9

“LIKE A STRUCTURE OF COTTON CANDY”: BEING ONESELF AS SELF-APPROPRIATION

Nana is an animal with an outside and an inside. If you remove the outside, you get what’s inside. If you remove what’s inside, you catch sight of her soul.

—KAJA SILVERMAN, HARUN FAROCKI: SPEAKING OF GODARD

Was he ready to claim that a self, a person in the psychological sense of the word, had no solid core and nothing whatsoever in terms of substance, but was a web of stories, constantly growing and subject to a constant process of relayering—a little like a structure of cotton candy at a carnival, except without material?

—PASCAL MERCIER, PERLMANN’S SILENCE

IN CONJUNCTION WITH THE PHENOMENA discussed in part 2, I described self-alienation as an inadequate power and a lack of presence in what one does, a failure to identify with one’s own actions and desires and to take part in one’s own life. Conversely, one is not alienated when one is present in one’s actions, steers one’s life instead of being driven by it, independently appropriates social roles, is able to identify with one’s desires, and is involved in the world—in short, when one can appropriate one’s life (as one’s own) and is accessible to oneself in what one does.

How, though, are we to characterize the self that becomes alienated from itself as described here? What conception of the self underlies the analysis of cases of alienation carried out in part 2? What form does the problem of the self and its unity take when addressed from the perspective of the threat of a loss of self as it has been understood here? I understand talk of the “self” and of a person’s “identity” in roughly the same sense they have in everyday language, as concepts that address what could be called the (psychic) continuity or the (psychic) unity of a person.1 What I mean here is the more or less stable “agency” that we presuppose when we understand ourselves as acting persons or what we have in mind when we say “this is who I am.”

The present chapter summarizes the implications of my analysis up to now with the aim of presenting an “appropriative” conception of the self and defending it against objections and rival positions. In contrast to essentialist views, this conception emphasizes the fluid and constructed character of self-relations in which we are not simply given to ourselves. Unlike the poststructuralist critique of the subject, however, it insists on the possibility of distinguishing between successful and unsuccessful ways of appropriating ourselves. Only in this way can one speak of self-alienation while avoiding the trap of essentialism.

The first section of this chapter, “The Self as a Process of Appropriation,” develops an appropriative conception of the self, borrowing both from Hegelian and (broadly) existentialist positions. This conception will take shape in the course of examining and responding to objections from two directions. The first of these raises objections to my critique of essentialism or to the ostensible implications of an antiessentialist approach; it charges that antiessentialism denies both the unity of the self and its intractability (Unverfügbarkeit, or its being outside our command). These objections will be discussed in the second section, “Intractability and Inwardness,” in conjunction with two positions that regard my model of identity as too weak: (1) accounts that more strongly emphasize the intractable elements of personal identity (those outside our command) and that endorse a more substantial model of the unity of persons than I do and (2) positions that insist on an idea of inwardness as the individual’s internal refuge from the world. Finally, in the third section, “Self-Invention and the Multiplicity of the Self,” I deal with objections from a second school of thought. Here I engage with the discussion inspired by poststructuralists and social constructivists, which accuses the appropriative model of the self that I develop here of residual essentialism and too strong a conception of the subject. In this section I discuss (1) the theme of self-invention, as it is contrasted in this discussion with self-discovery, and against these (in my view) false alternatives I argue for the idea of self-appropriation. Afterward (2) I examine the idea of the multiplicity and the hybrid character of identity, which contrasts with my conception’s emphasis on the appropriating subject’s achievement of unity. Finally, since these ideas have found an echo in contemporary cultural critique, I discuss (3) the soundness of such critiques by examining an empirical case, the construction of identities on the Internet.

1. THE SELF AS A PROCESS OF APPROPRIATION

In the introduction to part 2, I grouped under the name of the “core model” of the self those views that operate with the idea that one is “with oneself” (bei sich) or authentic when one is in agreement with an inner essence or with a kind of internal “original pattern” of oneself. According to these views, one realizes oneself by allowing this essence to be expressed and one can “find oneself” by turning back to that essence. Calling this a core model is apt because it presupposes (metaphorically speaking) an inner core that contains what one really is. This model has been criticized in two respects: first, for the reifying implications of its implicit essentialism and, second, because of the dichotomy between inner and outer inherent in the metaphor of a core and the accompanying idea that the true self is located somewhere “inside,” independent of its expressions and manifestations. How can the descriptions of cases of alienation in the previous chapters avoid these objections? To what extent have we succeeded in diagnosing alienation without a core model?²

DOING, NOT BEING—ALIENATION CRITIQUE WITHOUT AN ESSENTIAL SELF

With respect to the academic in our first example the diagnosis is obvious. The core model would claim that he has missed his essence—his authentic self, his inner character—in going from being a bohemian city dweller to being a suburban father. He is, according to this conception, alienated from himself in the life he leads to the extent that there is a discrepancy between what he does and what he—authentically—is. My own interpretation takes a different approach. The problem is not that he does something that he is not but that he is not present in what he does. I described this as “letting oneself drift” and analyzed it as a “masking of practical questions” that leads to us not really doing what we do, insofar as we do not ourselves decide (or perhaps do not even understand as the possible object of decisions) what we could have decided on and shaped. On this model, self-alienation is an alienated action—not an agent’s “falling away” from a self imagined as a substance underlying its actions, but a mode of this action. One is not alienated from something (one’s authentic self) but rather in one’s performance of actions and hence in what one does or how one does it.

My interpretation of the second example, too, explicitly contradicts the assumption that the self has an essential core. Since my analysis of this example emphasizes that alienation occurs not through but in roles, it also rejects the assumption of an authentic, unfalsified self that underlies its falsifying roles. If, in opposition to this view, we ask how one can appropriate one’s roles, the answer is that alienated or unalienated (inauthentic or authentic) behavior describes a mode of acting or doing. Authenticity resides in certain ways of behaving in roles—that is, in certain ways of shaping what one does in roles and in “obstinately” giving them a meaning of one’s own—rather than in an unspoiled pure or genuine self, understood as something that exists prior to and apart from roles. And if, as my interpretation insists, in cases of alienation through roles the “true” self cannot even come into being behind the “false” self, then the decisive standard is not what one is in distinction to one’s roles but rather what one is not able to do in them.

The third example (the feminist) suggests in various ways that the problem of one’s own desires being experienced as alien could be solved only by presupposing an essentialist self as an underlying standard. How, without referring to such a standard, is one able to decide in which of two conflicting complexes of desires and behaviors a person is really herself? Here, too, I have attempted to show that one can understand the conflict described without such a standard. If my diagnosis of an “inner division” can be contrasted with a condition of “agreement” with oneself, then this agreement is to be defined as an internal coherence between the characteristics, desires, feelings, and attitudes that constitute who one is and not as an agreement of one’s various features with a center or core. Insofar as this coherence must also be characterized by an inner mobility and an openness of access to oneself, a mode of doing, or praxis, comes into play. According to this reconstruction, the criterion for distinguishing between one’s own desires and those that are alienated or alienating lies in the functioning of this praxis.

Finally, in the fourth example (Perlmann’s indifference) the diagnosis of alienation relies on dissolving the dichotomy between “core” and “outer shell.” It is only because the self exists in identifying with its projects that indifference to one’s projects can be described as alienating. This idea presupposes not a finished self that then seeks the projects that are suitable for it but rather a self that constitutes itself in identifying with its projects and that acquires specific properties only in relating to them. Again, the self (or “true” self) is not something that exists separately, apart from its activities. In this respect the self is relational; it constitutes itself in its relations to the world, and its authenticity in turn melts into a “doing” that consists in identifying with something or in appropriating the world.

If one is not an agent in what one does, is not present in one’s life but is instead driven by it, does not identify with what one wants, and is not involved in what one does, this does not imply that one is somehow “really” someone else. And yet there is an identifiable discrepancy, an analyzable deficit or contradiction, in what one does.

OUTER, NOT INNER—THE EXTERNALIZATION OF THE SELF

These conclusions also agree with the implications of my discussion of what I called in the introduction (in reference to Jameson) the container model of the self.

The container model presupposes a self that demands to be expressed but that also is already “there” prior to this expression: “a self that cries for expression.” According to this model, self-alienation is always characterized by a discrepancy between inner and outer or between the self as it lives in the container and the self as it appears outside it, where it is constrained, distorted, and made into something alien. The self would like to express itself, but as soon as it enters the external world it is threatened by distortion and deformation. The concern of the container self is how it can move undamaged from inside to outside, but my objection to this model is directed at the very dichotomy it presupposes. Without externalization—as my account implies—there is nothing there to be damaged. The self, as what makes up who we are, cannot be separated from its expression and externalization in the world. There is not first a self about which one could ask how it should express and realize itself; rather, what we call a self is formed in expressing and externalizing itself, and through this it, in Hegel's words, “gives itself reality.”3

The academic’s alienated situation, then, is precisely not to be described as the tragedy of someone whose true self is not adequately expressed in the life he lives, such that he is unable to “recognize himself in it.” Perhaps he is not what he appears to be in his life, but he is also not something different inside that has simply not found its proper expression. In the case of the role player, too, the opposition between inner and outer is out of place. Whereas a model focused on inwardness would claim that a person’s (external) roles alienate her from what she is inside, my analysis implies that even when role behavior is a false (distorted, rigid, lifeless, artificial, constrained) expression of oneself, the “correct” expression of oneself can only be a publicly accessible articulation of who one is. The problem of unwanted and concealed desires can also be explained without relying on the model of inner and outer. These desires do indeed express themselves, and we recognize them as candidates for authentic desires precisely because we cannot dispute their power, since they manifest themselves by blocking, distorting, and hindering a person’s free accessibility to herself. Thus, if we ask what H. really wants, neither she nor we can decide that by looking into what is “inside” her, but only by asking what she actually (already) is doing in what she does and to what extent her actions show signs of being inhibited. As Jean-Luc Godard remarks: “How can one portray a person’s inner life? By directing one’s entire attention to her external life.”4

The discussion of Perlmann’s indifference also calls into question the division between inner and outer, between (inner) self and (outer) world, insofar as Perlmann’s feeling of the unreality of the world and himself can be traced back to the fact that he has lost the possibility of externalization, which alone would allow him to become real.

