Ordering and reordering of social space is one of the main ways in which ‘selves’ are changed and regulated. This essay will first explain ‘the nature of the self’. By moving forward along the time line from the sixteenth century to contemporary society, it will then illustrate the contribution of ‘civilizing self’ and of spaces like closed institutions and the family with their corresponding local practices to social change in the nature of the self over time. It will conclude, that many practices and spaces are contributing to social change in the nature of the self, connected and interdependent.
What is meant by the nature of the ‘self’? Erving Goffman (1997) distinguishes the self as successfully performing and staging a character and by taking cues and interacting with other ‘actors’, inferring an inner self, and a psychobiological set of impulses, affects and moods. This set forms an inner motivational core, affected by performing this character, learning, taking pleasure and experiencing anxiety at the possibility to not coming across as intended. The ability to play and move between different roles is crucial to the successful staging of the self. It occurs in different spatial settings like home, work, school etc. and changes to one role should not affect the others. The ‘normal’ self autonomously manages, controls and makes changes in a number of different circumstances.
Both Elias (1994) and Foucault (1965) argue that social change in the nature of the self originates in detailed, localized and deliberate social practices, initiated by various authorities, suggesting a link between civilizing selves and disciplining bodies. A good example in which individuals control their emotions and regulate themselves, civilizing selves, and how practices change over time is the quote in Elias (1994) on the use of the serviette, which is quite different from contemporary use and behaviour. Also if we think about the content of fridges now and some decades ago, we realize significant social changes in the nature of the self behind alleged small variations, e.g. growing concern over food safety and animal cruelty or regulated conduct like holding a healthy diet and maintaining a good level of fitness.
The other part of the link, the regulation of conduct through disciplining bodies, enclosed institutions, by various practices like removal of property and civilian clothing, changing the full name for a number, and thus social changes in the self, started in the sixteenth and seventeenth century in Europe, called ‘the Great Confinement’ by Foucault (1965). The breakdown of feudal relations produced a class of vagabonds and ‘masterless man’, left homeless and without a socially recognized space and status. It was through these poor and marginalized populations which were ‘locked away’, where experimentation and innovation in the regulation of the self where conducted in enclosed institutions like monasteries, prisons and asylums. The applied practices intended for the individual, to loose the self-image and relations to others and the capacity for role-scheduling through confined and separated space. This ‘identity trimming’ demolished the individual’s sense of personal identity then rebuild it to suit the requirements of the institution.
At the end of the eighteenth century, through the emergence of liberal political institutions and early capitalism, the enclosed institutions gradually developed specialised knowledge and applied it to various confined populations e.g. in prisons, workhouses and asylums. This was an attempt to not only regulate the character, the self, of these populations like in the above described practices used to fit into the institution, but to reform it in order to ‘fit’ into society. ‘Imprisonment’ is until today the generalized system of punishment for all criminal and ‘abnormal’ behaviour and an important space of regulating and contributing to social changes in the nature of the self, aligning behaviour trough self-responsibility with the conduct and society of the time. A specific ‘closed’ institution and social space in the late nineteenth century in this context was the workhouse, where the poor received assistance within it, and only if the economically responsible had died, the women and children were given ‘outdoor’ public relieve.
The disciplinary power of such enclosed institutions e.g. the practices of disciplinary techniques like the mortification of the self, in the formation of conduct and the application of manners and forms of civility, creates a certain type of individual who is obedient, productive and self-governing with self-control and a conscience, by providing a controlled environment in space and time. These spaces of regulation with their local practices not only contributed within their ‘walls’ to social changes in the nature of the self. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the enclosed institutions not only have become specialized places for reforming conduct of certain classes of populations, through their deterrent functions, they had also become techniques for regulating the conduct of the populations outside, making them more self-responsible e.g. to prefer the independence of wage labour and self-support over state-provided and controlled welfare assistance. Self-responsibility is now expected of the majority of the contemporary society and occurred through e.g. the generalization of the public education. This development is evidence for the effect of enclosed institutions on the majority outside population through their ‘radiation’ of new regulations, gained through new and combined knowledge, ‘implemented’ in new behaviour and conduct, and by their symbolic value.
So far we have seen how enclosed institutions have changed from spaces of confinement for the dangerous and idle, to specialized disciplinary institutions of reform and rehabilitation for the management of those, who represent a risk to the norms of the community and by their practices, contributing to social change in the nature of the self both for the ‘inmates’ of these institutions and the majority of the population outside, by being a deterrent symbol of control and power.
The theory of Goffman on ‘total institutions’ (1961) reaches its limits at this point because it isolates ‘total institutions’ from society and obscures historically differentiated forms of knowledge, practices and techniques, invented, borrowed and adapted to be applied in diverse sites for different purposes where as Foucault’s theory of ‘Governmentality’ (1991), to be understood in the broad sense of the technique and procedures for directing human behaviour, is in alignment with the understanding that social change is inherently multiple and diverse.
