The Structural Context for My Participants

As the current plan stands, I’ll have 18 participants, all of whom were born in 1990. I want to explore how their nascent context(s) have influenced the manner in which they approach their present context (i.e. their life at university which they will have just started). How does it influence how they think about what they’re doing: what the point of it is, what the gains and costs of it are, what the process entails etc? Beyond what they think about what they’re doing, I also want to explore what is that they’re doing in an everyday sense: what’s important to them, who’s important to them, what choices do they make about how they spend their time, who do they choose to spend their time with, how do they handle the unavoidable constraints on such choices, how do they cope with  the likely enablements which living away from home provides in terms of choice and autonomy?

There’s a micro structural story to be told for each participant: how did their background shape their access to the university?  How has it shaped their time at university? Did they have the guidance and expectations common within private schools to smooth the entrance process or was it a more difficult and self-directed process? Do they have to work to support themselves while at university, with all the impact this subsequently has on their academic work and time for leisure? What outside support have they taken out of what was offered to them? This then ties up to the macro structural story: what were the costs involved in higher education? What support was available? How does the higher educational policy underlying these conditions relate to wider political and economic trends? In both cases, the structural story encompasses the period prior to university (1990 – 2009), as well as their time at university (2009 onwards). Past macro-structure (1) shapes past micro-structure (2) (i.e. the structural context within which they had the privilege, or lack thereof, which they did) which, in alliance with present day macro-structure (3) (the overall structural context within which higher educational policy etc is enacted), shapes present day macro-structure (4). So it’s (1) –> [ (2) --> (3) ] –> (4). Now what of culture? That will be my next post.

Emotional Morphogenesis and Emotional Morphostasis

The previous post gives a particular instance of a generic problem: we all live in the natural, practical and social orders and, as such, we are all faced with the task of  making sense of the distinct and often contradictory constellations of emotions which emerge from them. To refuse this task, to turn away from the challenge it poses, invites drift and meaninglessness. It would leave us, as Archer puts it, “at the mercy of … first order pushes and pulls, drifting from job to job, place to place and relationship to relationship” (Being Human: 246-247). The interrelationship of our emotions pose questions which we cannot help but try and answer, even if our answers amount to little more than acquiescence to momentary impulse and sensation. At any moment our life entails the “things we are doing, the things we have done and the things we could do” (Being Human: 233) and, unless we seek to embrace an episodic life and a fragmented self, this temporality demands that we make some sense of the reflective, retrospective and prospective dimensions of our existence.

We involuntarily confront successive situations throughout our lives which present us with choices while shaping the conditions under which we choose. Sometimes the dimensions of that ’shaping’ are the result of our deliberate activity in the past (i.e. some of the personal conditioning influences) while more often they are not (i.e. many of the structural conditioning influences). At all points we are beings to whom things matter: our emotional responses to the situations we confront are expressive of our underlying concerns and they impel us towards certain choices rather than others and thus shape our movement through successive situations.

Often our constellation of emotions is simply stable from situation to situation, as challenging situations allow for routine responses which reproduce our emotions and so what we’ve done, what we’re doing and what we could do are easily – and often imperceptibly – knitted together in a coherent movement through the social world (emotional morphostasis). An example of this would be when we’ve made a commitment to a career and then find that at every stage it’s obvious what the next move should be to further act on our initial commitment. When our environment doesn’t frustrate our commitments (structural or socio-cultural challenges) and nor do other emotions or concerns (personal challenges) then we can move through successive situations in a routine way i.e. we are generally able to answer situational questions without much reflexive deliberation. We might think strategically or instrumentally but our underlying commitments aren’t called into question by either our self or our circumstances.

However often we do confront challenges: personal (arising from the natural and practical orders) or socio-cultural and structural (arising from the social order). At such points either our self or our circumstances prevents us from routinely reaffirming and reproducing our prior commitments i.e. emotional morphostasis. The things we have done are unable to lead us in a routine way through the things we are doing to the things we could do. Our present situation leaves our future commitments as an open question inviting reflexive deliberation. This is the aforementioned generic problem: the unavoidability of choice and deliberation. At times we may feel as if we are enjoying organic integration between our different concerns but this can never be enduringly stable because it always relies on the absence of personal, socio-cultural and structural challenges and we are progressively less able to control the presence or absence of each of these three types of challenge. So there will always be situations where we are faced with questions which we cannot easily answer, which invite deliberation and self-questioning, and if we fail to meet the challenge these situations pose to us, we are left with drift and disorientation. However when we can answer these questions, when we can negotiate between our conflicting concerns and achieve a workable modus vivendi, we can gain new purchase on life and, at least until we meet challenges once more, enjoy something approaching organic integration (emotional morphogenesis).

