Internet and Self Identity
Content
THE INTERNET AND SELF-IDENTITY Dr. Dennis M. Weiss York College of Pennsylvania In the age of the Internet, the World Wide Web, and cyberspace, more and more of our contact with one another is not of the traditional face-to-face variety. Rather, our communications with one another are increasingly mediated by machines, especially computers. We have voice-mail and email, participate in discussions on computer discussion lists, meet people in computer chat rooms, role play in virtual realities such as MUDs, and satisfy our sexual desires with anonymous, virtual others. These forms of computermediated conversation (CMC) are decidedly different from the traditional face-to-face contact that was the norm for most of the history of civilization. When communicating through the intermediary of the computer we can, if we choose, remain anonymous or even create false or alternative identities. As Howard Rheingold has noted in The Virtual Community, “The grammar of CMC media involves a syntax of identity play: new identities, false identities, multiple identities, exploratory identities, are available in different manifestations of the medium” (147-48). Recently, a number of commentators on the computer culture have argued that this aspect of computer-mediated communication, this identity play, will lead to a new sense of self-identity in our culture. The notion that the self is a stable, fixed, unitary, and centered object will ultimately give way in the computer culture to the idea of a self that is multiple, decentered, fluid, and fragmented. Sherry Turkle, for instance, in Life on the Screen, argues that our contact with computers and virtual identities is leading to a new image of the self in terms of multiplicity, heterogeneity, flexibility, and fragmentation. In traditional communities where face-to-face contact dominates, people developed a strong, unitary sense of self. On the Internet, though, we learn to experiment with different selves, different identities. We learn to fashion for our virtual lives new selves. As Turkle puts it, today, “many more people experience identity as a set of roles that can be mixed and matched, whose diverse demands need to be negotiated” (180). Social psychologist Kenneth Gergen has termed this phenomenon “the saturated self.” According to Gergen, communications technologies saturate us with the various voices of 1
humankind and lead to a self that is without foundations, an incoherent, fragmentary self in which the notion of authentic self-identity is lost. Gergen writes, “There is a populating of the self, reflecting the infusion of partial identities through social saturation. And there is the onset of a multiphrenic condition, in which one begins to experience the vertigo of unlimited multiplicity” (The Saturated Self, 49). Allucquere Rosanne Stone agrees. In her The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age, Stone argues that we are witnessing a radical rewriting of our conception of the self. In the age of the computer, our belief that to each body there corresponds a single self or identity is undermined. Older, stabler structures of identity are giving way to a new form of multiple identity. Stone draws parallels between this new form of identity and multiple personality disorder, suggesting that in the age of the Internet, multiple personalities may become the norm, not the disorder. Similar claims are made by Mark Poster in his analysis of what he terms the “mode of information.” Poster argues that the shift from an oral to a print to an electronically based culture reconfigures the subject’s relation to the word and the world. In electronically mediated exchanges the self is decentered, dispersed, and multiplied. As he writes, “In electronically mediated communications, subjects now float, suspended between points of objectivity, being constituted and reconstituted in different configurations in relation to the discursive arrangements of the occasion” (11). Similar points are made by Jay David Bolter, in his analysis of hypertext and the coming network culture, by Elizabeth Reid in her discussions of MUDs (multi-user domains) and IRC (Internet Relay Chat), and by Amy Bruckman in her analysis of MUDs as identity workshops. Ignoring the differences among these various accounts, we can identify at least four common claims in this body of work: 1. There has been a paradigm shift in our sense of self-identity, from a coherent, stable, centered sense of self to a fragmented, decentered, multiple sense of self. 2. The role of technology is deeply implicated in this shift, perhaps constitutive of it. 3. The emphasis is on a social constructionist account of the self.
