Journalfor Ihc 7hcoty of &&I Behaviour 25:3 002 1-8308

The Identification of Self

ANDREW TRAVERS

The approach is by a winding road about nine miles long, boldly cut out of the rock . . . the road comes to an end in front of a long underground passage leading into the mountain, enclosed by a heavy double door of bronze. At the far end of the underground passage a wide lift, panelled with sheets of copper, awaits the visitor. Through a vertical shaft of 330 feet cut right through the rock, it rises up to the level of the Chancellor’s [Hider’s] dwelling place. Here is reached the astonishing climax. The visitor finds himself in a strong and massive building containing a gallery with Roman pillars, an immense circular hall with windows all around . . . It gives the impression of being suspended in space . . . The whole, bathed in the twilight of the autumn evening is grandiose, wild, almost hallucinating. The visitor wonders whether he is awake or dreaming.

Francois-Poncet, October 20, 1938

I. INTRODUCTION

This essay is about the selves that manifest in face-to-face interactions. I concentrate on how interacting selves experience their identifications of one another and of themselves. The thesis I advance is that in face-to-face interaction the identification of self ought to be understood as a dual process of idayication with and ident$catwn as self. The notion of idenhjication with is new to interaction sociology and most of the essay explores what it means. The interactional self, I suggest, is not, and cannot be, fully appreciated unlessfirst it is idenhjied with.

I write introvertively within the confines of two essays by Erving Goffman (‘On Face-Work’ [(1955) 1972al and Frame Ana&sysis [1975]) where he goes as far as he can and in my opinion (Travers 1994a) farther than anybody else into

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face-to-face interaction. But I outbid Goffman in finding (Section IV) that his sociology falters self-destructively just where he begins to identit with his own self and with others’ selves (the same point is made about Goffman’s self- destruction with regard to his textuality in Smith and Travers 1995 and, with regard to his supersession of Durkheim, in Travers 1996). Unlike Schutz (1962), I do not distinguish between phenomenological realms but grant equal status to pre-‘natural attitude’ (purely phenomenological), ‘natural attitude’ (which I call ‘second-nature cultural’), and artfully fictive realms. Like Goffman I feel that they are equally invisible realms until they are framed (Goffman 1975) by interactional involvements therein (Travers 1992a; 1992b), and I abide by Goffman’s rule that social reality is real to the degree that it is engrossing, whatever its substance (see Sharrock 1996 for a critique of Goffman’s rule and a defence of sociology as the exploration of Schutz’s ‘natural attitude’). This has the effect that I imply that identzjicuhbn as - because it is less engrossing is inferior to or less real than identzjicution with, which further implies that interactional identzjication With is more emotional than specular. (To keep my argument manageable, I write as though all iden@cutions with are full engrossments.) It is of course epistemologically and morally disturbing that &@cations with produce idmtjfications as that are distortions, over-valuations, and selections from what could be seen in finer but less integrated detail without emotion and with detachment. But take, for example, the case of the anorexic adolescent woman (Bordo 1994). She identy’ks herself as a self who exerts control in her life when she ident$es with her abnormally starved body. Researchers have said that such a woman suffers from ‘false perception’ (anorexic women looking in mirrors sometimes actually see their starved bodies as - idenhi them (ls - too fat). But, if we allow that idenhjicution with self is going on here, we can understand that the anorexic woman is always too fat in her own eyes, however thin in others’ eyes. (Bordo [I9941 says that anorexics are just extreme examples of nearly all western women today.) ‘False’ perception of her body remains true perception of her self tragically expressed by such a body. And this is not so well understood by researchers who gloss over the anorexic’s idmtzjicution with (in this case) body- as-self. That is an example of how the term &@cution with can illuminate otherwise b a i n g phenomena. But one has to identii zuith the anorexic woman to understand that, and one does.

Elsewhere (Travers 1992a; 1994b) I argue in effect that iden@cutiow as, under a rtgime of detachment methodology, indicate an unacknowledged idenyication with the detachment methodology itself. I say that idmhjicution with a detachment methodology prevents a full experiental apprehension of the emotional (because engrossing) phenomena that it is meant to grasp. That argument poses major problems for the devizing and application of methods for the study of self, and I address those not only in Travers (1 994b) but also in the Conclusions of this essay. Meanwhile this essay expands on the construction of self that that argument points to, and could be read as a suicide-of-sociology note. Unlike Mead ([ 19341

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1962)’ who is confused about his ‘I-me’ distinction in face-to-face interaction,’ probably because he is cultured to take identity more seriously than I take it, I have little to say about what it is like to receive engrossment from others. (I believe, however, that the currently fashionable criticism by interactant A of interactant B that he or she is ‘too intense’ registers a phenomenon of interactant A not being able or willing to fully dmh5 with his or her self with which in his or her irritated judgment interactant B patently does ‘too’ f d y idenb3 with. In this essay I simplifjl interaction to exclude asymmetrical intensities of engrossment, which would open up a discussion of receiving as well as giving attention [but see Footnote 71.)

Interactant identity (including the identification of an interactant as a human being) in my way of thinking only has interactional salience in proportion to the emotion invested in its identification by itself and by its co-interactants (Travers 1994b). So no cultural image of an essential interactant nature should be sociologically regarded as the aboriginal genesis of interactive behaviour. Of course, one such image is self, and perhaps it is guiltier than any other of driving people to extremes of unempirical certitude, which is why it needs interactionist therapy (in the Wittgensteinian sense of that word).

I am persuaded that interactive behaviour if deemed a function of its &&$cation as the behaviour of this or that identity is not apprehended so sociologically (against the grain of cultural determination) as the same behaviour read as the processual product of interactants’ idmhjications with one another. Therefore, entailed in my argument, is the implication that analyses which s t a r t out by taking for granted our culture’s ready-to-go identities just have not recognized how an identity is an identity by virtue of being acted to be seen (or seen to be acted) as an identity so that it can be dentgfied with. (Thus, for example, Schwalbe’s [1993:334] idea that self must answer to biology comes from his &&$cution with biology, misleadingly represented as the divination of a biological impulse.) Clearly one can elect a single broad identity - Schwalbe’s ‘biology’ or the economists’ ‘rational actor’ or the feminists’ ‘female’ or the ‘body’ or ‘life narrative’, to name but five - as the handle and hold-all of every other possible identity only by so intransigently idenhzing with it as to be deceived into thinking that it could exist apart from such an identilicatory process (I return to this theme in a sub-section of my Conclusions [‘The Fundamentalisms of Self in Society and Social Theory’]).

The essay is organized as follows. First I read Flaubert’s ([1857] 1992) fictional character Emma Bovary. Emma Bovary as a sign-set in thrall to a compelling consumerist sign-set of her epoch is a good example of the self that patriarchal capitalism still fosters. This is followed by a swift review (which incidentally warrants Emma Bovary’s paradigm status) of how even the most accomplished theorists (Barthes [1974; 19761, Tanner [1979], Sartre [1981; 1987; 19891, Kaplan [ 19931, and Bourdieu [ 19931) cannot help idenb5Zng with Emma Bovary - because she is so well written and so deeply readable. Then, for the reason that

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Goffman’s sociological idea of self (unintendedly) conforms closely to the logic of Emma Bovary, I critically define the self of Goffman’s rigorously exteriorized interactant (Goffman 1972~; 1993). Noting, however, that Goffman’s version of self falters at the brink of his identykation with it, I slightly develop his idea of self at this juncture. After that, to broaden my relevance - through (1) a theory of reader identifications in the capitalist genre of the novel (Davis 1987) and (2) a theory of subject construction in ethnography (Clough 1992; 1993) - I show how Goffman’s ‘self is congruent with Davis’s and Clough’s accounts of the fictively-real everyday-life selves that are owed to the growth of patriarchal capitalism. Davis and Clough strongly reinforce my thesis that the identification of self is only achieved by people (including analysts of the self) when they idenhb with self. The Conclusions (Section VI) summarize my split of the identification of self into identykation with and idmhjication as before fanning out into separate preliminary statements concerning the potential of my thinking for studies of violence, TV consumption, the fundamentalisms of self, and face-to-face inter- action. Finally, to reflexively avow my message, I close the essay with ‘I Identify with Me’ (Section VII). My single purpose throughout is to argue that the identifcation of self is desirably the exploration of the experiences of idmC5fication with. This exploration would be pre-empted if it fell back into the cultural habit of identifjmg self by identzzing its signs as signs of a self that can be detachedly observed. So the rationale of such an exploration is the sociological one of identifying the interactional self without ignoring the major part of this cutural phenomenon, that is, the experience of it.

Before now passing on to Emma Bovary, I need to introduce a recurrent phase, ‘preferred hegemonic code’. The phrase combines ‘ideology’ and ‘dis- course’ (Pu rv i s and Hunt 1993), ‘code’ (Baudrillard 1993) and ‘hegemony’ (Gramsci 1971). It refers to a seductive constellation of signs that promises fulfilment to the interactant who views it as preferable to any other constellation. The substance of ‘preferred hegemonic code’ for Emma Bovary and her derivatives is a flawless and fluid and sharply televisual hallucination, that of advertisement reality in late capitalism.

11. THE PARADIGM SELF O F EMMA BOVARY

My reading of Flaubert’s Madurn Bovary ([1857] 1992) describes how self seen through the character of Emma Bovary is:

1. Least the self it thinks and feels that it is when strictly bound by an identity that (a) prevents release into its preferred hegemonic code and @) thus coerces an unhappiness with which it most resentfully idmhjies. 2. Most assured of experiencing its selfhood as an indomitable but chaotic liveliness when it outstrips the given forms of its imputed identity by entering a state of commodity semiosis.

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These two propositions have no more complicated meaning than that Emma Bovary as a self lives when she can identifjr with a selfhood that cannot be sealed inside a closed identity and that Emma Bovary is a self who, when exiting identity and entering her hegemonic code of preference, melts her robotic routines into a nearly psychotic vivacity. It is intended that the Emma self be read as an exemplar of any contemporary self in our culture (the culture that can follow my meaning).

I first look at Emma’s hegemonic code of preference and then at her most extreme emotions and experiences or selfhood within that code. After that, I reflect on Flaubert’s seemingly variant literary code before - in the next section (111) - going on to show that Flaubert and Emma Bovary are not isolated historical freaks but major cultural figures who have seductive capacity to compel sophisticated theoretical readings in the pursuit of whom Emma Bovary really is and, in general, just what a self might be.

