmetrically and competitively communicated. Both
Goffman (1959) and Holland and Skinner (1987) state that
dominance or prestige is often the subject of competition and
negotiation in a dyadic relationship. The signaller competes with
the signal receiver. Because fashionability is a desirable trait, the
speaker will want the receiver to be able to appreciate her fashion
utterance but will not want to communicate so much to the receiver
such that the receiver is able to replicate her utterance
symmetrically. To differentiate oneself from possible imitators, a
speaker will pay attention to subtleties which may only be received
by a most nuanceful receiver. Davis's example of disingenuous
mistakes is an example of this sort of fine-grained differentiation,
and this will be discussed more judiciously in the following
subsection.
Liminality. The "liminal" is that which is barely perceptible. A
liminality, then, is the set of barely perceptible features which
characterize any action or object. Liminality may be a great
metaphor for understanding the nuance- and authenticity- aspects
of communicative systems in the literature.
Whereas language does not particularly value details more than the
generalities of a communication, it seems that it is the details which
communicates better and more reliable information about a
speaker. This is because details are harder to replicate in a
deceptive communication than generalities, and in evolution's
attempt to make more astute signal receivers, the focus was turned
to the details. Liminality is seen throughout the communicative
systems in the literature. In Goffman's theatrical interpretation of
human interaction (1959), "expressions given" are not as reliable as
the expressions "given off," which are "more theatrical and
contextual" and "non-verbal, presumably unintentional" (p. 4) In
Fashion, Culture, and Identity, Davis (1994) argues that liminality can
be manipulated to a signaller's advantage through "disingenuous
mistakes," (p. 66) such as the act of purposefully forgetting a button
on a shirt or forgetting to shave; these mistakes add a "rough
around the edges" genuineness to a sartorial ensemble leading to
higher quality signalling. Liminality also factors into Thornton's
discussion of subcultural "authenticity." Thornton suggests that
obscurity and rarity are the keys to authenticity. This in part
accounts for the fact that the underground dance music scene is
saturated with so many artists and tracks. Not only is there no
motivation to sort it all out, but to the contrary, the space of dance
music is purposefully inchoate, in order to differentiate posers from
authentic hipsters.
Liminality differs from language in a number of respects. First,
because we generally think of language's goal as being willful
communication, language necessarily implies a sense of
pragmatism, forthrightness, and obviousness. In contrast, liminality
is more concerned with sensitivity, disfluencies, and idiosyncrasies.
Second, while language is formally capturable, liminality is difficult
to articulate, and often an inchoate mash of features. Third,
language is far easier to manipulate than liminality, although
liminality signals do not appear to be necessarily more difficult to
receive than linguistic signals. Fourth, liminality more often than
language, is involved in communicating authenticity and is
regarded as a more reliable signal.
Patina. Patina is a unique metaphor describing an unparalleled
communication mechanism. Strictly speaking, patina is the bluegreenish oxidization which accrues on objects and buildings as a
result of age. In Western cultures, particularly those antedating the
18th century, patina was regarded as an authenticator of status. It is
unique from other communicative systems because it is easy to
visually verify by all, yet it is quite impervious to fraud. Thus, only
those who possess it can reap the legitimacy associated with
signalling patina.
In Culture and Consumption, McCracken puts forth a theory of
patina which explains in terms of structuralist discourse that patina
is different from most symbols because the message it encodes is
itself: "patina, as a "signifier," stands for status, as a "signified,"
because of the "natural" connection between them." (McCracken,
1991, p. 36). McCracken likens patina to Pierce's definition of an
"icon," that is to say, "the patina of the object reproduces the
duration of the family's claim to status." (p. 37). Its iconic status is
patina's main source of expressive power, and also what
distinguishes it from other systems of communication like fashion,
whose symbols' meanings shift while patina's symbolic meaning
always remains the same.
While McCracken contends that patina is waning in modern
society, being instead supplanted by fashion, I suggest that a more
liberal reinterpretation of patina will lead us to see that it is still a
pervasive and important system today. What is the spirit of patina?
Patina is an object whose age is easily visible and verifiable, and
very difficult to fraudulently reproduce. It is also touched by some
sort of personalization (as most patinaed objects were historically
houses and family heirlooms) so as to dissuade transferability. We
can think of many objects which fit this more liberal definition. An
American Express Gold Card, thought by many to permanently
retain status cachet, features the inscription of a date: "Member
since 1981." This should be thought of as patina because it is
difficult to forge, the age is easy to verify, and as a personal credit
card, it is nontransferable! Similarly, certain rare email addresses
demonstrate patina. For example, if someone had the address,
"george@harvard.edu," it clearly demonstrates the age of the
account. It is widely known that first names, especially common
ones, are the first to be taken, so to have a first name as an email
address is a sign of someone who was one of the first to receive an
email address from a certain domain. Email is also associated with
non-transferability because it is not usually commodified and
traded.
Patina is also found in the modern home. While family heirlooms
fit more traditional notions of patina, a liberal interpretation will
find patina on the yellowing and bend corners of family photos
which have stood the test of time, furniture which has begun to
show age and creek or otherwise develop age-caused
idiosyncrasies (the light switch to my parent's chandelier requires a
special tap to turn on). In Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton's
survey of objects in the American home (1981), the objects which
are most likely to exhibit patina (books, art, furniture, and photos)
happen to be the four most cherished classes of objects in the home
(p. 58), and this further testifies to the authenticatory power of
patina.
Patina differs markedly from language. Whereas language is public
and expressible by all, patina must be possessed and its
communicative power is only granted to its non-transferable
owner. Also, whereas the meaning of language may be ambiguous
or may require interpretation, patina has definite meaning which is
intrinsic in the appearance of an object: the object with patina
signifies historical possession and authenticity. Finally, because
patina is personalized and cannot be bought or traded, it is
impervious to fraud, where language is not (at least not at the scale
of a single utterance).
Gestalt. In language and in fashion, it is often possible to emulate a
particular utterance or a particular outfit, and this is troubling
because the possibility of fraud devalues the cachet of the whole
communicative system in which the fraud is perpetrated. I
introduced the idea of liminality as a natural mechanism of fraud
detection which works by paying attention to barely perceptibles.
However, even liminality can be deceived on occasion. A final
metaphor for communication is the Gestalt, or, the sum or integral
of a series of choices and decisions. While it is possible to emulate a
single utterance or outfit, it is nearly impossible to emulate a whole
series of utterances or outfits without getting into the mind or
aesthetics of the person generating those choices. There is also a
sense that when attempting to assess abstract difficult-to-grasp
qualities such as identity, we often turn to the gestalt to reveal a
"deeper truth" about an inchoate idea. This interpretation of gestalt
is that certain latent variables only get communicated through
larger patterns.
Most of the sociological theories about identity in the literature
invoke the metaphor of the gestalt without explicitly identifying it
or invoking it as a mode of communication. Csikszentmihalyi and
Rochberg-Halton's conceptualization of the home as a symbolic
environment which collectively characterizes the nature of a family
should be seen as an embrace of the gestalt because while no single
object reveals unambiguously the individuality-familiality of a
person, or the warmness-coldness of a family, the gestalt of the
choices of possessions does lend itself to more decisive conclusions.
The most contemporary social construction theories of identity are
indeed pillared on the emergent properties of the gestalt. Social
constructionism argues that "selves, persons, psychological traits ...
are social and historical constructions, not naturally occurring
objects" (Sampson, cited in Grodin & Lindlof et al., 1996, p. 5).
Viewing the self as being formed through the aggregation of
instances of how the self relates socially, is to essentially believe
that out of patterns of relations emerges a gestalt centroid which
serves as some definition of self.
Consumption too, forms a pattern whose gestalt has
communicative power. While particular consumptive choices may
be backed by any on of an ambiguous field of possible motivations,
the overarching corpus of all choices reveals the values of certain
variables which lay latent and invisible in each of the individual
choices. The gestalt communicates emergent properties of an
individual or object which otherwise remain unknown. In the
domain of consumption however, there is an open problematic
regarding the nature of the gestalt. While idealistically, we would
like to think that the gestalt is provides the most candid and honest
signal of identity, it is not beyond manipulation. What McCracken
calls the Diderot Effect is a force which promotes consistency and
continuity in consumption patterns. However, it can also serve to
produce a false gestalt -- a situation in which the gestalt signals not
the most natural convergence of choices unto a self, but instead a
convergence imposed by the Diderot Effect. In other words, the
Diderot Effect may cause a few early decisions to become
commitments which must unnaturally be followed through with in
the remainder of decisions, thus constituting the false gestalt.
Enforcing social boundaries
While fashion, liminality, patina, gestalt and language all differ in
communicative mechanism, they often share some of the same
goals. One shared property is that all of these communication
systems serve the enforcement of social boundaries, separating
high-status from low-status, and separating authentic from poser.
Language enforces social boundaries primarily through dialects
and idiolects. While in our treatment of Language as Prototype, we
have posited language is objective, the reality of language is that it
is actually quite subjective, though at the level of group-subjectivity
rather than individual-subjectivity. In Sociolinguistics (1974),
Trudgill asserts that "value judgments concerning the correctness
and purity of linguistic varieties are social [sic] rather than
linguistic. There is nothing at all inherent in non-standard varieties
which makes them inferior." (p. 20) Yet despite this revelation that
all dialects are equal, language is routinely used to identify and
discriminate against people for the educational, ethnic, and
regional characteristics of language. Language thusly understood,
is used by members of certain groups, for subjective rather than
objective motivations, to exclude others from the group. Patina
works in a manner similar to language to enforce social boundaries.
Patina, possessed by the haves, is nontransferable, and just as an
outsider cannot fully manipulate his dialect to emulate a more
educated speech, patina cannot be easily spoofed either.
Patina, along with gestalt and liminality, also define a social
boundary of authenticity, and prevent others from being able to
manipulate this boundary. Liminality is difficult to spoof because it
presumably concerns barely perceptible and not easily manipulable
details. Gestalt is difficult to spoof because while isolated
utterances can be emulated, emulating a whole series of utterances
would require an inaccessibly intimate understanding of the
signaller's psyche. Patina cannot be manipulated because it is
personalized, non-transferable, and physically aged. Through the
enforcement of authenticity boundaries, a poser cannot easily
present himself as a hipster and penetrate an underground club
culture; a mediocre writer cannot, in the long run, pass as a real
poet because he cannot sustain his tricks over any period of time;
and a cold family cannot pretend to be a warm one because it
cannot fake the age and wear-and-tear of various shared or
sentimental objects which show a history of a family united.