2
4. There is a repudiation of the traditional Western Cartesian view of the self. For the purposes of this discussion, I focus on the central claim that communications technology, especially the computer and the Internet, is leading to a shift from a stable, centered sense of self to a multiple, fragmentary, decentered self. Despite the growing proliferation and increased acceptance of this claim, there are three general reasons for rejecting it. First, it is not clear that we can understand the basic claim being made. Second, as a descriptive claim purporting to account for changes apparent in our culture, this claim rings false. Third, as a normative claim recommending a particular view of the self as multiple and fragmented, it undermines many of our important moral ideals. Let me address each of these points in turn. First, this claim is, simply put, both vague and ambiguous. The authors, for instance, fail to distinguish between different varieties of unity and fragmentation. It is never clear whether the issue is unity of consciousness at any given time or unity of consciousness over time. There are a variety of terms used, even within one particular analysis, such as “self,” “person,” “subject,” and “subjectivity” that are not adequately defined or distinguished. Furthermore, the central terms of the claim, “multiple,” “fragmented,” “decentered,” are never made clear and so the view of the self that is being defended is left ambiguous. The authors, for instance, treat “fragmented” and “fluid” as synonymous and, yet, there may be significant differences between a fragmented self and a fluid self. Indeed, a fragmented self might be neither fluid nor flexible. Additionally, multiple models of this new, multiple self are proposed with little recognition of the significant differences among these models. Turkle, for instance, at various points in Life on the Screen, mentions Gergen’s saturated self, Emily Martin’s flexible self, Robert Jay Lifton’s protean self, Daniel Dennett’s multiple drafts model of the self, and her own metaphor of the self as a distributed system, analogous to the multiple windows on a computer screen. No attempt is made to distinguish between these competing models. Finally, and I think most significantly, the relationship between this multiple, fragmented self and technology is never clearly explicated. Is the technology fashioning a new sense of subjectivity or is the new sense of subjectivity a product of 3
broader cultural forces? Is the fragmented, multiple self an outcome of interacting with computers or simply a function of a postmodern, fragmented culture? The relationships between the broader culture milieu, technology, and subjectivity are obscured in these accounts. And yet, the focus in these accounts is clearly on computers, virtual systems, and cyberspace. This strongly implies that the technology is causally implicated in the paradigm shift. This claim, though, is never substantiated. A larger difficulty concerns the status of the central claim that we are witnessing a paradigm shift from a stable, fixed self to a multiple, fragmented self. Is this merely a descriptive claim or should it be read normatively, as prescribing norms of subjectivity? There is support in the work of Turkle, Gergen, and Stone to read this claim either way. Gergen, for instance, suggests “I am not trying to document the societal norm. Rather, my hope is to isolate an emerging shift in perspective and related life patterns. The case is drawn from specially affected segments of the population—yet there is good reason to believe that what is taking place in these groups can be taken as a weathervane of future cultural life in general” (200). The style of writing in both Turkle and Stone suggest a descriptive account of a particular culture or subculture, consistent with their ethnographic approaches. Stone, for instance, writes, “Among the phenomena at the close of the mechanical age that it is useful to note is the pervasive burgeoning of the ontic and epistemic qualities of multiplicity in all their forms” (53). Turkle, too, suggests that these are broad changes influencing every sector of culture. And yet, beyond merely reporting on these changes, these writers also speak approvingly of the changes they are documenting. They are not simply neutral observers. Both Turkle and Stone speak approvingly of individuals “playing” with multiplicity. Stone refers to members of the virtual age living happily with multiplicity (43). Gergen refers to the self taking pleasure in the expanded possibilities of social saturation and being liberated from the demands for coherence. So the central claim regarding the multiple, fragmented self can be read either descriptively or normatively. Unfortunately, there are problems with either reading.