“BEING ONESELF” AS APPROPRIATION OF SELF AND WORLD

The conclusions of my analysis up to now can be summarized as follows: if processes of self-alienation can be analyzed as ways in which actions are disrupted or constrained rather than as a falling away from or a distortion of a substantial essence, then one is not alienated from something but in the performance of an action. In this account an unalienated “agreement with self” is conceived of as an active process of externalization. Thus the self’s “being” is dissolved into something practical (the performance of an action) that has no ontologically independent entity underlying it; in other words, the unity of the self has no metaphysical foundation. It is an ever renewing achievement of integration in which, in accordance with Kierkegaard’s demand, one carries out the “task of becoming oneself through one’s own deed” without the self being already given prior to and apart from this integrating activity. What is crucial for the conceptions of appropriation and externalization I have proposed is that, in contrast to more strongly essentialist, expressivist models, here it is not possible to make out any “doer behind the deed” (Nietzsche),⁵ no self that exists prior to and apart from the deed. On the other hand, insofar as a self emerges in its deeds, it does so within a process where what exists beforehand is appropriated and simultaneously transformed—a “web of stories . . . subject to a constant process of relayering” in which the self constitutes itself by relating to itself and the world in an appropriative manner. Being oneself is the result of such a process of appropriation and externalization—and it first exists as such.

My account also implies a conception of expression different from that of the container model: what is expressed does not exist independently of its expression—hence (here, too) not prior to or apart from the act of expression. Whereas in the one case the expression is merely a reflection of what is already inside, in the other it first produces what is expressed. This entails a reinterpretation of the kind of expressivism that a theory of alienation presupposes (and with it the problematic Promethean aesthetics of production that I referred to in part 1 in my discussion of Marx). In what follows I will provide a sketch of this revised expressivism by engaging with the views of Charles Taylor. Instead of starting with a given, as the classical model does, I will propose a performative-constructivist interpretation of “the human being, who simultaneously produces himself and his world.”

TAYLOR’S CONCEPT OF ARTICULATION

In his theory of articulation the Canadian social philosopher Charles Taylor productively explores the relation between what is previously given and what is constructed or made. Taking over themes from Romantic expressivist conceptions of human nature and from Hegel’s conception of spirit,⁶ Taylor understands becoming oneself—the process in which we constitute ourselves as what and who we are—as a continual process of articulation in which we clarify to ourselves what we desire and value and develop a corresponding self-understanding. The crucial feature of his account is that the act of articulating does not merely serve to make our desires and attitudes public; in an important sense, it first creates them: “To give a certain articulation is to shape our sense of what we desire or what we hold important in a certain way.”⁷ According to this model, we first become accessible not only to others but also to ourselves through articulation. Thus, it is not the case that we want, value, or care about something and then give expression to these valuations in a process of articulation; rather, the process of articulation itself has a creative dimension. If we need articulation in order to determine ourselves or to give our self-conception a certain shape, then articulations do not express something independently given; rather, they represent, as Taylor explains, “attempts to formulate what is initially inchoate, or confused, or badly formulated. But this kind of formulation or reformulation does not leave its object unchanged.”8 In this sense articulation does not simply find what it articulates; it does not simply uncover something that was given prior to and independently of being articulated. Rather, it simultaneously creates what it articulates. Thus the concept of articulation can be understood antiessentialistically. As Hartmut Rosa explains: “What is to be made ‘clear’ through expression or articulation not only cannot be known objectively from any perspective; it does not even exist independently of the expression or articulation. Every expression and articulation simultaneously changes what is articulated or expressed. The medium of expression and what is expressed merge in this way since expression is no longer to be understood as a previously existing something’s becoming manifest but (at least partially) as its production.”⁹ And in Taylor we read: “Expression partakes of both finding and making.”¹⁰ The interesting point, then, is that in a certain respect articulation must accomplish two things: it makes or creates what is articulated, but it must simultaneously correspond to what it finds before itself as unarticulated (the material, as it were, that it deals with). And one could regard it as the very point of Taylor’s approach to try to hold in balance the constructive and the interpretive-disclosive elements of successfully becoming oneself.¹¹

ARTICULATION AND SELF-APPROPRIATION

Taylor’s account is useful in several respects for my reflections on the relation between self-appropriation and self-alienation.

First, Taylor’s approach provides suggestions that are helpful for solving the problem discussed regarding the criteria for successful relations to self. Although articulations are constructed, they are not arbitrary. Taylor holds on to the possibility of judging articulations to be successful and unsuccessful or correct and false: “There are more or less adequate, more or less truthful, more self-clairvoyant or self-deluding interpretations. Because of this double fact, because an articulation can be wrong, and yet it shapes what it is wrong about, we sometimes see erroneous articulations as involving a distortion of the reality concerned. We do not speak of error but frequently also of illusion or delusion.”¹² This criterion, however—and this is crucial—focuses our attention on distortions of the expression and not distortions by the expression. And the talk of illusion or blindness indicates that what is at issue here are defective processes of articulation—an erroneous How of articulations—that (in the terminology I have proposed) can be traced back to disturbances of various aspects of the accessibility of self and of world.

Hence our self-interpretations, which operate within such articulations, are—as I discussed in detail in chapter 7—constitutive of what we are and of the experiences we can have with ourselves and the world: one has such experiences (only) within such interpretations. At the same time, however, these interpretations (as appropriations of ourselves) are not arbitrary; they cannot arbitrarily construct what we are. There is also here a kind of relation of fit. The attempt to make oneself into who one is and the attempt to understand oneself as who one is are two sides of a practical reflective equilibrium. It is possible, then, to arrive at what Holmer Steinfath demands as the implication of a consistently applied antiessentialist conception of expression: “a concept of identity that can do without the idea that subjects necessarily have at their disposal a solid core or ‘frame’ defined by their highest values and without needing to stylize identity formation into an act of self-mastering choice.”¹³

Conceived along these lines, the interpretive appropriation of ourselves constitutes what it appropriates, just as it, at the same time, depends on something previously existing that it can be more or less true to. Formulated differently, if self-appropriation is a complex process with many preconditions (comparable in this respect to the psychoanalytic process of “working through”), this is precisely because appropriation (and having oneself at one’s command) is not simply a relation of gaining power over something, but relies on relations of fit as well as on processes of transformation and of responding to the specific characteristics of the situation. We behave in an appropriative manner to what we find before us; we behave in an appropriative manner—in many respects—to our own given conditions. Thus appropriation refers not to a limitless power to determine ourselves and the world but to ways of dealing with situations that we must relate to and to which, in doing so, we can respond in more or less adequate ways.

Second, the model of articulation sketched here sheds light on a further problem. As I have understood them, both processes—appropriation and articulation—are subject to the suspicion that they still rely on an “essentialist remainder.” If it is difficult to conceive of the process of appropriation without a “given material”—ultimately there must already be something there to be appropriated—then a process of articulation always deals with something that it seeks to express. If, as we have seen in connection with Taylor, articulation is neither a creatio ex nihilo nor merely a reflection of something that already exists, then—if one radicalizes Taylor in an antiessentialist direction—what previously exists enters as material into a process that can be described as a “process without substance”: nothing underlies this process in the (substantial) sense that it must constitute the process or remain identical to itself throughout it. At the same time, this is a process in which we are always already involved. It is therefore meaningless to look for a beginning of the process or to ask about the conditions prior to such a beginning. In the moment in which we articulate ourselves, the process of transformation has already begun. Insofar as it is at all accessible to us, the “previously existing something” is always already articulated, and insofar as it is to be articulated or determined as something identifiable, it is no longer separable from its articulation.

This can be carried over to the process of (self-)appropriation: self-appropriation is always at once a finding and an inventing, a constructing and a reconstructing—a process in which what is appropriated first acquires a shape through its appropriation (see the section titled “Appropriation” in chapter 4). Hence, understood in terms of the capacity of self-appropriation, the self is simultaneously given and made, and, similarly, the process of self-appropriation knows no “outside.” In the moment in which we relate to ourselves we are always already appropriating what we are. In neither case does the fact that something always already enters into the processes described here lead us back to essentialism.

RECAPITULATION

The conception of the self that underlies my analysis of alienation can now be summarized in terms of the following ideas:

BEING AS DOING In my analysis the being of the self or person is dissolved into a doing, into the performance of an action. This means—in line with existentialist themes¹⁴—that the self is conceived of as a relation to self or as a “relating to one’s own existence” that is always already a worldly existence and must be understood within the context of a totality of practical situations. The self is defined, then, as the “sum of one’s actions” (Sartre).¹⁵

IDENTIFICATION We are what we do and what we identify with. The self, as I argued above with help from William James, is always a self “in the broadest sense.” As John Christman notes in summarizing the recent analytic discussion of autonomy and personal identity, the true self is no longer an ontologically independent entity: “The true self is the set of characteristics with which the person genuinely identifies.”16

RELATIONALITY The self is a relation. It does not arise self-sufficiently out of itself but is fundamentally relational.¹⁷ As something that “establishes relations among relations,” it constitutes itself in and through the relations it has to others and to “the other” more generally and it has no being outside these relations. Even when it individuates itself, it does so from within these relations.

FLUIDITY Identities as I have described them are fluid and always “selves in the making.”¹⁸ This fluidity derives from the fact that the self is not given but must first constitute and realize itself—from the fact, then, that it first forms itself in relating to and externalizing itself in the world, in the course of which it repeatedly transforms and retransforms itself. If we ask about the unity of the self, it cannot be located in “remaining self-identical” but must be sought in the particular ways in which it integrates itself. (I discuss the integration necessary for selfhood later in this chapter.)

RELATION TO THE WORLD The subject appropriates not only itself but also, and at the same time, the world. The self, as it has been understood here, is an acting and worldly self, one that always finds itself already acting in the world and cannot be separated from it. It can understand itself only from within the world and in its involvements with it.¹⁹

ARTICULATION AND EXTERNALIZATION Immersed in the world, the self does not exist in a closed-off inner space where it could be found in isolation from the external world. One can understand this conception (in analogy to Marx’s externalization model of labor) as an “externalization model of the self.” As Hegel says, “an individual cannot know what he is until he has made himself a reality through action.”²⁰ Our self-relation, then, always depends on and is inseparable from our externalization or articulation of ourselves. This means that we cannot be separated from how we express ourselves in the world (in what we do and say) and from how we give ourselves specific qualities by acting in the world.

EXCURSUS: “SELVES IN THE MAKING” (CASSAVETES)

“Just be yourself,” says Peter Falk to his wife in A Woman Under the Influence. “Which self?” she answers; “I can be anything.” In this film Gena Rowlands plays a woman who, asserting herself against her environment, is engaged in a search for herself. But she knows that this self is not there as something finished or discoverable and that this self does not exist independently of or in abstraction from the expectations of the external world. In a famous scene with her husband and his fellow firefighters, who after a night spent struggling with a broken water main arrive in the morning at her kitchen table, she provocatively plays out, in ever faster succession, a large variety of roles and possible identities, from the caring housewife dishing out spaghetti, to the reserved introvert, to the teasing vamp. This functions not only as a parody of the thesis that the self is constituted by taking over roles. In asking “which self?” she appears to be trying to make her husband share the responsibility: he cannot make it that easy for himself. Simply “being oneself” is not possible, just as little as simply letting someone “be herself” is—within a network of relationships—possible.

