/tag/social%20accountability

8 quotes tagged 'social accountability'

Publisher: Zero Books (2014)

Author: Bakhtin, Medvedev, Voloshinov, Pam Morris (Editor)

Publisher: Arnold (2001)

51-52

Every ideological sign is not only a reflection, a shadow, of reality, but is also itself a material segment of that very reality. Every phenomenon functioning as an ideological sign has some kind of material embodiment, whether in sound, physical mass, color, movements of the body, or the like. In this sense, the reality of the sign is fully objective and lends itself to a unitary, monistic, objective method of study. A sign is a phenomenon of the external world. Both the sign itself and all the effects it produces (all those actions, reactions and new signs it elicits in the surrounding social milieu) occur in outer experience. \nThis is a point of extreme importance. Yet, elementary and self-evident as it may seem, the study of ideologies has still not drawn all the conclusions that follow from it. \nThe idealistic philosophy of culture and psychologistic cultural studies locate ideology in the consciousness. Ideology, they assert, is a fact of consciousness; the external body of the sign is merely a coating, merely a technical means for the realization of the inner effect, which is understanding. \nIdealism and psychologism alike overlook the fact that understanding itself can come about only within some kind of semiotic material (e.g., inner speech), that sign bears upon sign, that consciousness itself can arise and become a viable fact only in the material embodiment of signs. The understanding of a sign is, after all, an act of reference between the sign apprehended and other, already known signs; in other words, understanding is a response to a sign with signs. And this chain of ideological creativity and understanding, moving from sign to sign and then to a new sign, is perfectly consistent and continuous: from one link of a semiotic nature (hence, also of a material nature) we proceed uninterruptedly to another link of exactly the same nature. And nowhere is there a break in the chain, nowhere does the chain plunge into inner being, nonmaterial in nature and unembodied in signs. \nThis ideological chain stretches from individual consciousness to individual consciousness, connecting them together. Signs emerge, after all, only in the process of interaction between one individual consciousness and another. And the individual consciousness itself is filled with signs. Consciousness becomes consciousness only once it has been filled with ideological (semiotic) content, consequently, only in the process of social interaction... \nSigns can arise only on interindividual territory. It is territory that cannot be called 'natural' in the direct sense of the word: signs do not arise between two members of the species Homo sapiens. It is essential that the two individuals be organized socially, that they compose a group (a social unit); only then can the medium of signs take shape between them. The individual consciousness not only cannot be used to explain anything, but, on the contrary, is itself in need of explanation from the vantage point of the social, ideological medium. \n*The individual consciousness is a social-ideological fact*. Not until this point is recognized with due provision for all the consequences that follow from it will it be possible to construct either an objective psychology of an objective study of ideologies... \nNo cultural sign, once taken in and given meaning, remains in isolation: it becomes part of the unity of the verbally constituted consciousness. It is in the capacity of the consciousness to find verbal access to it. Thus, as it were, spreading ripples of verbal responses and resonances form around each and every ideological sign. Every ideological refraction of existence in process of generation, no matter what the nature of its significant material, is accompanied by ideological refraction in word as an obligatory concomitant phenomenon. \n

How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves

Author: Paul John Eakin

Publisher: Cornell University Press (1999)

141

I am less interested, finally, in demonstrating that there is a link between narrative disorders and identity disorders than I am in pointing out that both clinicians (psychologists and neurologists) and conventionally socialized laymen make this link. What I find striking in both Sack's and Schacter's cases on the one hand and in Thernstrom's account of her friend's response to her own 'case' on the other is the steady monitoring of narrative practices by these observers for familiar signs of healthy identity. Well before Melanie's attempted suicide, for example, her down-to-earth, sarcastic friend Bob condemns her morbid tendency to 'see things Match Girl' (202): 'I think, actually, the metaphor sucks,' he tells her bluntly (272). And her boyfriend Adam, increasingly disturbed, joins Bob in attacking her Match-Girl self-characterization as 'the doomed kind': 'But this isn't a story...And you aren't a kind...You are you,' he protests (278). Identity narratives generate identity judgments; the way we practice identity narrative makes a difference: is the display of affect appropriate, is it lacking? Either way, as we make such evaluations (and I grant that we often make them in what we consider another's best interests), we enter an ethical realm that deserves further investigation. After Foucault, we hardly need to be reminded of the potentially disciplinary dimension of this regulation of identity, especially when it is a question of labeling the individual as healthy or normal. \r\n\r\nMelanie Thernstrom. The Dead Girl: A True Story. 1990. New York: Pocket Books, 1991.