Finally, fashion enforces a social boundary generally correlating to
high-status versus low-status by levying a hefty resource cost on
each subscriber to fashion. In Grafen's formulation of the handicap
principle (1990b), fashion would correspond to a "strategic choice"
handicap, or costly signalling, as it is otherwise known, because
each signaller chooses how large of a handicap to produce. It so
happens though, that those who possess wealth and independence
of time will be able to disproportionally better afford the resource
cost associated with keeping up with fashion than those who are
less affluent and with less leisure time to spare. Costly signals, like
fashion, however, may also be worthwhile pursuits as winning the
status attribution pays dividends which may equilibrium with, or
more than justify its costs.
Works Cited
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Eugene Rochberg-Halton: 1981, The
Meaning of Things: Domestic Symbols and the Self, Cambridge
University Press, UK.
Fred Davis: 1994, Fashion, Culture, and Identity, University of
Chicago Press, Chicago.
Erving Goffman: 1959, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.
Doubleday: Garden City, New York.
A. Grafen: 1990, Biological signals as handicaps. J. Theor. Biol. 144.
517-546.
Debra Grodin, Thomas Lindlof (eds.): 1996, Constructing the Self in a
Mediated World, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
D. Holland, and D. Skinner: 1987, Prestige and intimacy: the
cultural models behind Americans' talk about gender types. In D.
Holland and N. Quinn (Eds.) Cultural Models in Language and Thought.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
George Lakoff, Mark Johnson: 1980, Metaphors We Live by.
University of Chicago Press.
Grant McCracken: 1991, Culture and Consumption: New Approaches to
the Symbolic Character of Consumer Goods and Activities, Indiana
University Press, Indiana
Sarah Thornton: 1996, Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural
Capital, Wesleyan University Press.
Peter Trudgill: 1974, Sociolinguistics: An Introduction to Language and
Society, Penguin USA.
T. Veblen: 1899, The Theory of the Leisure Class, New York: Dover
Publications.
Grounding Frameworks in Sociological Theories
Introduction
What makes one theory more or less persuasive than another? Is it
simply that one possesses a weightier body of evidence or does the
nature of a theory's rhetoric factor in? In this essay, I will argue that
the persuasiveness of a theory is dependent on both these things
equally. Together, evidence and rhetoric form the essence of the
concept of "grounding," but rather than acting independently, true
grounding requires that they work synergistically, achieving a
weaved fluidity and emerging as a framework of intuition on top of
which a theory can comfortably be articulated. The goal of this
essay, however, is not simply to characterize the nature of
"grounding"; we wish to understand how the various theories in
the identity literature are grounded. Some theories make it quite
explicit how they are grounded, while others require more
interpretation. In all cases, exposing the foundations of a theory is
always an exercise which bears much fruit of insight.
This essay is structured as follows. First we examine the notion of
"grounding" more closely and sketch out a working definition.
Second, we discuss the theories in the literature whose grounding
is clear, and explore how they meet our working definition for
grounding. Third, the less clearly-cut and more-interpretive cases
of grounding are examined. We conclude by reflecting on some
common themes of grounding which pervade the literature.
On Grounding
A theory's grounding directly dictates its persuasiveness. Of
persuasiveness, there are two major components: the evidentiary
foundation of a theory, and the system of rhetoric used to describe
the theory. While the doctrine of Science clearly illustrates the need
for evidence which supports a theory's claims, coming in the form
of previous work or an appeal to axiomatic assumptions (such as
an ontological argument), the contribution of rhetoric to grounding
is only tenuously understood. In this section, I first expose the
value of rhetoric to grounding; second, I attempt to describe how
evidence and rhetoric synthesize to form a "grounding system." The
goal is to distill out some criteria for assessing the successfulness of
any grounding system, and to carry forth these criteria into our
case study of the various identity theories in the literature.
Rhetorical systematicity. Rhetoric is more than words, it also
encompasses the conceptual framework, the subtext, which
structures and motivates the text. Rhetoric is the way of going about
something. Thus, effective rhetoric must necessarily have a
systematicity, consistency, and coherency. That rhetoric and the
human thought process are inherently metaphorical is argued by
Lakoff and Johnson in Metaphors We Live By (1980). According to
these theorists, all linguistic constructions build upon an existing
complex hierarchical and structural framework of metaphors. At
the very bottom of this meaning pyramid are the most fundamental
layers of human experience, such as orientation: up, down, front,
back; and movement: forward, backward, inside, outside. These
axiomatic metaphors are good foundations because they are
completely intuitive in that they are possessed and existentially
trusted by all people. In layer after careful layer, cultural truths are
built on top of this foundation, always staying consistent with the
fundamental systems of meaning inherent in orientation and
movement.
So here, language presents itself as our first example of grounding.
Language is grounded in the common human experiences of
orientation and movement. However, just because all of language is
expressed in these experiential frameworks does not mean that
"up," "down," "inside," and "outside" provide evidentiary value.
They don't. Rather, appealing to common basic human experience
is a rhetorical device to generate an intuitive feeling in the listener.
Without the systematicity of thought that rhetoric furnishes, a
theory will not feel coherent or intuitive, or in the worst case, will
not be understood at all; thus the rhetorical component of
grounding is key.
Rhetorical impact on interpretation. Lakoff and Johnson also
suggest that rhetoric has the power to shape the way that a theory
is interpreted by highlighting certain aspects and hiding other
aspects. For instance, consider that a theory about an argument
between two people can be posed using two rhetorics. First, by
speaking in terms like: "I demolished his argument," and "if you
use that strategy, he'll wipe you out," one is invoking the structure
of war as a framework for understanding, and thus invoking an
affect of intensity, focusing on things like plan, strategy, hits, and
misses, victory and defeat. If instead, one used rhetoric like "I used
careful footwork to maneuver my arguments," then instead, the
structure of a dance is invoked as a framework for understanding,
and the listener shifts to a completely different interpretation of the
argument as a cooperative act. Depending on what theory is being
put forth about this hypothetical argument, one rhetorical system
may provide a more effective grounding than the other.
Grounding systems. Having motivated the importance of the
rhetorical component to grounding, it is vital to understand that
rhetoric and evidence must work together in coherent fashion to
produce a good grounding for a theory; together these two factors
form a grounding system. A good way to think of the relationship
between evidence and rhetoric is that evidence are isolated facts,
and rhetoric is the glue system which weaves together all the points
of fact into a tapestry called theory. To take Metaphors We Live By
once again as example, Lakoff and Johnson have evidence that
certain English constructions have certain other metaphors in them.
Then, using the rhetoric and concept of structural hierarchy to
connect the dots, the coherence of their theory finally emerges.
Without the vivid imagery of metaphors laying on top of one
another, of metaphors fitting together like puzzle pieces, of
metaphors constituting a vast hierarchy of understanding, the
various facts about English have no meaning. Theory only emerges
when all the evidence is fitted together by a rhetorical
systematicity, and together, this constitutes a grounding system.
"Goodness" of a ground. There is a clear sense about what qualifies
a system to be a good grounding system. A good grounding system
must itself be intuitive and profound, and it must demonstrate a
good analogical fit with the target domain addressed by the theory.
First, there exists a handful of systems which emerge repeatedly as
favorite choices for grounding many scientific theories, such as folk
economics, life cycle, ecology, construction, movement, the body,
and evolution. These systems seem inherently good for grounding
because of their intuitiveness and profundity; intuitive because we
are familiar with the system having directly experienced them (e.g.
"the body," "movement") or they are governed by elegant rules (e.g.
"evolution") which thoroughly account for all aspects of their
behavior (thus these systems are always analog rather than
discrete); and profound because they are almost mythical in the
scope of their explanatory power and in their applicability by
analogy to different phenomena of our reality. All good grounding
systems must be intuitive and profound, because only then do they
possess the solidity and vastness that even the word "ground" itself
implies.
A third criteria for assessing the goodness of a grounding system is
the quality of the analogical fit between the native or prototypical
domain of the grounding system (e.g. life on earth, for evolution)
and the target domain addressed by a theory (e.g. genetic
algorithms). In an ideal fit, every new event in the target domain is
explainable within the framework of the native domain; thus, the
act of binding a target domain to a grounding system allows the
target domain to inherit the grounding system's intuitiveness.
Incidentally, the symbol grounding problem in the philosophical
literature is concerned with precisely this problem of finding an
intuitive system which can ground the meanings of formal symbol
systems. In The Symbol Grounding Problem, Harnad defines the goal
of symbol grounding as making "the semantic interpretation of a
formal symbol system [] intrinsic to the system, rather than just
parasitic on the meanings in our heads" (Harnad, 1990, p. 1). The
solution that Harnad articulates is to select the connectionist
representation of sensory experience as the grounding system for
formal symbolics. This proposal is consistent with our
aforementioned characterization of a good grounding system as
being experientially intuitive and analog. The formal symbolic
system needs grounding precisely because it is not analog, thus
there are unexplainable gaps. Harnad calls these types of systems
"semantically extrinsic" and "arbitrary."
In summary, rhetorical systematicity helps to weave evidence
together into a grounding system. A good grounding system is
itself intuitive (analog, intrinsic meaning, connected-to-common-
human-experience) and profound (great explanatory power, widescoping, mythical). A well-grounded theory also requires that there
be a natural fit between the native domain of the grounding system
and the target domain addressed by a theory, and there is a sense
that the theoretical postulation of explanation in the target domain
is purely an analogical extension of the grounding system. In short,
a theory is simply a projection of a grounding system onto some
new domain. Having arrived at this working definition of
grounding, we now invoke it as an analytical framework with
which we examine the various theories in the identity literature.
Clear instances of grounding
Signalling theory grounded in evolutionary theory, game theory,
and economics. Signalling theory is a sociological theory about
how animals (including humans) convey information about
themselves (such as identity) to others and how they receive
information from others. The grounding system for signalling
theory is primarily evolutionary theory, as evolution is used as a
framework which is used to weave together the evidence of animal
traits. Some additional grounding comes from economics, and
game theory.
There is a substantial literature around animal signalling theory
including Zahavi's Handicap Principle (Bergstrom, 2002); Grafen's
evolutionarily stable signalling equilibrium (1990); evolutionary
arms-race hypothesis (Krebs & Dawkins, 1984), and Guilford &
Dawkins's receiver psychology (1993). The purpose of all these
accounts is to explain the mechanisms and dynamics of animal
communication. The chief corpus of hard evidence which fuels
theories about signalling are biological traits possessed by animals
past and present, and accounts of animal behavior such as
predation and mating. Of course, isolated anecdotes alone do not
constitute a grounding system; something more is required.