The characters in John Cassavetes’ films are radically relational, perfect examples of selves without a core and of constantly changing “selves in the making.” What one could call their identity emerges only in the situations they are confronted with. These situations, too, are fluid; they always emerge—this is what is distinctive about these films—out of constellations that sometimes arise very suddenly. One of the typical features of Cassavetes’ films, a sudden upending of a situation just as a new character enters the scene, is due to this. It is then more than the composition of the scene that changes, and sometimes it is completely irrelevant how the newly arrived character acts. With a new external composition of the scene, the internal composition of its participants also appears to change, virtually without mediating circumstances. The individuals moving within such constellations are not self-contained but, in an almost frightening way, radically relational. In the way in which they confront situations and people—in the way in which they expose themselves and are exposed—they have “fuzzy borders” that must always be contested.

2. INTRACTABILITY AND INWARDNESS

In what follows I will attempt to make my position more precise by engaging with some objections that can be raised against the conception of the self I have outlined, as well as against my reconstruction of the idea of self-alienation that is based on it. The first objection accuses this conception of being blind to the intractable dimensions of the self (those outside our command) that appear to go hand in hand with dissolving the self’s being into a doing and with its fluidity and malleability. The second objection concerns the critique of inwardness. Here I will argue against intuitions that tie inwardness to the idea of a refuge that is taken to be crucial for the development of independence, or “obstinacy,” over and against social demands.

(1) THE INTRACTABILITY OF THE SELF

The intuition underlying the first objection can be articulated as follows: we cannot do everything we want; there are conditions of our existence that are intractable and outside our command not only because there are external obstacles and constraints but also because something about us or in us prevents us from doing certain things or choosing certain ways of leading our life, and from having or realizing certain desires. Formulated differently, we have the feeling about some actions, desires, etc., that they simply do not “fit” us, even when we clearly want to do or have them. In such cases it seems right to say that someone is trying “to be something she is not”: the compulsive character who cannot give up the idea of a wild bohemian existence, the Kreuzberg anarchist who carries around “deep inside” him the bourgeois ideal of an orderly life, or even the feminist who has a difficult time putting her conceptions of her roles into practice. Such persons are clearly incapable of wanting as they wish they could want. And when someone with such a life history finally makes it into “a house of her own,” it is frequently remarked (more or less sardonically): now she has arrived, just where she belongs; now she is finally herself. These comments seem not only to indicate that there are limits to the malleability of who a person is; they also operate in one way or another with the assumption of a “being” that underlies a person’s possible actions and that prescribes and limits her modes of existence.

The objection implicit in such reactions can be formulated as follows: the conception of the self sketched earlier in this chapter does not do justice to the ways our lives are subject to conditions not of our own making. Fixatedon the idea of the power to have oneself and one’s life at one’s command, it is unable to capture the dimension of intractability that also constitutes our existence—the ineluctable commitments and the results of formative influences that we sometimes call character. According to this objection, the self is more substantial than it appears to be in my reconstruction, and the correct account of self-alienation is (more simply) that individuals are alienated from themselves when they are compelled to act contrary to these deep formative influences (or to their character or personality).

“VOLITIONAL NATURE” AND “GROUND PROJECTS” In discussing this objection I want to return to a position we examined in chapter 7, Frankfurt’s theory of volitional nature, as well as introduce a further position, namely, Joseph Raz’s claim that being loyal to certain “ground projects” is constitutive of a person’s identity.²¹ I examine these positions because I consider them to be the theoretically most sophisticated accounts of the intractability of the self (its being outside our command) and because one could claim that, if not genuinely essentialist positions, they are plausible reconstructions of what is persuasive about (or even indispensable in) such positions.

I have already presented Frankfurt’s conception of a volitional nature in connection with the feminist who is at odds with herself (chapter 7). According to this view, there are things one feels ineluctably committed to (“one can’t help caring about them”) and also things one cannot bring oneself to want. (Frankfurt’s example was the mother who cannot bring herself to give up her child.) This leads to defining a person’s identity ex negativo: what constitutes someone is what is intractable in her, that which she cannot have at her command. The contours of the self, then, are determined externally or negatively by the limits of its own will or the limits of its power to bring something within its command, or to “dispose” of it. As we have seen, Frankfurt goes so far as to call the contours of the self defined in this way the “volitional nature” or “personal essence” of a human being. His argument’s crucial assumption is that since it is these aspects, traits, and conditions that constitute us as a person, they cannot be at our disposal. The price of putting them at our disposal would be self-betrayal, the loss of one’s own identity. They represent the conditions of possibility for having an identity. Joseph Raz’s idea of ground projects follows a similar model: ground projects are the “core” projects and attachments that we cannot give up except at the cost of losing ourselves. They—our pursuing and promoting them—provide the basic orientation that guides us in leading our lives. Ground projects are, in other words, constitutive parts of what we are and of what constitutes us. Here, too, at issue are the essential foundations of our identity: ground projects are grounding—projects that ground our identity or on which our identity is founded.

Whereas my account of the self as “what one wants and does” does not seem to place limits in principle on the self’s power to have itself at its command (or to “dispose” of itself), the conception of the self just examined emphasizes the self’s limitations: it implies that we are conditioned and determined by factors that are in many respects ineluctable and not at our disposal. What constitutes us as determinate and particular persons, according to this view, is precisely what is outside our influence, necessary, and inaccessible to thought—the intractable commitments that we have without having chosen them and that we cannot have at our disposal or command. Both versions of this position imply that we are not simply what we do and want but are rather what—to a certain extent—we must do and want; we are that which makes us do and want. The self is then not fluid but solid, not, as the metaphor of cotton candy suggests, a transformative process without a core but a structure with an ineluctable foundation. David Velleman summarizes this position as follows: “Frankfurt conceives of the self as that to which a person must be true in order to be true to himself.”22 And this self, one might add, is given and not made (by us). Even if this position is not essentialist in the classical sense, its implication for the question of self-alienation is that we are alienated from ourselves when we act or are compelled to act contrary to this personal essence or when we act in a way that is disloyal to our ground projects.

Before turning to the question of whether it is plausible to assume such foundations of the self, I will first take a closer look at the nature of these foundations and determine more precisely the specific form of essentialism they entail. Two things must be taken into account here. First, the personal essence that Frankfurt means to capture is understood as the “essence of a person” rather than a definition of the “essence of human beings.” This means that Frankfurt is interested here not in humans as creaturely beings and in the ways nature imposes conditions on them (even if this is not to be denied) but rather in persons who are characterized by the structure of their will—by the fact that in willing they relate to themselves. Volitional nature, then, is not “nature”—the argument does not appeal to our being constrained by the natural conditions of human life; it refers, instead, to a fact about the will. At stake is not the essence of human beings but the essence (or nature) of our will and the self-relation that is bound up with it. In a similar sense Raz, in focusing on what “grounds” us, is not seeking natural or biological foundations. He, too, is concerned with projects that constitute us and things we have committed ourselves to. If this is an essentialist position, it does not have the reifying character of the essentialist positions we criticized earlier. The essence at issue here refers to a dimension of intractability within the domain of what is at one’s command. It consists in forms of intractable commitments about which we do not deny (as we do in processes of reification) that we ourselves have created them.

Second, talk of a volitional nature is characterized by an inner tension: it refers to something that is, on the one hand, volitional, on the other hand, nature. And while we normally think of a will as something we have at our disposal or command, this is not true of nature. Our volitional nature refers to something that we want but that we supposedly also cannot help but want. Raz’s ground projects, too, refer to projects we have set for ourselves but that are nevertheless understood such that, once our commitments to them are there, they constitute who we are and therefore ground us.

“BEING TRUE TO ONESELF” In what sense is it plausible to assume that our identity has essential foundations of this type, to assume that certain commitments define us so that we would no longer be ourselves if we renounced them? Are there things, projects, and commitments to which we must remain true if we are not to lose ourselves? And is the self, then, less fluid than substantially fixed?

My answer, to go straight to the point, is: no. According to my interpretation, the question whether someone is “herself” is not about whether she remains true to certain projects and commitments but whether in passing through various fundamental commitments she is able to tell a coherent “appropriative story” of herself that can integrate the ruptures and ambivalences in her life history (including radical revaluations of her own values).23 I remain true to myself not when I remain loyal to projects I once entered into but when I can integrate both my holding onto projects and my giving them up into a meaningful narrative about myself. This, as I will argue, calls into question two implications of Frankfurt’s and Raz’s positions: the specific form of continuity and the idea of the self’s unity that both presuppose. To be sure, one must first get clear about what is intuitively plausible in these conceptions²⁴—there seem to be essentialist elements in our everyday notions about the self that are not easily avoided—in order to be able to integrate the views bound up with them into my interpretation. There are two intuitions and a structural consideration that speak in favor of the ineluctability thesis:

(a) On the one hand, the intuition that sometimes one “simply cannot do otherwise” is compelling, and we might be tempted to characterize someone’s personality in terms of these intractable dimensions that are outside our command. It seems right that there are commitments and projects of such fundamental importance to us that if we were to lose them we would feel we had lost our orientation in life. For the revolutionary whose revolution fails,25 or the lover who loses her beloved, it is possible that the world and her own life become meaningless in the sense described by Frankfurt. The situation must appear all the more drastic when, instead of the revolution failing, one betrays it or when, instead of losing one’s beloved, one breaks off the relationship oneself. Does one still know who one is when one does something of this sort? Does not a “betrayal” of this kind undermine the foundations of one’s existence? In any case, such situations can indeed lead to existential crises if the commitments at issue are truly fundamental. Precisely when it is plausible to think of identifications and commitments as crucially important—“we are what we pursue and care for”²⁶—it is natural to suspect a danger of losing oneself.

(b) A further quite basic thought also seems to be correct: in order for something or someone to have a particular identity (a particular character or form) it must have limits. Someone who could be anything (could want and do anything) is not merely eerily odd; she is in an important sense not really anyone. (Frankfurt calls such a person amorphous.) Under certain circumstances she impresses us as frighteningly empty. For this reason it is not completely incomprehensible when the helpless husband in Cassavetes’ film A Woman Under the Influence reacts with alarm when his wife answers the encouraging advice “Just be yourself” with the comment “Which self? I can be anything.” In this excessive freedom to be anything her husband senses the beginning of the dissolution of her personality.