Emma Bovary’s Hegemonic Code of Preference

At school Emma is carried away by books that send ‘the sonorous lamentations of romantic melancholia echoing out across heaven and earth’ (28). Discarding as ‘useless anything that did not lend itself to her heart’s immediate satisfaction’ (28), she reads as if to enrich herself: ‘From everything she had to extract some kind of personal profit. . .’ (28). Predictably, after such self-tuition, Emma experiences marriage to a country doctor (Charles Bovary) as exile from a constantly intoxicating fictional culture. But Emma only once mingles with people who seem to her to belong to the world of her reading. This is when she and Charles are invited to a ball by a Marquis drumming up support for his election to the Chamber of Deputies. Amongst the crowd at the ball ‘[v]arious men’ stand out ‘by a family likeness’ (39) depicted ironically by Flaubert as that of naked wealth

Their coats looked better cut, of smoother cloth, and their hair, combed forward to curl at the temple, seemed to glisten with a superior pomade. They had the complexion that comes with money, the clear complexion that looks well against the whiteness of porcelain, the lustre of satin, the bloom of expensive furniture, and is best preserved by a moderate diet of exquisite foodstuffs. Their necks turned gracefully in their low cravats; their long whiskers flowed down over their collars; they wiped their lips on handkerchiefs embroidered with large initials, and deliciously scented. Those who were past their prime looked youthful, and even the faces of the young wore a certain maturity. In their coolly glancing eyes lingered the calm of passions habitually appeased; and, from beneath their polished ways, they exuded that peculiar brutality which comes from a too-casual supremacy in everything that demands strength and amuses one’s vanity, the handling of race-horses and the company of fallen women. ( 3 W )

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Thus with the acerbic aplomb of an outsider who likes to feel that he chose his exclusion, Flaubert depicts Emma’s dream culture as a consortium of prize animals standing aloof from a battery society and collectively ruminating the capital that allows them a relatively free range. The code of preference by which Emma is captivated in the above ‘fieldnote’ is nothing but money dressed up as breeding (Veblen [1899] 1994:71-101).

One of the powers of Emma’s preferred hegemonic code is that it can turn heads (Flaubert’s too). Consequently, when Emma’s head is turned, her world spins, most graphically while she is waltzed by a Viscount: ‘[Elverything was turning around them, the lamps, the furniture, the panelling, the parquet floor, like a disc on a spindle’ (41). Flaubert for the rest of his novel never allows Emma to stop spinning, and her moral progress through his text is a centripetal journey to the heart of her code. This journey begins immediately after the ball. ‘The memory of the Viscount haunted her reading’ (45) and ‘gradually the circle of which he was the centre’ widens ‘around him’ (45), becoming ‘Paris, rippling like the ocean’ (45). Drawn resistlessly towards the glamour of Paris, Emma takes ‘[elverything in her immediate surroundings, the boring countryside, the imbecile petits bourgeois, the general mediocrity of life . . . to be a kind of anomaly, a unique accident that had befallen her alone’ (46). And, mistaking ‘sensual luxury with true joy, elegance of manners with delicacy of sentiment’ (46), Emma starts to believe that love itself cannot be hers ‘without a balcony in some great tranquil chlteau, without a silk-curtained deep-carpeted boudoir, with lavish vases of flowers and a bed on a little pladbrm, without the sparkle of precious stones and the glitter of gold-braided livery’ (46). Thus is Emma launched into the oceanic text of Parisian luxury goods, a seething, whirling wealth of signifiers that promise her fantastic emotional consummation.2 She finds, and gives herself to, her preferred hegemonic code.

Though physically barred from the social world of her preferred hegemonic code, Emma nevertheless dresses for inclusion and behaves as an honorary member. This explains a surprising similarity - lost on most Flaubert critics - between Emma and the secondary characters in her novel. Where Emma is turned towards her Paris text, Charles (her husband), E o n (her first and also her last lover), Homais (the chemist), Guillaumin (a lawyer), and Justin (a servant) are turned towards Emma. Even Rodolphe, the great false love of her life, sees Paris in Emma. In the same way that Emma is to herself her truest self in her imagined Paris, the men in her lie are most themselves when they lose themselves in their idcnt&acions with her behavioural manifestation of her Parisian code. In other words, Emma, an exiled princess in her provincial world, is herself a dissemination of the code signs that she is trying to enter. However, Rodolphe, with whom she finally achieves her most intense experience of selfhood3 is far more Parisian (more coded) than she is. He is a thirty-four-year-old bachelor estate owner with an income of 15,000 francs per annum. Introduced to the reader as a man of the world - his temperament is ‘brutal‘ (104) and his

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intelligence ‘shrewd’ (1 04) - he runs his eyes over Emma on their first encounter as though she is sexual livestock at an auction:

She is very nice! . . . Lovely teeth, dark eyes, a dainty little foot, and the style of a Parisienne . . . And we are bored. We want to live in town, dance the polka every night. Poor little thing! Gasping for love, just like a carp on the kitchen table wants to be in water. Three words of gallantry and she’d adore you. I’m sure of it. She would be tender, charming . . . Yes, but how do we get rid of her afterwards?’ (104)

Rodolphe is to Emma what Emma is to those men in her world who desire her. He embodies the signs in which Emma longs to live out her dreams of ideal selfhood. On his side, cynically employing Emma’s code against her own respectability, he immediately connects Emma’s ‘style of a Parisienne’ to her need for immersion in a seductive text. That text he delivers as a rhetoric of romantic fate which has it that ‘[nlothing is actually said, you just know. You have seen each other in your dreams’ (1 15). Perfectly at ease within such rhetoric (familiar today in popular song) - and sure of successfully seducing Emma - Rodolphe goes so far as to tell Emma how to see him ‘naturally’:

There it is at last, the treasure you have sought so long, there, right in front of you; shining, sparkling. Though you still have doubts, you dare not believe it; you stand there dazed, just as if you stepped from shadow into sunlight. ( I 15)

The code of Emma’s preference with which she identifies herself in dreams that are the more hers the wilder they are, is one that Rodolphe has mastered that he might master the likes of Emma (but not necessarily the likes of Flaubert, who seeks to master him). Yet, no more than Emma, can Rodolphe operate outside the code, though his advantage of greater code fluency (gained through rank and gender and upbringing) is offset in his overuse of it by the code’s devaluation of love to sensual ~leasure.~ None the less, the great attraction of Emma for Rodolphe is her ‘style of a Parisienne’. If Rodolphe had been cruised by an Emma puffed up with satisfaction in her role of provincial doctor’s wife, he would have laughed at her implicit challenge to his monied Parisian sensibility. He would have acted like the snob that he is behind his raf€ish charm.

Emma’s Experience of Her Self of Choice

Unearned cash value (‘treasure’), dream, and emotional fulfilment are equated for Emma by Rodolphe in a code that like every good ideology denies its own operation (‘you just know’). This ideology issues mellifluously from Rodolphe’s manipulative mouth and, as Rodolphe has calculated, Emma, dazzled as she was at the ball, buys the salemanship, that is, experiences the Parisian code as the truth of whom she must really be:

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And then the swooning was upon her, she remembered the Viscount who had waltzed her at La Vaubyessard, whose beard, like this man’s hair, gave off that scent of vanilla and lemon; and, mechanically, she half shut her eyes to breathe it deeper [ . . . ] then it was all a blur, clouds went past; it felt as if she was st i l l turning in the waltz, under the bright chandeliers, on the Viscount’s arm, as if Leon were not far away, was going to come . . . and yet all this time she could smell Rodolphe’s hair beside her. The sweetness of this sensation went down deep into her past desires. . . (118)

After a strategic absence of six weeks (he claims he had to stay away because he could not control his feelings for her), Rodolphe returns, showering Emma with more blandishments: ‘It was the first time that Emma had ever heard such things said to her; and her vanity, like a body unclenching in a steam-bath, melted open, softly and f d y , at the warm touch of his words’ (1 25). As it were, Rodolphe heats up Flaubert’s water imagery and sells Emma to herself as a true Parisienne, to the ultimate effect of dissolving her fear of being a quick fuck as well as her pain of being condemned to live the living death of a lowly provincial wife:

She summoned the heroines from the books she had read, and the lyric host of these unchaste women began their chorus in her memory, sister-voices, enticing her. She merged into her own imaginings, playing a real part, realizing the long dream of her youth, seeing herself as one of those great lovers she had so long envied. Indeed, Emma felt the satisfaction of revenge. Had she not suffered enough? This was her moment of triumph, and love, so long sealed in, poured out in a copious fizzing rush. She savoured it without remorse, without anxiety, without worry. (131)

Rodolphe, as we have seen, is never fully carried away by his own code, but even when he is writing Emma a farewell letter (‘getting rid of her afterwards’) he can only have a code experience, though in his case it is as arid as orthodox Derrida-led deconstruction. Unable to remember what Emma looks like and seeking to ‘recapture something of her’ (162), Rodolphe tips out the contents of a biscuit tin in which he keeps the love letters he has garnered from years of philandering. Amongst the mementoes is a miniature of Emma. This does not help: ‘Emma’s features gradually blurred in his mind, as if the living and the painted faces, rubbing one against the other, were both being obliterated’ (162). And then Rodolphe loses his focus altogether:

Playing with his souvenirs, he examined the handwriting and the style of the letters, as diverse as their spelling. They were tender or jovial, facetious, melancholy; there were some that asked for love and some that asked for money. From a single word, he conjured faces, from certain gestures, the sound of a voice; sometimes, though, he could remember nothing.

Indeed, these women, crowding together into his thoughts, hampered and diminished each other, as if worn down into a single love, interchangeably. Taking a handful of mixed-up letters, he entertained himself for several minutes by letting them cascade from his right hand to his left. At last, bored and drowsy, Rodolphe went to put the tin back in the cupboard, saying,

- What a load of nonsense! (163)

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Thus the end of love and the end of Emma in a shufRe of dead signifiers. Rodolphe writes his farewell letter and leaves the district the next day. But Emma when she reads the trite phrases of her disabusal nearly dies of shock. The infinitely desirable Parisian lover with whom she has fully idmhjied while fully ident$bg with herself as his mistress has run out on her like a confidence trickster. For Emma, the hand of signifiers that Rodolphe dealt from the code really was fate. Rodolphe, however, can take his pick of further provincial ‘carp’, all of them gasping for it, ‘it’ being transcendent selfhood, no more complex in its way than a hit of crack cocaine, no more subtle than ‘Je suis comme je suis’, no less histrionic than ‘Moi, j e ne regrette rien’.

Flaubert’s Hegemonic Code

Early in the novel, both satiated and impoverished by consumer dreams, Emma is never more herself than when, having ‘nobody to write to’ (47), she wants ‘equally to die and to live in Paris’ (47). So it is not surprising that, beset by frustration and boredom, she should say to herselc ‘I’ve read everything’ (49). Glutted with the emptiness of her reading, Emma is ‘a shipwrecked sailor’ (49) of her Paris text, perusing ‘her solitary world with hopeless eyes, searching for some white sail far away where the horizon turns to mist’ (49). Of course she has no realistic means of embarking on the fictional life she wishes to live even while she loathes her unromantic provincial marriage (‘The future was a dark corridor, and at the far end the door was bolted.’ [49]). Then, emotionally carried away by Rodolphe:

Never had Madam Bovary been so beautiful as she was now; she had the indefinable beauty which comes from joy, from enthusiasm, from success, the beauty which is simply the harmony between temperament and circumstances. Her cravings, her sorrows, her experience of pleasure and her still-fresh illusions had brought her gradually to readiness, like flowers that have manure, rain, wind and sun, and she was blossoming at last in the splendour of her being. Her eyelids seemed perfectly fashioned for those long ardent looks that drown the eye; while deep breathing dilated her fine nostrils and lifted the plump corners of her mouth, shadowed in the light with a faint black down. You would have said some artist skilled in corruption had arrayed about her neck the dropping coils of her hair; they twined in a great mass, neglectfully, betraying the accidents of adultery, that so dishevelled her every day. Her voice, these days, took on more mellow inflections, as did her figure; something subtle that ran straight through you breathed out even from the folds of her gown and from the curve of her foot. (157).