Evolutionary theory, game theory, and economics are the
animating and motivating systems which tie together isolated
evidences into a compelling story.
Zahavi, for example, pointed to the fact that female peacocks are
drawn to the male with the most flashy tail to conclude that costly
behaviors or physical features make for inherently reliable signals
(Bergstrom, 2002). To see how this argument was made and why it
is successful, we must refer to two grounding systems: economics
and evolution. In the peacock's tail example, evolution informs us
that evolution selects for the traits which are most beneficial to an
organism's survival and reproduction. Assuming that peacocks
have achieved some measure of evolutionary equilibrium or
stability, the truth of evolution would imply that having a flashy
tail is an advantageous trait. However, this finding seems to
contradict our economic sensibilities because a flashy tail is quite
costly relative to a modest tail, requiring more food to grow and
maintain and increasing vulnerability to predation; also, the flashy
tail seems to have no utility except as a signal to prospective mates.
From an economy-theoretic point-of-view, the only way to justify
costly behaviors like the peacock's plumage, is for the cost to be
outweighed by a reward, which in this case is that more elaborate
plumage attracts mates. So by combining evolutionary intuition
with economic intuition, it is concluded that costly traits make for
better signals, and this is the heart of Zahavi's Handicap Principle.
Grafen added nuance to Zahavi's theory by adding another
grounding system to the mix: game theory. The intuition behind
game theory is that each player in a game has the goal to win,
formulates a strategy to win, and often incorporates models of the
other players into this winning-strategy. Applying game theory to
the Handicap Principle, Grafen recasts the handicap scenario as a
communication game, and costly signalling as an equilibrium
strategy in the game (1990). The addition of game theory to the
grounding of costly signalling theory allows Grafen to intuitively
project the dimension of choice onto the signaller and receivers.
Peacock plumage for example, lacks choice (Grafen calls this
"condition-dependent" handicap) because it is genetic, while the
relative amount of salary a person dedicates to fashion garments
involves more choice and consideration of strategy (what Grafen
calls "strategic choice" and the "amplifier" handicap apply here).
Adopting game theory as a grounding system adds natural
motivation for exploring "deception" in signalling systems because
it is so salient to our prototypical understanding of strategy in
games (deception is often manifested as buffing and trapping).
Krebs and Dawkins also uses game theory (in conjunction with
some evolutionary history of animal behavior) as grounds for their
evolutionary arms-race hypothesis. They argue that the signalling
game can be segregated into cooperative and competitive contexts;
as a competitive game, manipulative signallers and skeptical
receivers will lead to an evolutionary arms race resulting in
signalling which is progressively more costly; but as a cooperative
game, common interests will lead to cheaper signals or
"conspiratorial whispers." Again, the nativeness of dimensions like
choice, deception, cooperation, and competition to the basic
workings of the game-theory grounding system allow for these
dimensions to be projected rather intuitively onto the target
domain of animal communication.
Having established that signalling theory is grounded in
evolutionary history, game theory, and economics, we also want to
discuss the fitness of these grounding systems with respect to our
working definition of grounding. The first criterion of a good
grounding system is that it should be intuitive: analog, possesses
intrinsic meaning, and has experiential bases. Evolution, game
theory, and economics are all analog representations because they
are integration rather than logically based; meaning is intrinsic in
these systems because they all have a continuous notion of fitness
(fitness of traits, fitness of strategy, fitness of economic equilibrium)
and thus pointing to anywhere all that spectrum is associated with
a particular meaning or set of consequences in the system; these
systems have no exceptions, they are only governed by rules and
the absence of rules. On experientiality, people experience naive
economics and naive game theory in everyday life, and may
experience evolution theory in everyday life through analogous
proxies such as any competitive social situation. On the second
criteria, all three grounding systems are profound. Evolution has
been widely verified and its principles applicable to other domains
too, such as business competition. Game theory is profound
because every interaction between conspecifics can be understood
as a game. Economics is profound because it is applicable to a
domain afflicted with demand and limited resources.
The final criterion is that there be a natural alignment between
these three systems and signalling theory's target domain of animal
communication. Animal communication involves animal subjects
and there is a sense that these systems change over time, so
evolutionary theory (whose native domain is animal evolution)
immediately fits; in animal communication, conspecifics exhibit
competition and strategy so game theory fits; furthermore animals
occupy an environment characterized by limited resources, so
economics fits. It is really quite unsurprising that evolution,
economics, and game theory so readily meet the criteria as good
ground systems for animal communication because these systems
are so wide-scoping that they apply to many more domains outside
of animal communication. As a final observation, signalling
theories, which take advantage of many grounding systems, seem
to have stronger ground. Bergstrom's Theory of Honest Signalling
(2002) for example, is discussed under and justified by three
grounding frameworks: biology, economics, and mathematics.
Goffman's theatrical self grounded in theatre metaphor and game
theory. In The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959), Goffman's
idea about the self is that it is composed of a repertoire of masks -fronts or personas that we are each capable of; our choice of which
mask to wear depends on the social situation that we are in.
Goffman see the self as capable of strategy, choosing to express the
version of self which is most beneficial to us, and in doing so, takes
a Machiavellian position on identity. Each act of presentation of self
is a "performance" and results in expressions given and expressions
given off. Finally, there is strategy involved in the signalling and
reception of identity. From this rough outline of Goffman's theory,
two grounding systems can be seen: theatre, and game theory.
The whole rhetoric is structured by the theatre metaphor, which
Goffman makes quite explicit. Perhaps defying this reader's initial
expectation, the theatre metaphor is actually quite the elegant
metaphor for social life. Two reasons for this are theatre's
profundity in western history, and its historical relationship with
sociality. Theatre has been a paternal institution in Western culture
ever since the Greeks and continuing with the Romans. In a sense,
Western theatre began with Greek mythology, the drama of the
Greek gods refined to timeless perfection in pagan lore. Because the
myth of the Gods served as a guiding light for men, the drama of
the Gods was also a very real part of Greek life. The Greeks, known
for their perfection of tragedy and comedy, possessed a tragic
culture, and as Nietzsche remarked in The Birth of Tragedy, the
psychological milieu of these ancients was deeply affective and
dramatic. Thus, beginning with the Greeks, theatre was already a
structuring metaphor for social life. Our English word for "person"
is itself very revealing of ancient understandings of social behavior.
Person derives from the Latin word "persona" which means "role,"
and that is in turn derived from the Etruscan word "phersu" which
means "mask" (the Etruscans had great influence on Roman
culture). Our rhetoric about social life is also heavily structured by
theatre, as in the expression, "We all play many roles in life, such as
parent or teacher." Even the word "role," as in "social role,"
historically meant "a roll of parchment" and referred to the text
scroll from which an actor learned a part (source: American
Heritage Dictionary, 4th ed.) If Lakoff and Johnson's hypothesis
about metaphorical structuring of thought is correct, then the
presence of the concept of theatre in the discourse of social life is
evidence that we understand much of social life in terms of the
theatrical framework. For its mythical profundity and for its
established relationship with sociality, theatre should be judged a
strong grounding system.
While theatre is the explicit and dominating grounding system,
theatre only partially structures Goffman's theory. The discrepancy
between theatre and social interaction is that while theatre is prescripted, social agents in real life have to make choices. Thus, the
Machiavellian strategic interaction which Goffman postulates
between two social agents is not well-explained by theatre
(improvisation is the closest notion), but is well-explained by game
theory. Of course, Goffman did not know about game theory with
the formality and rigor that we understand the system now, and for
the most part, the notion of game is not used as a rhetorical
framework; nonetheless, Goffman's view of social agents vying for
social standing in a given interaction is best seen as a game.
Goffman's vocabulary of concepts like concealment, strategy,
deception, discipline, goals, and teams is consistent with this
conclusion. With the addition of a naive or folk game theory helping
to fill in some of the weaknesses of the theatrical metaphor (e.g. no
account of strategy and free will), Goffman's theoretical grounding
is stabilized.
Interpretive cases of grounding
Domestic object theory grounded in Jungian psychoanalysis and
eastern elemental philosophy reminiscent of Feng-shui.
Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton's (C&RH) theory of
domestic objects (1981) reports that the nature of the object-milieu
in the home echoes and reinforces individual's and family's identity.
They describe contrasting archetypes of "warm families" and "cool
families" -- warm corresponding to happy families who cultivate
"shared context" and possess "integrating objects"; cool families
corresponding to fragmented families who cultivate personal rather
than family identity and possess "differentiating objects." In my
interpretation, two grounding systems structure C&RH's theory:
Jungian psychoanalysis on the evidentiary side, and eastern
elemental philosophy (cf. Feng-shui) on the rhetorical and affective
side.
Firstly, Jungian psychoanalytic ideas form the evidentiary core of
many of C&RH's arguments. C&RH quite readily acknowledge that
many of their ideas are rooted in Jung. They embrace Jung's view
that "A symbol is charged with psychic energy and transformative
power" (p. 24) and share Jung's view that both the personal
unconscious and familial collective unconscious are psychically
structured by many externalities, such as objects in the home. While
C&RH's terminological adoption of the word "sign" is somewhat
confusing, as it may also refer to Structuralism and Semiology a la
Barthes, C&RH's conceptualization of "sign" is purely Jungian; both
C&RH and Jung define the sign as something whose meaning
"must be rediscovered by each person in a different way," (p. 25)
while for structuralists, the sign is a socio-ideological unit. In the
peripherality of domestic object theory, Jung's archetypal
psychology is also evident, although discreet. When articulating the
characteristic differences between individuals and families, C&RH
always use the rhetoric of archetypes. For example, their analysis of
families is given in terms of the archetypes of "Defendence,"
"Impulsivity," "Nurturance," "Order," etc. (p. 160). To be fair, C&RH
do reach out in their citations from the literature to structuralists
and behaviorists, but the gestalt philosophy that drives their
interpretation has a distinct, new-agey, Jungian feel.