4
As descriptive, this claim rings false. This claim to a new sense of identity, it is suggested, captures a widespread shift in our culture. Unfortunately, very little is offered as evidence in support of this claim. And what evidence is offered is largely biased and based on non-representative samples. Turkle’s sample, it appears, is drawn exclusively from undergraduates and so-called “twenty-somethings,” precisely the group one would expect to find engaged in identity-play, as their self-identies have not yet fully formed. In her central chapter on identity from Life on the Screen , Turkle profiles eleven individuals. Of these eleven, her four extended analyses are all of young male college students. The average age of the eleven is 25. Her “Note on Method” suggests that many of her informants are kids from the MIT and Boston area. Outside of individuals with multiple personality disorder, the only group Stone mentions accepting the multiple self are hackers and young engineers. But premising claims about social trends on the backs of twenty-something hackers is probably not a good idea. In studies by Steven Levy, Bruce Sterling, Katie Hafner, and even Turkle herself, hackers are often portrayed as loners, maladjusted, uncomfortable with themselves. It is doubtful that broad conclusions about identity in the wider culture can be soundly based on such a non-representative group of individuals. Furthermore, in Turkle’s ethnographic study, many of her subjects use the very same modernist vocabulary of the self (authenticity, self-fulfillment, self-development) that she argues is passé in the postmodern, computer culture. The case of Stewart, for instance, presents a young man in search of his ideal self and working towards the goal of an integrated self. These are ideas much at odds with the postmodern vocabulary championed by Turkle. Importantly, Stewart’s concern for realizing an ideal and fully integrated self still finds parallels in many sectors of our society. While I think Stone, Turkle, Gergen, and Poster are right that there are signs of multiplicity and fragmentation in contemporary society, there are just as many signs of unity, integration, and authenticity. Certainly the self-help and new age sections of most major book stores trade on the search for authenticity and integrity. As just one brief example, Time magazine recently profiled Sarah Ban Breathnach, who has been called the Martha Stewart of the Spirit. Ban Breathnach’s Simple Abundance: A Daybook of Comfort and 5
Joy has been on the best-seller lists for 70 weeks and sold 2.2 million copies (far more, I imagine, than all the texts I am considering combined). Significantly, Ban Breathnach emphasizes, as she puts it, excavating the authentic self. Additionally, just a glance at the best seller lists also suggests that memoirs are currently a growth industry in the publishing world. It almost seems as if a new memoir is published daily. A thorough and more complete account of the self in contemporary culture has to account for these phenomena as well as the potentially multiple self found in the computer culture. Even in the computer culture, it is not clear that technology leads inevitably and completely to a fragmentation of self-identity. The phenomenon of personal home pages seems to attest to a certain desire to represent and fix the self in cyberspace. The growing field of biometrics, the use of retinal identification, voice recognition devices, iris scanners suggest further ways in which technology operates to fix and preserve a stable and nonchanging personal identity. The now ubiquitous camcorders act to preserve every moment of our lives so that they can be re-experienced over and over again. While all of these phenomena require a deeper analysis than they can be given here, they do suggest that it is too simplistic to claim first that the self in contemporary society is multiple and fragmented and, second, that technology acts solely to fragment the self. As descriptive, these claims are simplistic in two further ways. First, they overplay the role of technology in constituting subjectivity while simultaneously underplaying other factors that play a role in the formation of identity, such as early childhood experiences, human embodiment, and human sexuality. In attending to the formation of identity in relation to interaction with technology and especially computers, these analyses simplistically suggest an almost direct connection between technology and identity. The self, though, is more than a product of its interactions with machines. Too often, accounts of the power of the media and technology to shape human lives presuppose that human beings live in a vacuum and that there are not other influences on our lives. Long before children experience a computer they have been formed and shaped by parental influences and interactions. Or briefly consider the role of the body in the formation of selfidentity. There is a long tradition in philosophy that focuses on bodily criteria in personal identity and there is growing support in fields such as cogntive 6
science and linguistics for the claim that the body plays an important role in our sense of self. In these analyses we are considering, though, human embodiment receives very little attention. Often, as in the rest of the computer culture, the body is portrayed as mere passive stuff, the meat that somehow or other supports the self. Secondly, these claims simplify the modernist view of the self against which they are reacting, a view which often amounts to little more than a caricature. The sharp shift these analyses see from a modernist, centered self to a postmodern decentered, fragmented, multiple self is simply falsely drawn. Alternative theories of the self have been around at least as long as Buddha’s theory of the “no-self” and David Hume’s account of the self as a bundle of perceptions. Nietzsche clearly articulated a notion of the multiple self, as did the American Pragmatists James, Mead, and Pierce. The phenomena of akrasia, self-deception, and other forms of self-conflict were commented on by both Plato and Aristotle. Additionally, it is not clear that our sense of self hasn’t always embodied at least some degree of flexibility and multiplicity. As Jennifer Radden points out in her study Divided Minds and Successive Selves, our lives and selves are marked by a want of oneness, wholeness, and homogeneity. She writes, “Ordinary selves are at best only relatively continuous through time, and at any particular time their unity or oneness is not simple” (20). Feminist analyses of the self and subjectivity have been especially noteworthy for revealing the orindariness of the divided self. As descriptive, then, the claim that technology has led to a shift in the sense of self from a stable, centered, unified self to a fragmented, fluid, multiple, decentered self is unacceptable. Beyond merely describing this new self-identity in the age of the Internet, this claim can also be read normatively as recommending that we actively take up a multiple, fragmented, decentered identity. This claim too faces serious problems and I wish now to consider several reasons for regarding it as dangerous. First, as a number of practicing therapists have argued, the judgment that we should embrace a fragmented subjectivity and play with multiplicity is overly naive and fails to recognize the terror most patients suffering from 7
