Abstract
One of major branches of philosophical research is the self, which, in particular, tries to find out how a subject creates her identity. In this work, I will just focus on two kinds of identity approaches: the narrative self-concept and the dramatic self-concept. I will argue that, although the Narrative identity approach especially helpful for the subject being able to give continuity to her actions, the Dramatic identity is which achieves to give meaning to the subject’s actions as soon as they are happened, and also to herself. Hence, although both approaches might be useful for the self-concept of a subject because maintain a bidirectional relationship, it is the Dramatic identity theory which manages to resolve certain problems facing Narrative identity theory. To explain this, I will claim that agent is dramatized herself by acting in different situations. Following Erving Goffman and J. David Velleman, what it is posed in this essay is that the subject develops a Dramatic identity, in a similar way to the performer who represents her character, when she enacts herself in concrete contexts. That is, the agent dramatizes herself in a situation in a manner similar as an actor represents a character on stage. Consequently, my main goal is to answer to how an agent makes her identity by acting (and trying to give meaning to her behavior) in social contexts.
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Notes
Usually, it is accepted that the minimum function of any narrative is to reveal the causal connections between actions and events. Peter Goldie formulates the following example by way of clarification. If we say “the king dies, then the queen dies”, this implies that the queen dies later than the king, but does not indicate if the first event causes the second. For this reason, Goldie considers it less than a narrative. Instead, declaring “the king dies, then the queen dies of sorrow” reveals, to this author, a causal connection between the two (Goldie 2004). However, this causal connection is located in sentences or in the reader’s mind? The queen can die of sorrow for other reasons that we do not know, because the text does not indicate otherwise. For Goldie, our reasoning is that which makes us relate both statements because they are located in the same context.
Some authors also consider that a person may have a solid psychological unity without need for a narrative structure, since this narrative plays a role uncertain in her practical problems. Another way to put this point is that some narratives do not work. It needs, therefore, that a person corrects them. This sounds like that it is not the narrative itself which makes the subject’s experiences united with one another. In this connection, the narrative just would be understood as a kind of post hoc overlay. Furthermore, the main worry comes from the fact that narrative identity theory depends on numerical identity theory. This is so because although the narrative identity approach gives temporal continuity to the experience of the subject, this presupposes, in turn, the numerical identity of a subject. However, I believe that this discussion may make the proposal posed by this work more difficult to understand. That is reason why I decided do not dealt this argument with in greater depth. To access more detailed information, see: Shoemaker, David, “Personal Identity and Ethics”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2016 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2016/entries/identity-ethics/>.
In this regard, the metaphor would work, for example, for Daniel Dennett (1992), who believe that persons are fictions invented by biological organisms. Dennett proposes a non-embodied self. He attempts to explain this using the example of a robot, called Gilbert, which has a story-writing program. Such a robot lives different situations and reports them through its storytelling program. Thus, the robot collects several stories and makes its autobiography. Gilbert, therefore, is the product of a set of story in which its self takes no part. According to Dennett, the robot’s brain really knows nothing about the world in which it acts. It cannot be a self because it unknown what it is doing. What Dennett affirms is that subject acts in a similar way to Gilbert, since no self whatsoever precedes the narrative fiction that her brain creates. However, this proposal also involves great problems because it is generally considered that the self of a subject is also a product of her brain. Dennett’s metaphor of the self as a center of narrative gravity cannot explain the meaning of the self of pre-narrative and pre-linguistic embodied experience.
Galen Strawson (2004), contrary to Schechtman, rejects the narrative view in any ‘non-trivial’ version: «if making coffee is a narrative that involves Narrativity, because you have to think ahead, do things in the right order, and so on, and that everyday life involves many such narratives, then I take it the claim is trivial. ». Schechtman (2007) dissents from the Strawson’s view: «there really are significant differences between the narrative of coffee making and a person-constituting narrative as I have defined it, because a person-constituting narrative is genuinely a kind of story we tell ourselves about ourselves, and not just a sequence of events. ». According to this, she thinks that it is not a story that needs to provide a resolution, but rather it is a narrative of how actions and events lead to other actions and events. Thus, this narrative-self perspective entails that it is necessary for a person to engage this kind of story in order to carry out particular activities and interactions.
It should be pointed out, no life story is a fully developed, because such a life is still in progress. For that reason, it is sensitive to changes in life circumstances. The narration of the subject’s story carries a number of important implications that help her understand how her personality dynamics and her behavior are. But, far from simply reflecting the things that have transpired life stories are understood to influence the manner in which lives unfold (Dunlop 2017).
For an alternative approach, see Jongepier (2016). She offers an alternative approach that understand narrativity as an enabling condition for experiences –and not only that it is presents in experience. For her, the intelligibility of the subject’s experiences is due to the fact that they are anchored in a longer diachronic context, which takes a fundamentally embodied and narrative dimension.
Merleau-Ponty described the body as our point of view on the world (our embodiment). On this basis, Mackenzie (2014) outlines the subject perceives and engages with the world from the perspective of her body, by experiencing her body as herself. Although a person is primarily a body-subject, she also is able to experience herself as a body-object. In this way, her bodily engagements with the world involve a pre-reflective bodily self-awareness.