In the context of Flaubert’s fanatical realism it is amazing that Emma, when most the self she would wish to be, is described as having ‘indefinable beauty’. Further, her hair is said to be arrayed about her neck by ‘an artist skilled in corruption’ (‘un artiste habile en corruptions’). Her author in this description is and is not Flaubert and Emma is both a referential illusion and an unspecific

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product of a hack artist (‘habile’ means ‘facile’ as well as ‘skilled’). In this moment of novelistic trompe l‘oeil, an unseeable description by a hack is the crowning realist glory of a heroine Feted for over a century now as a supremely observed character. Emma at her apogee is nothing more and nothing less than her power to inspire the attribution of authorship at so many francs a thousand words. To expatiate, the precise creation of Emma Bovary, if she is most real when she is most herself, is just a beautiful advertisement for adultery, that is, a perfectly hackneyed face, stigmatized by her culture’s definition of beauty (Tseelon 1992). This must be what Flaubert means by his qualifier ‘indefinable’, a word with which Flaubert asserts his hegemonic control. ‘You want to know what my Emma Bovary is really like?’ Flaubert seems to ask, and answers: ‘You have a word for it - “indefinable” - which means nothing to you and a whole writing career to me.’

Having brought Emma to a peak of banal indefinability, Flaubert accelerates his narrative. The deeper Emma travels to the centre of her preferred hegemonic code, the less fulfilment she achieves, and as her search for fulfilment intensifies so too does the power of her own coded beauty. Finally, her promised self, on whom she has staked her inner life, falls apart, even as she unstoppably slakes her erotic thirsts in her rebound affair with Uon:

She was not happy, had never been so. Where did it come from, this feeling of deprivation, this instantanteous decay of the things in which she put her trust? . . . But, if there were somewhere a strong and beautiful creature . . . why should she not, fortuitously, find such a one? What an impossibility! Nothing, anyway, was worth that great quest; it was lies! Every smile concealed the yawn of boredom, every joy a malediction, every satisfaction brought its nausea. . . (231)

Retreating more and more frequently from domesticity to the privacy of her marital chamber, Emma ‘stayed . . . all day long, sluggish, half naked,’ reading ‘until dawn, bizarre books, f d of orgiastic set-pieces and bloodthirsty adventures’ (235). Emma’s masturbatory decline has the flavour of the degenerating Roman arena, and one can imagine her not batting an eyelid at the torture scenes in Bret Ellis Easton’s Ammkzn Pycho (1991). But, sometimes, feverish from ‘the fierce heat . . . which adultery had kindled in her, breathless and shaking with desire’ (235), she opens her window and gazes at the stars, dreaming again of ‘princely lovers’ who easily merge with Lkon, himself having no more character now - when she writes to him - than a series of dissolving lantern slides: ‘She beheld a different man, a phantom put together from her most ardent memories, her favourite books, her most powerful longings. . . ’ (236). (For his part neither does E o n see an identity when he regards Emma. He too experiences a composite of his wildest code expectations: ‘She was the lover in every novel, the heroine in every play, the vague she in every volume of poetry’ [2 151 .4)

So Flaubert resolves Emma’s code aspirations in an identity-churning flux of floating signifiers. Just like it will be for everybody when capitalism collapses,

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Emma’s climacteric is her frantic search for money to pay off debts incurred in the code-induced throes of love. She approaches the local lawyer, Guillaumin, who offers help if she prostitutes herself to him. This is another shipwreck (‘she strode rapidly onward, pale, trembling, enraged, hunting with tear-filled eyes over the empty horizon’ [248]). Then she returns to Rodolphe who, struck for a second time by her radiant beauty, renews his vows of eternal love, only to renege on them the instant she requests a loan. Leaving Rodolphe’s house for the last time, Emma finds that the distant ‘rippling ocean’ of Paris is now all about her like a raging sea: ‘The earth beneath her feet was undulating gently, and the furrows looked like enormous brown waves, pounding the beach’ (255). More than ever carried away by the promise of the Paris text even as she is buffeted by its deconstruction of her provincial physical surround, Emma Bovary duly swallows arsenic and dies.

Flaubert, I think in a fit of code jealousy, concludes his novel with the moral that wholehearted ident&ation with any self - one’s own in its living dream of itself or another’s as the promise of realizing that dream - leads to betrayal and chaos. We do not have to agree with him. Certainly his mistress Louis Colet did not (Enfield 1922). In any case, Emma’s vulnerability predates texts that might have helped her to resist early capitalist consumer codes (she has no Marx, Veblen, or Adorno). Even so, in his style of deconstructive realism (Culler 1982; Jameson 1985; Rignall 1992), Flaubert persuasively demonstrates that a self is not self unless it uientzjies with the dreams that it can see and read. Identities on their own, in Flaubert’s judgment, are just well-turned things, ‘nothings’, like Angel Clare’s brothers in Ess of ,h d’llrbnvilles: ‘mall-marked young men, correct to their remotest fibre; such unimpeachable models as are turned out yearly by the lathe of systematic tuition’ (Hardy 1980).

Now I want briefly to show how attempts to encompass Emma Bovary fall victim to Flaubert’s code with which those who would master him end up identizing despite themselves. This will be my argument for Emma Bovary’s importance as a paradigm capitalist self who anticipates and goes beyond the Goffman self.

111. THEY JUST CAN’T HELP IDENTIFYING WITH EMMA BOVARY

The following readings of Flaubert and Emma Bovary are arranged in an order of increasingly obtuse refusals to analytically identit with Emma Bovary as a character. I select from the many distinguished social and literary analysts who have written about Emma Bovary and Flaubert just five, Barthes, Tanner, Sartre, Kaplan, and Bourdieu. They are chosen both for their distinctive theoretical self-presentations and for their excellence as advocates of those. By very rapidly reviewing the respective failures of Barthes, Tanner, Sartre, Kaplan, and Bourdieu to grasp that their reading of a character in a novel is, despite their analyses,

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premised on their identiiing with that character, the meaning of ht3 f ica twn rerith is deepened in a range of sonorities that become harmoniously coherent if identrjication with Emma Bovary is their common key. It will be seen that dent$cation with is inseparable from any possible appreciation of character, no matter how committed such an appreciation might be to determining a character by identiz.ing it as a character. This is not then an exercise in comparing my interpretation of Emma Bovary with other interpretations. It is rather a continuation of my identjfication with Emma Bovary through my dtsidentizingfim (see Conclusions for explanation of that term) a series of secondary identifications of Madame Bovary. Unfortunately there is no way I can present this as anything other than an expression of a view that I think my reading is a better one. But the presentation of any view as an alternative to other views has no option but to say one way or another that it is better. Or why do it? I must add that, consistently with the meaning of this essay, my view does not entail a vaunting of myself over other selves. It is more a case of, I have a right to speak and to identify with myself.

In this section I seek to more firmly establish (1) a prima facie case that Emma is indeed a paradigm self for social scientists as well as for general readers, (2) that there is a problem about translating Emma from Flaubert’s language to other languages, given that Emma is Emma by virtue of Flaubert’s style, (3) that the above problem points to a problem about the self, that it comes in its full panoply of signs and is necessarily traduced when caught in a contrary set of selectively focused idmti&ing as signs. So my purpose in this section is to stir things up. I deliberately create a vertiginous ‘Emma-effect’ - an absent hot body - which then in Section IV is poured into Goffman’s cold mould of self to crack that mould prior to my connecting Emma - now seen from a distance - to discourses of patriarchal capitalism that are said to be responsible for the production of Emma Bovary and of the contemporary self.

Roland Barthes (1976) pulls off an astonishing contradiction in his confronta- tion with Emma Bovary. He denies the possibility of selfhood altogether - his own included - even while writing an analysis that is singularly his by virtue of its ingratiatingly overwrought insistence that it be read not as an analysis but as an analysis-by-Barthes (and therefore beyond argument since the prose is of a piece with Barthes’ fervid struggle not to be himself any other way). Barthes’ (1 974; 1976) theory of reading posits a disjunction between the text of pleasure, which slavishly conforms to current cultural desiderata, and the text of bliss (‘jouissance’) that ‘imposes a state of loss . . . brings to a crisis [the reader’s] relation with language’ (1 976: 14). In plain English, Barthes says that pleasurable texts give the experience of endless foreplay while a blissful text, by contrast, blows selfhood away in a quasi-orgasm. Madame Bovary is saluted by Barthes for being both pleasurable and orgasmic, despite that orgasm and pleasure are not a continuity (since the ‘historical subject’ is a ‘living contradiction’ [ 1976:2 13). Flaubert, Barthes says, achieves his impossible textual eroticism through a riven language of ‘controlled discontinuities, faked conformities, and indirect

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destructions’ (1976:9). But an analysis of Flaubert’s literary orgasms can only be carried out as imitation: ‘Mou can only speak “in” it, in itsfashion, enter into a desperate plagiarism, hysterically affirm the void of bliss (and no longer repeat the letter of pleasure)’ (1976:22). Thus Barthes reading Flaubert loses himself in Flaubert losing himself in Emma Bovary, and Emma Bovary is reduced by Barthes to a bourgeois revenant, a necrophiliac textual foreplay, much as E o n and (sometimes) Rodolphe are to her. What remains after Barthes’ bliss with Flaubert is the cliche of the loss of the subject in contemporary capitalism (together with the irresponsible attitude that the subject is not worth looking for - in preferred hegemonic codes, for example). But, though Emma Bovary herself has been discarded as if she were a drag costume, Barthes is still there, simpering on about his not being there, which I think is dishonest.

Ironically and orgiastically, then, Barthes’ experience of identiiing with Flaubert- Bovary devastates his sense of having and being a separate self. That devastation is then theorized in a renunciation of any truth of self, which amounts to drawing a sickly veil over the possibility that selves can be intensely selves by their shattering of their own identities. Because Barthes has no theoretical or textual resources with which to register his own experience as a self Edenhzing with Flaubert (and therefore with Emma Bovary), he self-indulgently posits his experience as an experience of being detached from self, from Flaubert’s self, from his own self. Yet he is exactly whom he is - Roland Barthes - because he does just this. Behind his own back, in the act of denying self, he affirms his self in all its ontological pusillanimity. The step he does not take is to see himself doing that. Having shed an analytical identity (a strip-tease that culminates in ‘Look, no body!’), he does not feel like posing in his own authorial skin and perhaps then proclaiming Artaud-style that nudity is just another fancy dress (and yet Barthes is the author who prefers Rimbaud’s ‘Drunken Boat’ to Verne’s Nautilus submarine).

Tanner (1979) is Barthes withoutjoulssance, again refusing Emma her selfhood by cleaving as closely as he possibly can to the words through which Emma Bovary brings to his attention those very words that designate her. Tanner’s (1979:233-367) image of Emma is that she is ‘indefinability within overdefin- ability’ (1 979:3 lo), a character for whom ‘identification is becoming annihilation’ (1979:3 1 l), ‘a presence dissipated by overdescription, a vagueness beyond all words’ (1979:312). Why? Because she is dominated by male ‘ascriptions and descriptions and prescriptions’ (1 979:3 12). Never relaxing his assiduous exercise of an impressively refined literary sensibility, Tanner deflects his identgfication with Emma into a deconstructive obsession with Flaubert’s words. So Tanner only describes words, consigning the emotions they evoke to the same vague space that he says Emma occupies as a self (he calls it a fog). But the words of M u d m Bovay are not just words. They constitute a character just as a montage of signs does a self in interaction. One can only say that Tanner in an unacknowledged state of being carried away by Emma is carried far away from her by an equal

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and opposite feeling that he will not be carried away. He emulates Emma’s own idmtijicutions with a code that he further embroiders with very great finesse, and then - from the outer space of his poetic deconstruction - says that Emma is nobody, a ‘fog in the head of society’ (1979:312). But she is Emma Bovary, a doctor’s wife who is also more than that if a self is more than just an identity. And, if she is a fog, Tanner is foggier still.