Emotional Morphogenesis: A Small Scale Example

I wake up one morning with a hangover. Prior to any emotional commentary upon this situation, it’s been shaped by both structural and cultural factors. The structural dimensions of the situation are shaped by structural factors i.e. I wake up in a house I own because I was able to get an interest free loan via my family, I don’t have to get up and leave the house to go to work because I occupy a role in an institutional structure (PhD student) which allows me to work at home, the one house-mate who is currently staying there is out because she does have to go to work. The socio-cultural dimensions of the situation are shaped by cultural factors i.e.  I stand in a certain social relation to my housemates who are both contingently absent (itself a consequence of structural factors) and the properties of those relations, as well as the structural factors which have produced their absence from the house at that moment, all work towards conditioning the situation I confront, in both its structural and socio-cultural dimensions, when I wake up. Obviously the two dimensions are interrelated – as in this example, structural factors have led to the people I live with being out which shapes the soci0-cultural situation I face – though they can be analytically distinguished when looking at a given situation because they don’t operate simultaneously i.e. their causal properties can be unpicked temporally.

So when I wake up I confront a situation which has been conditioned by antecedent structural and cultural factors. Of course my own actions have also shaped the situation, as I wouldn’t be waking up with a hangover if I hadn’t drank too much the night before. So structural, cultural and personal factors all work to condition the situation I confront. What do I make of it? There are emotions arising from the natural order: I have a headache and my throat is sore. I feel unable and unwilling to leave the dark room and comfortable mattress, as a need for rest and recuperation – I’ve slept for too few hours the night before in a light drunken sleep – provokes an emotional response of reticence regarding the start of the day and the tasks I have to complete (the latter being another personal factor: the expectations I’ve placed on myself for that day and the plans I’ve formed). There are emotions arising from the social order: some of these tasks, for instance looking after my girlfriend’s pets while she’s away, are of great importance to me: both because of my own concern for the animals and my concerns stemming from her concern for the animals i.e. because I care about her, I also care about her concerns, particularly when responsibility for them has been delegated to me. My awareness of this obligation, which I willfully embrace, generates a feeling of resolve in me. There are emotions arising from the practical order: I’m trying hard to become a better writer and thinker and this is very important to me (both in terms of practical mastery of an art but also for reasons arising from the social order i.e. I want to do well as a researcher because it’s a role I’ve invested myself in and a site of my self-worth in relationships with other people) and, to this end, I’d previously concluded that I needed a reasonably disciplined daily routine. So when I wake up an hour later than planned, sleep deprived and hung over, with little realistic prospect of meeting my writing schedule for that day, I feel irritated at myself because for no good reason I’ve undermined the pursuit of my concerns in the practical order

For 20 minutes or so I’ve been lying in bed, appraising my situation and registering my emotional responses to it. I experience three distinct emotional commentaries upon my situation: reticence, resolve and irritation. They arise from the natural, social and practical orders respectively. As it stands though, my articulation of my emotional responses is inadequate because it simply leaves me lying in bed aware of these distinct emotions which I’m experiencing. It’s inadequate because it precludes mastery of the situation. My emotions stand in conflict with one another: my reticence undermines my resolve (“I know I need to feed the rats but I can’t face getting out of bed”) and my irritation underscores my reticence and stops my resolve from leading anywhere (I lie there feeling ill and thinking “it was stupid of me to drink so much” rather than getting up and acting on my resolve). My initial articulation, which simply involves sequentially registering each of my emotions, only deepens the poor mood I woke in’; in fact it adds another layer, as my contradictory emotional responses begin to provoke a mild sense of disorientation and distress. My emotions challenge me to do something about my situation, to make some sense of it and gain some purchase on it but their precise constellation simultaneously undercuts my ability to do this.

However at a certain point I get sick of lying there feeling sorry for myself. The resolve stemming from my commitment to my girlfriend (via my promise to look after her pets) leaves me to consider how I could overcome my reticence: I interrogate my self-knowledge – albeit in this example the rather mundane kind of self-knowledge involved in getting over a hangover – as I plan action to diminish the physical symptoms underlying my reticence. As a result I get up and have a shower and make some coffee. While I’m doing this the increase feeling of resolve feeds into a rearticulation of my irritation: I start to reconsider my earlier sense that it was foolish to drink the night before I had work scheduled. Rather than trying (and failing) to live by some absolute injunction on getting drunk on a weekday evening, I wonder if it would be more sensibly simply to accept the compatibility of alcohol in the evening with work the morning after but simply seek moderation? I also realise that there was a performative contradiction expressed in my irritation: I was angry at myself for the way I thought my drinking the prior night would affect my work today but that very reaction actually undermined my work by fuelling my reticence and leaving me lying in bed. Guiding this deliberation is an idea of human flourishing (resource of the self) which values integration rather than exclusion i.e. trying to find a place in life for different things rather than acquiescing to apparent contradiction. I draw on social knowledge and remind myself that there’s no contradiction between alcohol and academia. I drink some water and, as the coffee kicks in, the bodily pain and its associated reticence begin to dissipate. My irritation has transmuted into a renewed commitment to moderation and a desire to gain a greater understanding of what personal factors sometimes make moderation difficult for me.