(c) What is further correct about the ineluctability thesis—this is the structural argument—is that it is not evident how someone who was not already, and did not already want, something specific could determine herself as something or how someone who did not already have specific dispositions could be able to act. Frankfurt discusses this in his essay “On the Usefulness of FinalEnds”: Someone who has nothing—does not already have something—that is important to her has no starting point from which she could pose the question of how she should lead her life or what she should consider important. There is no neutral standpoint outside my desires and my already existing commitments. We do not disinterestedly decide “from the outside” and hence free of previously existing commitments what can become important to us. The crucial question is whether this is synonymous with the ineluctability of certain projects to which one previously committed oneself, whether for this reason these projects cannot be put up for renegotiation. This leads us to a version of the old question: how can one change and at the same time remain true to oneself?

I will argue that the conclusion that Frankfurt and Raz draw from the discussions sketched here is false. The model that invokes the idea of our deepest, ineluctable commitments depends, according to my claim, on substantializing commitments and projects in a way that depends on an inadequate understanding of the unity of the will. The supposed plausibility of this model arises from a confusion of two elements: the impossibility of taking up a standpoint outside already existing commitments is not to be equated with the ineluctability of a certain stock of constitutive commitments. When in my account I replace the substantial notion of a totality and continuity of the self with a processual version of the self as self-appropriation, I am attempting to do justice to the fact that we are enmeshed in deep identifications and to the requirements of a self-bestowed unity of the subject without, however, interpreting changes in personal orientation and ambivalences within such commitments as elements of self-alienation or loss of self.

LOSS OF SELF—DISCONTINUITY AND DISSOCIATION It must first be explained how Frankfurt imagines the process of losing oneself that he speaks of. What does it mean to be destroyed as a person, as Frankfurt puts it,27 through the loss of commitments or projects? And is it plausible to say that the loss of certain commitments must destroy us as persons? We must first consider what in such experiences is supposed to lead to the loss of self and how the structure of this loss of self is to be characterized.

(1) Loss. An essential feature of the model of the loss of self under discussion here becomes clear when one compares the complicated structure of self-betrayal with the simpler case of the loss of something one considers important. As I have indicated, the loss of essential life projects or of something one loves can lead to serious crises of orientation. We do not, however, assume that such a loss necessarily destroys a person’s continuity because—formulated very briefly—in normal cases one at the same time “holds on internally” to what one has lost or, more accurately, holds on to and lets go of it at the same time. One mourns. As we know from psychoanalysis, successful mourning is marked by a balance between letting go of and holding on to the loved object. In coping with a loss, a person’s attachment to the object is transformed without being given up completely. For this reason both rigidly holding onto the object—being unable to acknowledge the loss—and giving it up immediately are problematic. Insofar as a painful loss can be overcome, the (psychological) continuity of the person throughout change is preserved by her integrating the experience of loss in a specific way.28 In this respect she is in fact (in Frankfurt’s sense) “no longer the same person” as the one who had a certain love or pursued a certain project. She is, however, someone whose identity and self-conception are marked by the experience of loss such that it could be said that what she has lost remains a part of herself in this negative form and is preserved in her identity. The question whether one is still oneself after a loss depends, then, on the conditions under which it is worked through, on how one relates to what has been lost (in a way that produces continuity), and not necessarily on the “objective” severity of the loss.

(2) Self-Betrayal. Much more complicated is the case in which the loss of a commitment or object comes about through our own break with it. When we ourselves betray what we love (and hence break with what constitutes us in Frankfurt’s sense), precisely the element of “internally holding on to something” that can secure continuity in the case of a loss seems no longer possible. The object is then not simply gone—the loved one disappeared, the revolution no longer possible; rather, one has abandoned it oneself. What has to be worked through then is not only the loss of an object but—on a second level—the loss of one’s own attachment to the object. Formulated schematically: in the one case the object is gone but the attachment continues to exist, and the task of the person who suffers the loss is to transform this attachment. In the other case (of alleged self-betrayal) the object is still present (the revolution is still possible, the loved one is still there), but the attachment to the object has been lost. Whereas, in one respect, one might consider this to be the easier case—in the end the attachment was dissolved voluntarily and as the result of one’s own decision—on the other hand what takes place here is a serious transformation. Assuming the attachment in question belonged to the commitments, desires, and projects that constitute us in our “innermost selves,” the dissolution of this attachment must, in fact, appear as a betrayal of oneself with the feared consequence: a loss of self.

On the other hand, is it not I who breaks with myself? And, if it is, why should I have betrayed myself in doing so? How is it even possible to betray oneself or to be untrue to oneself in Frankfurt’s sense? My conjecture is that the plausibility of Frankfurt’s talk of self-betrayal depends on two elements being run together such that the betrayer appears, at the same time and in the same respect, both to love and betray the revolution or loved one. Strictly speaking, though, this is not the case.

There are two possible ways of disentangling what appears here to be situationally (and motivationally) indissolubly bound together: either what has gone on is a (temporally occurring) process of transformation; then one would need to describe the structure of self-betrayal such that a later self has betrayed an earlier one (the counterrevolutionary that I now am betrays the revolutionary I once was).29 In this case the crucial question is how to conceive of the relation between the earlier and later selves. The second possibility is that we have here a structural ambivalence or a mixed emotional state. I love something (the revolution or my loved one) and at the same time I do not love it. In that case I would have split myself into two parts in a certain respect, where one part betrays the other. Here, too, the crucial question is how we are to imagine the splitting of oneself into two parts and the relation between them.

In both cases the talk of self-betrayal implies a split into two selves: either a discontinuity between earlier and later selves or an ongoing dissociation of the self. The destruction of the person or the loss of self that supposedly accompanies the abandonment of constitutive attachments must be conceived of as follows: the person Frankfurt speaks of is destroyed because she is no longer one but is split into earlier and later (or two parallel) selves. Frankfurt can describe such a split completely without paradox (and without serious metaphysical problems) as a split in a person’s “volitional unity.” What I want and advocate as a revolutionary is incompatible with what I want and advocate as a counterrevolutionary; since my unity as a person, however, can be characterized only in terms of a unity of will, this volitional split splits me as a person. The dissolution of volitional unity means, then, according to Frankfurt, the dissolution of the person. Hence, if we want to criticize Frankfurt’s account, we must call this idea of unity into question. As I noted earlier, I consider his tying the possibility of a person’s unity exclusively to those situations in which we pursue and hold fast to a project with our “whole heart” to entail an overly substantialist picture of the self. And the idea that in cases of ambivalence or transformation a person splits into two parts (or two identities) goes hand in hand with a reessentialization of personal identity. Against this backdrop, the unity of a person can be understood only on the model of an undivided substance, and its continuity only in terms of something’s remaining identical to itself.

One sees this—with respect to the case where the will is split in two contrary directions—in Frankfurt’s discussion of a famous case of self-betrayal: Agamemnon, forced by a tragic conflict to betray either daughter or fatherland, is, after he has committed his betrayal, destroyed as a person. “Agamemnon at Aulis is destroyed by an inescapable conflict between two equally defining elements of his own nature: his love for his daughter and the love for the army he commands. . . . When he is forced to sacrifice one of these, he is thereby forced to betray himself. Rarely, if ever, do tragedies of this sort have sequels. Since the volitional unity of the tragic hero has been irreparably ruptured, there is a sense in which the person he had been no longer exists. Hence there can be no continuation of his story.”30

This is counterintuitive as an interpretation of the epos, and it displays little insight into the nature of a tragic conflict. In fact, Agamemnon’s story does continue, and precisely as the story of someone who has to cope with his betrayal and who remains scarred by it. The tragic hero is a personality characterized by having to endure an insuperable conflict. This means, though, that, just as with a simple loss, there can be a continuation of the story as his story insofar as he appropriates it, exactly as one does in the simpler case of loss and mourning. Agamemnon must integrate his abandonment of his loyalty to his daughter; he must accept it as a part of his will (which is then simultaneously willing and not willing). Here too, then, the element of holding onto the object is present without this implying a resolution of the conflict. (The conflict is tragic precisely because one holds onto both sides, because one does not give up one’s loyalty to the one side while acting in favor of the other.)

BEING ONESELF AS SELF-APPROPRIATION The counter position to this substantializing or unifying conception of identity can be formulated as follows: identity is what perseveres in the balancing out of inner ambivalences or of (externally caused) conflicts and in securing continuity in the face of changing commitments. The integration of the self required here does not imply the resolution of all ambivalences and conflicts, and it is conceived of as a temporally extended process. The unity of the person that is achievable in this manner is not, then, given as a starting point but is a result of a process of integration or appropriation; at the same time, it is to be conceived of as a unity of qualitatively different elements, hence as a unity that is capable of encompassing internal tensions. (Incidentally, it does not follow from this that there is a self beyond or independent of these projects and commitments, something that remains identical to itself independently of them. So understood, the self, as something that “establishes relations among relations,” is the agency responsible for “working through” the constellation of these commitments.)

In contrast to Frankfurt’s conception of unity, this means I can be myself without being wholehearted in a substantial sense. This implies that I am also myself when I am fundamentally ambivalent with regard to important and constitutive attachments. (Otherwise, hardly anyone would have an identity if we assume that many if not most fundamental attachments—classically, those to one’s parents—are marked by ambivalence.) What constitutes me (my identity) would consist, then, in the specific ways I engage with ambivalences or “balance” them.31 One is threatened with the shattering of identity that Frankfurt sees in every loss of wholeheartedness only when this balancing is unsuccessful.

In contrast to the conception of continuity as “holding on to something” or remaining self-identical, it follows that someone can remain herself even if she has made fundamental about-turns with respect to basic aspects of her life, terminating important commitments or abandoning important projects. The self’s continuity in such transformations depends not on steadily holding onto certain projects but rather on being able to integrate the succession of changes among projects or commitments. Neither the committed revolutionary nor the devoted lover necessarily betrays herself if she one day separates herself from her projects. The question is rather how one gives them up or how the process of transformation takes place. Crucial here is whether one can make sense of the process—the changes that have led from one condition to another—and integrate it into one’s own life history or self-conception (as I characterized it in chapter 7, as a structure that is both constructed and reconstructed). If someone is unable to do this and experiences unbridgeable discontinuities, among which no connections can be made, that can be described as a form of self-alienation, as alienation from one’s own past. By emphasizing the element of integration in this way, it is possible to take up a different position concerning the unitary nature of the self. Whereas Frankfurt’s idea of (unalienated) identity is clearly oriented around a picture of a unitary and stable person rather than one who is characterized by ambivalences and radical breaks, my position focuses on the process of (self-)appropriation. What is important is not a substantial “totality” or constancy of identifications but the capacity to integrate and appropriate, that is, the accessibility of the conflicting parts and the mobility among them. Being able to make sense of, or to integrate, one’s changes is in turn a complex process that, on the one hand, involves being able to give good reasons (to myself and others) for the changes in my position and, on the other hand, depends on the extent to which I can make sense of them emotionally and fit them into the overall economy of my desires and projects as it has developed in the course of my life history.