borderline syndrome experience. As Jane Flax observes, “Those who celebrate or call for a ‘decentered’ self seem self-deceptively naive and unaware of the basic cohesion within themselves that makes the fragmentation of experiences something other than a terrifying slide into psychosis” (Thinking Fragments, 218). A strongly similar point is made by James Glass in his analysis of multiple personality disorder and postmodernism. Oliver Sacks argues that one cannot live normally, humanly in the world without the integrative power implied by a stable self. Anthropologists such as Sheri Ortner and Jose Limon, in their study of minority populations, write with great eloquence about the striving for unity and a coherent life among minorities in this country. Jose Limon argues that while life for working-class Mexican Americans is indeed full of discontinuity, disruption, and fragmentation, the forms and patterns of their dancing in south Texas dance halls represents a struggle against these things, an effort, however momentary and inadequate, to construct a world of meaning and coherence (Limon, “Representation, Ethnicity, and the Precursory Ethnography”). The weakness in these celebrations of multiplicity is that they fail to connect to a sense of lived reality, the practical sphere in which selves must live out their lives and construct a sense of coherence and meaning. Additionally, these claims celebrating the fragmented self ignore the potential dangers of accepting multiplicity as a normative standard. Norms are often appropriated for disciplinary ends and the norm of multiplicity can itself become disciplining when connected, for instance, to the demand that one ignore integrity or coherence of the self or that one continuously reshape oneself according to flexible and changing social standards. Stone herself recognizes the connection between self-identity and regimes of discipline and control. She argues that the unitary monistic identity characteristic of the modern period, what she terms the fiduciary subject, is the product of tactics of discipline, control, and violence directed at the body and institutionally maintained by what she refers to as location technologies: psychological tests, phone numbers, census taking, etc. As an account of the formation of self-identity, Stone’s is very simplistic, reducing what surely must be an exceedingly complex story to a one-dimensional account of the violence of the law reigning in the multiplicitous psyche. Equally simplistic, though, is 8
Stone’s corrollary suggestion that the multiple self, created in the cybersystems of the virtual age, escapes that disciplining process. The technosocial space of virtual systems, Stone argues, has an iruptive ludic quality, a potential for experimentation and play that undermines the disciplining forces of real space. How exactly this technosocial realm is able to escape the discipline and control of real space is never precisely made clear in Stone’s analysis. It is as if the mere presence of play in cyberspace is powerful enough to guarantee a degree of freedom not normally encountered in real life. Relatedly, when it becomes normal to reinvent oneself and when social standards are missing or themselves fragmented and multiplied, the self risks losing itself in slavish devotion to social trends and fads. Robert Jay Lifton, who has developed a notion of the protean self, points to one potential danger of the fragmented self, what he terms “doubling”, evident in the ability of German doctors during world war two to move easily between their practices as healers and their “Auschwitz self.” Lifton writes, Use of the term doubling calls attention to the creation of two relatively autonomous selves: the prior “ordinary self,” which for doctors includes important elements of the healer, and the “Auschwitz self,” which includes all of the psychological manoeuvres that help one avoid a conscious sense of oneself as a killer. The existence of an overall Auschwitz self more or less integrated all of these mechanisms into a functioning whole, and permitted one to adopt oneself to that bizarre environemnt. The prior self enabled one to retain a sense of decency and loving connection. (qtd. in Glover, 23) In Habits of the Heart, Robert Bellah and his colleagues speak eloquently of the danger of what they term “the unencumbered self,” the self completely unencumbered by ties to others, communities, or traditions. Bellah describes this self as a fluid self, “moving easily from one social situation and role to another without trying to fit life into any one set of values and norms, even one’s own. In fact, one’s values are not really a single ‘system,’ since they vary from one social situation and relationship to the next” (77). This is the view of selfhood championed by Turkle, Stone, Gergen, and others. As Bellah warns, though, such a self defined by this kind 9
of absolute autonomy is not really self-defining and self-constituting, but simply becomes a slave to the social situation and socially defined values. The only basis for choosing becomes one’s own idiosyncratic preferences, which come to define the true self (74). Finally, this multiple self also presupposes a socially isolated and individualistic view of the self that is antithetical to our social existence and leaves no room for the development of character, virtue, care, integrity, and future concern. In this respect, the multiple, fragmented self is not far afield from the highly individualistic, Cartesian self that it is defined against. Both stress the self as ultimately an atomistic individual, making its way through the real world or the chat rooms of cyberspace, defining and redefining itself as it moves from situation to situation, adopting first this role, then that persona. Such a self seems incapable of including the ties that bind a family together or constitute friendships that progress beyond mere acquaintances or role-playing others. The view of the self as described in works by Turkle, Stone, Gergen, Poster and others is often portrayed as a self at play, a free spirit, positively recommended for life in the virtual age. But it is also a self without attachments, with little coherence, perhaps lacking integrity, completely unencumbered by ties to others or to a stable community of family and friends. Before adopting this playful approach to multiplicity, we ought to ask ourselves whether we really want to play such a part in life.