Through the increased capacity of self-regulation by civilizing self and disciplining bodies, a new approach of regulation, ‘liberal’ regulation, emerged. This regulation was based on knowledge and techniques of social, biological, psychological, demographic and economic processes, found in different spheres of spaces of society by various actors and authorities in the social and political field and was a renunciation of exclusive state knowledge. This new approach, by which individuals are rather governed through their own capacities for self-regulation than by the earlier authoritarian approach to policing, is best illustrated by the example of the family, by focusing on that space and the various practices, causing social change in the nature of the self. By becoming a private, non-political sphere separated form the government, the family was not subject to summary police powers anymore and constructed as a space of intimacy and mutuality, care, consumption and aspiration (Donzelot, 1979). Through the aspirations of the family and various agents like doctors, hygienists, social workers and teachers, often working together with the mother, norms and standards of living were promoted, changing society and selves. Another closely linked practice, for families that cannot look after themselves or particular family members, was and still is the system of professionals and institutions who link them into a network. Through this network, the state reserves the right to intervene in those families that cannot provide for their members, often becoming criminals or causing disorder. Examples for such interventions are the juvenile and family courts and the proliferation of social work and psychiatric knowledge and practices. These regulations occur in distinctive social spaces like the home, the school or the prison and change or establish new norms e.g. of self-regulation, contributing to social change in the self.
Today, this social intervention, combined with the emergence of mass parliamentary democracies and mass labour, guaranteeing minimum standards of provision in education, health, security against the risks of unemployment, poverty, illness and many more, is called into question from the viewpoint of the regulation of the self by social movements such as feminism and from different social and political positions, because it encourages a uniformity of provisions, removing autonomy, creating dependency on social benefits. It is also conflicting, like in the case of social security, were the regulation of the self is simultaneously about facilitating and forcing selves. The critique, caused by the creation of selves with interest in maintaining and strengthening their capacities for self regulation and demands of choice and reward for enterprise, provoked a renewed emphasis on ‘governing through freedom’, opening a myriad of different agencies and authorities, using different techniques and practices like e.g. self-help literature, health-promotion and risk management for the regulation of the self.
This essay started out with the description of closed institutions and their associated authoritarian methods and practices like mortification, attempting to regulate the self. Gradually, a sense self-responsibility was built through civilizing selves and disciplining bodies. Further attempts were made to govern through open social spaces, aspirations and desires of e.g. families and individuals ‘guided’ by liberal-democratic institutions. Foucaults’ theory of Governmentality proves a very important means of illustrating the development of self-responsibility and showed the limits of Goffman’s work on ‘total institutions’. Today, a variety of social spaces and practices contribute to social changes in the nature of the self e.g. the interaction between various agents with their knowledge and the family, together with a network of institutions where the state controls and reinforces self-responsibility and self-regulation.
The multiple, varied and multi-faceted nature of social changes of the self seems more closely connected to Castells’s theory of the network society than to Foucauldian theory, which does not acknowledge the connection between types or levels of regulation.
(1648 words)
References
Dean M. (2002) The regulation of the self, in Jordan, T. and Pile, (eds), (2002), Social Change, Milton Keynes, Open University.
Donzelot, J. (1979) The Policing of Families (trans. R. Hurley), New York, Pantheon, in Jordan, T. and Pile, (eds), (2002), Social Change, Milton Keynes, Open University.
Elias, N. (1994) The Civilizing Process (trans. E. Jephcott), Oxford, Blackwell, in Jordan, T. and Pile, (eds), (2002), Social Change, Milton Keynes, Open University.
Foucault, M. (1965) Madness and Civilization (trans. R. Howard), London, Tavistock, in Jordan, T. and Pile, (eds), (2002), Social Change, Milton Keynes, Open University.
Foucault, M. (1991) ‘Governmentality’ in Burchell, G., Gordon, C. and Miller, P. (eds) The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, London, Harvester Wheatsheaf, pp. 87 – 104, in Jordan, T. and Pile, (eds), (2002), Social Change, Milton Keynes, Open University.
Goffman, E. (1991) Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates, Garden City, NY, Doubleday, in Jordan, T. and Pile, (eds), (2002), Social Change, Milton Keynes, Open University.
Goffman, E. (1997) The Goffman Reader (ed. C. Lemert and A. Bannaman), Oxford, Blackwell, in Jordan, T. and Pile, (eds), (2002), Social Change, Milton Keynes, Open University.
Jordan, T. and Pile, (2002) Social change: introduction, in Jordan, T. and Pile, (eds), (2002), Social Change, Milton Keynes, Open University.
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