Obviously I don’t deliberate under these terms. This is a philosophical reconstruction of an internal conversation rather than a verbatim report. It’s also relatively trivial and situationally bound. However these sorts of micro-level deliberations and the emotional morphogenesis they can provoke are the building blocks of personal growth. Through countless such deliberations the micro-structure of our character is knitted together  and this provides the context within which ‘macro’ decisions are possible i.e. without this micro level emotional morphogenesis, macro level personal morphogenesis would not be possible.

Ideational Resources

At the heart of my PhD research is the relationship between persons, structure and culture:

• The situatons any individual confronts are structurally conditioned. Structural influences (e.g. legal structures, economic relations, organizations) are mediated to people by shaping the situations in which they find themselves.
• The way in which we understand these situations – the terms under which we know the elements within them, the concepts through which we understand (explicitly and implicitly) the meaning and nature of these situations – are not simply a property of the person.
• The capacity to come to an understanding of a situation- to consider ourselves in relation to our circumstances and vice versa – is a power possessed of persons but the particular understanding  an individual comes to is shaped both by the person and their socio-cultural context.
• So persons have an intrinsic capacity to consider, evaluate and come to understandings of their circumstances. However the exercise of that power may draw on properties which are cultural: either those pertaining to socio-cultural interaction or to the cultural system.

This raises the question of what these properties are and how the subject draws on them in the process of reflexive deliberation. Broadly I’m defining these as ideational resources i.e. items external to the person yet which can be drawn on in ideational activity, thus constraining and enabling the form that takes. I’m distinguishing three forms which ideational resources can take.

Cultural Resources are the ideas which frame our deliberations. So if we think about the social world, we necessarily draw on a social ontology and social geography i.e. an understanding of the kinds of things that make up the social world, which of them exist and the relationships between them. Likewise when we think about persons we draw on an understanding of what a person is, the constituents of their inner life, how they do or should matter etc. The cultural resources which frame our deliberations aren’t merely descriptive. Our reflexive deliberations – in the most simple sense: thinking about our situation and deciding what to do – rely on social knowledge and self knowledge i.e. to decide what we should do we have to know things about ourselves (what we want, what we care about, what we need etc) as well as our social circumstances (the feasibility of enacting our projects in the world, the resources we need to enact them, the social consequences of enacting them etc). This obviously has an epistemic component where we make judgements about what constitutes knowledge and what doesn’t e.g. if we distinguish between a momentary whim and a genuine need when deciding how to spend our money. Cultural resources are those class of ideas which are a necessary condition for reflexive deliberation i.e. concepts without which we couldn’t consider ourselves in relation to our circumstances (and vice versa) in order to decide on courses of action. Usually such framing concepts are part of the background however they can be brought into discursive awareness, either as a topic of abstract deliberation (academic philosophy being the obvious example) or as an introspective inquiry into the concepts with which we operate. Cultural resources exist in the cultural system (as ideas lodged propositionally in world 3), socio-culturally (as ideas we encounter intersubjectively) and personally (as ideas drawn upon, implicitly or explictly, by the person). The sequencing in time of our reflexive deliberations and the uptake of cultural resources are distinct.

Resources of the Self are the ideas which guide and shape our deliberations. When considering our lives, we draw on ideas of what is important, what a good life involves, what human nature necessitates, what flourishing demands etc. These ideas shape the direction our deliberations and the choices we make through them. They also include self-heuristics – for instance metaphors such as ‘journeys’ and ‘quests’, which help us interpret and clarify our moral situation – as well as social identifications, ways of understanding the demographic categories to which the individual belongs. Like cultural resources, resources of the self can be encountered socio-culturally – as the beliefs, practices and orientations of friends, family, peers, co-workers, teachers etc – or within the cultural system. Where there is little pluralism within the individuals socio-cultural environment, resources of the self may acquire force through naturalization i.e. appearing as natural and inevitable goals and goods in the absence of any obvious alternatives. However this very socio-cultural poverty may lead an unsatisfied individual to look beyond their immediate socio-cultural environment – to other persons, groups or institutions – or into the cultural system to try and find ideas which help them make sense of their lives more effectively than those immediately at hand.