140

In speaking of amnesia and autism as pathologies, I want to get at the psychological rather than the neurological dimension of these phenomena, the strange absence or loss of affect in such individuals that in case after case makes so deep an impression on the clinicians who study them. This sense of something missing, an inner chill or deadness, seems to be associated with a 'dysnarrativia' that bespeaks a damaged identity. Who can say for sure, however, that the identities in question are truly damaged? It is the fact that those who observe such individuals should think so that interests me, suggesting that we live in a culture in which narrative functions as the signature of the real, of the normal. (I should add that, given the opportunity for first-hand observation, I suspect that I would agree that identity has been damanged in these cases.) In a remarkable essay that I keep going back to, 'The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality,' Hayden White makes this point in connection with history, whereas I want to apply it here in connection with identity. Social accountability requires identity narrative; in The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston gives a nice rendering of a child's perception of this requirement: 'I thought talking and not talking made the difference between sanity and insanity. Insane people were the ones who couldn't explain themselves' (216).

129-130

Certainly a continuing refrain in the clinical accounts of amnesiacs and autistics is the clinician's distress over the subject's apparent loss of affect, confirming that one of the important adaptive functions of narrative identity and the exchange of identity narratives is the enhancement of bonding and social solidarity. Sacks's remark testifies to the working of social accountability: to achieve a socially recognized identity, individuals need to display 'that range of emotions and states of mind that defines a 'self' for the rest of us.

111

The child's 'memory talk' training, I might add, confirms John Shotter's concept of 'social accountability' presented in Chapter 2: the child learns that she is expected to be able to display to others autobiographical memories arranged in narrative form.

The premise of Shotter's concept of social accountability is that 'one ontologically learns how to be this or that kind of person' in conversation with others (138). Identity formation, then is socially and (more specifically) discursively transacted: thus 'the capacity to be addressed as a 'you' by others is a preliminary to the ultimate capacity of being able to say 'I' of oneself' (143). \r\n... \r\nIf Shotter's theory of social accountability is correct, and I think it is, the longevity of the myth of autonomy is hardly surprising: in this view, we are conditioned precisely not to recognize the relational dimension of selfhood; possessive individualism, functioning as the dominant social 'text' to which we are held 'accountable,' masks the contribution of the 'practical social processes going on 'between' people' (137) toward making us what we are: 'we fail to register the fact of our involvement with others' (142).

The psychologist John Shotter has worked out a much more searching answer to the enduring vitality of the myth of autonomy. In order to correct psychology's - and his own - one-sided preoccupation with inner states, Shotter proposes 'to repudiate the traditional 'Cartesian' starting-point for psychological research located in the 'I' of the individual, ...and to replace it by taking as basic not the inner subjectivity of the individual, but the practical social processes going on 'between' people' (137). \r\n \r\n'In my earlier views,' Shotter writes, 'I was clearly still in the thrall of classic 'text' of identity, possessive individualism' (147). Possessive individualism is C. B. Macpherson's term for the proto-capitalist model of identity proposed by Hobbes and Locke, which posits the individual as 'essentially the proprietor of his own person or capacities, owing nothing to society for them' (quoted in Shotter 136). Stepping back, Shotter asks why he - why we all - continue to account 'for our experience of ourselves...in such an individualistic way [as Macpherson describes]: as if we all existed from birth as separate, isolated individuals already containing 'minds' or 'mentalities' wholly within ourselves, set over against a material world itself devoid of any mental processes' (136). We talk in this way, he answers, because we are disciplined to do so by 'social accountability': 'what we talk of as our experience of our reality is constituted for us very largely by the already established ways in which we must talk in our attempts to account for ourselves - and for it - to the others around us...And only certain ways of talking are deemed legitimate.' So pervasive is this discursive discipline that not only our talking but 'our understanding, and apparently our experience of ourselves, will be constrained also' (141).