In his essay “The Experience of Time and Personality” Peter Bieri elaborates, in an especially clear manner, the active and constructive character of the creation of such a unity of the person (in the sense of creating the unity of a life history). In his account, too, identity is constituted as a history of appropriation. When he speaks of the creation of a “hermeneutic unity” of the person that is carried out in the form of a history of appropriation, he means, in the first place, that I am the one who is able to create the unity among the heterogeneous elements. In addition, he means that I must first create this unity in an active process, that it is not otherwise simply given. Personal identity as the result of a history of appropriation—the appropriation of myself in my life history—is in this sense an ideal that must be approximated actively.

It is not sufficient, according to this ideal, that I simply establish vis-à-vis my past that certain things have happened to me. As a person I must attempt to take possession of them and to understand them as parts of myself such that they no longer appear alien to me. Described differently, this ideal says that I should attempt to bring a unity into my past life. In fact this past life already had a unity that came about without my assistance: the events of my history are causally dependent on one another and thereby form a causal unity. The unity at issue in the concept of appropriation is, in contrast, a unity that I myself must create. It arises from my need to understand my past. To the extent that I am successful in understanding my past, I bring unity into it. I would like to call this unity hermeneutic unity.32

The following points can be drawn out of Bieri’s account for my critique of Frankfurt’s position:

■ First, from the conception of (self-)appropriation as an active achievement of the person who appropriates her life history there emerges an alternative to the more passive model of identification found in Frankfurt. The individual does not find her identifications as volitional necessities but creates them, relates to them, and only then makes them her own. What this illuminates is the part individuals play in forming identifications—the fact that the commitments within which they move do not simply “happen” to them.

■ Second, identity is conceived of as a process: there is no identity without the continually renewed appropriation of what one does and, along with this, the potential transformation of what one is. As Bieri says: “If we are successful in constructing a new hermeneutic unity of our past that is more integrative than the previous one, then our identity changes. This is a constant process, and this kind of change of identity is essential for persons, since this process reflects an effort to come closer and closer to the ideal of personhood: an appropriation of the past that is as complete as possible.”33 (As with the cotton candy that Perlmann speaks of, without this constant renewal a person’s identity would collapse in on itself.) For the question of self-transformation and alienation it follows that holding on to ground projects and ideals (as Frankfurt also calls our ineluctable commitments) is not to be unalienated per se. On the contrary, when our ground projects and ideals are not part of a permanent process of appropriation, when volitional necessities or impossibilities remain in fact ineluctable, unquestionable, and not at our disposal, then identities are solidified and persons are rigidified in their loyalties; such persons are inflexible and therefore possibly alienated from themselves because the process of appropriation has come to a halt. In this sense Frankfurt is correct in objecting to the idea of the self’s unlimited tractability (its being wholly within our command): “We are not fictitious characters, who have sovereign authors; nor are we gods, who can be authors of more than fiction. Therefore, we cannot be authors of ourselves.”³⁴ On the other hand, the idea of a history of appropriation also implies the opposite position: in a certain respect we must be the authors of ourselves and we always already are our own authors precisely because in order to be someone we must appropriate our history. We must write, and continue to write, our history precisely because what we are is not already written down somewhere. Self-alienation, then, is a disturbance of this relation of appropriation and not the discontinuity of projects or ambivalence with respect to commitments.

■ Third, it follows from Bieri’s account that an antiessentialist conception of personal identity and the denial of an intractable, uncommandable substance do not necessarily lead to the will’s being confused or directionless. The position adopted here (doubting the existence of an essential element of our existence) is not equivalent to the assumption that individuals must have a presuppositionless starting point or be capable of unlimited self-mastery. As Bieri notes: “it is important to see that the succession of changing histories of appropriation is the only thing that can answer the question ‘Who am I?’. There is no stable core of the person, no standpoint outside these histories from which I could ask: ‘But who am I really—independently of these histories?’”35 Applying this to our question about ground projects or volitional necessities, it follows that, on the one hand, there can be no personal essence, no something that constitutes us beyond our construction and interpretation of ourselves.³⁶ On the other hand, this by no means commits us to the claim that there must be a presuppositionless starting point or a disengaged self that is able to act freely outside already existing commitments or involvements.

With this I return to the confusion I referred to earlier. The fact that we always already have specific commitments and are always already involved with something does not imply that the self is intractable or outside our command, nor can it be inferred from this fact that we are substantially bound up with certain commitments or projects that constitute us (with volitional necessity). Of course, it is crucial to see that one can never stand completely outside such commitments without losing one’s identity because that would mean standing outside one’s own life. However, this only means, to again take up the image from chapter 7, that every transformation and reappropriation (even a radical one) is like Neurath’s “rebuilding on the high sea” and that one cannot pull the ship onto land in order to replace all the planks at once.

The self is not given. It is always a self in the making, even if it cannot be designed from scratch but must instead—in an ongoing process of transformation—always be made out of something that already is something. To return to Neurath’s ship: the idea that some planks are in principle irreplaceable is misleading. Or, to use Perlmann’s image again, what is crucial for a person’s continuity and unity is only that the web of cotton candy does not tear apart and that one can integrate the various changes or tensions into the narrative unity of a history of appropriation in which we always already find ourselves. This does not mean that something (like a single thread that connects everything together) must be preserved, but that one should be able to connect one thing with another in a meaningful way. A person’s identity is threatened only when parts of the self can no longer be threaded together and not merely because it is spun with changing material. And, to return to the first of the intuitions mentioned earlier: it is possible that the threat of the thread breaking is especially acute when some commitments or projects are lost. This, however, is due—this is the key to preserving the intuition—to the kind of loss and how it is worked through (or the possibilities of working it through), not to the fact that there is a core of commitments and projects that constitutes us substantially and is outside our command.

(2) “A SELF THAT CAN RESIST AND OPPOSE”: THE INNER CITADEL AS A PLACE OF RETREAT

The modern self . . . was born in a prison. It assumed its nature and fate the moment it perceived, named and denounced its oppressor.

—LIONEL TRILLING, THE OPPOSING SELF

The second objection I want to discuss is directed against the critique of the “inwardness conception” of the self that I developed previously in conjunction with my discussion of alienation. I claimed that there is no true self apart from its external manifestations, and the conception of the self that stood in the background of my discussion was one of not only a radically fluid but also a radically relational self, one that first develops in relations and therefore in its public articulations. Several objections can be raised to this position.

■ Is it not clear that sometimes we can “come to ourselves” only by abstracting from the external world, that we sometimes need inwardness as a place of retreat in order to become aware of who we really are among all the things we are involved in and related to?37 And is not the experience that our public, external manifestations can distort our innermost self a common and vivid one? Is the possibility of one’s existence being distorted, deformed, and made alien by the public “other” not a real problem? Is not, then, the search Rousseau was driven by in his Confessions an understandable longing—the search for a pure, unfalsified self that, detached from its entanglement in the external world, lives “within itself”?

■ Moreover, does not the thesis of “coming to oneself” and defining oneself in relation to others (which is common to all conceptions of the self as socially constructed) lead to an oversocialized model that is no longer able to accommodate the real tensions between individual and society? Is there really, as the socialization model appears to suggest, no presocial remainder, something that the individual cannot make publicly accessible and that does not result from her position in a public world? Formulated differently, are there no limits to be placed on the “individualization as socialization” thesis, especially when self-alienation is at issue? Or, as Diggins raises the question against pragmatist conceptions of the self, “how can one be true to one’s self if the self has no ontological status apart from society and its discontents?”³⁸

If one thinks of the gap between self and (social) world as a defining experience of modernity and understands modern individuality’s objection to identifying the individual with her public functions and traditional roles (and subsuming her to them) as having an emancipatory dimension, then the (historical) function of the construct of inwardness is incontestable. And if, as MacIntyre portrays it, the ever intensifying split between inner and outer worlds was characteristic of bourgeois culture,39 then we must take the appeal to the inner seriously as an objection. According to Lionel Trilling, the romantic conception of a “self that can resist and oppose” defends the claim of an individual who, in her individual uniqueness developed in the form of inwardness,⁴⁰ represents an opposing authority to that of society.

I will return to the problem of the sociality of individuals and limit myself at this point to examining the intuitions bound up in the construct of inwardness. Although I will argue that these intuitions can be understood as a placeholder for the (bourgeois individual’s) desire for emancipation, I will also claim that they operate with a set of implausible assumptions. I believe—and this is all I want to go into briefly here—that the supposed plausibility of such objections (and the attractiveness of the outlined positions) rests at least partly on common confusions or misunderstandings. Finally—as I will show with the example of two characters from a novel of Henry James—the model of inwardness rests on an illusory idea of the pure self that forces it into precisely the defensive position it wanted to fight its way out of.

GENUINENESS AND INDEPENDENCE There are two ideas implicit in a positive appeal to inwardness: one is the assumption of genuineness (the idea of an “unfalsified” self), and the other is the assumption of a self’s independence, understood as inner and therefore outside the external world’s influence. In most contexts these two ideas go hand in hand with the claim that the self possesses a distinct ontological status independent of its social relations.

There are two objections I would like to bring against this position: first, in order to comprehend the possibility of such a pivot point for the self’s obstinacy or resistance, it is not necessary to accord the self any independent ontological status. Second, the self’s resistance, obstinacy, or independence in relation to social expectations of conformity and to the network of social practices and relations does not mark any pre- or extrarelational (or pre- or extrasocial) standpoint but rather a standpoint within these relations. (I go into this topic in more detail in the conclusion.)

Thus the claim that the individual develops in dependence on and confrontation with social relations and demands does not assume that these relations are free of tension. At the same time, the existence of a tension between individual and society does not imply that the former is independent of the latter. Not only can one claim that the individual, precisely in her obstinacy and resistance, derives her contours from this relation of tension; it is also the case that assuming such a discrepancy—a “self that can resist and oppose”—does not require the idea of an individual who is “inner” or independent of the external world. Thus one can conceive of a “resisting individuality” without thinking of obstinacy as something presocial,41 but instead as a constellation of various sources, layers, and displacements. If individuality, though, is something that first emerges in such relations of tension, the charge of accommodationism (made against the claim of the self’s sociality and relationality) is not tenable. The real conflict then does not turn on the question of the ineluctability of the relation in general. What is denied is not that individuals are resistant or obstinate but that the source of this obstinacy is to be found in the vacuum of an inner space that disavows a relation to the external world.