Reflexive Technologies are those things designed to be used for self-clarification and self-reflective monitoring. So while no one sits down and designs the concepts of a ‘calling’ or a ‘quest’ for use in an individuals life – although they do have that use – someone does write self-help books, design heuristics, produce the contents of training courses etc. All these things have been expressly designed to aid the practice of reflexivity. I’m unsure whether practices like Tarot, which can be convincingly seen as devices for aiding the “self-reflexive monitoring of [a] life” (in Doug Porpora’s words) fall into this category or the previous category. I guess it hinges on whether the distinctive feature of reflexive technologies is seen to be their originally having been designed for purposes of aiding reflexivity or the fact that they are used intentionally toward that end. On the former definition things like Tarot and psychometric testing probably wouldn’t fall into the category of reflexive technologies, whereas on the latter they would.

This is my very tentative typology of the ideational resources available within society. My intention is to use it as a starting point to help interpret the experiences of participants in the research but to flesh it out empirically, as well as reconsidering the categorisation if necessary, through the research.

This post feeds into the last because the decline of contextual continuity – the erosion of socially-culturally available common sense – perhaps feeds into the historical growth of reflexive technologies. I came across a suggestion that the US self-help industry is set to reach a market value of $13.9 billion by 2010. While it stands to reason that reflexive technologies will always have existed in some form – perhaps the Tarot can be seen in this light – can the period of their ascendancy (1930 onwards) be traced against the structural processes which have led to the proportional decline of communicative reflexivity against autonomous reflexivity? After all reflexive technologies are engaged with instrumentally, as opposed to other forms of reflexive guidance.

The Forms Relationships Take

I’m currently planning a research project which involves a case study of a married couple (a gay man and a hasbian) I recently encountered through a friend. While I don’t yet know the full details of their relationship or their past, I’m intrigued by the extent to which something affirmed by both partners as a relationship can stand in apparent contradiction to common sense notions of what a relationship entails. There are two ways to evaluate this: on the hand it could just be seen as an idiosyncrasy peculiar to the two individuals, while on the other it could be seen as suggestive of wider socio-cultural factors… are they ‘really’ just two close friends misapplying the notion of a romantic relationship to themselves, or is their relationship a genuine renegotiation of what partnership entails? I’d suggest the latter and that’s why I’m interested in the case.

When we attempt to make sense of our personal relationships – as we all must do – we draw on concepts and categories which are socio-culturally available to us (e.g. acquaintance, friend, lover, partner) to provide the framework within which the relationships develop, as well as making sense of what it is that develops within the framework. The categories we apply to people in our lives, as well as those which they apply to us, carry understandings and expectations of what the relationship should entail, how we should act, how they should act, what it means to us… yet these categories don’t exhaust what the relationship is. For instance there’s more to any particular deep friendship than is expressed in a generic cultural notion of friendship but without such generic cultural notions our personal lives wouldn’t have the shape and coherence which allows us to make sense of them over time.

The analysis I want to develop through the case study will suggest that the dynamic at play here – the relationship between socio-cultural ideas about relationships and the concrete relationships to which we apply them – is dialectical. The ideas about relationships we encounter in our socio-cultural environment – the personal roles we see people play to each other and the expectations and obligations that seem to inhere in them – aren’t ontologically independent of the actual relationships in existence at a given time but nor are they reducible to them: the ideas shape the relationships but are in turn shaped by them, as individuals appropriate and personalise them, living interpersonal lives with and through them which change how they are manifested socio-culturally.

The crucial question is what this change entails. Obviously much of the time these ideas are simply reproduced as they function as regulative norms against which people make sense of they personal relationships; however they can also be transformed and this occurs when the ideas no longer provide the template for the relationship but provide a starting point for an experiment. These are the central suggestions I want to explore: firstly that this couple’s relationship is an example of the sort of life-experiment (represented in the 20th century by, for example, the first openly gay couples) which reshapes the meanings which ideas about relationships hold more generally. Secondly that they are, in an import way, swimming with the tide in living out their personal lives in an experimental way. The socio-cultural conditions within which their unique relationship has taken its form are not unique to their relationship: the case is a striking (and unusual) example of intersubjective negotiation of meaning within the ‘private domain’ which can cast light on less striking and more everyday examples of intersubjective negotiation within the private domain.