10
humankind and lead to a self that is without foundations, an incoherent, fragmentary self in which the notion of authentic self-identity is lost. Gergen writes, “There is a populating of the self, reflecting the infusion of partial identities through social saturation. And there is the onset of a multiphrenic condition, in which one begins to experience the vertigo of unlimited multiplicity” (The Saturated Self, 49). Allucquere Rosanne Stone agrees. In her The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age, Stone argues that we are witnessing a radical rewriting of our conception of the self. In the age of the computer, our belief that to each body there corresponds a single self or identity is undermined. Older, stabler structures of identity are giving way to a new form of multiple identity. Stone draws parallels between this new form of identity and multiple personality disorder, suggesting that in the age of the Internet, multiple personalities may become the norm, not the disorder. Similar claims are made by Mark Poster in his analysis of what he terms the “mode of information.” Poster argues that the shift from an oral to a print to an electronically based culture reconfigures the subject’s relation to the word and the world. In electronically mediated exchanges the self is decentered, dispersed, and multiplied. As he writes, “In electronically mediated communications, subjects now float, suspended between points of objectivity, being constituted and reconstituted in different configurations in relation to the discursive arrangements of the occasion” (11). Similar points are made by Jay David Bolter, in his analysis of hypertext and the coming network culture, by Elizabeth Reid in her discussions of MUDs (multi-user domains) and IRC (Internet Relay Chat), and by Amy Bruckman in her analysis of MUDs as identity workshops. Ignoring the differences among these various accounts, we can identify at least four common claims in this body of work: 1. There has been a paradigm shift in our sense of self-identity, from a coherent, stable, centered sense of self to a fragmented, decentered, multiple sense of self. 2. The role of technology is deeply implicated in this shift, perhaps constitutive of it. 3. The emphasis is on a social constructionist account of the self.
2
4. There is a repudiation of the traditional Western Cartesian view of the self. For the purposes of this discussion, I focus on the central claim that communications technology, especially the computer and the Internet, is leading to a shift from a stable, centered sense of self to a multiple, fragmentary, decentered self. Despite the growing proliferation and increased acceptance of this claim, there are three general reasons for rejecting it. First, it is not clear that we can understand the basic claim being made. Second, as a descriptive claim purporting to account for changes apparent in our culture, this claim rings false. Third, as a normative claim recommending a particular view of the self as multiple and fragmented, it undermines many of our important moral ideals. Let me address each of these points in turn. First, this claim is, simply put, both vague and ambiguous. The authors, for instance, fail to distinguish between different varieties of unity and fragmentation. It is never clear whether the issue is unity of consciousness at any given time or unity of consciousness over time. There are a variety of terms used, even within one particular analysis, such as “self,” “person,” “subject,” and “subjectivity” that are not adequately defined or distinguished. Furthermore, the central terms of the claim, “multiple,” “fragmented,” “decentered,” are never made clear and so the view of the self that is being defended is left ambiguous. The authors, for instance, treat “fragmented” and “fluid” as synonymous and, yet, there may be significant differences between a fragmented self and a fluid self. Indeed, a fragmented self might be neither fluid nor flexible. Additionally, multiple models of this new, multiple self are proposed with little recognition of the significant differences among these models. Turkle, for instance, at various points in Life on the Screen, mentions Gergen’s saturated self, Emily Martin’s flexible self, Robert Jay Lifton’s protean self, Daniel Dennett’s multiple drafts model of the self, and her own metaphor of the self as a distributed system, analogous to the multiple windows on a computer screen. No attempt is made to distinguish between these competing models. Finally, and I think most significantly, the relationship between this multiple, fragmented self and technology is never clearly explicated. Is the technology fashioning a new sense of subjectivity or is the new sense of subjectivity a product of 3