Secondly, although Jung seems to be the dominant evidentiary
ground motivating C&RH's theory, there is a recognition that
psychoanalysis is not intuitive or profound enough a system to
serve as a grounding system. Psychoanalysis itself does not impart
any intuitiveness to any theory that builds upon it. If we look more
closely at Jung and C&RH's text, we can identify that there is a
deeper and more profound grounding system that underlies both
rhetorically. This is the influence of eastern elemental philosophy,
as manifested in the eastern theory of Chi (energy), and the system
of Feng-shui (wind-water flow); this philosophical system is
eminently qualified to serve as a grounding system because it is
deeply experiential and spatial and profoundly refined and
mythified over many thousands of years. Jung's psychoanalysis
differs from Freud's primarily in that Jung shifted grounding to Chi
and Feng-shui, causing the new psychoanalytical system to feel
more holistic than Freud's. In The Secret of the Golden Flower (1929),
Jung himself credits the teachings of Tibetan Buddhism and eastern
meditation in influencing his work. The Jungian conception of the
unconscious is built upon the principle of flow: The course of
events in life shape memories, dispositions, and identity just as
flowing water shapes a riverbank. Jungian archetypes are spiritful
icons closely resembling Eastern philosophy's idea of elementals
(e.g. Fire, Water, Wind, Water, Earth).
C&RH also inherits conspicuously from the structuring metaphors
of eastern philosophy (particularly because Jung's philosophy is so
holistic it is nearly impossible to embrace it without also embracing
the east). One example in found in C&RH embrace of nature and
the cosmos, a page no doubt taken from eastern meditations of Zen
Buddhists: "The objects that people use... appear to be signs on a
blueprint that represent the relation of man to himself, to his
fellows, and to the universe." (p. 38) C&RH also indulges in the
eastern metaphor of shifting energies and employs the Yin-Yang
energy metaphor to explain happy versus unhappy families:
"Warm families channel the psychic energy of their members
toward the broader intentions of the community." (p. 157)
Furthermore, C&RH's employment of the energy metaphor to
explain the transfer of meaning ("psychic energy") from objects to
individuals, and their suggestion that the energetic constitution of
objects in the home affects the fortunes of a family begin to
resemble the ancient eastern art of Feng Shui.
In summary, C&RH's domestic object theory is evidentiarily
grounded in Jungian psychoanalysis, the source of C&RH's
conception of meaning as psychic energy, of a self structured by the
unconscious psyche, and of the interactionist notion that not only do
objects echo the psyche of the individual, but the objects also
reinforce and structure the psyche of the individual. We must also
recognize that Jungian psychoanalysis itself is grounded in eastern
philosophies of meditation, Feng Shui, Zen Buddhism, and it is
these systems where true ground can be found. Metaphors of
energy, of flow, of inner sanctum versus outside flow, are based in
nature and in human experience and therefore are capable of being
intuitively intelligible. The intuition from these metaphors find
their way into C&RH's rhetoric and are the reason why domestic
object theory is capable of seeming fluid and natural.
Simmel's individuality-identity duality grounded in contentsinto-forms metaphor. On the sociology of identity, Simmel is
prolific and broad but seems to lack an explicit coherence; perhaps
this is because Simmel lacks a single explicit grounding system
which encompasses all of this theories; also, he rarely cites the
literature so we are at a loss for clues about what work (other than
his own keen observations) he is building on. Such a singular
grounding system does seem to exist, but it is often quite subtle: it
is the single metaphor of contents-into-forms. To be sure, it is a
powerful metaphor. The idea is that contents are the raw materials
of reality, but because they are in the realm of nature and not
human culture, their meaning is amorphous (for meaning is a
human notion). These raw contents are molded and given shape by
the teleology of human society and manifest sociologically as forms.
For Simmel, the individual is the raw content of the self, and social
roles by which the individual gains identification are his forms. Just
as the amorphous contents can never be fully captured into forms,
Simmel states that "This extrasocial nature--a man's temperament,
fate, interests, worth as a personality--gives a certain nuance to the
picture formed by all who meet him. It intermixes his social picture
with non-social imponderables" (Levine, 1971, p. 13). The notion
that sociality is a system of forms which can only partially capture
the nature of individualism is at the heart of Simmel's identity
theory; the self is duality between individuality and identity.
The contents-into-forms metaphor is elaborated into a larger
grounding system. Simmel treats contents with mysticism and adds
the idea of nurturance to the contents-into-forms transformation,
arguing that an individual must try to cultivate his contents into
the best forms; this is the idea of self-realization or selfactualization. Simmel writes that "all cultivation is not merely the
development of a being ... but development in the direction of an
original inner core, a fulfillment of this being according to the law
of its own meaning, its deepest dispositions." (p. 229) The contentsinto-forms metaphor also supports a host of other dualities,
including publicity-versus-privacy (private because totality is
unknowable), conformity-versus-individuation (individuation
privileges contents while conformity privileges existing forms),
proximal-versus-distant (proximal is close to form, distant is away),
nature-versus-culture (nature is content, culture is perfect form),
and subjective-culture-versus-objective-culture (subjective culture
is the glorification of cultivating contents into perfect forms). Also
inherent in the contents-into-forms metaphor is the notion of a
good form versus an ill-fitting form. Simmel leverages this to
explain through analogy the homogeneous-heterogeneous nature
of groups: "the elements of a distinctive social circle are
undifferentiated, and the elements of a circle that is not distinctive
are differentiated." (p. 257).
In summary, although Simmel's ideas about the sociological self
lack an explicit coherence, one plausible source of grounding is the
contents-into-forms metaphor. Simmel develops this very
fundamental spatial metaphor into a more elaborated grounding
system consisting of many other metaphors which are all variations
on a theme. Armed with this army of metaphors, and anecdotal
quasi-evidence about people and society, Simmel spins his
sociological stories.
Davis' theory of fashion and identity grounded in structuralism
and theory of markets. To Davis's credit, the theory of fashion and
identity he puts forth in Fashion, Culture, and Identity (1994) is true
intellectual bricolage; it is multivocal and draws from many
different voices from the literatures of sociology, popular fashion,
psychology, culture, and philosophy. However, two fundamental
analytical frameworks seem to underlie and provide grounding for
his theory: structuralism, and only toward the end of the book, the
theory of markets.
Structuralist ideas underlie much of the classical sociological work
of Veblen and Simmel, who were two of the first to characterize the
fashion system using a hierarchical, class-based trickle-down
model; thus it comes as no surprise that this framework is Davis's
point-of-departure. Structuralism was the first to embrace the
notion that cultural systems could be analyzed in terms of signs,
significations, oppositions, languages, and hierarchies. Because all
these notions can be visualized and conceptualized as structures
and machinery in space, they make for an intuitive grounding
system.
The structuralist idea of binary opposition championed by Saussure
inspires Davis to propose that the creative fuel of fashion are the
culturally-dictated identity ambivalences of gender, status, and
sexuality; these ambivalences are each understood as a tension of
opposites. Davis also follows the analytical playbook of Barthes
(1967) in his regard of garments as governed by a "sartorial code";
for Davis as well as for Barthes, clothing can be "read" like
language, and it is the inducement of misreading and
misinterpretation which opens up an opportunity for play and
creativity. Davis applies structuralist discourse of sign, signifier,
signification, and signified to his analysis of fashion. He states that
new fashions in their infancy are "undercoded" and governed by an
"aesthetic code;" he writes of clothing communication as symbolic
manipulation, as in "it is characteristic, therefore, for cross-gender
clothing signals, ... to be accompanied by some symbolic
qualification" (Davis, 1994, p. 42); he uses the structuralist lens of
"shifting signification chains" to explain that it is the "ever-shifting
ambivalences ... that affords dress and fashion endless opportunity
for innovation and variation" (p. 57).
Davis continues to structuralize fashion until his theory takes a
breathtaking turn toward the end of the work. He supplants the
familiar structuralist ground with a more postmodern, latecapitalist theory of ideal markets: "What appears to be emerging in
place of the classic, three- to five-year, bell-shaped cycle is a
plethora of microcycles, each oriented toward a different identity
segment of the apparel market ... there is not likely to be a single
reigning fashion at any moment in time" (p. 157). Davis is
apparently motivated to switch grounds because the more
idealized structuralist view of fashion, which has had a long history
in sociology and whose neatness affords "scientific" dissection, is
unable to account for the latest contemporary events in fashion. The
successful function of structuralism has relied on the fact that
culture is dominant and univocal, and signs have clear meaning
that pervades the whole of the culture. However, in a fragmented
market scenario, signs are no longer known to the whole of a
culture; also, because fashions no longer die off completely, it is
hard to argue that fashion still works by shifting signification.
Therefore, contemporary circumstances have broken down the
explanatory power of the structuralist theory of fashion, and so
Davis seeks new ground in markets.
The theory of markets is particularly qualified to explain and
ground the contemporary pluralism and polycentrism of fashion.
The workings of markets can be visualized very simply in spatial
and experiential terms, a prerequisite for an intuitive grounding
system: a market is what connects the many points of supply to the
many points of demand; the more efficient the market, the more
fine-grained and complete the connections. In a market where the
demand is quite diverse, the supply tends to mirror the demand's
diversity as the market becomes more and more efficient. This is
precisely why Davis proposes that the univocal fashion
macrocycles of yesteryear are being supplanted by a system of
more finely tuned niche markets which tap into the desires of the
heterogeneous populous. It is interesting to note that in shifting the
grounding system from structuralism to markets, the
corresponding shift of our understanding of fashion is breathtaking
and dramatic; such is the influence of grounding on our
understanding of theories.
McCracken's theory of modern consumption grounded in
(Marxist?) containment and movement metaphors. In Culture and
Consumption (1991), McCracken puts forth a theory of modern
consumption that focuses on the manufacture and distribution of
meaning. In this work, containment and movement metaphors are
the dominant frameworks of representation and rhetoric; they
serve as a largely rhetorical grounding, allowing McCracken to
create more intuitive argumentation, although there is precedent
for this grounding. Marx's analysis of commodification also uses
containment-and-movement to describe how rich, complex and
liminal phenomena are packaged as sellable commodities with a
single univocal value. Because McCracken uses the same spatial
metaphorical ground as Marx, there will be at least subconsciously
some transference of spirit from Marx onto McCracken.