The Decline of Contextual Continuity

Contextual Continuity and its Decline in the UK

Since the 1960s there has been a major increase in the geographical mobility of the British population. The decline of industry and manufacturing, as well as the concomitant growth of a service sector less constrained by capital-intensive regional investment, have necessitated an increased acceptance of relocation for the sake of employment. A variety of interrelated factors (containerization, deregulation of financial markets, offshoring, the growth of the internet, the declining cost and increasing power of computing, new technologies of production, deregulation of labour markets, the transnationalisation of capital, the growth of impatient capital, financialization) have led to an increasing geographical mobility of corporations which, coupled with concurrently decreasing time-horizons, serve to destabilize the occupational lives of the labour force as corporate activity becomes increasingly ‘flexible‘; likewise business activity is increasingly subject to the pressures of financial markets (either directly or mediated by a supply-chain) which are seeking shorter-term gain over a much wider geographical area for investment. This increased mobility and impatience of capital erodes the sort of long-term corporate investment in a region which is necessary for there to be stable jobs rooted in a stable context.

The instability of the labour market means that the possibility of a job for life has sharply declined, at least outside the public sector, while a shortage of homes for first-time buyers means that young people will buy where they can afford. Similarly both relocation and commuting are increasing necessary, as individual attempts to negotiate workable solutions to the quandaries posed by the labour market given their existing personal and family commitments. This is compounded by the necessity of both partners working, as well the cultural desirability of dual-career partnerships. There’s also an increasing organizational and technological capacity for flexitime and telecommuting, although the availability and uptake of each is deeply uneven across the labour market. The growing availability of cheap foreign travel means that geographical mobility becomes a recreational norm for much of the population. The recent growth of the budget airlines, as well as the organizational feats facilitated by the internet, entrench this norm as cheap foreign travel becomes more immediately available rather than as part of a preplanned package deal booked far in advance. Similarly many recreational activities (pop concerts, football fixtures, music festivals, retail centres and theme parks) assume that patrons will drive there.

Also since the 1960s attendance at university has increased from around 4% of the age cohort to 37% as of 2007, with the government having set a goal of 50%. For the majority of undergraduates this means leaving the natal home earlier and never returning to live there and the discontinuity this engenders is compounded when, as in many cases, the new students are the first from their families to take a degree. The contextual discontinuity their geographical and institutional move to university creates is entrenched by the cultural discontinuity the socio-cultural environment which university exposes them to.

Finally the explosive growth of communications technology has radically transformed the socio-cultural environment faced by any particular subject. The standardised cultural consumption offered by newspapers, magazines, radio and television has expanded hugely as the same economic processes underlying increased geographical mobility have facilitated segmented marketing and consumption. The change has been both quantitative and qualitative; as Cass Sunstein argues “technology has greatly increased people’s ability to ‘filter’ what they want to read, see, and here”. The pluralisation of information sources diminishes the role of general interest intermediaries as well as eroding the cultural integration they helped engender. The internet individualises access to the cultural system but in bypassing socio-cultural intermediaries (for instance the general interest intermediaries in newspaper and magazines which Sunstein talks about or individuals and groups which explain and interpret cultural ideas for the individual i.e. socio-culturally mediate their access to the cultural system) it changes the way the individual relates to culture, as the subject is increasingly throw upon their own resources for evaluation and interpretation, rather than relying on cultural authorities and endorsed routine hermenutical practices.

The Impact on Normative Conventionalism

These three factors (geographical mobility, university education and information technology) undercut contextual continuity. As Archer puts it,

It is no longer the case that a majority of parents and (teenage) children, let alone neighbours, fellow workers or inhabitants of the same area, have a communality of experiences, the same biographical reference points, a shared history and geography, thus making for a common mental topography with the same structural features and cultural landmarks. In short, fewer and fewer people actually have ’similars and familiars’, people who could be trusted to understand them sufficiently to complete their thoughts and to confirm their decisions.

This reliance on others to complete thoughts and confirm decisions is characteristic of communicative reflexivity. All normal individuals practice reflexivity i.e. think about themselves in relation to their circumstances and vice versa. However contrary to popular belief, not all individuals practice reflexivity in the same way. Some deliberate in a purely internal manner, withdrawing into their thoughts to consider a matter, only usually talking about their deliberations once they’ve already reached a conclusion about how to act (autonomous reflexives). Other considers themselves or their circumstances in relation to some ideal or set of ideals – e.g. environmentalist, religious, political – and evaluate how they could change themselves in order to live up to their ideal or change their circumstances in line with their ideal (meta-reflexives). While others rely on those close to them, turning to friends or family to draw conclusions and decide on courses of actions in dialogue with those they trust to provide guidance (communicative reflexives).

