NP book review: Cultural Psychology of Self

[pynchonoid]

Some of you may find this interesting (echoes perhaqps
of The Philosophy of the Flesh).  "Self" as "a
locative system which has an intricately
interconnected systems of navigation evolved through
various levels of being, from the non-conscious
processes of biological homeostasis to the highest
forms of moral, intellectual and artistic-aesthetic
consciousness" also sounds like the Pynchonian
narrative strategy, to my ear.


http://mentalhelp.net/books/books.php?type=de&id=1354


Cultural Psychology of Self
Place, Morality, and Art in Human Worlds
by Ciarán Benson
Routledge, 2001


[...] The book consists of two main parts. In Part I,
Benson explores the idea that having a sense of self
requires being in place by heavily drawing upon the
works in psychology, neurology, philosophy, history
and aesthetics. He clearly acknowledges the function
of the brain in constituting a person’s world and
positioning oneself in that world. The idea of self as
a narrative structure functions to place oneself as a
moral agent in and across personal time. He then goes
on to explore how these narratives constitute and
place the autobiographical self in time by citing
works by Jerome Bruner, Julian Jaynes and Rom Harre.
In the last essay of the first part Benson sets out
the underlining idea of the rest of the book, which is
that emotions are intricately related to how a person
acts in her physical or social worlds. By citing the
recent work by Antonio Damasio he concludes that “ways
of feeling, particularly in relation to their commonly
understood appropriateness in social, moral and
aesthetic situations, vary distinctively across time
and place, as constituents of self, feelings select,
guide and energize individual and social actions” (p.
115). 

After developing a concept of selfhood as a locative
system which has an intricately interconnected systems
of navigation evolved through various levels of being,
from the non-conscious processes of biological
homeostasis to the highest forms of moral,
intellectual and artistic-aesthetic consciousness,
Benson, then proceeds to explore how we locate
ourselves among other people, and particularly with
the ideas of choice, responsibility and related
feelings. First three essays of Part II are devoted to
exploring the aspects of moral responsibility
centering on relocation and dislocation of self. The
underlying locative theme of moral responsibility is
being placed in a particular culture in childhood. 

The essays on the second part of the book are built
upon the significance of location for an understanding
of the import of dislocation and relocation. In this
part of the book Benson tries to establish a relation
between self and cultural psychology through several
moral and aesthetic themes. The themes he mainly
considers are childhood, responsibility and acquiring
powers to place oneself as a moral agent, pitilessness
and compassion, suffering and guilt, visual art and
the location of self, connections between national and
personal identity, and a critical examination of
psychologies of maturity. Trauma and aesthetic
experiences have the general fact of relocation in
common while they differ in constituting personal and
social identities. Personal and social identities,
argues Benson are built upon moral identities which
simultaneously constitute social worlds and ways of
locating and navigating within these worlds. He cites
stories of Holocaust as examples of dislocation of
self and consequently destruction of self identity.
After examining pain and torture as examples of
diminishing self identity he goes on to examine
aesthetic experience as an example of the expansion of
self. As it is shown in Turrell’s work, there is a
sense of self as always being “a work in progress” in
a way that is strikingly similar to the artistic work
in progress. He goes one step further and establishes
analogical and symbolic relations between individual
and national identities as they both being “works in
progress” and being originated by artistic
creationism.
[...] 





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