Self and Social Change – By M. Adams

Adams, M. Self and Social Change Sage Publications 2007 189 pp. £60.00 (hardback) £19.99 (paperback) Throughout the postwar period in the West, social theorists have grappled with the problem of self/identity, both in terms of conflicts between individual needs and social demands and in light of significant and destabilizing social transformations. On the nature of the social changes wrought by modernity there is widespread agreement. While by no means affecting everyone equally, these changes include the pluralization of authorities, the deinstitutionalization of private life, the decline of overarching systems of meaning, the reconfiguration of time and space, global flows of people and products, and much more. We now find ourselves in a situation of fluidity and flux, without the old rituals and stable institutions, disembedded from tradition and external ordering criteria, and flooded by media imagery, new technologies, and a consumption ethic. Our lives are more mobile, more individualized, and managed with fewer and weaker communal ties. To this general agreement about social conditions, there is also broad consensus that these conditions create major challenges for identity formation and maintenance. Where social theorists disagree is on what these conditions and challenges mean. In Self and Social Change, Matthew Adams provides a clearly written and concise summary of key theoretical accounts of the meaning of social change for psychic life and the experience of self. The sociological tradition has long emphasized the negative impact that social transformations can have on individuals and has coined a rich vocabulary to describe adverse effects: alienation, anomie, atomization, the iron cage, and the like. Adams calls this tradition the ‘psychosocial fragmentation thesis,’ and discusses a number of more recent contributions to it, from Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man, to Riesman et al's The Lonely Crowd, Putnam's Bowling Alone and Sennett's The Corrosion of Character. The central tenet of this thesis, he argues, is that the deterioration of social life leads, more or less straightforwardly, to a self that is isolated, alienated, and adrift. Against this ‘declensionist’ account, Adams contrasts the more optimistic ‘reflexivity thesis’ championed by Anthony Giddens, and in various forms by all those whose analysis is premised on a reflexive and calculating actor. For Giddens, a range of cultural options are available to address each of the ‘tribulations of the self’ brought about by social instability. Rather than succumbing to fragmentation, for instance, an identity can be reflexively constructed that purposively incorporates many diverse elements. In the face of powerlessness in an anomic public realm and/or inadequate social mastery in personal relationships, identity can be strengthened through direct efforts at active control. The pluralization of moral authority, Giddens argues, can be countered through the use of more specialized forms of expert advice and by the adoption of a workable ‘principle of doubt’ for evaluating the claims of rival authorities. And so on. In Giddens' vision, self-definition is a reflexive project fraught with danger but also with rich possibility. He sees current conditions offering a fairly unfettered opportunity to construct a meaningful identity, one built up according to a life-plan, realized in experience and life-style, and held together by an internally-referential life narrative. The reflexivity thesis has been challenged on a number of key points and runs counter to other, more critical readings of contemporary experience. Especially important in Adams' summary of criticisms is the charge that the thesis, like rationalist theories of action generally, underestimates the role of established structures and cultural patterns on self-definition and overestimates the rational ego at the expense of ‘habitual, unconscious, ambiguous, and emotional dimensions’ of selfhood, and the self's embodiment. Further, Adams stresses that ‘reflexivity’ in this thesis is itself a cultural framework with prescriptive force. It unwittingly reproduces basic neo-liberal and taken-for-granted assumptions of contemporary Western society. In this sense, reflexivity and the valorization of the liberated agent may have, in Adams' words, ‘a regulative role in the constitution of modern subjectivity at least as much as a liberating one’. Not all theorists, Adams shows, have been impressed by the emancipatory potential of freedom of choice and continuous self-monitoring. In his writing on the government of selves, Foucault argued that social change has shifted regulation from external and authoritarian forms to more subtle and invisible ones that demand high levels of self-surveillance and the active interiorization of normative conduct by the governed. In his view, the notion of self-reflexivity as individualized empowerment is a fiction that masks the increasing administration of individual lives and psyches by all manner of experts and tutelary systems. Recent work in the Foucauldian tradition has extended this reading of ‘compulsory individualism’ in important ways. Adams highlights the work of Paul Du Gay, Nikolas Rose, and others, who have analysed work life and explored the normative discourses of ‘enterprise’ and ‘entrepreneur’ as models of selfhood. Yet others, informed by psychoanalysis and object-relations theory, have taken a similarly jaundiced view of the perpetual self-scrutiny and championing of choice characteristic of contemporary society. Adams concentrates on Christopher Lasch in particular, who argued that social change and endemic social instability have created the conditions for widespread problems of narcissism. The concept of narcissism has caused confusion, and interest in it has waned over the past two decades. Adams is to be commended, however, for retrieving this body of work because narcissism in its clinical sense—a blurring of boundaries between the self and what is not self—adds an important dimension to thinking about the psychological impact of social change. Specifically, it provides a theoretically robust connection between the erosion of an objective, taken-for-granted world in modern consciousness and the emergence of a fragile, shifting, and fragmented experience of self and tenuous relations with others. Through this psychoanalytic lens, Lasch reads the abundance of ‘choice’ in commodity capitalism and endless self-scrutiny not as harbingers of autonomous selfhood but as alienating and pathological, contributing, in Adams' words, to a ‘hypochondria of the soul’ rather than a richer and wider identity. Both the Foucauldian and Laschian approaches, Adams argues, have important and widely-discussed weaknesses. They suffer from overdeterminism and a failure to accommodate agency. Like the psychosocial fragmentation and reflexivity theses, they too offer an inadequate account of self in relation to social change. Despite their accomplishments, we still need, Adams maintains, theory that better captures the dynamic and relational embodiment of the self as well as its embeddedness in complex, differentiating social structures. We need, in short, a better understanding of reflexivity, and in the end he proposes a multidimensional reconfiguration. Self and Social Change is a terrific book. If looking for an accessible introductory text, look no further

Aesthetics · Alienation · Anomie · Epistemology · Identity (music · Meaning (existential · Modernity · Political science · Social change · Social science · Social space · Sociology · Anthropology · Law · Philosophy · Youth Education and Societal Dynamics