It is important to point out that Menary (2008) claims that the self is not simply a narrative construct because it perceives, thinks, and acts. The self is, rather, the entire human organism –including its narratives–, and this should be the starting point for any account of the self. Consequently, the unity of the self is a given of the person’s bodily experience.
See Neisser, U. (1988) to better understand of the notion of the ecological self that refers to a pre-reflective self-awareness, which is involved in bodily engagement with the environment.
I do not want to elaborate this issue because it is not essential for my work. I should like to point out, however, that just as Dennett (1992) thinks that the self is fictional and, for this reason, it is impossible that it is able to change certain aspects outside itself; Richard Menary (2008) believes that «[i]t’s not narratives that shape experiences but, rather, experiences that structure narratives. [...] The mistake is again to suppose that a narrative conceived in abstraction could be brought to bear on a sequence of experiences, ordering them and giving them meaning. ».
Brandon (2016) asserts that the general delineation of the schema concept is in harmony with the notion of narrative self-understanding. This is so, because «(1) a sense-making principle that unfolds over the years is comparable to the diachronic framework of narrative self-understanding; (2) the applicability of schemas to actual experience is similar to the constitutive characteristic of narrative self-understanding: it shows how one’s self-understanding shapes one’s experience and interpretation of current events; (3) the schemas may be implicit, one aim of the therapy is to make them explicit so that they can be changed; (4) these schemas concern one’s understanding of oneself, also in relation to the social world. »
The Symbolic interactionism claims that interaction is the process in which the ability to think is developed and expressed. But, in turn, asserts that such an ability is that which shapes the interaction process. Persons, therefore, are considered as reflective individuals that interact to build the society in which they live. The main idea that the Symbolic interactionism proposes is that the subject is representing herself when she acts in a social context. This leads to an understanding of the action as if it were a performance. This opened a new field of Performance studies, which focused on social performances. For more detailed information, see (Rivero-Obra 2016.
This acting process -which is based on the embodying, the embedding, and the engaging that are carried out by the agent- is called the Three stages of action (Rivero-Obra 2016). Thanks to this, the subject is able to give meaning to her actions and identity.
As against this, Harrelson (2016) claims that the fact that the person can remember a version of her past actions does not, in isolation, provide evidence of the truth of that version. He thinks that the autobiographical storytelling is radically fallible because when someone tells stories about her past, it is not transparent, immediate, or certain. This is why, Harrelson states that to whatever extent a person wish to know about her past, then, she should become as skeptical toward her own stories as she tends to be about those of other people.
Lee Strasberg –American actor, director, and theatre practitioner– made the Method, which had an important influence on theater and movies’ performer. The acting exercises that this method uses should not be considered improvisations, but practices of imagination. Thus, the whole search of the character could not be carried out without the imagination, because it is one of the elements that connects reality to fiction (both what the player is, and also what she aspires to be).
Konstantin Stanislavski –a seminal Russian theatre practitioner and actor– proposed one of the main acting method that the performer uses to represent a character: The performer, first, reads the script and examine it in a global way. After that, she breaks down the work into external and internal sequences, and distinguishes its logical connections. Dividing the dramatic text into smaller segments help actor to find the meaning of each one of them. In addition, the player is also able to award them a goal and a predominant emotion. However, all these fragments will return to merge before the actor plays the character. In this way, the performer does not forget that each represented action is part of the overall experience of her role. Once the player, through this analysis, establishes the relationship between the dramatic text and the elements of the stage (objects and actors), she is able to develop a sequential scheme detailing the actions (a plan of acting). Nevertheless, Stanislavski y believed that it was a mistake to worry about the results; the right thing to do was to think what actions someone had to do to get what was desired (Stanislavski 1989).
According to Konstantin Stanislavski and Lee Strasberg, the actor has to carry out certain improvisational techniques to present a truthfully enactment. Through these exercises, performer is able to discover different possibilities to represent her character. It is important to note that the player has not a preconceived idea of how to behave on stage, but rather she tries to understand the actions of her role by interacting with all elements in the scene.
Improv can be understood as a dramatic exercise in which players do not start from a prior script. In theater there are individual improvisations –in which the actor interacts with the scene–, or group event –in which several performers interact with one another.
Let me indicate here that Velleman classifies the expression of emotion into two categories: 1) as a passion which expresses a feeling through gestures; and 2) as an action that unfolds under the conception of what the subject believes she should do when she suffers such emotion.
Konstantin Stanislavski also made a similar method to put performer in the place of her character and that, in this way, she was able to understand the role’s behavior. This exercise raises the following question: What would I do if I was the character? Yevgeny Vakhtangov, by contrast, also proposed what he thought it would be better question: If I am the character and have to feel her emotions, what can I do to believe this event? Either way, a performer needs to do something that help her to connect the real world with the fiction in which her character acts.
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Rivero-Obra, M. Dramatizing The SUBJECT’S Identity. Philosophia 47, 1227–1245 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-018-0023-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-018-0023-5