broader cultural forces? Is the fragmented, multiple self an outcome of interacting with computers or simply a function of a postmodern, fragmented culture? The relationships between the broader culture milieu, technology, and subjectivity are obscured in these accounts. And yet, the focus in these accounts is clearly on computers, virtual systems, and cyberspace. This strongly implies that the technology is causally implicated in the paradigm shift. This claim, though, is never substantiated. A larger difficulty concerns the status of the central claim that we are witnessing a paradigm shift from a stable, fixed self to a multiple, fragmented self. Is this merely a descriptive claim or should it be read normatively, as prescribing norms of subjectivity? There is support in the work of Turkle, Gergen, and Stone to read this claim either way. Gergen, for instance, suggests “I am not trying to document the societal norm. Rather, my hope is to isolate an emerging shift in perspective and related life patterns. The case is drawn from specially affected segments of the population—yet there is good reason to believe that what is taking place in these groups can be taken as a weathervane of future cultural life in general” (200). The style of writing in both Turkle and Stone suggest a descriptive account of a particular culture or subculture, consistent with their ethnographic approaches. Stone, for instance, writes, “Among the phenomena at the close of the mechanical age that it is useful to note is the pervasive burgeoning of the ontic and epistemic qualities of multiplicity in all their forms” (53). Turkle, too, suggests that these are broad changes influencing every sector of culture. And yet, beyond merely reporting on these changes, these writers also speak approvingly of the changes they are documenting. They are not simply neutral observers. Both Turkle and Stone speak approvingly of individuals “playing” with multiplicity. Stone refers to members of the virtual age living happily with multiplicity (43). Gergen refers to the self taking pleasure in the expanded possibilities of social saturation and being liberated from the demands for coherence. So the central claim regarding the multiple, fragmented self can be read either descriptively or normatively. Unfortunately, there are problems with either reading.
4
As descriptive, this claim rings false. This claim to a new sense of identity, it is suggested, captures a widespread shift in our culture. Unfortunately, very little is offered as evidence in support of this claim. And what evidence is offered is largely biased and based on non-representative samples. Turkle’s sample, it appears, is drawn exclusively from undergraduates and so-called “twenty-somethings,” precisely the group one would expect to find engaged in identity-play, as their self-identies have not yet fully formed. In her central chapter on identity from Life on the Screen , Turkle profiles eleven individuals. Of these eleven, her four extended analyses are all of young male college students. The average age of the eleven is 25. Her “Note on Method” suggests that many of her informants are kids from the MIT and Boston area. Outside of individuals with multiple personality disorder, the only group Stone mentions accepting the multiple self are hackers and young engineers. But premising claims about social trends on the backs of twenty-something hackers is probably not a good idea. In studies by Steven Levy, Bruce Sterling, Katie Hafner, and even Turkle herself, hackers are often portrayed as loners, maladjusted, uncomfortable with themselves. It is doubtful that broad conclusions about identity in the wider culture can be soundly based on such a non-representative group of individuals. Furthermore, in Turkle’s ethnographic study, many of her subjects use the very same modernist vocabulary of the self (authenticity, self-fulfillment, self-development) that she argues is passé in the postmodern, computer culture. The case of Stewart, for instance, presents a young man in search of his ideal self and working towards the goal of an integrated self. These are ideas much at odds with the postmodern vocabulary championed by Turkle. Importantly, Stewart’s concern for realizing an ideal and fully integrated self still finds parallels in many sectors of our society. While I think Stone, Turkle, Gergen, and Poster are right that there are signs of multiplicity and fragmentation in contemporary society, there are just as many signs of unity, integration, and authenticity. Certainly the self-help and new age sections of most major book stores trade on the search for authenticity and integrity. As just one brief example, Time magazine recently profiled Sarah Ban Breathnach, who has been called the Martha Stewart of the Spirit. Ban Breathnach’s Simple Abundance: A Daybook of Comfort and 5
Joy has been on the best-seller lists for 70 weeks and sold 2.2 million copies (far more, I imagine, than all the texts I am considering combined). Significantly, Ban Breathnach emphasizes, as she puts it, excavating the authentic self. Additionally, just a glance at the best seller lists also suggests that memoirs are currently a growth industry in the publishing world. It almost seems as if a new memoir is published daily. A thorough and more complete account of the self in contemporary culture has to account for these phenomena as well as the potentially multiple self found in the computer culture. Even in the computer culture, it is not clear that technology leads inevitably and completely to a fragmentation of self-identity. The phenomenon of personal home pages seems to attest to a certain desire to represent and fix the self in cyberspace. The growing field of biometrics, the