It’s this latter mode of reflexivity which is impacted on by the decline in contextual continuity. Contextual continuity is a necessary – though not sufficient – condition for communicative reflexivity. Geographical mobility, inter-generational cultural discontinuity and cultural proliferation – with the individualised orientation toward culture which it fosters – all serve to erode the commonalities which communicative reflexivity requires. As Archer says, in short there are simply fewer people who actually have similars and familiars; with the consequence that communicative reflexivity becomes less and less sustainable as way of thinking about one’s life and orientating oneself in the world. Where it’s successful, it takes active work on the part of individuals to sustain contextual continuity (to keep in touch, to share experiences, to inhabit the same micro-world when at all possible) rather than being in any way a default and this work is, in a profound way, swimming against the stream.

Reflexivity, Guidance and Routine Action

If a subject relies on interlocutors to sustain a reflexive deliberation, it leaves them open to conversational censure in a way in which autonomous reflexives and meta-reflexives are not. If their interlocutor objects, mocks or fails to understand what they are saying then the possibility of reaching a conclusion, at least in that instance, is foreclosed; this need for conversational confirmation leads individuals to keep their deliberations in conformity with the conventions of the local context. Their internal deliberations are often restricted to gut reactions which are subsequently raised in dialogue with others, rather than coming to provisional conclusions which might later be ’shot down by others. The reflexive deliberations of the communicative reflexive are constrained by the transactional dynamics of the dialogues through which they are enacted. As Archer describes the consequences:

What the practice of communicative reflexivity does it to privilege the public over the private, shared experience over lone experiences, third-person knowledge over first-person knowledge. Through the tendency for every issues to be reduced to the experiential common denominators of its discussants, communicative reflexivity is inhospitable to the innovative, the imaginative or the idiosyncratic. In short, the speculative realm is severely truncated in favour of common sense, common experience and common knowledge.

So what are the likely consequences of the decline of this mode of reflexivity? The normative conventionalism enacted through such dialogues shouldn’t be understood merely as censorious; it also offered guidance and orientation through the sense, experience and knowledge - however fallible – which were reproduced conversationally as well as the socio-cultural immediacy with which they were available. The questions faced by the communicative subject which led them to seek guidance through conversation (i.e. all those sorts of life questions which common sense, common experience and common knowledge might have served to answer) persist in spite of the absence of those cultural resources which might have helped them answer the questions.

However the hegemony of such common sense, entrenched through the reliance of the communicative reflexive on conversational confirmation, meant that the answers given were routine: there were socio-culturally available answers to existential questions which were possessed of both immediacy and expansiveness. One’s dialogical partners were usually able to provide common sense answers to questions which usually effectively answered the question. While it might seem from a contemporary standpoint that such traditionalism is inherently limited – perhaps being seen to represent a subjective standpoint being falsely presented as objective fact – in fact the very conditions which gave rise to its stable reproduction also underwrote its objectivity; when common sense is being reproduced like this, its mode of reproduction (through substantive webs of dialogical partnership) relies on a grounding in shared experience, landmarks and reference points – a shared mental topography – which ensures its relevance  as a source of answers to existential questions. So the absence of such a shared mental topography and the seeming irrelevance of common sense are two consequences of the same underlying cause: the decline of contextual continuity. The process was routine because the answers, as well as the underlying questions, were common… the stock of accumulated shared knowledge which was socio-culturally available to the subject was usually sufficient to answer their questions.

This is one form of reflexive guidance, as the subject seeks answers to existential choices in their immediate socio-cultural environment i.e. their friends, family and colleagues. While those answers work they retain their status as common sense: tried and tested ways of coping with life. However their tried and tested status rests on their foundation in contextual continuity so, as it erodes, so too will common sense i.e. the immediate socio-cultural environment as a sustainable source of reflexive guidance. This leaves a number of options:

1. The subject must work with others to try and (re)produce contextual continuity within their socio-cultural environment, although given the structural factors leading to the erosion of contextual continuity this involves narrowing horizons and limiting goals so they stay within the immediate context.
2. The subject must look further into their socio-cultural environment – for authoritative figures and/or perscriptive organizations – as a source of guidance.
3. The subject must look to the cultural system - for understandings, ideas, ideals and theories – which help them make sense of their situation as so provide a source of guidance.
4. The subject must fall back upon their own resouces to negotiate a path through their situation without relying on outside guidance.

In my next post I’ll try and expand on my notion of reflexive guidance, as well as considering what it involves for each of the four options described above.

Who We Are and Where We Come From?

