- seCtIon sIx: seLF AnD otHeR
Language is a crucial mediator of this emergence. The function of language is not
to encode a set of neural representations; saying I am angry ‘is more like a hand-
shake or an embrace than a mirror of the interior’ (Gergen, 2011, pp. 646–647).
To say something is to perform an action within a relationship, and so ‘private
feelings’ are better thought of as public actions: ‘it is not that one has emotions, a
thought, or a memory so much as one does them’ (p. 647). And just as we cannot
make ourselves understood if we use words we’ve just made up, so our actions
do not make sense unless they draw on cultural traditions. Thus all our perfor-
mances of self carry a history of relationships, and extend that history: ‘The other
enters expressions of the self in their very formulation’ (p. 647). This is true even –
or especially – for prisoners held in solitary confinement, who survive only by
creating social worlds for themselves and by knowing that there are others who
remember them. In conditions like this, where the volume is turned down on the
everyday, it becomes clearer than ever that ‘Others think of me therefore I exist’
(Saunders, 2014, p. 93).
If we follow this path consistently, ‘the other’ stops seeming to be outside, but
becomes part of the self. Selves don’t first exist and then have intersubjectivity
or sociality added to them: those qualities are just as intrinsic to them as embod-
iment. These qualities also connect directly to embodiment, as is clear in various
important developmental activities in human children, such as imitation (learn-
ing by copying others’ physical movements) and joint attention (attending to
something along with someone else, like a mother and daughter reading a book
together). In ways like these, we act with others, attend to others, and attend with
others, and this way our shared experiences are part of who we are. And so the
self is fundamentally ‘dialogical’ (Hermans, 2011).
Most of these embodied and extended theories are ego theories, in that
there is continuity to their proposed selves. But they expand the boundaries
of the ego so far that the self/other and self/world distinctions begin to dis-
solve, and it becomes hard to tell where I stop and the world begins. For Andy
Clark (2008), the self extends beyond the boundaries of consciousness and
beyond the skin, so that external resources like the information on my phone
are a central part of my identity. Similarly for Alva Noë, the self is ‘distrib-
uted’ through the actions that connect my body with objects in the world:
‘a person is not a self-contained module or autonomous whole’; a self isn’t
like a berry, but like the whole plant rooted in earth and tangled in brambles
(2009, p. 69). This means the senses of unity and continuity no longer need
explaining in their own right, since they are more closely tied to the unity and
continuity that characterise the physical and social world in general. And if
it doesn’t seem this way to us – careful attention to the nature of experience
may help it to.
CENTRES OF NARRATIVE GRAVITY
Some of the theories considered so far try to explain what the self is – a work-
ing part of the mental theatre, a special neural process, a strange loop, a mental
model, or a consequence of embodiment or intersubjectivity. Others abandon
the idea of the ‘self itself ’ and try to account only for the feeling we have of having
a self. Some hesitate between these two positions.‘The other enters
expressions of the self in
their very formulation’
(Gergen, 2011, p. 647)
‘Others think of me
therefore I exist’
(Saunders, 2014, p. 93)
‘consciousness does not
really belong to man’s
individual existence but
rather to his social or
herd nature’
(Nietzsche, 1882/1974, trans.
Kaufmann, §354)
‘My body is an object all
right, but my self jolly
well is not!’
(Farrell 1996, p. 519)