voi Cesor another. even articulating who we are seems to change us: as we grasp at the self, it
dissolves in our hand-reassembling itself somewhere else.
in trying to make sense of the mystery, i turn first to the connection of self with time
and place. one popular view is that there is an essential self which remains unchanging
through life; though external contours to the self may be formed by circumstance, they
could be sloughed off if they are too uncomfortable. opposing this is the so- called
blank slate (or tabula rasa) attributed to locke (1964 [1690]: Bk.ii Ch.2). This is the
theory that the self is a blank to be written on by its experience. against both these
views is the existential self, which proclaims the freedom to choose who he or she
becomes. indeed, choice is always already inevitable with the result that at all times a
self can say, ‘i am what i am not yet’.
second, there is the relationship of the self to other people, to the social groups in
which it is embedded. one powerful strand of thinking in Western societies is the idea
of the individual as a social atom. The group, then, is an aggregate of such individuals
each of whom is able to decide its own future, rationally and autonomously, and is
responsible for the outcome. There is another powerful strand which takes the opposing
view. This is the idea of an individual as determined by society. determined by their
class position, their gender, their race and ethnicity, individuals play out their roles
in ways that economists and policymakers can predict. in a similar vein, there is an
influential view, associated with deconstruction and poststructuralism, that, roughly,
we do not speak our language, but that it speaks us. This postmodern self need not be a
unity; rather it may be a collection of fragments, the nature of the fragments depending
on the particular discourse in which a self is located at any given time.
The model of self used in this chapter can be positioned in relation to these latter
ideas. it is one in which the self continually creates itself, but not in the circumstances
of its own choosing, and, further, those circumstances contribute to its creation. (1)
each self is unique and its response to circumstance is not determined. Further, (2) the
process is continuing: we are always in a state of becoming, always unfinished. (3) We
make ourselves in relation to others. as i have argued elsewhere (griffiths 1995: 16):
‘i’ is a fragment rather than an atom. That is, an ‘i’ is always part of a ‘we’, indeed
of several different ‘we’s, which overlap with each other. For example, consider: ‘we
ballet dancers’, ‘we inhabitants of Rio favelas’, ‘we teenagers’. These groups sound
very different, but a self that belongs to all of them (as in Beadie Finzie’s film, Only
When I Dance) is self- constructed in relation to all of them. (4) The circumstances that
influence – and are influenced by – a self include specificities of time and place.
This model is strongly influenced by arendt’s concept of ‘the human condition
of natality’ (arendt 1958: 191). her model of the realm of human affairs is one that
is open to change, and indeed does change as new unique human beings are born,
come into the world and use their voices to act in it, in concert with others. arendt
draws a useful distinction between who and what a human being is. The ‘who’, she
says, is a unique personal identity which discloses itself when somebody acts and
speaks. it is ‘in contradistinction to “what” somebody is – his qualities, gifts, talents,
and shortcomings’ (arendt 1958: 179). it is also in contradistinction to his self as
a social or political being (an american or german, Jew or negro, woman or man)
(arendt 1966). she argues that the attempt to reduce the self to either the ‘who’ or
to the ‘what’ diminishes it.