In "Meaning Manufacture and Movement in the World of Goods,"
McCracken narrates the process of consumption as the containment
of world meaning into goods, the transfer of goods to consumers,
and the extraction of meaning from the goods through meaningtransfer rituals. In "The Evocative Power of Things," the
containment-and-movement metaphor reoccurs in McCracken's
idea of "displaced meaning" - that is, the packaging of certain ideals
and displacement into some other place and time in order to ensure
the preservation of said ideals. In "Diderot Unities and the Diderot
Effect," McCracken conceptualizes lifestyle as the coherency of
consumptive patterns induced by a consumer desire for
consistency and harmony; in posing this consistency as a unity and
in placing certain purchasing decisions as "outside" this unity,
McCracken is once again invoking the containment metaphor. In
"Ever Dearer in Our Thoughts," McCracken's theory of patina
conceptualizes patina as the physical embodiment of status which is
passed down through time. Finally, in "Consumption, Change, and
Continuity," objects are posed as concrete snapshots of current
cultural principles and their continued existence gives continuity to
culture. Again, cultural principles are contained, and these
principles give continuity by moving through time. In summary, the
containment and movement metaphors pervade McCracken's
theory of modern consumption, and like energy-flow in C&RH's
theory of domestic objects, the main function of these metaphors is
a rhetorical grounding system; a system of argumentation which is
intuitive and fluid.
Social construction theory grounded in bricolage. Grodin, Lindlof,
et al.'s volume entitled Constructing the Self in a Mediated World
(1996) portrays the postmodern self as nomadic, transient, and selfconcept is influenced by many cultural media genres such as selfhelp books, talk shows, rap, feminist literature, etc. Murray's Life as
Fiction (1990) theorizes that we construct notions about love by
watching romantic comedies, and notions about adolescent by
watching teenage sitcoms. The common grounding shared by all
these works is that in postmodern times, the self is constructed out
of a multitude of diverse social influences, and this construction is
motivated by one’s own underlying tastes; this closely resembles
Levi-Strauss and Derrida's notion of bricolage. Bricolage is the art of
pragmatic eclecticism; assemble together what you need from a
diversity of sources. Because meaning in the present late-capitalist
period is all but commodified and available primarily through
consumption, self-concept is no longer discovered through
subjective experience, self-concept gets redefined as parameters of
taste and of choice. The self is the meta-entity revealed in the
bricoleur's patterns of consumption. In Club Cultures (1996),
Thornton takes a similar view of the self as bricolage. Thornton
characterizes the underground culture of clubs as "taste cultures"
where membership in the "cool" niche is determined by the caliber
and authenticity of an individual's tastes.
Bricolage actually makes a lot of sense as a grounding metaphor for
postmodern identity and the fitness of this mapping is supported in
the philosophy and psychoanalysis literatures. Jameson's
intertextuality (1998) and Bhabha's notion of "beyond" (1994)
suggest that it is in the interspaces of forms in which the deepest
meaning lives. Simmel argued that the whole of an individual is
not-so-subtly captured by social forms. However, in measuring
identity as a taste function which makes certain consumptive
choices, we can get more at the heart of the extra-social individual.
In the psychoanalysis of Freud, Jung, and Lacan, the subconscious
is a key part of the self, as each person's subconscious psyche holds
intuition and repression and is formed through experiences and
memories. The subconscious is not well-measured by a few social
forms, but if we view the self as bricolage, then the subconscious
can be revealed in the gestalt of all a person's choices and tastes.
Conclusion
We have visited many sociological theories about objects, identity,
fashion, consumption, and signalling and tried to expose the
grounding of each. In some of the theories, such as signalling,
fashion, and social construction, the grounding frameworks are
dually the source of evidence as well as rhetoric. In other theories,
such as Goffman's theatrical self, domestic object theory, Simmelian
identity and McCracken's theory of consumption, grounding
metaphors were primarily rhetoric in nature. As it turns out,
rhetoric is key. Rhetoric lends systematicity to a theory, connecting
the dots of isolated evidence into a more fluid narrative. Rhetorical
grounds such as theatrical performance, bricolage, and games have
a real experiential basis, thereby allowing them to be understood
by projecting past experiences onto the current reading of a theory.
Other rhetorical grounds such as containment-and-movement,
contents-into-forms, structuralism, energy-flow, and markets
appeal to our spatial intuition. People are so good at envisioning
objects moving through space that to explain a theory in these
terms is to make the theory more intuitive.
The purpose of "grounding" is arguably to present a theory in
terms of unalienables and unshakables; not certainties in terms of
scientific certainties, but rather, certainties known and possessed in
each reader's own intuition. Thus, a theory is not truly grounded by
facts which cannot be intuited by a reader; true grounding happens
when a theory is rhetorically structured in the vocabulary of
human experience. This is just as Lakoff and Johnson have long
suggested in Metaphors We Live By -- nothing can be understood
intuitively or systematically without being grounded in
fundamental human experience.
Works Cited
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and Richard Howard. New York: Hill, 1983.
Carl Bergstrom: 2002, An Introduction to the Theory of Honest
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Homi K. Bhabha: 1994, The Location of Culture. London and New
York: Routledge.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Eugene Rochberg-Halton: 1981, The
Meaning of Things: Domestic Symbols and the Self, Cambridge
University Press, UK.
Fred Davis: 1994, Fashion, Culture, and Identity, University of
Chicago Press, Chicago.
Erving Goffman: 1959, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.
Doubleday: Garden City, New York.
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Mediated World, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
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in: The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern 1983-1998.
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Carl Gustav Jung: 1929: "The Secret of the Golden Flower" In
Collected Works of CG Jung 13. Alchemical Studies.
J.R. Krebs & R. Dawkins: 1984, Animal signals: Mind-reading and
manipulation. In: Behavioural ecology. An evolutionary approach. (Ed.
by J.R. Krebs & N.B. Davies), pp. 380-402. Sunderland,
Massachusetts: Sinauer Associates Inc.
George Lakoff, Mark Johnson: 1980, Metaphors We Live by.
University of Chicago Press.
D. N. Levine (ed.): 1971, On Individuality and Social Forms: Selected
Writings, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Grant McCracken: 1991, Culture and Consumption: New Approaches to
the Symbolic Character of Consumer Goods and Activities, Indiana
University Press, Indiana
Kevin Murray: 1990, Life as fiction, Ph.D. Dissertation, Department
of Psychology, University of Melbourne.
Sarah Thornton: 1996, Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural
Capital, Wesleyan University Press.
On Simmelian Identity
Introduction
Proto-sociologist Georg Simmel was perhaps the first scholar to
embark on an in-depth exploration of the nature of self in relation to
society and culture. For Simmel, society and culture provide many
prototypes which are various social forms appropriate to the
characterization of aspects of self; however, such characterizations
are ultimately incomplete and there will always exist parts of the
self which lie outside definition and social entanglements. This
private self is not completely knowable, but craves to be realized
and expressed via social and cultural forms. Simmel poses the self
as a series of dualities including social-versus-private, objectiveversus-subjective, and conformity-versus-individuation. In my
interpretation, the spirit of Simmel's theory of self can be collapsed
onto a single duality: identity-versus-individuality. Interestingly
enough, these two words are often used interchangeably and
haphazardly in the literature, but as I will show, these binary
opposites endpoint a whole spectrum of nuanced understandings
about the self, achieved in the literature.
Simmel's distinguishment of identity-versus-individuality can be
understood as follows: The self manifests as identity because
identification through fragmentary social prototypes is our primary
way of articulating the self; the self manifests as individuality
because there are aspects of self which escape identification and
differ from social identity, thus making us unique. The process of
realizing the self can also be viewed as a duality of craving-
identity-versus-craving-individuality -- we crave to identify
ourselves with social forms to grant order and consistency to our
self-conceptualization, yet we also crave to individuate and
differentiate ourselves from others. Utopically, the antithetical
goals toward identity and individuality might converge by finding
a way to identify ourselves as a singular consistent self which at the
same time expresses all the nuances of our individualism, but this
is not an easy challenge, and remain a holy grail of philosophy of
life.
In this essay, I will first examine Simmel's theory of self more
closely. Next, I describe how Simmel's identity-individuality theory
of self is echoed, extended, or contradicted by other theories of self
in the literature, including Goffman's theatrical model of identity,
Davis's ambivalence-driven theory of identity, Csikszentmihalyi &
Rocherberg-Halton's examination of the domestic self, Veblen and
McCracken's consumption theories of identity, and Grodin et al.'s
mediated social construction theory of identity. I conclude by
identifying common themes which thread these different
understandings of identity and self, and surmise the enduring
nature of Simmel's theory, which has foreshadowed all identity
theories which followed it.
Identity-versus-Individuality
Aligned in many ways with his structuralist contemporary,
Ferdinand de Saussure, Simmel's favorite conceptual-rhetoric
device for understanding the self is binary opposition. Simmel's
thematic oppositions structuring the self are publicity-versusprivacy, conformity-versus-individuation, antagonism-versussolidarity,
proximal-versus-distant,
subjective-culture-versusobjective-culture, and form-versus-contents. For Simmel, identity is
a social description of self, although he rarely uses the term
"identity." Culture and society provide ample social roles (e.g.
police officer, nobility, bureaucrat, beggar) and group memberships
(e.g. church members, family members, employees) which are used
by others and the self-engaged-in-reflection for understanding the
self. Using social prototypes for identity description amounts to
generalization, but such activity cannot be escaped in "a highly
differentiated society" (Wolff, 1950, p.12) and there is a sense of
cognitive inevitability where "The civilian who meets an officer
cannot free himself from his knowledge of the fact that this
individual is an officer." (p. 11-12) From a cognitive standpoint,
generalization and stereotype make sense because humans tend
toward defeasible or default reasoning when they are given
incomplete information.
Recognizing that social identification through prototypes is an
inevitable way that people understand themselves and others,
Simmel nonetheless believes that this only represents a
fragmentary and incomplete view of the self. There are also
"extrasocial nature[s] -- a man's temperament, fate, interests, worth
as a personality -- ... [which] intermixes his social picture with nonsocial imponderables" (p. 13). Simmel believes that this extra-social
self, for which he uses the word "individual," is not social and not
completely knowable. But it is the lifetime quest of the individual
to cultivate and articulate its full self, to express and identify all of
her own nuances. This articulation of individual into identified fits
well within Simmel's recurrent theme of cultivating form out of raw
contents, the teleological realization of nature into culture, and in his
own words, there is "an unalterable ratio between individual and
social factors that changes only in its form." (p. 257) Persons begin
with an unarticulated "personal individuality," which, through
personal cultivation and self-discovery, is traded in for "collective
individuality." This identification of the individual implies the
surrendering of some personal freedom, because "the elements of a
circle that is not distinctive are differentiated," whereas "the
elements of a distinctive social circle are undifferentiated" (p. 257).