Where Barthes would detach himself from Emma so as to instal himself in a ‘crisis’ of language (‘a state of loss’) and where Tanner would further dissipate her into a verbal fog, Sartre moves in the opposite direction. He enters Emma with the apparent intention of possessing her and then turning her into Sartre- Flaubert.

Sartre, as Bourdieu (1993:145-211) and before him Rawls (1984) observe, tries to link the individual directly to society with no intermediary sphere of action (which in Bourdieu is the ‘literary field’ and in Rawls Goffman’s ‘interaction order’). Sartre’s ‘genetic psycho-sociology’ (Bourdieu’s term) is a reflexive psychoanalytical sociology that ‘mashes up, often garrulously and certainly not felicitously’ (Erben 1993:20) the genres of biography, autobiography, and novel. Quixotically attempting to create a total understanding of society by achieving a total understanding of himself, Sartre in his Gargantuan homage to and wrestle with Flaubert, lh Idiot of the Farnib (1981; 1987; 1989), seeks to individualize himself by releasing himself into Emma Bovary and then into Flaubert. Sartre will write without pause, neglecting no branch of his Mandelbrot dialectics, to subsume Emma to Sartre and eventually to shoulder aside Flaubert as the author of the famous: ‘Madame Bovary, c’est moi!’ So, in a rage to portray the whole of society in one massively convulsive take (did Simone de Beauvoir smile?), Sartre, like Barthes, explodes Emma to the ends of his universe, but unlike the universe of Barthes, Sartre’s is not a state of loss but a state of Sartre declaiming nothingness as though his life depends on the world hearing him and after hearing him becoming him. Like Tanner, he forgets completely - such is his uncritical ident3ficalion with her - that Emma is st i l l a provincial doctor’s wife in a novel that bears her name.

Barthes and Sartre treat Emma as a brilliant abuse of language, that is, as a self whose selfhood is denied in bliss (Barthes) and is only to be understood through dialectical existentialism (Sartre). Kaplan (1993) does neither of these things. With- out guile and humbly, she addresses Emma as a real case whose ‘perversity’ is accountable by psychoanalysis. Kaplan argues that Emma is a socially symptomatic sick selfwho, if cured by psychoanalysis, would be much more of a self. However, it is also Kaplan’s argument that the Emma Bovary self is locked into a patriarchal capitalism whose overthrowing she formulates - inadequately, I believe - at the level of the individual and the family, paying scant attention to societal systems and the cultured languages both of the human sciences and of Foucault.

In Kaplan’s (1993) judgement, Emma suffers from four kinds of perversion, (a) hn$zit (abasement towards a love partner as a condition of sexual satisfaction,

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(b) mild kleptomania (in Emma’s case an erotic shopping compulsion that appeases a longing for nourishing human attachment), (c) child abuse (when Emma turns to her infant daughter for emotional consolation after her adult love of Rodolphe has been frustrated), and (d) ‘homeovestism’ (masquerading as a female social gender stereotype so as to dissimulate male sexual appetite and male ambition). Kaplan regards Emma as perverted because Emma’s erotic conduct is a repetitive and compulsive disguise of the humiliated rage she still feels at having been excluded from the relationship between her mother and her father as she fantasized that at around the age of eighteen months.

However, Kaplan’s argument for Emma’s pathology is weak in several respects. First, Kaplan (1 993:507-509) claims that postmodern societies are becoming fixated on sadomasochistic Madonna-style sexual representations in which commodity fetishism (1993:287) is normal and in which perverse scenarios are the norm. But, if normality is doing what everybody else does and if everybody is involved in perverse scenarios, perverse scenarios are not perverse. Rather it is the psychoanalytical fantasy of unstereotyped, de-oedipalized, sexual-emotional relationships that is perverse. Kaplan (1 993: 14) is also dismissive of social gender role stereotypes because they are developed from infantile fantasies about concealed mother-father congress. But she says (1 993:6 1-66) that infantile fantasies make explicit use of those same stereotypes. This is circular: stereotypes cause stereotypes that Kaplan contradictorily tries to pin to pure uncoded infantile fantasies. The upshot is that fantasies ought ideally to be psychoanalytically clean. No other code than one of cured fantasies can offer redemption from a capitalist fetishism of relationships. Yet the psychoanalytic code stems from inquiries into a state of childhood - itself an invention of capitalism - which is designed, Kaplan says, to bolster family life as a forcing house of the gender stereotypes that stabilize hierarchical social relations. So, in this sense, psychoanalysis falsely offers an escape from the conditions that created the psychoanalytic code in the first place. The promised escape would be into unrealizable potentials of maturity, authenticity, and omniscience that somehow will transcend the commodity fetishism by which psychoanalysis is tainted both in its origins and in its provision to consumers of a purchasable cure for neurosis. Finally, Kaplan’s derided gender stereotypes are said by her (1 993:5 12) to prevent social mayhem. In the practice of perversions, stereotypes contain individuals’ rage, envy, anxiety, and depression, and so slow down society’s descent into a bloodbath. This means that the perversions which destroy genuine human relationships preserve the very social order whose collapse would destroy individuals. So Kaplan resurrects Emma Bovary as the resolution of her psychoanalytic contradiction, for Emma, though conned by her preferred hegemonic code, still has her own mind and still is a case to study. Psychoanalysis, the phallic tool that Kaplan would use to fix Emma, snaps off in the body of Flaubert’s text. Emma is too much of a character to passively lie down on Kaplan’s couch-like operating table that is only designed for cosmetic psychic surgery in an age that Kaplan clearly feels

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is ontologically rotten and which Kaplan also clearly feels - since she idenc3f”s with Emma - is more and more in its individual selves identiiing with Emma Bovary.

Bourdieu (1993: 145-2 1 l), reversing Sartre’s approach to Emma Bovary, begins with the ‘power field’ of Flaubert’s epoch. Within that field Bourdieu finds an emerging ‘literary field’ that opposes the terms of the power field even while aligning with it. Writers of Flaubert’s epoch, he says, are dominated but powerful. They are dominated because they have no money, and they are powerfi because they share the values of the dominant class while affecting in the precarious practice of ‘art for art’s sake’ to despise the idea of making money out of creativity. Flaubert stands as the writer’s writer because he assumes all the contradictions and problems of the literary field, composing a ‘socially utopian discourse, stripped of all social markers’ (1993:168) in a text of indetermination and painful lucidity (the one because of the other) whose powerlessness is converted into the social distance of a neutral position that cancels the forces of society. Thus Bourdieu, looking the wrong way down a telescope, reduces Flaubert the writer to a single point in a system (Bourdieu’s) which is no more empirical than a nested set of spatial ‘field‘ metaphors.

Bourdieu’s theory is like the concrete and lead sarcophagus that seals a nuclear reactor. The potent core of Flaubert, which is split and controlled by Flaubert’s painstakingly chain-reactive style into fictional characters that, once broached, rapidly and lethally invade social scientific discourses, is buried alive in Bourdieu. Yet Bourdieu runs his own text on the power of his confessedly naive idenyications with Flaubert’s characters (especially FrCdCric Moreau of Sentimentul Education [1964]). So the main point of Emma Bovary - that she is a character st i l l read as a singular but universal self- just disappears into Bourdieu’s sociology. One might say of Bourdieu that his theory of the literary writer breaks down as a sociological analysis since it is dependent on the uniqueness of Flaubert (Flaubert is a writer but not all writers are Flaubert). Of course, Bourdieu just wants Flaubert to be an extreme typification. But what if Flaubert is genuinely exceptional, and the mould for the rest? Then the literary field did not engender Flaubert. He (Flaubert) engendered both the field and Bourdieu’s analysis.

This selective review by its very brevity gives the feeling that I wish to convey, that Emma Bovary as a fictional character in a nineteenth-century novel has a demonstrable capacity to absorb and transcend those who would contain it within stylistically less aesthetic codes. In addition, my review supports my claim that any self may prevail over its idenyication as a self even when that identification reduces self to its signs. Self must always do this, I argue, because analysis of its signs can only follow the identification of self that comes of identiting with it. And idenyication with cannot follow ident@ation as because ident@ation as, when it is analytical, denies the possibility and desirability of ident@ation with anything other than the analyst’s code. It would seem that idenhjication with precedes idenkjcation as because the appreciation that a set of signs constitutes selfhood is a recognition of continuity between seer and seen operating according to

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second-nature cultured expectations. Idenyicution as, so to speak, is a post hoc reconstruction that the perceiver assumes to have prompted the idenyication with that prompted that reconstruction. Thus I am suggesting that denyication with is always an instant and prior cultural affect. More than that, analysis seems to be motivated by the experience of zdentjfication with which the analyst seeks to abridge to identjfication as by means of fetishizing a methodology of detachment. Perhaps, if the dentjfication with had not been extremely potent, the need for idenyicution as by rival analyst selves would not be so great. Barthes, Tanner, Sartre, Kaplan, and Bourdieu thus make my case that Emma Bovary is a paradigm capitalist self, since she seductively compels their theoretical activity. The conclusion I draw from this section, then, is that self is not caught in analyses that shuffle its signs around. The selfness of self, in my argument, inheres its promise of readerly consummation and is to be found in that experience which always transcends signs even though signs are all it has to go on. Naturally, no deconstructionist, when attempting to reduce dentSficatwn with to identjfication as, would admit to trying to find less than the phenomenon presents, even if the ‘more’ that the deconstruction hopes to establish is ips0 facto the same phenomenon mirrored, cynics might feel, with utmost jealousy.

No one yet knows how to incorporate ident&ing with into a literary or a sociological analysis. By the same token, interaction sociologists (particularly ethnomethodologists and Conversation Analysts) are at present unable to cope with seeing selves as selves in signs and in interaction. This essay is just a first step into idenyication with. That step involves the analyst in experiencing self as self by ident&ing with it in the same way that one identifies a character in a novel not as a wall of words but as a self who may then be profitably explored by a closer look at the words.

IV. G0FFMA”S MANIFEST SELF OF FACE-TO-FACE INTERACTION ON THE BRINK OF I D E ; ~ ~ ~ ~ F I ~ ~ T I O J V WITH

My essay bifurcates now. This section expands my contention at the end of the previous section that ‘no one yet knows how to incorporate idmh2ing with into a . . . sociological analysis’. I shall examine how Goffman - in my view alone amongst sociologists - comes very close to idmhiing both with other selves and with his own participating and observing self. The section that comes after this one derives directly from the previous sections but goes in a direction away from Goffman even as it shows how integral he is to its claims. In that next section (the second fork of the bifurcation) I closely link the Goffman self to the self of fiction and of capital so as to situate my idea of self within a broader social context than that of face-to-face interaction.

