Proposal for Ph
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 ill-suited 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 avant-garde 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, avant-garde, early adopter, trendy, mainstream, classical, or non-fashionable -- 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 blue-greenish 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, wide-scoping, 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 pre-scripted, 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 contents-into-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 self-actualization. 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 contents-into-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, late-capitalist 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 meaning-transfer 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 self-concept is influenced by many cultural media genres such as self-help 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
Roland Barthes: 1967, The Fashion System. Transl. Matthew Ward and Richard Howard. New York: Hill, 1983.
Carl Bergstrom: 2002, An Introduction to the Theory of Honest Signalling. Retrieved from octavia.zoology.washington.edu / handicap / handicap_intro_1.html
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.
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.
Tim Guilford, and Marian Stamp Dawkins: 1993, Receiver psychology and the design of animal signals. Trends in the Neurosciences 16:430-436.
Stevan Harnad: 1990, The Symbol Grounding Problem. Physica D 42: 335-346.
Fredric Jameson: 1998, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” in: The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern 1983-1998. Verso.
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, objective-versus-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-versus-privacy, conformity-versus-individuation, antagonism-versus-solidarity, proximal-versus-distant, subjective-culture-versus-objective-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 non-social 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 counter-balance 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.
[pic]
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 self-differentiation 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. Anti-fashion 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 integration-differentiation 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 socio-psychological 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 self-identification, 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, self-help 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 nature-into-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.
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