Individualism is not to be surrendered though. As a counterbalance to the society's trend toward creating collective
individualities for its members, and the surrendering of personal
freedom which it entails, Simmel also proposes that people possess
a "differentiation drive" causing them to want to stand out from
their social circle. Fashion is one mechanism for differentiating
oneself from more massified social circles, but in a narrow circle
such as a collective individuality circle, "one can preserve one's
individuality, as a rule, in only two ways. Either one leads the
circle, ... or one exists in it only externally, being independent of it
in all essential matters." (p. 261).
In summary, Simmel's theory of self is that there exists ways to
identify the self using social prototypes, but these social
identifications give only a fragmentary view of an individual, who
is also an extra-social being. The complete self is not fully
knowable, but through self-discovery, more and more is known. As
the individual becomes articulated into known social forms,
personal individuality is traded for collective individuality.
However, a person does not willingly surrender his individuality,
as he possesses a drive to differentiate himself. In this paper, I
suggest that the tension between social self and extra-social self,
and the tension between craving identification versus craving
individuation, can best be summarized in the duality of the self as
identity-versus-individuality. In the next sections of the paper, I
will compare and contrast Simmel's theory to other identity
theories in the literature.
The Theatrical Self
Erving Goffman's treatise on the self, entitled The Presentation of Self
in Everyday Life (1959), does not inherently disagree with Simmel's
view, but does examine the notion of self at a different granularity.
Whereas Simmel examines the self, identity, and individuality
macroscopically at a societal level or at the timescale of an
individual's lifetime, Goffman is interested in the self as she
behaves at the granularity of a single dyadic interaction, with
attention to the game-theoretic psychology of negotiating identities
in social settings. Goffman's position can be essentialized as
follows. People wear different masks or personas when in different
social contexts. A mask is chosen for a particular social encounter
which benefits the speaker the most, and the identities of the
participants in an interaction are further negotiated in the early
stages of that interaction, until a "veneer of consensus" regarding
each participant's role in the interaction is reached (p. 9).
In order to assess the identity of a person and thus the appropriate
role to grant him in an interaction, the perceiver monitors the
speaker's non-verbal and verbal cues for signals, and uses the
generalizations that can be drawn from each sign to construct a
truer picture of the speaker. According to Goffman, the best signs
are not the expressions given (and presumably manipulated) by the
speaker, but rather the expressions "given off," which are "more
theatrical and contextual" and "non-verbal, presumably
unintentional" (p. 4). These aspects of Goffman's theatrical self are
in the same vein as Simmel's idea that the self can only be
understood in fragments, through the cues granted by generalizing
to social prototypes. Also, Goffman's notion that there exists some
signals such as expressions "given off," which maybe escape the
speaker's conscious control and awareness, is sympathetic to
Simmel's assertion that the idiosyncratic entirety of an individual is
not knowable.
However, Goffman differs from Simmel by portraying the self as
much more Machiavellian and adaptable than Simmel suggests.
Simmel states that a person's overarching goals are to self-actualize
and converge onto a "true" identity expressive of all her
individualisms, and to differentiate oneself from others, but these
goals seem to be incompatible with Goffman's suggestion that
people possess a larger repertoire of selves which they manipulate
and adapt to different social settings. The possible contradiction is
between one's goal of converging onto a "true identity" and one's
goal of maintaining many selves a la a repertoire of masks. Do we
want one self, or many selves?
It is not clear, but perhaps this is merely a disagreement of scale. It
is possible to reconcile Goffman with Simmel by interpreting
Goffman's repertoire of masks as minor variations to a dominant
trajectory that is still nevertheless converging onto an
individualized identity as Simmel predicts. There is also the sense
that a person who is insecure with his identity is likely to fluctuate
his presentation of self much more widely than someone who is
further along the process of self-realization, and that in realizing
the complexities of a mature identity, there is probably less energy
to devote to the maintenance of too many facades. We can visualize
the reconciliation of Goffman and Simmel as illustrated in Figure 1.
Figure 1. One possible scenario in which Goffman's masks theory and
Simmel's theory of identity convergence of the individual can be found
compatible.
Goffman's notion that identity and roles are negotiated uniquely in
different social interactions may also find support in Simmel's
"Heuristic Principle" of an individual's "Differentiation Drive." That
a person's goal is to present herself in a maximally advantageous
light may exist to serve the larger goal of gaining social leverage
over others, which is a form of differentiation.
In summary, Goffman's account of the self being negotiated in a
social interaction represents a granularity of description different
from Simmel's, but the two accounts do not necessarily contradict
one another, and in the aforementioned, I have proposed one
scenario for the mutual co-existence of the two schemes.
Identity Ambivalences in Fashion
Simmel suggests that fashion provides a vehicle for selfdifferentiation and individuation (Wolff, 1950, p. 260) and
proposed fashion as "the social by-product of the opposition of
processes of conformity and individualism, of unity and
differentiation, in society" (cited in Davis, 1994, p. 23). In Fashion,
Culture, and Identity, Fred Davis extends Simmel's enunciation that
fashion facilitates self-differentiation by proposing specific
dimensions along which differentiation occurs, and situating these
dimensions within a wealth of examples drawn from the fashion
world. Davis nominates gender, status, and sexuality as three
dimensions of creative tension, or ambivalences as he calls them,
along which individuals vary and differentiate themselves in the
realm of fashion. These dimensions are some of the fundamental
cultural dimensions which structure a person's identity. Anslem
Strauss, who Davis cites, proposes that 'in very large part our
identities--our sense of who and what we are--take shape in terms
of how we balance and attempt to resolve the ambivalences to
which our natures, our times, and our culture makes us heir.' (p.
24) Thus, finding individuality can be thought of as a kind of
"ambivalence management" (p. 25) and fashion assists in the
realization of individuality by providing a means of expression and
catharsis along these dimensions.
Davis demonstrates that fashion fulfills the dual drives of the self
proposed by Simmel: the craving for identification with a particular
social group, and the craving to be different from everyone else.
The advent of fashion jeans is an example of the drive to
identification with desirable social groups and the garment's
potentialities as language is leveraged here. Along Veblenian lines,
"the designer jeans speaks most directly to the garment's encoding
of status ambivalences" (p. 75) because they are used by the wearer
to identify with the social groups of high-status and fashionable.
On the other hand, fashion also fulfills the drive toward
differentiation from peers of a social group or an escape of social
groups altogether. Davis presents one particularly interesting
phenomena of "disingenuous mistakes" in which something is done
wrong "with one's dress or resorting to some other form of
vestmental imperfection for the purpose of enhancing status" (p.
66). This sort of "one-upmanship of subtly" is intended to
differentiate oneself from one's peers by feigning authenticity. Antifashion is another way toward differentiation of self by seemingly
rejecting the language of fashion altogether, although the
conscientious objector cannot prevent others from nevertheless
projecting their own generalizations implicating the objector as a
member of some counter-establishment social group. Sarah
Thornton's Club Cultures (1996) gives further consideration to the
issue of fashion as an identifier and differentiator in which she
proposes subcultural capital and the degree of disparagement of the
mainstream as a measure of a young person's "cool."
While Davis's treatise on identity mostly fulfills Simmel's abstract
model, Davis points out an interesting paradigmatic shift in the
interplay between fashion and identity that is novel and goes
beyond Simmel. Contrary to the classical Eurocentric model of
fashion, or the "collective selection" model put forth by Davis's
mentor Herbert Blumer, Davis sees a contemporary cultural trend
toward polycentrism and pluralism, in which all possible fashions
co-exist happily within society's subcultural niches. Although this
counters Simmel's dated model of fashion, we find that it perhaps
parallels another one of his identity theories. Simmel's account of
the eventual transformation of personal individuality into collective
individuality through the process of realizing oneself's societal
niche identity is analogous to Davis's account of fashion's turn
toward polycentrism and pluralism. Just as personal individuality
becomes articulated and socialized as collective individuality, the
dissolution of unicentric mass culture into the polycentric and
pluralistic niche culture of the contemporary period represents the
cultural articulation of individuality. Market forces have
capitalized on individual's craving for self-realization by creating a
subculture to suit every individual, and engraved collective
individuality into the cultural language. These niches are collective
individualities which on the one hand lend identity expression to
an individual, but one the other hand, Simmel might predict that
reifying identity as social groups will endanger an individual's
sense of freedom.
In summary, Davis's identity ambivalences build upon Simmel's
theory of identity by proposing gender, status, and sexuality as
culturally-originated dimensions of identity, and suggesting that
fashion's role is to facilitate the realization of individuality by
allowing one to locate herself at various points along these
ambivalence dimensions via fashion garments. Fashion lends itself
to Simmel's notion that the self desires to identify by behaving as a
language which facilitates social identification. An individual's
desire to differentiate herself can also be fulfilled if she exploits
nuances in the fashion language (e.g. disingenuous mistakes) or
ignores the language altogether (e.g. anti-fashion). Finally, Davis's
account of the increasing specialization of fashion into subcultural
niches can be interpreted as the realization of Simmel's prophecy
that personal individualities ultimately seek to be articulated into
collective individualities.
The Domestic Self
Just as Davis describes how Simmel's identity-individuality duality
manifests in the cultural system of fashion, Csikszentmihalyi &
Rochberg-Halton (C&RH) give an account of how Simmelian
identity-individuality plays out in a domestic setting. C&RH report
that objects in the home should be understood as an external
extension of the self, and are collectively indicative of the state of
self and of family. But possessions are not only a passive reflection
or echo of the self, they also actively reinforce a person's sense of
identity. The reason for their impact on our self-reflection is that
objects have presence and permanence, and "the belongings that
surround us in the home constitute a symbolic ecology structuring
our attention." (p. 94) The role of possessions in echoing and
reinforcing identity is not discussed in Simmel's work, but there is a
consistency between C&RH's observation and Simmel's writings as
both exhibit a Jungian psychoanalytic bent. Both C&RH and
Simmel agree that self-cultivation (also a Jungian concept) is good,
with Simmel praising "subjective culture" and C&RH praising the
"investment of psychic activity" into meaningful activities which
bring about "enjoyment" rather than "pleasure" (C&RH, 1981, p.
104).
Simmel's identity-individuality duality is paralleled in C&RH's
observation of the integration-differentiation opposition. C&RH
state that "People either cultivate their selves by developing signs
of individuality or by stressing signs of relatedness" (p. 113).
Developing individuality maps to Simmel's "differentiation drive"
and the term "individuality," while stressing signs of relatedness
maps to Simmel's "collective individuality" and the term "identity."