Goffman ([1955] 1972a:7) says that in face-to-face interaction a person ‘on the basis of a few known attributes . . . is given the responsibility of possessing

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a vast number of others.’ If we meet a stranger, ‘first appearances are likely to enable us to anticipate his pler] category and attributes, his pler] “social identity”. . .’ (Goffman [I9631 1968:12). Our anticipations of the other’s identity become at once ‘normative expectations’ or ‘righteously presented demands’ (ibid:l2). But we are unaware of making these identity demands until their fulfilment is at issue. So:

m h e demands we make might better be called demands ‘in effect’, and the character we impute to the individual might better be seen as an imputation made in potential retrospect - a characterization ‘in effect’, a uhml social i&nQ (ibid 12)

As it were, a self is prematurely read into an abbreviated display. Further, the self is read from an ‘image of self (Goffman [I9951 1972a:5) or ‘face’ that a person takes as his or her own:

A person tends to experience an immediate emotional response to the face which a contact with others allows him per]; he [she] cathects his per] face; his [her] ‘feelings’ become attached to it. (ibid6)

But Goffman (ibid20) says that the self of which face is an image recedes into the ‘ritual equilibrium’ of interaction. Ritual equilibrium is arrived at when the various imputed selves of all the interactants become congruent. By congruence, here, Goffman means a state of agreement about the evaluations - dependent upon the application of shared standards of conduct - that each interactant has (1) about himself or herself, (2) about the others, and (3) about the interaction itself (ibid:5,6). Thus, in interactional equilibrium, ‘a person’s face clearly is something that is not lodged in or on his pler] body. . .’ (ibid7). Rather, face is usually ‘something that is diffusely located in the flow of events in the encounter. . .’ (ibid:7). But, since Goffman’s ‘equilibrium’ is a theoretical limit case, seldom to be experienced in life, he can be read as saying that face is always in the air like a distinguishing personal atmosphere. Or, better, face is like an imagery deliberately suggestive of an ungraspable self.

Face will ‘manifest’ (Goffman’s term) when an encounter’s events ‘are read and interpreted for the appraisals expressed in them’ (ibid7). So Goffman’s ‘face’ is much more than the face of portraiture. It is a readable context of appearances, behaviours, acts, words, and expressions that suggest an insubstan- tial self by which, when it has coherent presence, the interactant would seem to be pos~essed.~

Goffman’s manifest self then is an impalpable real fiction beholden to frames that hold nothing but more frames, within each one of which, at every level of analysis, self‘s interim traces are assumed to have been left like a signature of an autobiographical impulse of the moment. Nevertheless an interactant thoroughly identifies with his or her manifest self? To sum up, unless each self of an interaction rdent3fies with the other selves it ident3fies as selves, Goffman’s interactional

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selves would not manifest themselves. Further, the manifest self attributed to another interactant is the same in kind as the self attributed by others and by itself to itseK7

Implicitly Goffman contends that a person has a self for another person only if that self is idenyied with by that other person. Or, the other way round, to see a person as a self is to become that person when seeing his or her self. Therefore, between selves, before they commit themselves to specific identities, no distance exists. Indeed - and this will be an important conclusion of my paper - relationships that increase distance between selves devolve from interactants entrenching in their individual identities.

In Frame Anabsis (1975) Goffman fits self even more comprehensively into society. A person’s conduct must copy, or have ‘attitude’ towards, a model that is taken - appropriately for a given social situation - from a cultural repertoire. Interactants proclaim virtual social identities through straightforward or ironical emulation of selected models. In addition, a person acts as though a hidden character directs his or her actions in an intentional way. A person creates character - as a real possibility - along with his or her commitment to it. Such a character is then further defined by what it says about itself either indirectly through both its selection of topics and its manner of delivery or by direct reference to an ‘1’.

So the self of Frame Anabsis is framed (1) by social situations that prescribe behaviours from which situational selves are read, (2) the particular but appropriate cultural model(s) that the interactant is wont to artfully act out in a given frame, (3) the character that a person thinks he or she has or is when not in the actual frame of the moment, and (4) the frame of talk wherein a person is forever striving to reconcile the ‘I’ of ‘I did that’, ‘I saw that’, ‘I felt that’, and ‘I thought that’ with the speaker who says those sorts of things. Interactants, according to Frame Anabsis, find themselves in synchronous contexts, each of which sustain and are sustained by cognate selves. These cognate selves are coordinated through role-distancing (Goffman 1972b; Vester 1989) to give the effect of unique, context-free, internal selves lying behind ‘natural’ expressions that are designed to indicate original unities after the fact (Travers 1991).

The above sketch of Goffman’s theory of self boils down to the postulation of a self whose underlying unity and whose control of its interactant’s actions are read backwards - in the same way by others as by itself - from signs of the interactant held responsible for those. Further, the self is read simultaneously in several layers of cultural language (situational grammar, cultural stereotypes, accepted beliefs about self, and everyday talk). However, Goffman’s manifest self is always a virtual (or potential) identity. Crucially, the interactional strength of Goffman’s insubstan- tial ‘self resides in the tdmt$cutiom with it that interactants, including the one ‘owning’ it, seem unable to avoid. The royal analytical road to this self, therefore, is the route of reading it as a self in the formal likeness of cultured characters that are fictive through and through (Goffman 1975:562-563).’

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Goffman (1975:298, 495, 575) frequently derides the idea of perduring real selves yet at the same time in at least one of his authorial voices (see Smith and Travers 1995) appeals to self as though it goes without saying that within face- to-face interaction it be treated as perduring. His analyses of self([1955] 1972a; 1975) do displace it, however, to ritual equilibrium and frames. And when that happens Goffman loses the uniqueness of self in each case, the very uniqueness that secures the moral activity of his ritual idiom (‘Excuse me’ is said not to a set of frames or to a disequilibriated interaction system but to an individual in the image of a single self, even as its utterance stabilizes frame and ritual equilibrium). It is as if Goffman identifies and deconstructs self in order to problematize his own &$cation with it. Though he does not take the tack of reducing &t$cation with to identzjication as (he simply asserts that the self of den@cation as is a construct without any ground but current interactivity), neither does he push his iden@cation with self to the extreme of registering his own experience of idenhang with others’ selves and with his own. Goffman falls short of analytically experiencing &$cation With because he refuses to be carried away into the frames that he insists are the only current interactional realities. He pays little analytical attention to the powerful feelings that people do have that they and others are real selves though in his early work he is angry with those who account these feelings in dent$cution as language from which the self goes missing as an inalienable interactive phenomenon.

Goffman’s frame analysis does not include the possibility that concurrent frames at any given moment may accommodate selves-considered-as-frames. If it did, it could say that selves are engrossing in their own right, and it could give up relegating selves to deterministic situations. So Goffman’s interaction theory could be developed to say that, when an interactant becomes involved in another interactant as a self (by denhbing with the other), its experience of the other is organized to perfectly resemble the other, prior to more detachedly defining the other through &@cation as in the same ontological breath, so to speak, as defining itself separately in reciprocation with the other. This is exactly how Goffman’s framing is explained to work. Going on from there, one could say - as Goffman would like to say - that &@cation with may be more prevalent than iden$cation as in interaction and that involvement in interaction is most plausibly a consequence of interactants’ surrenders of individual identities to a play of selves with which to creatively idenhz. If interaction, by contrast, is modelled as an interactivity of identzjication as identities, it must be lifeless, wooden, and stilted. The life of interaction that guarantees the involvement without which it is not interactive, I therefore suggest, belongs to its selves in a state of dynamic suspension and negotiation. Otherwise boredom sets in, as it always does when interactants shrug their shoulders and default to identities (of course - see the Conclusions - when the gesture is not shoulder-shrugging but baring the teeth of identities, violence becomes a possibility). Thus Goffman falls short of saying that social life belongs to selves that are iden&zjied with, and never finds

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it in himself to say that the study of social life should begin with the process of trying to theoretically &h$ with self so as to preserve the reality of self as something that invites the grasp it always eludes just because it is self (see Travers 1996 for a reprise on the theme of Goffman’s abdication from his own selfhood).

V. THE SELF OF FICTION AND CAPITAL

Thus far this essay has produced a reading of one character from one novel, a reading of some readings of that character, and a critical version of one interaction sociologist’s identification of self. But it has also argued that the identification of any self in any interaction is not an identification of a self as some signs but rather an identgfication wdh signs that are then read as evidence of a self beyond them. Now I want to show how this latter and new understanding of the identification of self sits comfortably within a wider provenance, that of the fictive personal selves which each person owes to the growth of capitalism. I begin by recapitulating Davis’s (1987) argument that, as capitalism advances, people increasingly &h$ with their own and others’ selves in the same way that they &h& with the signs of fictive characters in novels. Then I underline that argument with Clough’s (1992; 1993) view that the construction of selves in writing about ethnographic fields is geared to the development of ‘mass media communication technologies’ ( 1992:7). Davis and Clough strongly reinforce my thesis that the identification of self is only achieved (by interactants and/or analysts of the self) through idenh$ing with the self. Sociologically, it would follow, the identification of self is desirably the exploration of the experiences of identgfication with, an exploration that would be pre-empted by any falling back into the cultural habit of identifying self by idenh$@ its signs as signs of self that can be detachedly observed. The aim of such exploration of course is to avoid sacrificing what is most selflike about the self.

The contemporary idea of a fictional character - ‘a simulacrum of linguistic signs’ (Davis 1987:128) - may date from the emergence of capitalism. The human subjects of capital, Davis says, have learned to &h& with fictional people in novels so as to defend themselves against dehumanizing economic relationships. But the defence is politically ineffectual. Alienated and isolated readers of novels, in becoming emotionally attached to arrangements of signs, become more and more detached from one another. At the same time, by experiencing themselves through their reading as being similar in form to fictional characters, people start to feel that they are each unique selves. Then, trying to live themselves as unique selves, they feel that they are alone and fully responsible for their own futures, when in reality the responsibility for the form of their selfhood lies mainly elsewhere. Selves in the likeness of fictional characters are essential, however, to the continuing construction of environments that systematically cheat those selves. Cruelly designed by hidden historical processes and hidden

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vested interests to exploit human labour, annul souls, mysw minds, and replace instinctively creative human faculties with automatic needs, modern and postmodern societies vaunt the autonomous self as a paradigm case of self- determination the better to control it for alien, systemic ends. Many capitalist selves, moreover, in Davis’s view, cheerfdy acquiesce in their abjection (just as cheerfully - one cannot help noticing - as Davis acquiesces in his academically Marxist analysis).

Unlike LukAcs (1971), Davis does not blame the ideological function of the fictional characters (that people use as models for their selves) on particular examples of character, as though some characters are not so ideological as others. Davis says that the very construction of a fictional character is ideological. Yet when Davis distinguishes fictional characters from real people he succeeds - unwittingly - in describing to a T the real Goffmanian self. Davis says that fictional people are designed to:

1 . Elicit maximum identification (Davis 1987:145). 2. Be nothing but their instructions for their perception (ibid 110). 3. Have a simplicity (ibid 1 1 3) that gives them an ‘unrealistic’ appearance of consiitency (ibid 114) and purpose (ibid: 112). 4. Have the capacity for fundamental change through the slightest switch of parameter (ibid 1 18- 1 19). 5. Show their capability of rational choice (ibidl19). 6. Be exhaustively comprehensible (ibid 1 1 7-1 18). 7. Appear to be seif-authoring (ibidl41).