use of retinal identification, voice recognition devices, iris scanners suggest further ways in which technology operates to fix and preserve a stable and nonchanging personal identity. The now ubiquitous camcorders act to preserve every moment of our lives so that they can be re-experienced over and over again. While all of these phenomena require a deeper analysis than they can be given here, they do suggest that it is too simplistic to claim first that the self in contemporary society is multiple and fragmented and, second, that technology acts solely to fragment the self. As descriptive, these claims are simplistic in two further ways. First, they overplay the role of technology in constituting subjectivity while simultaneously underplaying other factors that play a role in the formation of identity, such as early childhood experiences, human embodiment, and human sexuality. In attending to the formation of identity in relation to interaction with technology and especially computers, these analyses simplistically suggest an almost direct connection between technology and identity. The self, though, is more than a product of its interactions with machines. Too often, accounts of the power of the media and technology to shape human lives presuppose that human beings live in a vacuum and that there are not other influences on our lives. Long before children experience a computer they have been formed and shaped by parental influences and interactions. Or briefly consider the role of the body in the formation of selfidentity. There is a long tradition in philosophy that focuses on bodily criteria in personal identity and there is growing support in fields such as cogntive 6
science and linguistics for the claim that the body plays an important role in our sense of self. In these analyses we are considering, though, human embodiment receives very little attention. Often, as in the rest of the computer culture, the body is portrayed as mere passive stuff, the meat that somehow or other supports the self. Secondly, these claims simplify the modernist view of the self against which they are reacting, a view which often amounts to little more than a caricature. The sharp shift these analyses see from a modernist, centered self to a postmodern decentered, fragmented, multiple self is simply falsely drawn. Alternative theories of the self have been around at least as long as Buddha’s theory of the “no-self” and David Hume’s account of the self as a bundle of perceptions. Nietzsche clearly articulated a notion of the multiple self, as did the American Pragmatists James, Mead, and Pierce. The phenomena of akrasia, self-deception, and other forms of self-conflict were commented on by both Plato and Aristotle. Additionally, it is not clear that our sense of self hasn’t always embodied at least some degree of flexibility and multiplicity. As Jennifer Radden points out in her study Divided Minds and Successive Selves, our lives and selves are marked by a want of oneness, wholeness, and homogeneity. She writes, “Ordinary selves are at best only relatively continuous through time, and at any particular time their unity or oneness is not simple” (20). Feminist analyses of the self and subjectivity have been especially noteworthy for revealing the orindariness of the divided self. As descriptive, then, the claim that technology has led to a shift in the sense of self from a stable, centered, unified self to a fragmented, fluid, multiple, decentered self is unacceptable. Beyond merely describing this new self-identity in the age of the Internet, this claim can also be read normatively as recommending that we actively take up a multiple, fragmented, decentered identity. This claim too faces serious problems and I wish now to consider several reasons for regarding it as dangerous. First, as a number of practicing therapists have argued, the judgment that we should embrace a fragmented subjectivity and play with multiplicity is overly naive and fails to recognize the terror most patients suffering from 7
borderline syndrome experience. As Jane Flax observes, “Those who celebrate or call for a ‘decentered’ self seem self-deceptively naive and unaware of the basic cohesion within themselves that makes the fragmentation of experiences something other than a terrifying slide into psychosis” (Thinking Fragments, 218). A strongly similar point is made by James Glass in his analysis of multiple personality disorder and postmodernism. Oliver Sacks argues that one cannot live normally, humanly in the world without the integrative power implied by a stable self. Anthropologists such as Sheri Ortner and Jose Limon, in their study of minority populations, write with great eloquence about the striving for unity and a coherent life among minorities in this country. Jose Limon argues that while life for working-class Mexican Americans is indeed full of discontinuity, disruption, and fragmentation, the forms and patterns of their dancing in south Texas dance halls represents a struggle against these things, an effort, however momentary and inadequate, to construct a world of meaning and coherence (Limon, “Representation, Ethnicity, and the Precursory Ethnography”). The weakness in these celebrations of multiplicity