C&RH nominate that objects such as televisions, stereos, books, and
musical instruments are differentiators while photos, art, and
furniture integrate the self into the collective of the family by
providing shared context. They point out that young people and
men more often possess differentiators than the elderly and
women. Interestingly, C&RH assert their belief that while
differentiators are common and acceptable among young people,
"differentiation, originality, and individuality [] taken as ultimate
goals in themselves, ... ultimately lead to chaos, fragmentation, and
nothingness." (p. 240) Simmel is neutral on the virtues and perils of
differentiation. On one further point, C&RH contradict Simmel's
view of differentiation and integration as a duality: "the data
suggests[s] that instead of being in a dialectic relationship, the two
processes might be in practice dichotomous." (p. 113)
Simmel's lamentation on the decline of "subjective culture" is
complemented by reports of decline of the home and domestic
identity by C&RH and David Halle. C&RH link terminal
materialism (i.e. addiction to consumption) to "cold" families which
are fragmented and whose members focus on differentiation rather
than integration. They see terminal materialism as a threat to
domestic identity but probably an unstoppable trend: "The
prognosis is not very bright, given that our goals and institutions
are now geared to maximize each person's drive to consume." (p.
232) Similarly, Halle sees the prominence of domestic identity on
the decline and reports that family portraits have declined, at best
replaced by casual photographic depictions or abstract artistic
depictions of the family (Halle, 1993).
In summary, not only can social prototypes be used to identify a
person as Simmel has argued, but C&RH add that possessions and
objects in the home also serve to collectively identify a person.
Furthermore, objects not only echo an individual's identity, they
also play an active role in reinforcing a person's identity by
structuring the self's psyche with its presence, and offering
continuity and stability to identity. Simmel's identity-individuality
opposition is paralleled in C&RH's observation of the integrationdifferentiation opposition, but whereas differentiation and
identification are dual goals in Simmel's theory, C&RH reach a
contradictory conclusion that differentiation and integration (with
the family) are dichotomous and mutually exclusive. Additionally,
C&RH characterize differentiation as a pejorative practice and
suggest that it is linked to terminal materialism and the decline of
domestic identity.
Consumption-based Theories of Identity
Simmel's early observation of the decline of "subjective culture" and
meaningful cultivation of selfhood is a major thematic which has
been echoed in Davis and C&RH. Whether it be through fashion, or
possessions, the cultural trend of the contemporary period is
toward the use of material goods and consumer behavior in the
description and manifestation of self. Whereas in subjective culture,
privilege is placed on the unknowable and slowly-revealing
individual, the present consumer culture privileges a notion of self
described through consumer behavior, interests, and tastes. This is
paralleled by the demystification, demythification, and
commodification trends of modern culture, and the increasing
privilege of shallow concepts over deep experience in "the
information age" (cf. discussion on cultural shift in (Liu, 2004a)).
Two works in the literature, Veblen's The Theory of the Leisure Class,
and McCracken's Culture & Consumption, well-address the problem
of how modern consumerism has changed the nature of identity in
the contemporary period, allowing us to repose theories of identity
in terms of consumption.
In The Theory of the Leisure Class, Veblen pioneers a sociopsychological study of the self's relationship to objects, setting a
foundation for other work to follow (e.g. C&RH, McCracken,
Davis). Drawing on his observations of the behavioral patterns of
the leisure class, Veblen theorizes that the leisure class was born as
a consequence of ownership, and is defined by leisure and
conspicuous consumption -- consumption not for survival or
necessity, but as an overt demonstration of stature and wealth.
Conspicuous consumption is first and foremost an assessment
signal of wealth because it is not possible to possess such quantity
of valuable goods without money. However, Veblen suggests that
within the high class, there is also internal struggle for
differentiation, and as a result, it is not enough to simply be able to
afford the quantity of valuable goods. "He is no longer simply the
successful, aggressive male -- the man of strength, resource, and
intrepidity. In order to avoid stultification he must also cultivate his
tastes" (Veblen, 1899, p. 74). Furthermore, fashion adds a further
reflexivity to the definition of the "high class" by constantly sifting
out those who claim to belong to the "high class" but do not
demonstrate knowledge of current fashions. Not only does
consumption and possession of valuable goods serve to
characterize a person's class and stature in the eyes of others, but
Veblen also observes that possession and consumption themselves
have a transformative effect on a person's image of self: the
consumption norms of the high class "will to some extent shape
[men's] habits of thought and will exercise a selective surveillance
over the development of men's aptitudes and inclinations." (p. 212).
Veblen's observation that objects not only signal a person's identity
but also feeds back to affect a person's self-image is also seen in
C&RH's echo-and-reinforce view of domestic possessions, but this
thematic of material influence on identity seems to be absent from
Simmel's work. I would speculate that perhaps this is so because
Simmel was much more fatalistic in his view of identity, seeing the
realization and articulation of the individual as a fulfillment of an
apriorian promise, and casting the structuring of contents into
suitable social forms as a problem of discovering truth. Despite
being absent in Simmel's work, Veblen and C&RH's observation of
the transformative effects of objects is nevertheless an important
contribution to the understanding of identity.
Although Veblen was the first to implicate material objects and
consumptive behavior as participants in identifying and
structuring the self, he was only concerned with the cultural
category of social class. In a more contemporary work, Culture and
Consumption, McCracken examines consumption in a much broader
cultural framework beyond mere social class. According to
McCracken, goods and consumption are relevant to identity
because they are sources of meaning out of which identity can be
constructed. Rather than viewing selective consumption as largely
a pejorative, wasteful, and empty habit as Veblen does, McCracken
poses the consumption cycle as the contemporary cultural vehicle
necessary for delivering meaning to individuals in a complex
society. McCracken's theory is that meaning lives in three locations:
in the culturally constituted world, in the consumer good, and in
the individual. Advertising and fashion select meaning from the
world and imbue goods with certain cultural and symbolic
properties. By consuming these meaningful goods, their meanings
are transferred onto the individual, who may exploit the meanings
for her own purposes.
There is a sense of empowerment of individuality in McCracken's
optimistic portrayal of modern consumption. Individuals are, after
all, free to choose what to consume, and presumably this "act of
choice" is "an act of identity construction" (McCracken, 1991, p. 50)
in which identity is recast as a willful and creative construct.
Freedom of choice is a thematic for Simmel, who fears that
collective individuality erodes the freedom of the individual, and
who believes firmly that people possess a drive to differentiate
themselves from others. As McCracken portrays it, consumption
satisfies the differentiation drive by enabling an individual to
express uniqueness because "goods [] have a genuinely innovative
capacity ... allow[ing] individuals to take existing cultural meanings
and draw them into novel configurations." (p. xv).
Echoing Simmel's spirit of "subjective culture," McCracken notes
that rote consumption alone does not suffice to transfer the
meaning from the goods to the individual, thus dispelling the fear
that consumerism is a realization of Marx's alienation or Weber's
rationalization. Instead, an individual must become acquainted
with an object, find and extract meaning from that object, and
certain rituals are pivotal in accomplishing this. In "exchange
rituals" such as gift-giving, the giver "insinuates certain symbolic
properties into the lives of a recipient." (p. 84). Through "possession
rituals" such as discussing and showing off a new possession, an
individual establishes the idiosyncratic person-object relation
necessary for a full sense of ownership, and over the lifetime of the
possession, "grooming rituals" such as manicuring an automobile "
'supercharges' the object, [which] might in turn give special
heightened properties to its owner" (p. 86).
Finally, McCracken addresses an important aspect of identity
which is not fully explored in Simmel's fragmentary portrayal of
the self -- the nature of the self's drive toward consistency. What
causes and sustains this drive? McCracken believes that the
consumption of goods is not purely a creative act of creating novel
configurations. Sometimes, consumption falls into regularities and
patterns. McCracken calls this the Diderot Effect, and defines it as
"a force that encourages the individual to maintain a cultural
consistency in his/her complement of consumer goods." (p. 123).
The Diderot Effect represents a drive to demonstrate an aesthetic
consistency in one's consumptive choices. Because each choice in
consumption is a manifestation of aspects of individuality such as
tastes, interests, and attitudes, patterns in choice paint a more
gestalt picture of the individual, and become one way to identify
the individual. Combining the Diderot effect with the idea that
objects reinforce our self-ideals (cf. C&RH), the choices we make
are not only consistent, but give a consistent shape to our selfidentification, or as McCracken poses it, "the Diderot effect
contributes, ... indirectly, to continuities of the experience and self-
concept of the individual." (p. 124) Lifestyle then, can be thought of
as a consistency in consumptive choice, or "Diderot unity" as
McCracken calls it, and thus we can add lifestyle to the growing list
of ways by which an individual can be identified.
In summary, our understanding of identity based in Simmel's
prototype theory should be augmented to account for the role that
objects and consumption plays in revelation and transformation of
identity. In the literature, Veblen and McCracken offer differing
accounts of the relation between consumption and identity. Veblen
views (conspicuous) consumption as a pejorative and enslaving
phenomenon that is primarily driven by the desire for attaining
status, while McCracken views consumption most optimistically as
a liberating phenomenon affording an individual the opportunity
for self-expression. In Veblen's account, consumption manifests
Simmel's spirit of "objective culture" because he argues that the
high social class defines a single, objective set of correct
consumptive choices for those who ascribe to their ranks to follow.
McCracken though, argues that Simmel's "subjective culture" is
indeed alive in modern consumption, and this is demonstrated by
the fact that consumer goods offers an expressive language for the
individual, and demonstrated in the fact that individuals actively
personalize the meanings of what they consume through object
rituals for divestment, possession, exchange, and grooming.
However, there is a point of agreement between Veblen and
McCracken, along the same lines as C&RH, that possessing objects
has a transformative effect on a person's self-identification. Veblen
says that consumption 'shapes men's habits of thought' and
McCracken says "Surrounded by our things, we are constantly
instructed in who we are and what we aspire to." (p. 124).
McCracken gives new articulation to Simmel's under-explored
suggestion that individuals crave singular identification with his
theory of the Diderot Effect. The Diderot Effect stipulates that
individuals tend to maintain a cultural consistency in his
possessions and consumptive behavior, and the unity afforded by
one's lifestyle helps an individual to converge upon a singular
identification of self.
