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Identity, Story, and Self-Hood

20/10/2011 By Kelly Cooper

"The very notion of selfhood (individual and social) is challenged by discourses where human subjects are increasingly defined as 'desiring machines' or 'effects of signifiers'. The best answer to this crisis of identity is not, however, to revive some substantialist notion of the person as essence, cogito or ego. We must look here again. Ricoeur suggests, to the resources of narrative. The most fitting response to the question 'Who is the author or agent?' is to tell the story of a life. Why? Because the enduring identity of a person, presupposed by the designation of a proper name, is provided by the narrative conviction that it is the same subject who perdures through its diverse acts and words between birth and death. The story tells us about the action of the ‘who’: and the identity of this 'who' is a narrative identity. This is what Ricoeur' terms an ipse-self.

The narrative self involves an ongoing process of self-constancy and self-rectification that requires imagination to synthesize the different horizons of past, present, and future. The narrative concept of self thus offers a dynamic notion of identity (ipse) that includes mutability and change within the cohesion of one lifetime…. This means, for instance, that the identity of human subjects is deemed a constant task of reinterpretation in the light of new and old stories we tell about ourselves. 'The subject becomes, to borrow a Proustian formula, both reader and writer of its own life. Selfhood is a cloth woven of stories told'" (Kearney 2004:108-109).

Kearney, Richard
2004 On Paul Ricoeur: The Owl of Minerva. Burlington, VT: Ashgate.

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Our Recognition through Narrative Identity

03/06/2011 By Kelly Cooper

"The same triadic relation of me/you/third person third person can be found on the plane we have distinguished by the question 'Who acts? ' 'Who is the author of an action? ' The capacity to designate oneself as the author of one's own actions is inscribed in a context of interaction where the other figures as my antagonist or my helper, in relations that vary between conflict and interaction. But innumerable others are implied in any undertaking. Each agent is bound to these others by the intermediary of different orders of social systems. We can, with Jean-Marc Ferry, designate with the term 'orders of recognition' the large-scale organizations that structure interaction: technical systems, monetary and fiscal systems, juridical systems, bureaucratic systems, pedagogical systems, scientific systems, media systems, and so on. It is first as one of these systems that the democratic system is inscribed in the sequence of 'orders of recognition….' That recognition is what is at stake in this organization has to be called over against a systematic abstraction that would banish consideration of those initiatives and interventions by which persons posit themselves over against such systems. Conversely, that the organization of social systems is the required mediation for recognition must be affirmed over against a personalist communitarianism that might dream of reconstructing the political bond on the model of the personal bond illustrated by friendship and love.

Some may doubt whether narrative identity presents the same threefold structure as do discourse and action. But they are wrong. Life stories are so intertwined with one another that the narrative anyone tells or hears of his own life becomes a segment of those other stories that are the narratives of others' lives. We may thus consider nations, peoples, classes, communities of every sort as institutions that recognize themselves as well as others through narrative identity. It is in this sense that history, in the sense of historiography, can itself be taken as an institution destined to make manifest and to preserve the temporal dimension of the orders of recognition we have been considering" (Ricoeur 2000:6-7).

Ricoeur, Paul
2000[199] The Just. David Pellauer, trans. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.

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Consideration Through Narrative Identity

21/04/2011 By Kelly Cooper

"The same triadic relation of me/you/third person can be found on the plane we have distinguished by the question 'Who acts?' 'Who is the author of an action?' The capacity to designate oneself as the author of one's own actions is inscribed in a context of interaction where the other figures as my antagonist or my helper, in relations that vary between conflict and interaction. But innumerable others are implied in any undertaking. Each agent is bound to these others by the intermediary of different orders of social systems. We can, with Jean-Marc Ferry, designate with the term 'orders of recognition' the large-scale organizations that structure interaction: technical systems, monetary and fiscal systems, juridical systems, bureaucratic systems, pedagogical systems, scientific systems, media systems, and so on. It is first as one of these systems that the democratic system is inscribed in the sequence of 'orders of recognition.' That recognition is what is at stake in this organization has to be recalled over against a systematic abstraction that would banish consideration of those initiatives and interventions by which persons posit themselves over against such systems. Conversely, that the organization of social systems is the required mediation for recognition must be affirmed over against a personalist communitarianism that might dream of reconstructing the political bond on the model of the personal bond illustrated by friendship and love.

