fragmentation of experience pulls the generalized otherand the self-
concept along with itapart. Many experience multiple selves, none of
which necessarily fit together. The ensuing “multiphrenia” makes feeling
secure in one’s identity more challenging than ever before. Rather than feel-
ing liberated by the capacity to experiment with selfhood, postmodern the-
orists posit that youth feel suffocated by the wide range of choices that are
available to them.
Post-modernization is thus thought to affect self-forming processes by
promoting an experience of the world that is mediated through images,
technology, and doubt. Directing heightened reflexivity toward their choices
and values, and finding it difficult to develop a coherent generalized other,
the above theories suggest that many cannot rest easy in their self-concepts.
AsGiddens (1991) argues, the convergence of these challenges proves
“existentially troubling for ordinary individuals” (p. 21). The result of
post-modernization, then, is not merely the “depthlessness” of identity
thatJameson (1984)laments, but a profound experience of anxiety and
self-doubt that penetrates to the core of one’s sense of being in the world.
While Giddens and Gergen paint a bleak picture of the postmodern self,
empirical research suggests that they exaggerate the degree to which the
contemporary currents of economy, media, and culture fragment identity
(Glaeser, 2000; Muggleton, 2000). AsAdler and Adler (1999)concluded in
their study of transient resort workers: “the postmodernists’ most pessimis-
tic view of the demise of the self has not been born out; rather, the core self
has adapted to contemporary conditions and thrived” (p. 54). Their find-
ings, I would argue, are unsurprising. Although postmodern theorists have
maintained that formulating an identity is more complicated than ever
before, fears regarding the “death of the self” have always existed, attaining
particular expression in the writings of Nietzsche, Freud, and the Frankfurt
School but dating as far back as ancient philosophy (Katovich & Reese,
1993 ). The self has thus never possessed the stability that Giddens’ and
Gergen’s work implies.
The tendency to overstate the stability of self-concepts prior to post-
modernization stems in large part from the way in which contemporary
theorists have disregarded the work of symbolic interactionists writing
afterMead (1934)interms of self-formation. Mead’s social behaviorism,
as Katovich and Reese (1993)note, was rooted in an Enlightenment-style
of thinking that construed identity as willful and the generalized other as
harmonious. Post-Meadian scholars likeGoffman (1959, 1961)and Becker
(1963), however, rejected the idea that “stable, cooperative, and ...
forthright situated action” could precipitate agentic self-concepts and
Ecstatic Ritual as a New Mode of Youth Identity Work 165