Thus Davis point for point recreates the self according to Goffman. But - and this is where I see further than Davis - Davis’s distinction between real and fictional people can only be intelligible within the ideological understanding of character that he deplores. If, as he says, we are ideologized to be fictional people, we can only grasp his real people as yet another variety of fictional people. Thus Davis puts the Goffman self into an historical perspective and provides an explanation of the process of identification that eats its own tail and shows how impossible it is not to be a self in Goffman’s image of self, even when one begins with a Marxist ideology (a preferred hegemonic code) quite antithetical to that self.

Clough’s (1 992) account of the genesis of the contemporary self is similar to Davis’s account but much more Lacanian. The characters of novels, Clough

. Jays, are ident3ficd with in a vain attempt to repair loss (named that of mother in psychoanalytic narrative reconstructions of early infancy). By reading characters as if characters are unified objects, readers heal endemic splits in their subject positions. Further, the act of reading implicates readers in narrativities that are nothing but the play of desire. This desire in reading (for unity) is reparation of the oedipal narratives of separation, and it is a desire that is always disavowed.

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When the novel was young, disavowal worked by constructing the object of identification as a heroine. She could then be mastered by author and reader, whose mastery would involve the heroine’s fetishization and/or sadistic punish- ment. Masteries on this order serve to keep the locomotive of patriarchal capitalism on its own rails. (But, though the novel is no longer a cultural crucible of self, ethnography st i l l is. Adapted from the cultural form of the realist novel, sociological fields of inquiry, just like the worlds of novels, are constructed as feminine, while the ethnographer is constructed as a male who writes as one venturing through the feminine field in fear of absorption and castration. The objectivity of an ethnographic report is really a panic disavowal of the cloven desire that impels the ethnographer’s unity in the report.) But, Clough (1993) contends, not only is the human subject - as reader, as author, as character - a product of discourse but so too is human experience. The feeling that experience is real in its own right - pre-discursive - is owed entirely to the textual-semiotic field of perception framing it.9 Thus an interactant is a self because of the experiential conviction of belonging to signs of a unity that is constructing itself to disavow not only the signs’ fragmentary nature but also their erotic perception. Or, a person’s living self is a fiction realized through identifications [fantasmatic? I am not sure . . .] facilitated by what one might call sign-overdetermination. So self is nothing more than its contexts for discovery. And that proposition of course is Goffman’s proposed ‘self’ of the previous section, in Clough as it was in Davis.

Clough adds to Davis the idea that the identification of self is not just a matter of perceiving other people in the same way that one perceives fictional characters in novels but is also inextricably tied up (1) with the illusion that any social reality can be objective and (2) with all the possible forms of that reality’s narrative representation. Experience itself, in Clough, cannot be posited as a vantage point from which to validate this or that discourse, since experience is the last term of discourse, that is, experience is experience because it discovers itself in the subject position of a narrative that has made sense. I identi5 with this view, which in effect argues that Goffman’s manifest self of interaction is always internally threatened by the collapse of its vain hopes for transcendent realization of a continuous display of legible signs that are a matter of its social life and social death. The blame for this nemesis of the Western individual must be put upon the hubris of individalism, which in Davis’s and Clough’s analyses is historically explained by an unedlfjing human descent into relationships patriarchally dominated by monetary exchange value now coupled to increasingly invasive mass communication technologies.

This reading of Davis and Clough, placing Goffman’s self in an historical narrative, emphasizes the sense in which Goffman’s ‘self is a self because it can be idenlzjied with. But Davis and Clough have a difficulty, comparable to Goffman’s, in idmh$ing with their own conceptions of selfhood in contemporary societies. Like Goffman, they do not quite idenh$ with the selves they descry in capitalism

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and patriarchy, though they do idenh3 with their deep suspicions about them, which are framed in their respective preferred hegemonic codes (Davis’s Marxism, Clough’s feminist, psychoanalytically-oriented semiotics). The next step of &h&- ing With self the better to iden@ self analytically is not taken. I myself take this step after my Conclusions (;I the h a l e ‘I Identifjl with Me’) and thus close my own circle. This essay then becomes a sign-set of self that others, if they d m h j with it, will be able to read themselves into on behalf of better understanding the identification of self in everyday life. Ultimately, I would hope, readers who idah3 with this selflessay will respond with texts alive to the phenomenological benefits to be gained from thhr readers idenh3ing with their texts. Throughout such a dialogue or conversation of selves there must run the paradox that Flaubert exhibits, that he is never more himself than when he says: ‘Madame Bovary, c’est moi!’ To put that another way, the analyst of self is never more analytically himself or herself when saying ‘I’m somebody I never was but always wanted to be!’ (A major problem inherent in these identifications of self issues from the likelihood - that I note in the Conclusions - of people being drawn into violent confrontations when their hegemonic codes conflict.)

VI. CONCLUSIONS

Beyond Goffman’s interaction theory (Smith and Travers 1995) which suggests that selves are read into interactants by one another from just a few promissory signs (Travers 1994b), I propose in this essay that interactants are carried away from identity when they become their living selves in interactive experiences which involve them in more than mutual but fleeting scrutinies that only establish them as stereotypes.” Interactants, I contend, may have their fdest feelings of selfhood when they forget themselves, when they throw off stifling masks by entering their preferred hegemonic codes. Contrariwise, as Goffman might say, interactants know that sociality and selves are most at risk if they selfconsciously feel reduced to discrete strategic identities that are having to negotiate potentially damaging imputations. The cogency of the above proposal and these last two contentions is greatly enhanced, moreover, if the reader idm+ with the view that the self has its origins in the coincidental rise of alienative monetary exchange relationships (Marx 1963) and autonomous characters in novels (Davis 1987; Clough 1992).

Drawing heavily on Flaubert’s ([1857] 1993) character Emma Bovary, I find that Emma Bovary is her fullest self only when, for herself, she exceeds any sense of precise identity. The Emma Bovary whom readers experience as a real self emotionally rushes into an idmtjficarion with the commodity signs that she feels must simultaneously release and consummate her. Emma Bovary’s most real experience of her self, then, is never the experience of a fixed identity. As it were, if Emma said to herself, ‘Now I am nothing but Emma Bovary,’ she

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would not be Emma Bovary. But it should be remembered that Emma is her paradoxical self not only when romantically transported by the promises of lovers or the seductive dreamscapes of mass-produced cultural narratives. Emma also lives her paradoxical self when she feels that her everyday life is a treadmill, for then too - pedalling a bourgeois repetition of an identity that grinds her face into bitter frustration - she feels that her self is less the identity of an unhappy provincial wife than the unhappiness itself, m'th which she fully ziientzjies. The Emma Bovary who is uniquely Emma to her readers would not be that Emma if she did not invite readers to empathize with her revulsion from her appointed socio-economic station. In short, Emma, especially when she cannot enter her preferred hegemonic code, is a time-bomb of Nietzschean ressentiment waiting to explode as what I claim she is, an apotheosis of self that far from disappearing into the hegemonic code of early capitalism actually sucks all alternative codes into her own literary assumption of selfhood. In my reading of Flaubert's novel, Emma Bovary has that name and is that character and seems real because she stands as a paradigm sociological self. She leads me to assert that the self which can be identzjed with is never the self that a person is iden@ed as either by that self or by others. Identity, I am arguing - from the preferred hegemonic code of Madame Bovaty - is not self even if selfhood depends on the coded feeling of coming from an identity whose bounds it bursts.

The originality of my view of self lies in its splitting the identification of self into idenhjication as and identzjcahn with. This split can be seen in at least five different would-be hegemonic readings of Emma Bovary - by Barthes, Tanner, Sartre, Kaplan, and Bourdieu - where I show how attempts to either encompass Emma Bovary as an identity or encompass her as the identity of a non-identity disappear into authorial identzjcations with her. Thus, accounts of Emma Bovary as a character must always fail to be definitive because her character is in part the experience of her carrying away her reader just as she herself is carried away in her readings of books and situations. And the same is true, I suggest, of any self. A sers description or explanation is descriptive or explanatoty onb when it delivers more than description or explanation, that is, when it also delivers a selj-that can be identjlied with.

Social Control through Emotional Identification, and the Roots of Violence

Because identification of self requires dentijcation with, some communal experi- ences of interactional selfhoods may give rise to disidentzjication j h m . Interactants may be said to disidentify from other interactants by attributing to the others identities with which they refuse to idente, and interactants who are disidentified from are seen as objectionable identities - as objects - that warrant attitudes towards them of contempt, scorn, ridicule, dislike, detestation, hatred, and so forth. Disidentification from, in my definition, is a vicious manner of observing

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others as nothing but identities that within a particular interaction ethos repel identification with. It follows that, if those who are disidentified from are moved to apologize for, ameliorate, or suitably m o w their identities, their submission can only come from their identifiring with the disidentifjing from that is practised towards them.

An extreme experience of being disidentified from would be mort$cation. An interactant is mortified upon discovering that his or her self is seen to be both intolerably offensive and inescapable, as in Garfinkel (1956). Garfinkel’s analysis of degradation by wraparound essentialization stops short, however, of the possibility that mortification can also be of self by itself, when it is se&zte. But only in those cases where mortification induces self-hate in its victims will the victims identit with those who are morttzing them and so join in the work of exorcizing their offensive identities from the ongoing interaction (there might be pride in this - see Warren 1985).

Both disidentification from and mortification induce in their interactional objects the emotion of shame, as shame involves an interactant in identifiring with a self that he or she vehemently wishes to disidentify from. Through shame, interactants experience the punishment of having to be their socially ordained selves no matter their desire to be other selves of whom they would not be ashamed. Shame, then, is important evidence that an interactant can be forced by social practices to be a self for which he or she is held responsible and with which he or she cannot avoid emotionally identifying. When interactants who have been shamed expiate their social crimes, they not only submit to their mortifiers - at least eating shit (Travers 1995) - but necessarily identifj. with the mortifiers’ disidentifications from them. Here again, mortification plus shame work for society because a self can only be a self - as I have been arguing all along - through its capacity to identify with selves, in the first place with the self dealt to itself by interactions. The normalizing social correction of supposedly aberrant or rogue cultural identities and selves through the experience of shame has a force in my argument that is absent, however, from other interaction theories of shame and self (Retzinger 1991; Scheff and Retzinger 1991). In Scheffs and Retzinger’s work, the relation of self to society is lost in a blurred notion of identity that, unliie mine, fails to explain why shame ehtens the ties of offenders to the same situations and persons that are offended, up to a breaking point of disidentification.

