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Self-Concept

  
 
ellen
23:42 / 05.04.04
I am putting together an artist's talk about self portraiture and I'm trying to explore a few questions about what people use to define the Self.
Is the self those traits which you identify with internally? Or is self better defined as those traits you choose to externalize (decided by social conditioning)? If the general community, within which you live, does not percieve the traits that you assign to yourself, are they really a part of you?
I'm an artist, sometimes I have a hard time putting questions together--please feel free to ask for clarification
 
 
SMS
00:04 / 06.04.04
On the one hand, it sounds like you're asking for which kinds of characteristics are most essential to the individual as it relates to an art project. If that's the question, then I think that's deeply personal, and I can only answer for me.

On the other hand, because this is the Head Shop, we could what the essential characteristics of a person are. The best explanation I have heard of the idea of the self is the idea of the unity in which all our characteristics inhere. This doesn't imply any hierarchy of characteristics, which is why the question as it relates to the art project is so personal.
 
 
Sleepsix
00:04 / 06.04.04
Sincere individuals will indentify with their inner selves, or not even bother constructing an outer self.

Others will try to convince themselves that their their masks are their true faces.
 
 
---
01:14 / 06.04.04
Is the self those traits which you identify with internally? Or is self better defined as those traits you choose to externalize (decided by social conditioning)?

I'd say that it's all the same thing, but the internal part is more in Harmony with life and it's energies whereas the outer part is more like a shell or a mask/suit that the person wears until he/she grows enough to let/allow the inner self become the outer self aswell.

'Merging with the Tao', or any of the other myriad concepts, saying and ideas that are used to describe the same thing.
 
 
Disco is My Class War
05:55 / 06.04.04
Personally, I really hate talk about 'concepts of the self'. I think we have lots of selves and none of them can be reduced into one, and we can never know what they all are. We are radically different to ourselves.

Nevertheless, I was recently reading a very interesting book about affect (emotion) by Silvan Tomkins, a US 20th C psychologist and philosopher. He describes an exercise where he asks people to draw themselves, and then makes them close their eyes and 'repeat' the self-portrait. What you end up with, he argues, is a cariacature of a cariacature: something that people immediately are a little shocked by, but in the drawing there will be echoes or traces of things we feel about ourselves. I tried it and it really was interesting: in the original, I accidentally made myself look like Frankenstein (hardly a coincidence, if you know me, although I don't actually look like that); in the eyes-closed one, it was a lot clearer/less monstrous, but I was missing an arm and everything was spatially disconnected, the legs didn't connect with the torso, the eyes were standing out by themselves beside the head.

Perhaps this is useful for you, I don't know. The book is called Shame and her Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader, edited by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and someone else I can't remember. It's a great book anyhow, try to look at it in a library. The stuff about self-portraits in in one of the final chapters.
 
 
Cat Chant
08:16 / 06.04.04
Like Mister Disco, maybe, I'm not convinced by the idea of someone's actions proceeding from a unified 'true self' that lies behind or before their actions, but then I have a tendency to think people are only effects of reading. I wanted to pick up on thisphrase:

their masks are their true faces

The word person is derived from the Latin persona, a mask, which suggests the distinction is a bit less clear-cut than you make it sound. Not to mention whether the face is the best metaphor for personhood; what's wrong with the rest of the body? Or, since we're all text here anyway, prose style? Hannah Arendt defines style (in The Human Condition, I think) as the unsubstitutable way each of us does things - it's the mode of acting that happens despite ourselves, the thing we have no control over, however we try to disguise it. From fiddling about with my writing style, I think there's something to that: there's a certain level of sentence construction or thought that I ultimately can't disguise and that makes my writing recognizable. That notion of 'style' seems to me to be an interesting way in to thinking about what Ellen's calling 'the self'.
 
 
trouser the trouserian
12:16 / 06.04.04
My views of selfhood have been influenced by sociologists such as Irving Goffman - the concept that selfhood is performative, and one of my all-time favourite Goffmanisms being:

Our sense of being a person can come from being drawn into a wider social unit; our sense of selfhood can arise through the little ways in which we resist the pull. Our status is backed by the solid buildings of the world, while our sense of personal identity resides in the cracks."
(from Asylums)
 
 
i
12:26 / 06.04.04
I think it's pretty much a given that the value of self portrait is largely limited to the artist themselves - the artist might recognise traits suggested in a self portrait but only because they knew they were there in the first place, also that the process is probably more important than the product and to this end and, continuing from what Deva said and 'the unsubstitutable way each of us does things', some method of capturing the creative process itself might be more revealing - a photographic self portrait of the artist at work?

