harmony or collusion with market forces and the consumerist imperatives of advanced capitalism than as a discordant or oppositional social force. Meanwhile, new pressing political issues, including mass migration, multiculturalism, cultural Americanization and rampant consumerism, forced their way onto the political agenda, which in turn bred new social theories of the relation between self and society. At the political level, new forms of political resistance – from peace and ecology movements to human rights and citizenship campaigns – raised anew the question of human agency and the creative dimension of social action. At the theoretical level, this led to the in-depth critique of the more negative or pessimistic elements of theories of identity formation in European social theory and philosophy. In particular, questions concerning the individual’s capabilities for autonomous thought, independent reflection and transformative social practices emerged as politically important. In the face of these changes, another terminological shift occurred, one from the analysis of subjectivity and individual subjection to the study of the creative dimensions of the self.
The self, therefore, becomes a vital preoccupation of the contemporary age for a whole series of practical, political reasons. The impact of identity politics looms large in this context. Struggles over the politics of identity have intensified dramatically in recent decades, with issues concerning gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, multiculturalism, class and cultural style moving to the fore in public and intellectual debate. The sociocultural horizon of identity politics – premised upon new conceptual strategies for both the theorization and the transformation of self – has provided important understandings of particular forms of oppression and domination suffered by specific groups, including women, lesbians and gay men, African-Americans and other stigmatized identities. Identity politics has produced cultural and strategic perspectives, concerned with the development of alternative concepts of the self, different narratives of identity and emancipatory strategies for mobilizing individuals and groups against oppressive practices, cultures and institutions. Questioning the universal categories that have long been deployed to unite identities in the name of liberation (such as truth, equality and justice), the struggle over identity politics has instead focused on the creation of the self, the articulation of cultural style and the production of fluid alliances for specific political interventions in concrete social processes.
Over the past several decades, what highlighted the topic of identity more than any other theoretical and political current, at least in terms of placing it most centrally on the agenda for cultural politics, was feminism. In advancing the slogan that the personal is always political, feminism inaugurated a switch from institutional politics to cultural politics. Recasting everyday life as a terrain of struggle in the reproduction of unequal power relations, feminists focused on the historical interplay of sexuality, sex and gender in analysing constructions and contradictions of personal identity and the self. Since the eruption of women’s liberation and the sexual revolution at the close of the 1960s, the conceptual and political strategies of feminism have shifted from the analysis of male domination, understood in terms of patriarchy, to the study of more localized forces for grasping divisions and differences across sexual life. Most recently, key global issues have emerged, including sexual harassment and the #MeToo movement. Today, in an age that is supposedly post-political, feminism has thrived (or so some have argued) on the demise of universalist arguments for the political and economic transformation of gender relations in favour of lifestyle and identity politics, with the stress on prioritizing multiple selves, cultural differences and gender instability. Alongside the rise of various new feminisms (including black and Third World women’s groups), the period has also witnessed other forms of broadly transformative identity politics, from ecology and peace movements to forums for the survivors of domestic and sexual violence, from postcolonialist identities to the creation of transnational human rights organizations. In the process, the analysis of the self has been recast, from derivative of political structures or social practices towards identity, information and images as sites of possible restructuring for interpersonal relations and public life.
Identity politics is thus enormously wide-ranging in scope, and has bred a multitude of cultural forms and theoretical systems. This book discusses the provocative dialogue between identity politics scholarship and cultural activism, though the main focus concerns discriminating between different concepts of self that have entered popular and political discourse. The attempt to theorize explicitly the place of selfhood and identity within politics and culture has deepened in recent times, as social theorists and cultural analysts have turned to Freud, Marcuse, Lacan, Foucault, Kristeva, Butler and others in order to develop a more sophisticated understanding of individual subjectivity in an age of pervasive globalization. In contemporary social theory, the cultures and conflicts of identity loom large, with the fragilities of personal experience and the self viewed as central to critical conversation concerning social practice and political transformation.
As a result of these conceptual developments and transformations, a number of social issues relating to identity politics arise. For many commentators, identity politics is valuable precisely because it draws attention to new cultural forms of social integration and conflict experienced at the level of the self – such as the search for cultural style and personal identity in consumerism, new information technologies, or alternative subcultures and movements. The importance of concepts of self and identity to critical discourse, according to these commentators, is deeply bound up with politics in the widest sense. That is to say, identity politics reflects not a turning away from public life, but rather expresses genuine global reach in inspiring progressive and transformative politics. For other critics, however, identity politics is hardly energizing at all. According to this critique, identity politics deflects attention from the core political and institutional issues of the times, reducing politics to a solitary, individualistic search for personal identity. Politics in the sense of identity preoccupations leads to the elevation of individual choice over collective action, and prioritizes individualism over traditional collective means of political activity. The result is a kind of anti-political politics, one that promotes the privatization of public concerns. This leads modern women and men to imagine that problems of identity are, first and foremost, matters for individual attention and personal solution; the culture of identity politics is increasingly made up of isolated and isolating voices, with few cultural resources available for connecting personal troubles to public issues. In short, some worry that identity politics is too closed in on itself, unconcerned with wider political solidarity, and too intolerant and defensive properly to grasp how political demands for recognition and respect relate to oppressions of the wider political system. While it may be the case that questions concerning the constitution of the self have been linked to radical politics (as in, say, sexual politics or postcolonialism), it is much less clear that attention to the subjective aspects of social experience is always inherently subversive. Indeed, the opposite might be true. Some critics argue that the advanced capitalist order is so drenched with consumerist signs, codes and messages that the self is now, in effect, fully regulated by dominant corporate interests in advance. From this angle, concentration upon the self is part of the political problem, not the solution.
Important differences regarding the nature of the self and self-experience are at stake in such evaluations of identity politics, and I shall look at the cultural gains and losses of contemporary debates around the paradoxes of self. In using conflicts over the self as my central reference point, I shall examine a range of cultural anxieties that have informed the language of self in sociological theories, in psychoanalytic readings, in recent poststructuralist (especially Foucauldian) theory and in feminist and postmodern critiques. This is a book about such social theories and their impact upon how we see the self.
The Structure of the Book
The chapters that follow are designed to introduce students to concepts and theories of the self within the social sciences. The book aims to examine critically the ideas, concepts and theories of the self that are used in social analysis, while also discussing key areas in which such approaches have addressed the trajectory of self-identity, selfhood and personal identity.
Chapter 1 looks at how the self has entered sociology.