is that they fail to connect to a sense of lived reality, the practical sphere in which selves must live out their lives and construct a sense of coherence and meaning. Additionally, these claims celebrating the fragmented self ignore the potential dangers of accepting multiplicity as a normative standard. Norms are often appropriated for disciplinary ends and the norm of multiplicity can itself become disciplining when connected, for instance, to the demand that one ignore integrity or coherence of the self or that one continuously reshape oneself according to flexible and changing social standards. Stone herself recognizes the connection between self-identity and regimes of discipline and control. She argues that the unitary monistic identity characteristic of the modern period, what she terms the fiduciary subject, is the product of tactics of discipline, control, and violence directed at the body and institutionally maintained by what she refers to as location technologies: psychological tests, phone numbers, census taking, etc. As an account of the formation of self-identity, Stone’s is very simplistic, reducing what surely must be an exceedingly complex story to a one-dimensional account of the violence of the law reigning in the multiplicitous psyche. Equally simplistic, though, is 8
Stone’s corrollary suggestion that the multiple self, created in the cybersystems of the virtual age, escapes that disciplining process. The technosocial space of virtual systems, Stone argues, has an iruptive ludic quality, a potential for experimentation and play that undermines the disciplining forces of real space. How exactly this technosocial realm is able to escape the discipline and control of real space is never precisely made clear in Stone’s analysis. It is as if the mere presence of play in cyberspace is powerful enough to guarantee a degree of freedom not normally encountered in real life. Relatedly, when it becomes normal to reinvent oneself and when social standards are missing or themselves fragmented and multiplied, the self risks losing itself in slavish devotion to social trends and fads. Robert Jay Lifton, who has developed a notion of the protean self, points to one potential danger of the fragmented self, what he terms “doubling”, evident in the ability of German doctors during world war two to move easily between their practices as healers and their “Auschwitz self.” Lifton writes, Use of the term doubling calls attention to the creation of two relatively autonomous selves: the prior “ordinary self,” which for doctors includes important elements of the healer, and the “Auschwitz self,” which includes all of the psychological manoeuvres that help one avoid a conscious sense of oneself as a killer. The existence of an overall Auschwitz self more or less integrated all of these mechanisms into a functioning whole, and permitted one to adopt oneself to that bizarre environemnt. The prior self enabled one to retain a sense of decency and loving connection. (qtd. in Glover, 23) In Habits of the Heart, Robert Bellah and his colleagues speak eloquently of the danger of what they term “the unencumbered self,” the self completely unencumbered by ties to others, communities, or traditions. Bellah describes this self as a fluid self, “moving easily from one social situation and role to another without trying to fit life into any one set of values and norms, even one’s own. In fact, one’s values are not really a single ‘system,’ since they vary from one social situation and relationship to the next” (77). This is the view of selfhood championed by Turkle, Stone, Gergen, and others. As Bellah warns, though, such a self defined by this kind 9
of absolute autonomy is not really self-defining and self-constituting, but simply becomes a slave to the social situation and socially defined values. The only basis for choosing becomes one’s own idiosyncratic preferences, which come to define the true self (74). Finally, this multiple self also presupposes a socially isolated and individualistic view of the self that is antithetical to our social existence and leaves no room for the development of character, virtue, care, integrity, and future concern. In this respect, the multiple, fragmented self is not far afield from the highly individualistic, Cartesian self that it is defined against. Both stress the self as ultimately an atomistic individual, making its way through the real world or the chat rooms of cyberspace, defining and redefining itself as it moves from situation to situation, adopting first this role, then that persona. Such a self seems incapable of including the ties that bind a family together or constitute friendships that progress beyond mere acquaintances or role-playing others. The view of the self as described in works by Turkle, Stone, Gergen, Poster and others is often portrayed as a self at play, a free spirit, positively recommended for life in the virtual age. But it is also a self without attachments, with little coherence, perhaps lacking integrity, completely unencumbered by ties to others or to a stable community of family and friends. Before adopting this playful approach to multiplicity, we ought to ask ourselves whether we really want to play such a part in life.
10