INNER LIFE AS INNER WORLD It is also the case that the intuition that one must sometimes withdraw in order “to come to oneself” does not necessarily lead to locating the true self in an inner space. One can partially withdraw from the world by distancing oneself from it, by (metaphorically speaking) creating a space in which one maintains a distance from certain influences and expectations. What is reflected on in this space, however, is still the world. In connection with this, David E. Cooper describes very compellingly Heidegger’s rejection of the “introspective approach towards self-understanding”: “He does not, of course, deny the need to pause and take stock of oneself; but this is the need, not for ‘inner perception’ but for awareness of the things, and my engagement with them, which constitute my ‘environing world.’ The shoemaker understands the man he is by seeing himself—replete with his sense of what matters to him and his ambitions for the future—reflected in the shoes he makes, the workshop in which he makes them, and the home in which he lives.”⁴² According to this, being able to withdraw from the world means reflecting on what one does in the world while abstracting from certain (or especially pressing) current expectations. It is still, however, always the world one deals with. The person who reflects in this way is still an individual who would not be conceivable without relations to and engagement with this world. Inwardness, when it claims to be worldless, is illusory. It would have no content.

It is wise, then, to regard the inner citadel as a metaphor. What one here “inwardly” keeps back from the world is still the world. What one reflects on here while momentarily suspending external influences can only be the world, oneself in one’s relations to it. Inner life is an inner world. The individual is independent insofar as she can independently take a position with respect to the demands of the external world. And obstinacy does not develop in an unfalsified, unspoiled, and self-sufficient realm of one’s own but rather as an obstinate (external) expression and obstinate dealing with the world.

THE SELF AND ITS SHELL (HENRY JAMES) In a dialogue that one could almost read as a commentary on the views of his brother William concerning the “self in its widest sense,” cited earlier, Henry James illustrates the conflict between a social and worldly conception of the self and a form of subjectivity oriented around a worldless inwardness. Isabel Archer, the young heroine of The Portrait of a Lady, receives what is supposed to be an introduction into life from her (only apparently well-disposed) motherly friend Serena Merle:

When you’ve lived as long as I you’ll see that every human being has his shell and that one must take the shell into account. By the shell I mean the whole envelope of circumstances. There’s no such thing as an isolated man or woman; we’re each made up of some cluster of appurtenances. What shall we call our “self”? Where does it begin? Where does it end? It overflows into everything that belongs to us—and then flows back again. I know a large part of myself is in the clothes I choose to wear. I’ve a great respect for things. One’s self—for other people—is one’s expression of one’s self; and one’s house, one’s furniture, one’s garments, the books one reads, the company one keeps—these things are all expressive.43

Disagreeing with Merle, Isabel Archer insists on an inwardness of character that cannot be reduced to external expressions and external qualities and attachments:

I don’t agree with you. I think just the other way. I don’t know whether I succeed in expressing myself, but I know that nothing else expresses me. Nothing that belongs to me is any measure of me: everything’s on the contrary a limit, a barrier, and a perfectly arbitrary one. Certainly the clothes which, as you say, I choose to wear don’t express me; and heaven forbid they should. . . . My clothes express the dressmaker, but they don’t express me. To begin with it’s not my own choice that I wear them: they’re imposed on me by society.44

Merle’s position corresponds to a conception of the self similar to the one I have discussed: the self expresses itself in external manifestations; it expresses itself and materializes itself as a “shell,” consisting of the material and immaterial things with which one identifies and to which one relates, which, at the same time, does not remain external like a shell. These manifestations, the attachments and circumstances in which one finds oneself, are not detachable from the self but become part of it. They are therefore not constraints but conditions and they amount to “being determined” in a positive sense: they make someone into what she is. Isabel, on the contrary, insists that the self is ungraspable and immaterial, something for which everything that “belongs to it” can appear only as a completely contingent and hence meaningless characteristic and therefore only as a barrier and limit, as a falsification of a genuine “being oneself.” Not only (contrary to Merle’s position) do clothes make the self alien; tellingly, even language is characterized as alien and self-alienating. What exactly, though, is her self, if everything it could fasten onto and in which it could manifest itself is thought to be indifferent to it? The individual Isabel sees herself as eludes every definition. It expresses itself in nothing (in nothing manifest in the world) and cannot be expressed by anything. Here we have a perfect example of a conception of identity as inwardness. One can characterize James’s position in relation to Isabel Archer’s as follows: “To live, in the Jamesian sense, one must choose certain experiences and reject others; it is through such choices that we project a social identity. . . . Isabel, however, with her inflated American ideal of sincerity, refuses to accept any social identity that does not express her true spiritual being.”⁴⁵ And this “true spiritual being” will reveal itself to be an illusion. The entire further development of events can be interpreted as a refutation of this ideal of sincerity. Henry James’s implicit psychological position, as many examples show, involves a quintessentially relational conception of the self that is not only “embedded” in a static sense but is, beyond this, situational. Who his characters are can be expressed only by describing constellations of persons and situations.

Here, too (in Isabel’s conception), insisting on the purely “inward” model of the self goes hand in hand with thinking of what is one’s own in terms of resistance and independence in relation to society. The implicit view seems to be that what is one’s own can be preserved or developed only by abstracting from external manifestations, from the impressions external things make on the individual, and from how the individual is expressed in them. Here too, then, the inwardness conception of authenticity is connected to the possibility of resistance and obstinacy. When Isabel Archer justifies her refusal to see herself as expressed by her clothes by appealing to their nature as a social convention—“it’s not my own choice that I wear them: they’re imposed on me by society”—she is making this kind of argument. As we have seen, this connection is not only not compelling; it is also illusory. The point is not merely that Isabel Archer cannot get by without wearing clothes. Even if she were to decide to dress completely carelessly or to treat certain forms of etiquette with indifference, she could not avoid expressing something in doing so; especially in the time and social stratum in which she lives, she would be expressing something whether she wanted to or not. “A self that can resist and oppose” must not only be one that is real, that is capable of shaping its reality, and that shapes itself in its involvement with reality; it must also, above all, be capable of reflecting on the relations that, for better or worse, it is caught up in. Learning this will be Isabel’s fate. The conception of independence as inwardness founders on itself.

3. SELF-INVENTION AND THE MULTIPLICITY OF THE SELF

I’m not me.

—GENA ROWLANDS IN JOHN CASSAVETES’S FILM OPENING NIGHT

Whereas, in my discussion of Harry Frankfurt, I argued against a position that assumes too strong a unity of the self and seeks to tie the subject too closely to a basic core of its identity, my appropriative conception of the self also entails a critical distance to positions that want to completely dissolve both the unity and the conditioned nature of the self. In what follows I deal with approaches and themes—one can associate them, roughly, with postmodern or poststructuralist views—that, from the perspective of a critique of the subject, are oriented around the idea of a no longer identifiable—a fluid, multiple, or transformative—identity. Without being able to treat exhaustively the multifaceted discussion of the problem of subjectivity that has emerged above all from the work of Michel Foucault,46 I will address some of the themes that have become important as a result of this debate: (1) the idea of self-invention,⁴⁷ in contrast to the traditional idea of finding oneself; and (2) the idea of the multiplicity, plurality, and hybrid character of postmodern identities, in contrast to traditional ideas of the unity of the subject.

My claim is that the conception of self-appropriation goes beyond the alternatives sketched here. Since self-appropriation is opposed to both the model of self-invention and the model of finding oneself, my position shares the critique of essentialism made by the Nietzschean poststructuralist camp without, however, giving up on criteria for successful relations to self. And since processes of appropriation always also involve an integration of diverse and malleable elements, the appropriative model, as a conception of unity in diversity, considers a unity in the self’s relation to itself (one that must be first somehow created) to be indispensable.48

(1) THE SELF AS A WORK OF ART—SELF-INVENTION VERSUS FINDING ONESELF

Already for Nietzsche, who can be regarded as the founding figure of the idea of self-invention, the idea of creative self-formation stands in contrast to the idea of finding oneself that underlies the search for the true self. Nietzsche writes: “It is mythology to believe that we find our authentic self after having left behind or forgotten this thing or that. In this way we unravel ourselves back to infinity: instead, to make ourselves, to shape a form out of all elements—this is the task! Always that of a sculptor! Of a productive human being!”⁴⁹ Clearly proceeding from the same distinction, the late Foucault formulates the point as follows: “From the idea that the self is not given to us, I think that there is only one practical consequence: we have to create ourselves as a work of art.”⁵⁰ And Wilhelm Schmid, too, locates the alternative between a substantially conceived “subject of identity” and what is to be reconceived as the “subject of experience and experimentation” in a field of conflict that adjoins the question of the authenticity of the self: “If there is no longer a substantial subject, no longer a subject that exists as an unchanging ground of our relation to self and world, then a space is opened up for a subject that is to be artistically fashioned as something new: this subject is not ‘authentic.’ This self-constitution is not a ‘self-realization’—it has nothing to do with a self that could be tracked down in some depth where it has lived on for itself fully unknown.”⁵¹

Thus creativity in relation to oneself takes the place of the ideal of authenticity. Yet this “self-production” does not only represent (as it is sometimes polemically presented) an overcoming of the classical Enlightenment, humanist project of emancipation; it also continues that project. Even if the ideal of self-creation has in the meantime “become an economic imperative”—as Diedrich Diederichsen notes in regard to a situation in which the idea of self-creation is increasingly interpreted in terms of plastic surgery52—at least for Foucault self-invention also represents a potential for resistance. Considered in this way, producing oneself is a strategy of the subject for not simply abandoning itself without resistance to formation through power (which at the same time constitutes it).

SELF-INVENTION VERSUS SELF-APPROPRIATION How, then, does this interpretation of the relation to self differ from the model of self-appropriation put forward here? And to what extent does it make a diagnosis of alienation impossible?⁵³

If the idea of self-invention is contrasted with that of working through layers of masks, under which it is assumed that there stands a true self or the “subject as an immutable ground,” then one can immediately see commonalities with the model of self-appropriation. The latter, too, envisages a “subject of experience and experimentation,”⁵⁴ and it, too, is explicitly concerned to avoid any appeal to an underlying self that “could be tracked down in some depth where it has lived . . . unknown.” Both views agree, then, in their antiessentialism; in both cases the self is a “self in the making” that exists insofar as it produces itself in action.

At the same time, I want to elaborate two differences between the idea of self-production or self-invention and the thesis concerning the practical production and appropriation of the self:

The first difference between self-invention and self-appropriation consists in the fact that in the latter it is possible to identify criteria for successful processes of appropriation and hence also for disturbances in self-relations. The very point of the self-inventing “self as a work of art,” in contrast, seems to be that here—in being oriented toward what is new and has never before been thought of, understood as something that conforms to no standard—such criteria are ruled out.