To belatedly offer some context to the list of questions I posted up at the end of July, it’s worth explaining that this is my new PhD topic. After much thought and some much needed inspiration, I’ve abandoned the rather dour inquiry into student finance after realising that my original topic was both what I actually wanted to spend the next 5 years of my life doing and, contrary to my earlier thoughts, actually made sense as a sociological investigation. In short: I want to investigate the relationship between who we are and where we come from. In slightly more substantive terms this entails an inquiry into how our social and cultural background conditions the way in which we think about ourselves and our lives, as the social and economic situations we face in our nascent contexts shape our access to and engagement with culture; this in turn shapes the cultural resources available to us, with and through which we attempt to elaborate an understanding of our selves and our place in the world. How does where we come from shape who we are? How do the ideas and understandings we meet with as we grow up shape the ways in which we move through adolescence and enter adulthood?

In asking these questions I’m understanding all functioning humans as possessed of the mental capacity to consider themselves in relation to their circumstances and vice versa i.e. as reflexive. My core theoretical concern is with how culture shapes reflexivity and is in turn shaped by it. How do the cultural items we encounter socio-culturally throughout our lives (from parents, siblings, peers, teachers, media: the realm of intersubjectivity, of shared and contested meanings) and those we encounter in the cultural system (the creations of the human mind which, once created, possess partial autonomy: the realm of libraries and the Internet) shape how we consider ourselves in relation to our circumstances and vice versa? Such reflexive considerations necessitate self-knowledge and social knowledge. I would suggest that we are neither the unthinking pawns of culture (as in, for example, the strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis) but nor do we generate the semantic and conceptual tools of reflexivity ex nihilo. We stand in relation of adoption and appropriation, as well as rejection and repudiation, to cultural items which we encounter socio-culturally and in the cultural system. These relational stances are continually changing because we are continually changing, as our the socio-cultural circumstances within which we find ourselves: our engagement with culture is path-dependent i.e. the choices we made in the past shape where we now stand in relation to socio-cultural circumstances which are themselves changed, in part, by our choices.

One of the main objectives with my research will be to adequately conceptualise this process. In some instances the relations I’m considering aren’t conceptually problematic e.g. a young individual comes across an ideal in a book which greatly resonates with their current existential predicament and greatly shapes how they approach their later life. This could be called an explicit cultural item where something is appropriated in a manner which makes it a substantive presence in their reflexive deliberations i.e. it’s something which they think about and care about in a explicit way. Yet there are also those implicit cultural items which exist as unspoken understandings and frame our deliberations, providing the categories within which we are able to consider ourselves and our circumstances. I need to conceptualise the implicit and the explicit, as well as h0w they sit in relation to socio-cultural interaction and the cultural system.

Another review of Archer’s work

A very good summary here.

Who We Are and Where We Come From: Culture, Reflexivity and Personal Identity

1. How does personal identity (second-order emotionality) emerge amongst young adults (18-22) who leave home for the first time and move to university?
2. How do the nascent socio-cultural context(s) of the young adults influence the later emergence of personal identity, or the failure thereof, while at university?
3. How is this emergence shaped by the socio-cultural context they inhabit and the situations they face while at university?
4. How is this emergence shaped by the structural context they inhabit and the situations they face while at university?
5. Does the practice of a distinct mode of reflexivity emerge while at university and, if so, how is this influenced by the aforementioned factors?
6. How, if at all, do different modes of reflexivity foster distinct stances toward culture? How do these stances concretely manifest themselves in forms of engagement with culture?
7. How do these corresponding forms of engagement with culture impact on the life of the reflexive subject?
8. How do different modes of reflexivity impact aggregatively on cultural morphogenesis and morphostasis?

A Summary of Archer on Reflexivity

Personal Reflexivity and the Internal Conversation

So what does Archer propose to be these “sui generis properties and powers” that emerge in humans as a consequence of their embodied interactions with the world? In addition to fundamental capacities for consciousness and a sense of selfhood that emerges as part of our practical dwelling in the world (Plumb, 2008), Archer (2003) identifies our capacity for “internal conversation” as the point of contact between our internal powers of reflexivity and the powers possessed by the external world. The very fact, she insists, that we can reflect on our external reality in relation to our personal concerns, and, given that external social influences are not insulated from our internal reflexivity, the internal conversation becomes an important means through which human beings can both sustain or transform their natural and social contexts.

