Professor: Jorge Martínez Lucena

Post-modernity and the Self

• The experience of ourselves as narrative selves has several features: Awareness, Morality, Historicity, Sociability, Intelligibility, Language, etc.

• All of these characteristic are partially natural to the human species. However, we are only co-authors of our-selves and this can also be detected in the shaping of our experience.

• For example: if we don’t receive linguistic knowledge during our childhood through communal living and at school, not only our potential social skills, but also our cognitive skills will be significantly reduced.

The Narrative Self

• So, the Narrative Self needs to be fed by some moral, cultural and social framework in order to develop its potentialities.

• This framework has been traditionally shared by the whole society. It was a kind of metanarrative which gave people a stable cultural and moral hypothesis through communal living and diverse socialization processes.

The Narrative Self and Its Framework

The two most representative metanarratives in our Modern Western Culture are the following:

1.Christianity: Life is a difficult path to salvation that can be walked thanks to the historical incarnation of God in Jesus Christ. We are all children of God and we should work for the Common Good which includes certain ideals of solidarity and subsidiarity.

This metanarrative has several formulations: catholic, orthodox and diverse protestant denominations.

Modern Western Cultural Metanarratives

2.Enlightenment: Life is a path toward individual and social wellbeing through the progress of our knowledge not only in the natural sciences but in the social sciences as well. This metanarrative is a secularization of the Christian one. God is surrogated by the State. Children of God are translated into national citizens. Etc.

This metanarrative has several formulations: communist, liberal, socialist, nationalistic, etc. (ideologies)

Modern Western Cultural Metanarratives

In his book The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1993), J.F. Lyotard announces a change in the way in which we manage our meanings in Western Culture societies. He points out that all of our metanarratives have fallen in postmodernity because there is an active and continuous process of incredulity towards them.

Our recent history shows how ideologies (and religions) can lead us to war and destruction.

Our society seems to be more pragmatic and scientific in this regard.

Post-modern Metanarratives

Our narrative skills are developed socially, but we need to depart from certain cultural hypotheses in order to make meaning. These hypotheses are included in the metanarrative that we have inherited from our parents, family or “defining communities” (Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self, 1989).

The Self and Post-modernity

This inheritance still exists, but:

1.Our “defining communities” tend not to have a strong and sharp narrative to pass on to their offspring.

The Self and Post-modernity

2.Our society doesn’t share a clear and stable metanarrative from which everyone can judge his own life and experience.

The Self and Post-modernity

3.It has become desirable culturally speaking (after the hippies, May 68, the Punks, the Spanish Movida, etc.) to rebel against parents, established social values, etc. this has been demonstrated in the book The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism (Thomas Frank, 1997) and La Revolución Divertida (Ramón González Férriz, 2012)

The Self and Post-modernity

Nowadays, everybody is forced to depart from a self-examined idea of the Good and its consistent moral framework.

Afterwards, we have two basic options:

1. To make a critical and free examination of the results of the action determined by this moral framework and to modify our idea of Good. This allows us to try to find a moral framework which will let us get more satisfaction from life than before.

The Post-modern Identity

2. To remain determined by a social normalcy that is not proposed in a very rational and discussed metanarrative, but in a social imaginary that lets people maintain the sensation of being free and rebels against the establishment at the same time as they are obeying the system through the mechanisms of consumerism.

The Post-modern Identity

This second option is much more comfortable than the one which constrains us to rational self-examination because it is more consistent with our present-day culture and every day reality which consist of:

1. Consumerism: We construct and reenchant ourselves through shopping (George Ritzer, Enchanting a Disenchanted World: Revolutionizing the Means of Consumption, 2005) .

The Power of the Media

2.Entertainment: It does not matter that life doesn’t have any sense if you can amuse yourself until death (Neil Postman, Amusing ourselves to death, 1986).

The Power of the Media

3.Virtual technologies and reality TV: There is a world we help to build where we can change and create the rules and where lives are faster, brighter and more real than here.

In his book El poder en escenas: de la representación del poder al poder de la representación (Paidós, 1994), Georges Balandier defends the new relevant role of media in the shaping of the identity of the post-modern individual.

The Power of the Media