Disidentified from or mortified interactants, after initial experiences of shame, may begin to feel that their degradation is unjust. Then they may respond with anger, rage, counter-denunciations, abuse, and physical aggression (see Katz 1988). Thus, if, as I am implying here, the social process of mutual identification when this ‘shorts to identities’ can be responsible for violence, violence is not a formless breakdown in communication but a deliberate reply to those mortifica- tions that are inflicted with intent to offer victims no option but total submission to an inimical ethos. Violence in my argument opens itself to inquiry as a

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language, therefore, whose study would gain from a more penetrating view of the social construction by preferred hegemonic codes of the relevant selves, especially of those selves whose disidentifications from those they attack are urgent and absolute. So here I make a case for tracing violence to the coded selves of social interaction (see Gardner 1990), particularly where the interactions involve highly volatile selves that for reasons of context and codes are not easily reconcilable by means of superficially polite or Habermasian communication.’ ’ It would follow that the processes of identification in interaction guarantee the likelihood of the threat of violence and of actual violence when codes clash as selves seek to evade experiences of social annihilation. So threatening conduct only makes sense as a communication of the imperious claims of self, and as such may well be present in apparently innocent communications. Many feminists, for example, feel threatened by patriarchal discourse that, from its point of view that a male self is better than a female self, adds injury to insult by saying that it is not threatening them, when of course it is party to a systematic interactional gender genocide which will only get worse as it is found out for what it is. Thus sides are taken and prisoners murdered and room for manoeuvre by the apostate murderer is cut back to a line of retreat into his own ranks.’*

The Fundamentalisms of Self in Society and Social Theory

The increasing prominence of self in the evolution of political action (Giddens 1991) makes it more vulnerable than ever to threats of insult and injury. Such a state of affairs, I feel, precipitates fundamentalist attitudes to and of and about self. If the complex discursive self of postmodern societies (Burkitt 1991) is as social as I say it is, then the tendency to fundamentally anchor self in infantile experience, in genetic inheritance, in fixed psychological constructs, in religious formulations, in discourse, in social structure, in ethnic or national narratives, in skin colour, and in gender might be explained as last-ditch identifications serving to theoretically stabilize the social turbulence of high-risk societies (Beck 1992).

Fundamentalist identifications of self, both theoretical and social, might be elucidated through my interactional approach that focuses on the motivation for selfhood. In such elucidation, however, competing theories of self would not be arraigned before an adjudicatory meta-theory but compared so as to see how each strives for a preferred theoretical hegemony. Thus my propositions about self could inspire a sociology-of-knowledge exploration of adamant would-be hegemonic selfhood codes, just those codes, incidentally, that Foucault (1 970; Rose 1989; Parker 1989) identifies as belonging to the social sciences and of which, ironically through his comprehensive disidentifications from them, Foucault’s own code has become a prime example.

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The Televisualization of Social Reality

Some sociologists argue that, because of the unprecedented interaction between the TV viewer and the TV screen, reality has evolved into a total informational simulacrum that is nearly virtual or ‘hyperreal‘, a web-like image of world replacing the world it models and leaping to a ‘chaos’ logic (Young 1991) that is no longer one of cause and effect (in ‘reality’) but of seduction, fatality, and reversibility (Kellner 1989; Baudrillard 1990a; 1990b; Gane 199 1 a; 199 1 b). It so happens that the simulation reality of consumer capitalism in Baudrillard’s (1983) metaphors of the ‘mass’ express a world of TV viewers who exactly in the manner of the interactants of my essay are carried away by programmes.

In contrast to Baudrillardian TV subjects, the citizens of traditional social and interaction theories remain conscious of themselves as viewers. As it were, traditional viewers are switched off in their heads, having been allowed - by cultural analysts - no other than selfconscious selfhood. The switched-on viewer, meanwhile, is busily denh3ing with endless streams of imagery. The opposition of ‘switched on’ and ‘switched off is implicit ia my terminology. Switched-off viewers are those for whom the TV screen is a window on an outer world while switched-on viewers live in an inner world that is not accessed by windows but by idenl3fications with. Switched-on viewers, who swim freely in their preferred hegemonic codes (rating programmes according to the quality of involvements they induce), are badly misunderstood by inquiries that presume viewers will be lucid about their TV watching, because viewers - I claim - do not watch TV so much as experience its visual contents as their dominant reality. The mysteries of human engrossment will never be achieved by analyses of the programmes’ contents alone. What demands to be fathomed in epidemic levels of mass TV- dependence is not the form of the programmes but the paradox of the self, that is, the ability of the viewer to lose himself or herself in stories the better to feel that he or she is a self.13

So my argument for self initiates a possible inquiry into the televisualization of social reality. It would proceed by the route of the viewers in relation to their preferred hegemonic codes. Thus far, of course, I can only hypothesize that people will prefer those codes that potentiate the emotions of celebratory attachment (Durkheim’s collective ‘excitation’, and Collins’s ‘ritual chains’). And I can only guess that this sort of attachment is well-nigh indispensable to lives blighted by morally unsavoury work, painful human relationships, and a continual thwarting of the very dreams that are fostered by the culture of advertisements. I am not saying here that the study ofviewers’ selfhoods within the televisualization of reality should omit analyses of programmes’ content. But I am saying that such analyses desperately need to be linked - via hegemonic codes - to the experiential involvement of viewers as selves.

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Interaction Analysis

Goffman’s inquiry into the social order of face-to-face interaction can be resumed through my propositions. However, at the premature end of his career, Goffman had drifted from his early deliberations to the extent of virtually denying, in such late works as Gender Advertisaents (1 979), that an individual can be uniquely recognizable (in social situations that fully determine the expressions of individuals therein). Now I think that Goffman is right to remind sociologists that social life produces selves (though many besides Goffman have been aware of this for a long time), and I think he is right to feel analytically mortified by the suggestion that those produced selves produce their order from domains other than face- to-face interaction. But I believe that, over-reacting to fundamentalist assertions of innate interactant selfhood, Goffman, with his extreme disidentifications from the Cartesian self of psychologists and other essentialists, hobbles the future of his theory. He unwrites the self of psychologistical discourse without seeing that that kind of self considered as a figure of speech might play a leading interactionist role in explaining the social and experiential compulsion to talk about those selves as if they are real. For Goffman’s theory to bear the fruits that its early work promises, it must re-admit the experiential self as a factor of analysis, along the lines that are sketched in this essay. The role of self in the maintenance of social order is clearly mapped in Goffman’s early work, and leads to his classic studies of interfacial violence (Stzgma [(1963) 19681 and Asylums [1970]). So the best prospects of Goffman’s interaction theory may lie in the exploration of interactional emotion, namely those emotions that inform the attachments and dissociations of people as they meet and part and arrange themselves in groups with which they identifjr or against which they rebel.

In the absence of any substantive studies of the self that I formulate in this paper, intentions for research are only advocacy thereof. But the workings of violations, mortifications, and disidentifications must be suitable topics of inquiry. Research into these topics would have to meticulously discover the behavioural codes - Goffman’s ([ 19551 1972a) ‘ritual idioms’ - that operate during the actual creations and destructions of selves. Goffman (1972d) began the study of ritual idiom in such areas as apology and personal territory. But he only wished to sketch general rules about widespread rituals that would then only indicate a quasi-universal concept of self in western cultures. Starting in the same place, however, one could point inquiry away from the generality of the lowest common denominator of human interaction and towards particularity, that is, the self when it most feels like self.

It must be conceded that any such inquiry into self may fall into itself, for if it does not yield selves by which analysts and their readers are carried away - and one of those selves will have to be that of the relevant analyst - then it has not caught the selves it has pursued. The implications of this impasse for methodical research are far-reaching. In this essay I ask the reader not to

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condemn my argument just because it poses an impasse whose egress might require the abandonment of method (Phillips 1973; Feyerabend 1975). It is entirely possible, for instance, that analysts could wholly idmtii with the implied authors (Booth 1961) of ideal research protocols and so achieve isomorphic apotheosis in the ‘non-style style’ (Gusfield 1976) of supposedly scientific objectivity. But it is also possible, if they do this, that such analysts will be ironical (even camp pravers 1993]), that is, suggestive of more real - but, in principle, codeless - selves, whose subscriptions to the selves of objective non- styles fluctuate between expedience and parody under the analysts’ duress of being true to themselves and so to society as well. James Clifford describes Malinowski as facing a comparable linguistic deracination that would have deconstructed him unto madness had he not, by theorizing the fictions of self and culture, ‘pulled himself together’ (Clifford 1988:104). What goes for Malinowski might go for any contemporary theorist of self. Doubtless, if one does not try to write one’s own self (Rorty 1986), one will surely have to identifjr with another self that is even less one’s own. Of course, it is not sociologically uninteresting that some, after asking: ‘Whatever is your objection to that?’ might then go on to extol the benefits to be had from identifying with a parent, a spouse, a leader, an academic discipline, Jesus Christ, Nietzsche, the Buddha, or even a university department.

VII. I IDENTIFY WITH ME

I am writing and every word I write threatens to unravel the self I am always becoming in the image of the abstract self that I create in response to others’ selves at all levels of their formulation. My text is nothing less than an invitation to the reader to construct himself or herself in this image, in this carrying away, in this racked prose by which I am possessed because it possesses me. I am travelling at reading speed to stand still in fixed meaning through my wilful employment of a genre intrinsically inimical to release so as to achieve just that emotion. The result? This writing is no longer a matter of truth or falsity, power or powerlessness, being or nothingness, but of persuasion. It probably would convince me if it did not have my name on the title page. And it probably depresses me that some - just because they have no way of dismissing me outright - will become uneasy reading an overture to a disembodied scream. That incapacity to dismiss me is of course the infinitesimal historical crack that I am wriggling through in order to escape into myself. So who am I if1 am not the only person in the world who would write l i e this, your double in fact, the living proof that you are the living proof that I am possible? But also I am Madame Bovary, more Flaubert than Flaubert, more Barthes than Barthes, more Sartre than Sartre, more Goffman than Goffman, more myself than any of them. And this self I am becoming - just because those other selves allow

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me to in my response to them - is one that, if Emma Bovary is its paradigm case, ends in degenerative disillusion, perhaps described most honestly and with the fullest appreciation of its nauseating brutality by Brett Easton Ellis, that great reporter of yuppie subjectivity:

. . . where there was nature and earth, life and water, I saw a desert landscape that was unending, resembling some sort of crater, so devoid of reason and light and spirit that the mind could not grasp it on any sort of conscious level and if you came close the mind would reel backward, unable to take it in. It was a vision so clear and real and vital to me that in its purity it was almost abstract. This was what I could understand, this was how I lived my life, what I constructed my movement around, how I dealt with the tangible. This was the geography around which my reality revolved it did not occur to me, evn, that people were good or that a man was capable of change or that the world could be a better place through one’s taking pleasure in a feeling or a look or a gesture, of receiving another person’s love or kindness. Nothing was drmative, the term “generosity of spirit” applied to nothing, was a cliche, was some kind of bad joke. Sex is mathematics. Individuality no longer an issue. What does intelligence signify? Define reason. Desire - meaningless. Intellect is not a cure. Justice is dead. Fear, recrimination, innocence, sympathy, guilt, waste, failure, grief, were things, emotions, that no one really felt anymore. Reflection is useless, the world is senseless. Evil is its only permanence. God is not alive. Love cannot be trusted. Surface, surface, surface was all that anyone found meaning in . . . this was civilization as I saw it, colossal and jagged. . . (1991:374375)

. . . there is an idea of a Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory, and though I can hide my cold gaze and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable: I simpb am nof thn [. . .] My personality is sketchy and unformed, my heartlessness goes deep and is persistent. My conscience, my pity, my hopes disappeared a long time ago (probably at Warvard) if they ever did exist. There are no more barriers to cross. AU I have in common with the uncontrollable and the insane, the vicious and the evil, all the mayhem I have caused and my utter indifference toward it, I have now surpassed. I still, though, hold on to one single bleak truth: no one is safe, nothing is redeemed. Yet I am blameless [. . . .] My pain is constant and sharp and I do not hope for a better world for anyone. In fact I want my pain to be idicted on others. I want no one to escape. But even after admitting this - and I have, countless times, in just about every act I’ve committed - and coming face-to-face with these truths, there is no catharsis. I gain no deeper knowledge about myself, no new understanding can be extracted from my telling. There has been no reason for me to tell you any of this. This confession has meant nothug . . . (1991:37&377)

Perhaps this is the current American mood that cries out for death as its just deserts. If it has hope, it is that rampant self-analysis will destroy it. And who am I, writing about it, but you, reading me? A n d m Travers Dcpa&nent ofSociolo&y UniversiQ of Exeter Amoy Building Redes Drive ExeterEX4 4RJ

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Acknowb&nmts. Thanks to all four referees for guiding me to a better version of this essay. Thanks as always to Greg Smith.