To unpack what Archer means by the “internal conversation” it is necessary to come to grips with a couple of essential qualifications. First, as part of our internal deliberations, Archer suggests, we constantly work to address and balance concerns that reflect different aspects of our engagement with the world – our physical, practical, and social encounters – one against the other. We do not do this in a vacuum, however. By fate of birth, we are thrown in particular ways into a world that variously constrains and enables us. At the same time as we deliberate the relative balance between our varied concerns, we must also confront and negotiate the different ways the world impinges upon us. The final results of this engagement Archer (2003) characterizes as our unique “modus vivendí” (p. 149).

Second, while Archer recognizes the important contribution of language to our internal conversation, we do not think just with words. In fact, the conversations we have with ourselves are quite different from the conversations we have with others. Perhaps most crucially are the ways we utilize a vast range of tools in our thinking that are absent in our conversations with others, like images, symbols, personal and public codes, and so on. She approvingly quotes Charles Saunders Peirces’s insight “that the more multi-media ‘booty’ is incorporated from the outer world, the richer the life of the mind becomes” (Archer, 2007, p. 76).
Archer identifies some other distinctive features of the internal conversation: 1) our internal conversations are conducted in silence and, as such, are private: no one can know for certain what we are thinking except ourselves (p. 73); 2) our internal conversations can be compact and elliptic, moving at lightning speed, or, like an accordion, expansive and deliberate, dwelling incessantly on a single pressing point of concern (p. 75); 3) given our personal history, our internal conversations develop a personal, even idiosyncratic character that contributes much to our uniqueness; and 4) because our internal conversations focus on our own concerns and contexts, depending on the extent to which we share the same contexts with other people, communicating the results of our musings with other people may be more or less difficult. This is important, Archer insists, because it shapes the extent to which our internal conversations are connected with our external conversations with other people. When our contexts are continuous with those of others, our internal conversations dovetail more neatly with our external conversations than when our contexts diverge. This feature contributes much to the various ways different people conduct their internal conversations.

Modes of Personal Reflexivity

In her most recent work, Archer (2003; 2007) has engaged in empirical explorations of the modes of personal reflexivity that prevail in contemporary times. Consistent with the tenets of critical realism, she admits that the four modes she now distinguishes may not fully capture the full range of possible ways people engage in their internal conversations. Her empirical investigations may, in fact, only tap a few of the actual ways people talk to themselves about their concerns. As well, it may also be that, under different circumstances, the real power of personal reflexivity (like all generative mechanisms) might support other actual modes.
With these caveats in mind, Archer identifies four principle modes of personal reflexivity: communicative reflexivity, autonomous reflexivity, meta reflexivity, and fractured reflexivity. Communicative reflexivity is a mode often utilized by people in contexts of strong contextual continuity (static or unchanging social contexts). The internal conversations of communicative reflexives are strongly intertwined with their external conversations with others to the point that they, “require completion and confirmation by others before resulting in courses of action” (Archer 2003, p. 93). For good or for ill, communicative reflexivity tends to reproduce static social and cultural structures.

Autonomous reflexivity is a mode more commonly encountered in contexts in which there is discontinuity where people increasingly turn to relying upon their own internal resources to make their way in the world. In this case, rather than requiring external conversations to confirm actions, autonomous reflexives can think through practical strategies and embark on independent courses of action to address their own concerns. Autonomous reflexivity tends to enhance the disconnection already experienced by people in discontinuous contexts. Archer suggests that, very often, this disconnection makes it easier for autonomous reflexives to avoid or overcome constraints or to seeking or taking advantage of enablements that would not be pursued by communicative reflexives. As a result, autonomous reflexives often achieve social mobility. Collectively, their actions tend to further aggravate contextual discontinuities.
Meta reflexivity is another mode that transpires in contexts that are discontinuous. The difference in this case is that, rather than focusing on thinking through autonomous courses of action, meta reflexives “are critically reflexive about their own internal conversations and critical about effective action in society” (Archer, 2003, p. 93). Meta reflexives also can experience increased disconnection from their contexts, in this case, because they are increasingly skeptical of and uncommitted to taken-for-granted cultural and social structures. When they aggregate, meta reflexives can generate great impetus for social and cultural change (although, very often, they require the participation of more strategically oriented autonomous reflexives to orchestrate effective action).
In the case of fractured reflexivity, contextual discontinuity results in an abandonment of the internal conversation as a power that is causally efficacious for addressing personal concerns. While people still think about issues, in this case, their thinking simply further exacerbates the sense that reflecting on things will not make a difference. This mode, increasingly common in today’s churning social and cultural contexts, provides few options and little impetus for personal transformation or social change.

Taken from this paper: http://www.oise.utoronto.ca/CASAE/cnf2008/OnlineProceedings-2008/CAS2008-Plumb.pdf