Media and Narrative Social Construction Theories of Identity
Beginning with Simmel's portrayal of the self as not fully knowable
and only interpretable through fragmentary views such as the
social roles occupied by a self, most theories of identity which have
been explored since Simmel have continued along this thematic of
fragmented identity. Goffman's masks, fashion garments,
possessions in the home, and patterns of consumption are all
nuggets of identity. In one of the most contemporary theory of
identity known as social construction theory, Simmel's idea of
fragmentation is culminated. It states that every social aspect of the
self, including all that we possess and consume and all of our social
experiences and interactions, reveal some part of the self. Whereas
Simmel, Goffman, Davis, Thornton, C&RH, Veblen and McCracken
explore in depth how different subdomains of sociality reveal
identity, social construction theory embraces the realization that all
aspects of our sociality reveal fragments of our identity, and in lieu
of a coherent Aristotelian identified self, we have but the integral of
all our manifested parts. In other words, social construction theory
"emphasizes notions of self as less autonomous and more
relational" (Grodin, Lindlof et al., 1996, p.8).
While Simmel himself did not attend much to the transformative
power that social roles and possessions have in influencing our
development and cultivation of self (instead, he romanticized the
notion of a "true self," hidden and waiting to be realized -- slightly
fatalistic), C&RH, Veblen, and McCracken all took a step beyond
Simmel to recognize the self as actively negotiated by our social
context. Continuing with this trend, social construction theory also
views the self as a negotiated rather than predestined entity. A
great diversity of influences and inspirations contribute to our
development of our self-concept. Given the great influence that
mass media welds on daily contemporary life, many social
construction theorists focus on the influence that media is having
on identity construction. In a volume entitled Constructing the Self in
a Mediated World (1996), Grodin, Lindlof, et al. (GL&A) explore
diverse influences on identity construction from rap, television talk
shows, anonymous internet communities, feminist thought, selfhelp books, and postmodern culture. In addition to social roles (e.g.
police officer, nobility, bureaucrat, beggar) and group memberships
(e.g. church members, family members, employees), GL&A suggest
that cultural media (e.g. music genre, self-help books, portrayal of
the mother-daughter relationship in television and film) can also be
Simmelian prototypes for identity. To take rap as a example,
Simpson (GL&A, 1996) reveals that the genre is not simply
constrained by syntactics such as the requirement of a rhythmic
vocal, but rather, there is a convergent identity being echoed in all
rap songs. The identity unity of rap is "concerned with constituting
and referencing an 'authentic' self" (p. 108) by way of rappers
echoing common memories and experiences (e.g. drive-by
shootings, body searches, and the importance of clothing and cars),
and repeating and remixing these memories in order to intensify
the listener's experience of identification with the music.
Furthermore, all of popular music, television, and film become
sources of culturally mediated identity. Lewis, for example, writes
about fandom and suggests that fans make "meanings of social
identity and social experience from the semiotic resources of the
cultural commodity" (cited in GL&A, 1996, p. 7). As to why media
has such a profound effect on our identity construction, the field of
narrative psychology offers an explanation: media portrayals are
given as stories, and all stories which are repeated enough in a
culture profoundly influences our psyche and self-perception.
Stories are meaningful identifiers because "the nature of [its]
closure grants meaning to the narrative" (p. 60). Testifying to
narrative's impact on self-identification, Murray takes the position
that our notions about love and socializing are acquired to a great
degree through our exposure to the narratives of romance and
comedy (Murray, 1990).
Of course, social construction theory's conceptualization of the self
is not all roses. A major thematic in the essays of GL&A is that
postmodern uncertainty threatens the coherence of, and belief in
the self. On the surface, this seems to accord with Simmel's
fragmented portrayal of self -- that the self is not fully knowable,
but at a deeper level, GL&A contradicts Simmel's underlying belief
that the individual is largely coherent and predetermined, and
simply not fully revealed. Simmel consistently refers to
"undetermined contents," "personal nature," "innate character" and
other concepts which suggest his belief in a true self. In contrast,
the postmodern perspective adopted by GL&A is that past notions
of "true self" are mere fiction; the self, they claim, was never
centered in any apriorian character. Simmel assumes that
cultivation can reveal a univocal individual, but GL&A suggest that
in postmodernity, "Self becomes multivocal... Individuals [] may
find that they no longer have a central core with which to evaluate
and act, but instead, find themselves 'decentered'" (p. 4). As a
result, "the ideology of self-determination" replaces Simmel's idea
of self-cultivation. Simmel's long-emphasis on the self being
revealed in fragments is finally contradicted and being replaced by
the notion that the self is being constructed in fragments, and
construction itself is problematic. GL&A and others in the
postmodern cultural literature have suggested that because the
onus of identity construction falls squarely on the shoulders of each
individual, there is more risk and more uncertainty concerning the
self today than during any previous period in history. Ironically,
the freedom of self-determination is proving too heavy a burden for
many people in the contemporary period, causing people to not
want to individuate, for it is too uncertain; instead, postmodernity
is encouraging us to partake of what Turkle articulates as "the
relational sublime...As we succeed in losing the self, the security of
single rationalities, the fixation on univocal goals, and give way to
the fluid and many-streamed forms of relationship by which we are
constituted, we may approach a condition of the relational sublime
(GL&A, 1996, p. 139). In reaction to the uncertainty of the
postmodern self, people are reacting by finding solace in
multivocality -- they want to be identified and partake of
Simmelian collective individuality. In spite of the incompatibility of
Simmel's theories with many of the currently accepted norms of
postmodern thought, we remember that Simmel also foresaw this
development of people yearning for identification: "the quest of the
individual is for his self, for a fixed and unambiguous point of
reference. He needs such a fixed point more and more urgently in
view of the unprecedented expansion of theoretical and practical
perspectives and the complication of life." (Simmel, as translated in
(Wolff, 1950, p. 223))
Conclusion
Simmel laid out a nascent understanding of the nature of identity
which has since been corroborated and augmented many times
over, and rarely contradicted. His basic insight was that the self is
not fully knowable, and understanding the self through social roles
presents only a fragment of or perspective on the whole individual.
Simmel also characterized the self as possessing a certain
dichotomous drive -- the drive toward differentiation and freedom
from the collective, and on the flipside, a drive toward
identification and wanting to converge on social identities and to
reveal a true self through cultivation. The journey of the self is end-
pointed by waffling between these two endpoints, or as Simmel
puts it, "As soon as the ego had become sufficiently strengthened
by the feeling of equality and universality, it sought once again
inequality." (Wolff, 1950, p. 222)
In this essay, I have drawn on the identity literature to compare
and contrast many different perspectives on identity to Simmel's
original postulations. Simmel suggested that group memberships
and profession are ways to socially identify the self. C&RH's
domestic possessions, Davis' sartorial code, Veblen and
McCracken's consumptive patterns, and GL&A's cultural media
extend the original Simmelian prototypes to include other social
manifestations. Simmel's thesis that people drive to differentiate
and individuate can be seen in Goffman's Machiavellian identity
negotiation; in Veblen and Davis's account of fashion being
motivated in part by the need to maintain a moving target for the
high class; in C&RH's observation that teenagers, men, and "cold"
families possess more differentiating objects than elders, women,
and "warm families"; and in McCracken's assertion that consumer
goods form an expressive language which leads to uniqueness.
Simmel's flipside thesis that people also drive toward collective
individuality, craving identification, and the pursuit of singular self
can be seen in Davis's observation that the emergence of
polycentrism and pluralism is leading to the coalescence of many
niche subcultural identities, fulfilling Simmel's predictions for
collective individuality; in C&RH's account of domestic possessions
like furniture and photos which emphasize family identity over
individuality; in McCracken's enunciation of the Diderot effect
which encourages coherence among possessions and the
convergence of self-concept onto a pattern of consumption called
"lifestyle"; and in GL&A suggestion that postmodernity makes
people yearn for identification through cultural and media
narratives.
If Simmel failed to emphasize any salient aspect of identity in his
writings, it is the transformative power of social context which
C&RH, Veblen, McCracken, GL&A, and Murray have prominently
observed. C&RH noted that possessions not only echo but also
reinforce the self because "the belongings that surround us in the
home constitute a symbolic ecology structuring our attention."
(C&RH, 1981, p. 94) Veblen noted that the consumption norms of
the high class "will to some extent shape [men's] habits of thought
and will exercise a selective surveillance over the development of
men's aptitudes and inclinations" (Veblen, 1899, p. 212). McCracken
conceptualized lifestyle as a "Diderot unity" which causes one's
self-concept to converge and resist change. GL&A argue that our
notion of the self's potential is influenced by the genre of self-help
books, that our conceptualization of the mother-daughter
relationship is due to media portrayals, and Murray's thesis is that
our notions about love and friendship are shaped by our exposure
to media narratives in film and television. Why did Simmel not see
the transformative effects of social context on identity? I surmise
that perhaps it is the fault of the contents-into-forms and natureinto-culture metaphors which underlied all of Simmel's arguments.
Such a metaphor entertains the romantic and fatalistic notion that
self-realization is always on a trajectory toward a single true self,
and rejects that the self can be constructed, crafted, or dictated so
profoundly by social context and culture.
The endurance of Simmel's theory of identity may stem from the
fact that it is not a coherent theory at all. Like the self, Simmel's
theories are themselves full of dualities and dichotomies which
illustrate a range of possibility rather than focusing on definition.
Like identity, Simmel's theories tell only anecdotal fragments of the
self, whose whole will never be fully knowable.
Works Cited
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Eugene Rochberg-Halton: 1981, The
Meaning of Things: Domestic Symbols and the Self, Cambridge
University Press, UK.
Fred Davis: 1994, Fashion, Culture, and Identity, University of
Chicago Press, Chicago.
Erving Goffman: 1959, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.
Doubleday: Garden City, New York.
Debra Grodin, Thomas Lindlof (eds.): 1996, Constructing the Self in a
Mediated World, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
David Halle: 1993, Inside Culture: Art and Class in the American
Home, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Hugo Liu: 2004a, Articulation, the Letter, and the Spirit in the
Aesthetics of Narrative. Proceedings of the ACM Workshop on Story
Representation, Mechanism, and Context. October, New York.
Grant McCracken: 1991, Culture and Consumption: New Approaches to
the Symbolic Character of Consumer Goods and Activities, Indiana
University Press, Indiana.
Kevin Murray: 1990, Life as fiction, Ph.D. Dissertation, Department
of Psychology, University of Melbourne.
Sarah Thornton: 1996, Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural
Capital, Wesleyan University Press.
T. Veblen: 1899, The Theory of the Leisure Class, New York: Dover
Publications.
Kurt Wolff (ed., trans.): 1950, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, Glencoe:
Free Press.