Episode 21 Where are you? Who are you?

This week I question whether the notion of the ‘self’ is as stable as people seem to want it to be. The instability of the self might be explored in terms of how it is situated within the language system. What words do you use to refer to your self? You might use a pronoun, but which one? Me, I, my, mine, myself? It all depends on its position in the sentence. Also, using a pronoun is always unstable, because pronouns are deictic – that is, they change according to their context of use. The pronoun ‘I’ can mean Jodie Clark, Madonna, Henry IV or Kermit the Frog, depending on who’s speaking.

You might use your name to refer to yourself, but names aren’t that stable either. Besides, try referring to yourself using your own name in a business meeting.

Can Jodie ask for some clarification here? Jodie disagrees with some aspects of the proposal you’ve put forward.

Why is this so weird? It’s because in the language system, the ‘self’ has its meaning only in relation to other selves – the self is not some stable entity with a fixed term of reference.

If the meaning of the self in the language structure is relative, what about the meaning of the self in the social structure? To explore this question, I draw upon Michel Foucault’s work, which, he says, is oriented toward creating

a history of the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects (Foucault 2000, p. 326)

‘Subject’ is a beautifully ambiguous word: it can mean the self, the subject of a sentence, or someone who is subject to another power, such as a monarch. Foucault was particularly interested in how it was possible for people to be subjected to power structures even in democratic societies.

One way to do it, he argues, is to make people constantly obsessed with their selves, to make them feel the need to be constantly vigilant about their behaviour and how well they fit in to society. In his History of Sexuality, volume 1 he discusses how well the ‘confession’ works to make people self-monitor. The confession shows up, he argues, in many different contexts – it’s not just for church anymore.

Once you confess to those behaviours, desires, thoughts and ways of being that are wrong, your self is safe and stable – it is welcomed back into the social structure that divides the world up into right and wrong desires, thoughts and ways of being. My own work, on the other hand, explores unsafe selves. I have the idea that it is those ‘selves’ that don’t fit in that carry with them the potential to transform social structures.