A second difference between the two approaches emerges in relation to what is prior to the constitutive process (invention or appropriation). If self-appropriation, as we have seen,⁵⁵ is a process in which finding and inventing, constructing and reconstructing, are equally primordial, then the process of appropriation always reckons with the existence of something prior that it takes over and transforms. This differs from the idea of self-invention since, in invoking a process of invention, it at least suggests a “creation out of nothing.”

It is this difference I would like to go into first in order to return afterward to the question of normativity. The differences between the self-invention and self-appropriation models can be traced back essentially to the nature of the formative process (of the self) posited by each. The difference that comes into view then can be understood, roughly, as a difference between a demiurgic process of production and a praxis that consists in carrying out actions.

THE SELF AS DEMIURGE AND THE PRODUCTION PARADIGM OF THE SELF There is a peculiar (and much discussed) tension in the work of some exponents of the idea of self-invention—a tension, namely, between the idea that there is no subject and an almost demiurgic idea of production, between a conception of the subject as a “grammatical error” (Nietzsche) or an effect of power (Foucault), on the one hand, and, on the other, the subject as an apparently omnipotent creator of a work of art (itself).56 This idea of self-fashioning seems in some respects to go hand in hand with a voluntarism that exhibits traces of hubris. For where does the agent come from who is suddenly endowed with so much power to act that it can create itself as a work of art? Who creates the creator here? Or is it not only a creatio ex nihilo but a creatio without a creator?

Taken seriously, the analogy with a sculptor or a work of art that informs the idea of self-invention suggests the creation of something that did not exist previously and for which there is no “construction manual,” no rules that govern its fashioning. What is at issue here, then, is not merely forming in general but a free and innovative forming of oneself. To say that the self invents itself is to say both that it invents itself as something new and that it is free and unhindered in this fashioning process.

Now the metaphor of a work of art raises several problems. First, insofar as a work of art is invented, it has no relation to something that was already there previously or that could determine or condition it. Second, someone who creates herself as a work of art approaches herself as material to be worked on; she is, then, simultaneously subject and object. Third, the self as a work of art is the result of a process of production, a product. Self-invention, then, is conceived of on the model of poiesis,⁵⁷ and this implies that the idea of self-production is bound up with an ultimately untenable paradigm derived from the metaphor of production.

THE SELF AS PRAXIS The difference between self-invention and self-appropriation can now be formulated using Aristotle’s distinction between praxis and poiesis: whereas self-invention follows a “production paradigm” of the self, self-appropriation is conceived of as praxis.58 The demiurgic idea of creation implicit in self-invention stands in contrast to an idea of self-appropriation in which one is practically, in performing actions, always already involved.⁵⁹ On the latter view, the self is less a work of art one makes oneself into than a practical-experimental process one is caught up in. This account has implications, on the one hand, for the self’s relation to what exists prior to it (and hence for its conditioned nature) and, on the other hand, for its relation to intersubjectivity.

Since appropriation is not a creation out of nothing, there is always something previously there that is appropriated, simultaneously transformed, and in a certain respect first produced. If what previously exists is itself the result of a process of appropriation, then it is impossible to identify either the beginning or the end of such a process; there is no condition outside or prior to such a process that can be meaningfully identified. If the self, as I formulated it before, is at once given and made, then neither is it given, nor does it first come into being in the moment of its creation; it is, rather, a process of transformation that must always reckon with already given conditions. Self-appropriation means, then, self-formation without the omnipotence of the self-inventing demiurge.

This can also be seen in a further point: as the result of actions we carry out, we are (in Arendt’s sense) always only coauthors of ourselves. Acting within a “web of actions,” in relating to ourselves we are subject to the influence of others. We do not, like the self-inventing demiurge, exist alone.

This difference between the self as a result of a productive process and the self as a result of a praxis consisting in interactions with what is “other” also has implications for the question of normativity and hence for the question whether there can be criteria for the success of such processes. The “selves in the making” postulated by the model of appropriation become something by making themselves into that something; at the same time, they are not fully free in forming themselves but are confronted with both the obstinacy of their material (which, by the way, the sculptor, too, must reckon with) and the obstinacy of social processes. As selves in the making, they are subject to an inexhaustible process of interaction with others and with “the other” more generally. Appropriation, then, is neither a process of finding oneself nor a demiurgic fashioning but an experiment. Such an experiment, however, has conditions of success.60 In contrast to demiurgic self-production, which finds its ideal in the lack of criteria and in being independent of all given conditions, in my model there are criteria of appropriateness and well-functioning.

Thus, from the fact that it is impossible to “find” oneself, my account does not conclude that it is also impossible to “miss” or “fall short” of oneself. Even in the absence of the possibility of finding oneself there can be success in the process of appropriation, which can be described as the success or lack of success in performing an action.

(2) “THE SELF THAT IS NOT ONE”—MULTIPLE IDENTITIES, HYBRIDITY, AND DISSOCIATION

In the discussion of postmodern identities there is a second topos that has achieved popularity beyond philosophical discourse in the narrower sense: that of multiple identities. Schmid formulates the task of a new conception of the self not based on the model of identity as follows:

The firmly established form is to be broken through by transformation; the finite formation of the subject is to be burst open through infinite experience, which is always experience of the other in every sense of the word. This is how a subject characterized by mutability and malleability constitutes itself; a diverse self and hence not a self of identity: being always self-identical and the same hinders the penetration of the other and makes every change impossible. The subject of identity is no longer tenable today.⁶¹

The terms mentioned here can be heard over and over again in the flood of psychological and sociological debates concerning postmodern identities. They describe what is supposed to replace the old “subject of identity.” Mutability, openness to experience, malleability, multiplicity: they characterize a self that is “not one,” a subject that is capable of experiencing what is completely different from itself without thereby acquiring a firmly demarcated and definable identity. Like the demiurgic paradigm, a conception of the self characterized in these terms also seems to rule out any resumption of a discussion of alienation. Can a self that is essentially “an other” still be alienated from itself? At issue here is the unitary nature of the subject, the possibility of an individual being identical with herself in a way that could be contrasted with an alienating loss of self.

Now the purely conceptual problems with such a conception of identity and transformation are obvious. A self that has experiences is in a certain respect always “one,” even if it becomes different (or “other”) in its experiences with itself and the world. For if there were no subject that could integrate these experiences into its experience and history, thereby making them its own, one could not speak of experience at all. This is the case even when experience is conceived of as a “borderline experience” or a “transgression.” Either a borderline experience changes the subject, in which case the subject—as something changed—remains “one” and is still a “subject of identity,” even if this identity is flexible or mutable, or the subject does not remain “one,” in which case it is unclear to what extent the subject has had an experience.62

The talk of multiplicity gets entangled in similar contradictions. Must not the various identities still be connected back to a bearer of these identities in order to be recognized or experienced as such? Do they not also depend on something that can integrate them? For this reason this much invoked multiplicity must either refer to different aspects of a person or to several identities that can be demarcated from one another. In the first case it would seem more appropriate to speak of a diversity of intersecting role identities or of ambivalences within a single person rather than of multiple identities. Genuine multiplicity, in which the orientations in question are comprehensive and mutually exclusive, would, in contrast, amount to a fragmentation of the person (as characterized by the clinical symptom of multiple personalities as opposed to the loose appropriation of the term in everyday usage). Then, however, we would no longer have transgressions and borderline experiences but rather (perhaps traumatic) experiences of which it could be said precisely that they make experience impossible. Such a subject would be, then, not diverse but threatened in its very existence. It is unclear how we are to imagine a multiple self that is no longer a “self of identity,” and it is an open question how “penetration by the other” can be conceived without referring to something that undergoes change. Regarded in this way, the talk of a multiple self whose identity cannot be pinned down is inconsistent, or, in other words, these ways of speaking are unfortunate theoretical dramatizations of phenomena that can be grasped more adequately by other concepts. My thesis, then, is that abandoning this reference point—that of a unity-creating self that appropriates its various possible roles and dimensions, as well as its attitudes and desires, and works through and integrates conflicting experiences—has grave consequences. Whereas the position of Frankfurt we have discussed conceives of the continuity of the self too statically, abandoning any idea of a consistent relation to self in relation to our self-perceptions and self-interpretations is counterintuitive. The concept of appropriation captures much more adequately the phenomena in question, the flexibility and diversity of identities: conceived of as an act of appropriation, the self is, on the one hand, “not one” insofar as it consists of a multitude of dimensions that must be integrated. Since it constitutes itself in experiences it has with itself and the world, it is a self of change. And, inasmuch as processes of appropriation have an experimental and creative character, this self is unpredictable. On the other hand, as the bearer of such processes of appropriation, the self remains a reference point in relation to which the success or failure of such acts of integration can be seen (without them needing to bestow unity in a strong sense). Thus, even if one does not want to understand the self as an immutable substance and as something that is unitary and free of conflict (and even if one does not subject it to the teleological structure of a Bildungsroman), being able to integrate the various aspects and parts of oneself is a presupposition of every kind of (unalienated) identity. Appropriation means therefore appropriating oneself in a diversity of possible aspects and through a diversity of possible experiences.

Yet we cannot come to grips with the debates I have just discussed with conceptual considerations alone. For the talk of self-invention and of postmodern multiple identities has become an influential metaphor and has been absorbed in various ways into contemporary cultural critique. With this vocabulary it has been possible to articulate a position that, in distinguishing itself polemically from traditional models of identity, gives expression to the notion that subjects today develop their identities within diverse and sometimes contradictory constellations. Because of the echo this philosophical position has found in contemporary cultural critique, I would like, in concluding, to discuss this conception of the self by looking at a case in which a philosophical thesis (that of postmodern identities) seems to have taken on empirical reality, namely, the phenomena of shifting identities and of playing with identities that have emerged in the context of a new medium, the Internet.

(3) “LIFE ON THE SCREEN”: A REALIZATION OF THE POSTMODERN SELF?

Become the person the chat-room thinks you are!

—CAR ADVERTISEMENT, NEW YORK CITY, 1999

In her book Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet the North American psychologist Sherry Turkle puts forward a thesis that immediately seems intuitively compelling: the Internet produces not only a new social reality; it also enables new forms of identity to develop, which, for the first time, make it possible to grasp what postmodern or poststructuralist theories have for a long time proclaimed.63 Here the postmodern situation is materialized. By her own account Turkle herself was never able to imagine concretely what poststructuralist theories had been talking about since the 1970s until, as a psychologist and “cybershrink,”⁶⁴ she encountered the sociological and psychological reality of new communications media such as the Internet: “Thus, more than twenty years after meeting the ideas of Lacan, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, I am meeting them again in my new life on the screen. But this time, the Gallic abstractions are more concrete. In my computer-mediated worlds, the self is multiple, fluid, and constituted in interaction with machine connections; it is made and transformed by language; sexual congress is an exchange of signifiers; and understanding follows from navigation and tinkering rather than analysis.”⁶⁵

One might see this as an inappropriately concrete application of a sophisticated theory. What is interesting, though, is that Turkle empirically investigates interactions and processes of self-presentation and self-formation on the Internet and that she has pursued these issues in several large-scale projects. Turkle claims that “the internet has become a significant social laboratory for experimenting with the constructions and reconstructions of self that characterize postmodern life” (180), and she has followed this “experiment” scientifically. From her analysis of interviews with Internet users, and her experiences in her Internet practice, we gain insight into what are undoubtedly new dimensions of social and psychological reality. These findings, though—this is my claim—do not support the thesis that the Internet allows for entirely new kinds of identity formation.