Some may doubt whether narrative identity presents the same threefold structure as do discourse and action. But they are wrong. Life stories are so intertwined with one another that the narrative anyone tells or hears of his own life becomes a segment of those other stories that are the narratives of others' lives. We may thus consider nations, peoples, classes, communities of every sort as institutions that recognize themselves as well as others through narrative identity. It is in this sense that history, in the sense of historiography, can itself be taken as an institution destined to make manifest and to preserve the temporal dimension of the orders of recognition we have been considering" (Ricoeur 2000:6-7).

Ricoeur, Paul
2000 The Just. David Pellauer, trans. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

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Social Systems and Narrative Identity

11/01/2011 By Kelly Cooper

“‘Who acts?’ ‘Who is the author of an action?’ The capacity to designate oneself as the author of one’s own actions is inscribed in a context of interaction where the other figures as my antagonist or my helper, in relations that vary between conflict and interaction. But innumerable others are implied in any undertaking. Each agent is bound to these others by the intermediary of different orders of social systems. We can, with Jean-Marc Ferry, designate with the term ‘orders of recognition’ the large-scale organizations that structure interaction: technical systems, monetary and fiscal systems, juridicial systems, bureaucratic systems, pedagogical systems, scientific systems, media systems, and so on. It is first as one of these systems that the democratic system is inscribed in the sequence of ‘orders of recognition.’ That recognition is what is at stake in this organization has to be recalled over against a systematic abstraction that would banish consideration of those initiatives and interventions by which persons posit themselves over against such systems. Conversely, that the organization of social systems is the required mediation for recognition must be affirmed over against a personalist communitarianism that might dream of reconstructing the political bond on the model of the personal bond illustrated by friendship and love.

Some may doubt whether narrative identity presents the same threefold structure as do discourse and action. But they are wrong. Life stories are so intertwined with one another that the narrative anyone tells or hears of his own life becomes a segment of those other stories that are the narratives of others’ lives. We may thus consider nations, peoples, classes, communities of every sort as institutions that recognize themselves as well as others through narrative identity” (Ricoeur 2000:6-7).

Ricoeur, Paul
2000[199] The Just. David Pellauer, trans. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.

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Narrative Identity and the Development Act

02/01/2011 By Kelly Cooper

“Narrative identity is not a seamless identity, and it is possible for many plots to emerge from the same set of incidents (not appropriately called the same events). It is always possible to weave different plots about our lives in an ‘exchange of roles between history and fiction.’ Narrative identity does not exhaust the question of the self-constancy of a subject, whether a particular individual or a community of individuals. The power of the act of reading, whether in oral or written form, resides in what Ricoeur calls a ‘thoughtful experience by means of which we try to inhabit worlds foreign to us.’ Herein, Ricoeur posits, ‘narrative exercises the imagination more than the will.’ The person or persons moving in a social imagination that can house the opposition between imagination and will is in a moment of both stasis and impetus. It is due to this inclusion of impetus that the moment becomes a provocation to be and to act differently. Ricoeur describes the development act when he says this ‘impetus is transformed into action only through a decision whereby a person says: Here I Stand!’” (Herda 2010:140).

Herda, Ellen A.
2010 Narrative Matters among the Mlabri: Interpretive Anthropology in International Development. In A Passion for the Possible: Thinking with Paul Ricoeur. Brian Treanor and Henry Isaac Venema, eds. Pp. 129-146. Bronx, NY: Fordham University Press.

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