Is the self those traits which you identify with internally? Or is self better defined as those traits you choose to externalize (decided by social conditioning)?

Yeah, both. The fact that you say 'choose to externalise' suggests that the outer persona is intentionally limited by the individual in it's reflection of what/how the individual percieves themselves to be - but how do you externalise this? are we talking about the clothes you wear/ music you listen to etc.? Yeah, so you can wear black to reflect a dark disposition but you are always limited in your capacity to do this by your inescapable, individual human form. I reckon the two are inextricable but often at odds, people often try so hard to modify themselves apparently to fit their own perception of themselves, probably quite unsuccessfully, which would suggest that the individual's inner perception of themselves is the more important/dominant. I know this has kind of been said before but I'm trying to imagine how this works in conventional self portraiture. The external persona has to be unreliable - the fact that it's material makes it a pretty poor vehicle for the conveyal of all the abstract shit that makes you you, regardless of whether you know what that is in the first place. I think Deva's point about style, the way you do things is the only real way of getting round/transcending the unreliable physical manifestation of ourselves and how you portray these artistically. Writing (and language in general I guess) seems to be a good way of exhibiting personal 'style' because the form and medium are the same for everyone. It's how you use it that differentiates. The limitless form of expression available to the artist might actually be an obstacle to/distraction from what the self portarit could say. Dumbass example but getting a group of people to make a 'self portrait' with 5 simple triangles might afford a similar means of idividual expression within a shared framework (?).

Not very head shop nor insightful but hope that there is a point in there somewhere. I will sit here sipping espresso, replete with goatee and black beret and hope that I haven't exposed myself as the dumbass I am. Or think I am.
 
 
ajm
13:02 / 06.04.04
I would say the 'self' is defined by relationship, that is the relationship between yourself and other people, things, ideas and maybe most importantly the relationship you have with your 'self-image'. It seems to me most people identify themselves with these things, through their experiences, through beliefs, through knowledge and people and through these things people feel they are defined. Without these things some people would feel they are nothing, and this feeling I think frightens some. Some believe (as I do) that this self is superficial and that there is a deeper essence that can be found when one strips away this outer layer of self that one may hold onto. Look at the Buddhists who try to destroy the ego (the known self) in order to understand the truth and their true essences.

I don't see how it's relevant how others see you, although I contend that people can create serious illusions in regard to their 'self-image' and talking with people about this may give you a clearer view of this (I've never used the term 'self concept' but I'm assuming it's the same as 'self-image'). To speak on one of your points, I would say the self is in the inner realm and when we socialize we act a certain way, but it's what motivates the action that is important and not so much the action. If one is a quiet person, it may be because he/she is timid or self-centered or thoughtful or dumb, only that person knows for sure (unless that person deceives themselves) and others can only speculate. Others may say that that person is 'shy', yet that seems to be only a consequence of the self.

I read something somewhat relevent to this last night about Jung's Psychological Types that I won't go into detail (just a reference for the curious). Jung's theory of introverts and extraverts are explained and the four differ functions of self, namely; sensation, thinking, feeling, and intuition.
http://www.cgjungpage.org/content/view/426/29/

How would a person with no self-image (concept) portrait themselves? Is there even such a person?
 
 
trouser the trouserian
15:29 / 06.04.04
Some believe (as I do) that this self is superficial and that there is a deeper essence that can be found when one strips away this outer layer of self that one may hold onto. Look at the Buddhists who try to destroy the ego (the known self) in order to understand the truth and their true essences.

Perhaps you could elaborate on your understanding of Buddhist views of the self, ajm. My understanding of the Buddhist Yogacara doctrine is that there is no 'essential' quality of selfhood and indeed, it is the very notion of selfhood which leads to suffering. As I understand the Buddha's teachings on selfhood (from reading the Pali Canon), the Buddha rejected any notion of an essential selfhood such as atman or Jiva and, rather, adopted the view of selfhood as arising from the interaction of a variety of dynamic processes (i.e. namarupa, samskara, samjnaa, vedana and vijnana, originally).
 
  
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