When Turkle writes about “life on the screen,” she is not interested in those who use the Internet as an instrument—the way one uses a telephone book, for example, as an extensive pool of information where one can look things up quickly and efficiently. She is also not concerned with the enhanced possibilities of communication made available, for example, by e-mail. However much forms of communication might be transformed by these developments, such new practices remain within the domain of traditional forms of information exchange. What Turkle investigates, rather, are users who move within the Internet as within a virtual interactive space—that is, the world of virtual communities and Multi-User Domains (MUDs) in which users come into contact with one another anonymously or under multiple names and identities when participating in interactive games (often highly complex fantasy worlds with complicated rules, played over years), discussion forums, flirt chat rooms, or cybersex. For some of the users with whom Turkle conducted interviews—sometimes over many years—“online life” has become a second, virtual life in which important (sometimes even their most important) social contacts and experiences take place. This is exemplified by the well-put remark: “My real life is just another window. And usually not the best one.”

According to Turkle, it is this life, in and with the MUDs, that leads to the creation of a postmodern self fundamentally different from the traditional self that is thought to be capable of greater and lesser degrees of authenticity.

MUD’s imply difference, multiplicity, heterogeneity, and fragmentation. Such an experience of identity contradicts the Latin root of the word idem, meaning “the same.” But this contradiction increasingly defines the conditions of our lives beyond the virtual world. MUD’s thus become objects-to-think-with for thinking about postmodern selves. . . . Traditional ideas about identity have been tied to a notion of authenticity that such virtual experiences actively subvert. When each player can create many characters and participate in many games, the self is not only decentered but multiplied without limit.

(185)

Two problems at the center of Turkle’s focus are of interest here: (1) How does the formation of the self take place in a medium that seems to impose fewer constraints on identity formation than the “real world” does? Whatever else may be said against the idea of the demiurgic self-creator, here it seems to be a reality: “In virtual reality, we self-fashion and self-create” (185). (2) How does playing with multiple identities proceed in a medium that offers more possibilities for this than (conventional) reality? “The internet . . . has contributed to thinking about identity as multiplicity. On it, people are able to build a self by cycling through many selves” (178).

The questions that arise for Turkle’s claims in the present context are the following: what exactly is understood here (all too readily) as the creation of a self, and how does it relate to the talk of self-appropriation described previously? What are we to say about multiple selves? Are they in fact experienced as different selves or, instead, as various versions of a person who ultimately must integrate them and who may also fail to do so? And, finally, to what extent do such processes of identity formation really subvert the concept of authenticity?

I want to use some of the empirical examples discussed by Turkle to examine two hypotheses: first, that these patterns of identity formation are not entirely new or different from more traditional patterns; and, second, that they, too, cannot get by without a conception of authenticity.

The following utterance of a gamer who describes the advantages of her MUD life bears witness to the utopia of unlimited self-creation: “You can be whoever you want to be. You can completely redefine yourself if you want. You can be the opposite sex. You can be more talkative. You can just be whoever you want, really, whoever you have the capacity to be” (184). On the Internet, so the claim, one can be what and who one wants to be. There are, in the first place, completely banal reasons for this. Because of the medium’s anonymity and immateriality, it is impossible to establish anyone’s real identity (in the everyday sense). No one is in a position to point out the biological characteristics of the chubby man who appears in the MUD as an attractive young woman. The persons who encounter one another here are identified, first of all, only by unverifiable self-descriptions. The statement “You can be more talkative,” however, follows a different logic. For, clearly, I can be more talkative in the MUD only if I actually talk more. Hence, if it is easier to make myself into a garrulous personality on the Internet than it is in the “real world,” this can only be because my identity is less fixed on the Internet since no one is there who already knows me to be a shy wallflower.

Yet, even on the Internet, being able to play with identities depends on their being socially recognized. And this comes up immediately when users are asked what the possibility of choosing identities depends on: “It’s easier to change the way people perceive you, because all they’ve got is what you show them.” This reveals two aspects of life on the screen: first, the lack of a context for Internet identities—individuals appear here without a past and without a social setting; and, second, the control individuals have over how they express themselves. Now the logic behind the first aspect—the “new beginning”—is not particularly unusual, and it is by no means exclusive to the new medium. Anyone who has ever changed schools or started over in a new city is familiar with it. This, then, is not a qualitatively new phenomenon. The ease of changes and their lack of consequences merely make such experiences on the Internet more likely and available to everyone. The second point is perhaps more important: one has the chance to make oneself different from what one was before because one has control over all the dimensions of how one presents oneself externally; others do not see what they are not supposed to see. But this is not true without qualification: it seems likely that even here there are elements of one’s own behavior (for instance, the language one uses) that involuntarily reveal things about oneself. Moreover, one must have (and employ) the capacity to chat in an entertaining way; otherwise one quickly acquires the reputation of being a bore, even in the MUD. The same holds for gender identity: this, too, the player must actually master to a certain extent. One does not, of course, need to have the primary or secondary sexual characteristics of a man or a woman in order to play the corresponding role on the Internet; one must, however, bring along a certain capacity for empathy and a precise observation of the role behavior of the respective gender in order to be recognized and accepted as a representative of that gender. This is not so easy, and users’ covers are often blown, as evidenced by the apparently not infrequent “unmasking discussions” reported to take place. To be sure, others cannot see what I “really” am biologically, but this makes their acceptance of my (social) gender all the more important. I must be able to depict it plausibly.

On the Internet, individuals can indeed make of themselves what they want to, but this, too, needs to be qualified, as evidenced by a remark of one of Turkle’s interviewees: “You can be . . . whoever you have the capacity to be.” This shows the utopia of free self-construction to be illusory and reveals its limits in two respects: first, here too I can make myself only into something that I already am in a certain respect; second, I can change my identity (even my cyberidentity) only if I am recognized in this role by others, namely, my fellow players. The conditions of this recognition may be easier to fulfill, and the possibilities for constructing my identity may be greater in many respects, but in general the conditions of creating identities on the Internet are similar to those that hold “outside.”

Why, then, do participants generally regard the identities produced in MUDs as so real? Why is it so easy to think of the online world as its own reality,66 as many players clearly do? This can be traced back to the intersubjective character of this media experience—which is in fact relatively new in kind—that is, to the fact that here one can become someone different not only in one’s own fantasy (this has always been possible); rather, on the Internet one’s self-construction can enter into an interactive process and acquire social reality through the reactions of others. Nevertheless, as indicated earlier, the omnipotence that characterizes private fantasy life also has its limits here. One could even claim that the more reality a game acquires, the weaker an individual’s omnipotence becomes and the less control she has over what happens to her.⁶⁷ This suggests, however, that role conflicts exist also on the Internet and that here, too, one can become fixed in roles that no longer fit (or never really did). This would mean that problems of alienation can arise here too, even if they might be easier to eliminate than in “real life,” simply by changing one’s identity or leaving the game. But even the option of leaving is less straightforward than it appears: if one looks at the intensity with which players design their identities, form social networks, compete for status, furnish their virtual spaces as if they were homes, and even celebrate intricately planned weddings in the MUD, all this suggests that abandoning even these identities is not easy and can have psychological costs: anxieties over loss, longing, homesickness, a loss of orientation. Virtual identities can also be threatened. In this regard, Turkle is, in fact, dealing with a social laboratory; the “raw material” she experiments with, however, is not completely new.

Contrary to Turkle’s own thesis, however, her interviewees’ reflections at least touch on the question of the self’s authenticity: “I feel very different online. I am a lot more outgoing, less inhibited. I would say I feel more like myself. But that’s a contradiction. I feel more like who I wish I was.”68 Hence the practice of multiplying identities constantly raises the question of what one really is, and this question is connected in turn to an idea of unity that must be defined more precisely. As a twenty-six-year-old municipal employee explains: “I’m not one thing, I’m many things. Each part gets to be more fully expressed in MUD’s than in the real world. So even though I play more than one self on MUD’s, I feel more like ‘myself’ when I’m mudding.”⁶⁹

The “many things” he claims to be are understood in the very next sentence as “parts” and therefore as aspects of the one self that he is. Then, however, it seems that what we have here is less a real multiplicity than a richer and more diverse development of one’s personality (very much in Schiller’s or Marx’s sense). This means, though, that there is an expansion of the self that must in turn be integrated. What takes place is not a multiplication of selves but playing with various aspects of an identity, a form of play that still always depends on the integrating act of the person who is playing.

Thus on the Internet it is possible to live out aspects of one’s own personality that one cannot live out in everyday life; one is freer to try out different desires and orientations. This, however, represents not a discontinuity but a continuity with conventional experiences of the diversity and malleability of identity. This means that even in the case of Internet identities there are conditions for successfully integrating such experiences and cases of successful or unsuccessful integration. This, too, is impressively documented by Turkle’s material. The self-experimentation described here is productive, then, only when individuals can understand these “selves” as parts and extensions of their personality, which can be seen in their effortlessly switching back and forth between various identities. Other cases come close to being pathological borderline experiences.

Thus neither of the two theses—the loss of authenticity as a reference point and the disappearance of traditional ideas of the self’s unity—can be sustained, at least on the basis of the empirical material presented here. Nevertheless, new media do create greater room and more possibilities for interacting playfully with various identities. There are fewer limits placed on these possibilities: one can try out and broaden various aspects of one’s own identity and ideal self-image with relatively few consequences. And evidence of the opportunities for the broadening of horizons and the deepening of one’s ability to empathize can be seen in the reports of a self-professed macho man to the effect that, after having played a female role in a game for months, he now better understands how women feel when they are exposed to stupid pick-up attempts or are constantly taken to lack certain abilities.

My critical examination of Turkle’s conclusions supports the claim that every plausible conception of self depends on assuming a unity and authenticity of agents (which needs to be defined more precisely). Moreover, the phenomena Turkle describes suggest a continuity between “new” and traditional relationships to self and world. That suggests in turn that questions of alienation and being oneself—of successful and unsuccessful self-relations in the context of one’s existence—are still relevant for even postmodern identities.