Social Experience and the Constructed Self

Social Experience and the Constructed Self

In the last few decades, our culture has adopted postmodernism as the predominant model of thought, as opposed to the modernist philosophy previously held. It is important that we understand both of these theories in order to fully understand the way that technology is shaping our thinking and our identities as individuals. Stephen Frosh, in his article “Social Experience and the Constructed Self,” explains each of these philosophies in terms of their definitions of individualism in “a world like this” (273).

First Frosh uses Berman’s All that is Solid Melts into Air to explain modernist thinking. Essentially, according to Berman, modernism, which was born in the European Enlightenment, is “the human and cultural response to modernization and the experience of modernity” (274). It “celebrates the excitement of perpetual change and also attempts to find a way of living with continually dissolving realities and fluctuating boundaries” (274). In other words, modernism aims to give people “the power to change the world that is changing them, to make their way through the maelstrom and make it their own” (Berman, qtd. in Frosh 275).

What are the tenets of this theory which acknowledges society’s impact on individualism yet sees individuals as empowered to make their own way? At its heart is the belief that the “self” exists in an internal set of emotions, intentions, and beliefs. This self is then expressed in our actions and discovered in our writing (275).

Modernism holds that people are “subjects as well as objects of modernization” (Berman, qtd. in Frosh 275). People are subjects in that they have “a genuine capacity for production and elaboration of a personal self-...

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... individual as self determining: bulimics are in charge of the illness and must only will themselves to not throw up in order to solve the problem. A postmodernist on the other hand looks to the bulimics’ culture and background and society as the cause of the problem. Postmodernists may blame society for pressuring women to be thin. Ultimately, they would call the problem a social problem and not an individual one.

Frosh believes that people construct their selves and challenges modernist thinking by asking “Who can tell what is ‘real’ in the human character, what pre-given, what invented?” (272). There are no easy answers, and with the dawning of the Internet Age, as individuals have nearly unlimited access to all kinds of information and contact with so many other selves that they appropriate daily, defining the true “self” is only growing more difficult.