NOTES

‘Mead ([1930] 1983) says that selves are immediately given in an objective reality that is in advance of inner experiences. For Mead, mind itself ‘is an outgrowth of primitive human communication’ ([ 19301 1983:xxxVii). Praising Cooley for showing that the other lies in the same field as the self and that other and self are interdependent, Mead posits that ‘taking the attitude of the other’ is priW to formulations of the self, the other, and the social world from which Cooley’s ([1902] 1983:170) self-feelings arise. But it can be argued that Mead leaves a gap in his role-taking model by exaggerating the part played by speech in interaction. Stone (1975), for example, says that Mead‘s speech- centred role-taking jumps over a mutual ‘review’ of interactants’ appearances. Without speechless reviews, Stone suggests, role-taking would be impossible. And, I would say, what goes for reviews goes too for my idea that recognition is a mutual IW that leans heady on second-nature cultural forms to construct the perceptions that only later might be defined by IA. None the less, Mead might reply that reviews post-dict role-taking, in which case Stone’s study is a selectively-focused study within role-taking of Mead‘s ‘primitive human communication’. However, If Mead’s role-taking (in 1930) accommodates an immediate (and cultured) review of appearances that directs the interactants to their respective selves, it must then also accommodate those mutual experiences that trigger role-taking (the experiences that as it were say ‘this is an other self, uftcr which the Meadian role-taking can begin). IW therefore reveals a vital aspect of self that is hidden in Mead, namely its resistance, proportionate to its presence, to ‘me’-like description and well-oiled role-taking. IW argues an ‘I’ that is palpable and, the more it is so, cogently independent of ‘me’, while Mead must always regard ‘I’ as a dependent variable of ‘me’ (less a product of situations than of a subjectivity’s monadic autonomy). Mead‘s ‘I’ cannot be experienced in analysis except through IA, which in effect obliterates the sense of it that makes sense of its power to stimulate IA. This essay of course attempts to experience Mead‘s ‘I’ directly as a basis for a dependent ‘me’.

*The Paris of Bataille, Sartre, Lyotard, Foucault, Lacan, Althusser, Demda, Kristeva, Cixous, and BaudrilIard seems to hold the same promise for many American academic the- orists.

3The code is not something beyond Emma and Rodolphe but informs their appearances for each other. If they were in code-terms unattractive, they could not have the same love affair but perhaps one that discovers its own different code.

q h e celebrated South American novelist Vargas Llosa (1987:9) is just as besotted as Uon. Describing his first reading of Mudm Bovay he writes: ‘I knew from that moment on, till my dying day, I would be in love with Emma Bovary. In the future she would, be for me, as for Uon Dupuis in the b t days of their affair [actually it is the last days], “the beloved of every novel, the heroine of every play, the vague she of every volume of verse.”’ Not to be outdone, Davis (1987:lO) owns up to similar besottedness: ‘And I fell in love, endlessly, with heroines - with Emma Bovary and Tess, with Sue Bridehead and Estella. I could taste them - they were so real to me, and I suffered painfully that they were not in the world. I chose for girlfriends women who reminded me of these characters because they modelled themselves on the same books.’

([1963] 1968) Goffman posits an actual social identity in conflict with a virtual social identity. But an actual social identity manifests in exactly the same way as

51n

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a virtual social identity. The difference between actual and virtual identities is not a difference in the type of the identities but of the emotional involvements - in the one or the other - by the person to whom both might be socially afiixed.

6Although Goffman in Sh&w ([I9631 1968) mostly deals with stranger-to-stranger interaction, his ‘self is the same order of self that he finds in, for example, marriage partners (1975:462463). Self in Goffman has just one way of being sociall;; constructed however familiar or unfamiliar it is thought to be by its others.

’Parity of interactional status between interactants tends to be assumed by Goffman, since his focus is on the demands of interaction that persons be good interactants first and their extra-interactional statuses second. But cases where parity does not easily obtain cast useful light on IW. One such case is the interaction between mother and baby, where it looks as though the mother gives recognition that the baby receives but does not return in kind. A second such case is that of Hegel’s (1931:234-240; Lloyd 1983; Easton 1984) master-slave relationship wherein the slave gives a recognition that the master does not exactly reciprocate. In these and other cases where the unequal power positions of interactants pervade their interaction it is clear that IW is more on one side and LA more on the other. However, the mother-baby and masterslave asymmetry of identification does not vitiate and is not vitiated by my as-with distinction. In the case of the mother and baby, the mother may indeed give a recognition whose IA the baby cannot reciprocate as such, but when the recognition is empathetic - as one would expect in this interaction - the mother does idenhb with the baby idendzing with her, and she does that because she experiences the baby’s dendting with her (while the baby - even though recognizing the mother in this way - cannot yet perform the IA that will yield the Lacanian definition ‘mother’). In the case of master and slave the asymmetry is a barrier to full mutual identification. Yet the master and the slave do recognize each other as master and slave (mutual IA) and the slave still succeeds in idendzing with the master even if the master (locked inside his or her own IA in the form of master) cannnof idenkt with the slave (the master, confronting the slave, must always abort an IW recognition to the detriment - as Hegel is at pains to point out - of his or her consciousness of the slave’s consciousness). So, even in cases of extreme asymmetry, IW and IA do occur, though not equally for both parties. It is therefore not necessary to assume that it would be better either to employ the term recognition than the composite IW-IA or to dissociate recognition from IW.

‘It may seem odd to ignore Goffman’s Presmtution OfSeCfin E v q h y Life (1959). But that work dwells on the contingencies of managing discrepant, involuntary, and emergent identities. It is not so concerned as ‘On Face-Work‘ and F r m Anahsir to get to grips with the manifest self.

‘See Smith (1993) for a heated and insensitive repudiation. ”Since I doubt the sociological wisdom of disconnecting self-experiences from

interaction behaviours, I am suspicious of interaction sociologies that exclude self from the terms of their studies. Conversation Analysis (Sacks 1972; Schegloff 1988; Maynard and Clayman 199 1 ; Boden and Zimmerman 199 I) , which holds that the principal social meanings of a person’s utterances are attributable to their places in utterance sequences, is perhaps the most anti-self interaction sociology. I know that Sacks (1972) in order to retain the idea of identity does coin for CA its central concept of ‘membership categorization device’. But the identities of Sacks’s membership categorization devices are so mechanical (like the identities in the account theory of Buttny [1992:162-1651) that an interactant could not identlfy with them in the way that I say interactants do identify with living selves (their own and others’). CA’s parent, Ethnomethodology (Button 1991; Flynn 1991; Coulter 1992; Hilbert 1992), also neglects the self. Because it sees human interactions as the continuous achievement of a consensual social reality whose

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members do not see that as such, it cannot step outside its interminable demonstration that constructing the taken-for-granted is the be-all and end-all of sociality (Travers 1994a). The possibility that constructed selves such as Garfinkel and Goffman (and those selves who read and are constructed by Garfinkel and Goffman) motivate the generation of apposite theoretical social realities (see Cohen and Rogers 1994; Travers 1992b; 1994a) is ethnomethodologically unthinkable. To my mind, therefore, interaction sociologies that neglect selves miss out what is most taken for granted of all, the commonsense knowledge that people, sociologists included, interact as if they have, and are, selves (Collins 1986:187). I should mention here the school of Symbolic Interactionism, to say why I find that it too neglects the sociological self. Despite its theoreticians (e.g. Glaser, Strauss, Rock, and Denzin), who consolidate and extend the insights ofJames, Cooley, and Mead, symbolic interactionists tend to study the self to study other topics rather than to formulate self anew in worlds that have evolved beyond its founders’ imaginiings (this is not true of Denzin’s recent exciting work). However, Goffman’s concern with ‘face’ has been systematized by the pragmatists Brown and Levinson (1987). But they condense Goffman’s careful phrase <image of self - the central term of ‘On Face-Work‘ ([ 19551 1972a) - into ‘self-image’ and so go back to square one, so to speak, conjuring identity just where Go#nanf form ofwanis vny shot& vnplics a manifest self that cannot only be seen as an identity because what is seen is an image ofself.

“Denzin (1984206) insists that the violent self is an unusual one that is emotionally divided and cut loose from solid inner and outer realities. But it is more economical to just say that the violent self is violence-selfhood supplanting the self that is experiencing its own annihilation.

I$ane Rostron and Jenny Barron stimulated this thought. I Thus the experience of the twenty-two-year-old Sergei Eisenstein, then a fan of

William James, in Moscow’s Proletkult Theatre, 1920. Eisenstein saw that a seven-year- old boy’s mimicry of an actor caught the atmosphere of the drama as a whole. Later, Eisenstein (1959:14) reflected: ‘The adult spectator is far more inhibited about imitating actors. But for precisely this reason his f a n e identification with the whole wonderful gamut of majesty and heroism purveyed by the drama must be all the more intense. Fanfay in the sense that it finds no outward expression and is without physical action. Or he must, by way of fantasy, give free rein to the base promptings and criminal tendencies of his nature - but, again, not through gestures or actions, but through the play of the rcal emotions that go with his f a n e complicity in the horrors perpetrated on stage.’ Alarmed by his discovery of audiences’ effortless emotional &@cations with actors’ roles, Eisenstein added: ‘I must probe its secrets, draw aside its veils. I must become a maestro. Then I can tear off its mask, expose it for what it is, destroy it.’ Was Eisenstein afraid of the power of his hture film art (calling that power a ‘diabolical mechanism’ and ‘a dreadful, temfying poison’)? Or was he afraid of human gullibility, including his own? Whichever it is, analyses such as Eisenstein’s of film or mine of human interaction must be rooted in a fear - variously expressed across the centuries by Kant and Rousseau and Plato - of involuntary human idmkfiationr with people who are dangerous. No successful film director fails to exploit audiences’ emotional identifications. Alfred Hitchcock (Truffaut: 1969:79), for instance, is a master of suspense because he knows that if a person is shown in somebody else’s room, searching through drawers, the audience will become involved when it sees the person whose room it is is coming up the st&: ‘Then you go back to the person who is searching, and the public feels like warning him, “Be careful, watch out. Someone’s coming up the stairs.” Therefore, even if the snooper is not a likeable character, the audience will still feel anxiety for him. Of course, when the character is attractive, as for instance Grace Kelly in Rear Wmdow, the public’s emotion is greatly intensified.’ Eisenstein’s and Hitchcock‘s artistic reliance on

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emotional identifications illustrates my thesis that in everyday l ie , people readily, immediately, and emotionally idmfrr with other people even as, from a montage of signs, they identi@ them as selves. Thus my thesis rests on the premiss that fellow feeling is an axiom of sociality.

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