Week 3 Identity Having and Being The Having Mode The Being Mode Having and Being in Daily Experience Learning and Climbing Having and Being - Alternative Modes of Living and Studying   [From Eric Fromm, To Have or to Be? , Abacus, 1978 37-8, emphases added]   The Having Mode   Students in the having mode of existence will listen to a lecture, hearing the words and understanding their logical structure and their meaning and, as best they can, will write down every word in their looseleaf notebooks - so that, later on, they can memorise their notes and thus pass an examination.   But the content does not become part of their own individual system of thought, enriching and widening it. Instead, they transform the words they hear into fixed clusters of thought, or whole theories, which they store up.   The students and the content of the lectures remain strangers to each other, except that each student has become the owner of a collection of statements made by somebody else (who had either created them or taken them over from another source).   Students in the having mode must have but one aim: to hold on to what they ‘learned,’ either by entrusting it firmly to their memories or by carefully guarding their notes. They do not have to produce or create something new. In fact, the having-type individuals feel rather disturbed by new thoughts or ideas about a subject, because the new puts into question the fixed sum of information they have.   Indeed, to one for whom having is the main form of relatedness to the world, ideas that cannot easily be pinned down (or penned down) are frightening like everything else that grows and changes, and thus is not controllable.   The Being Mode   The process of learning has an entirely different quality for students in the being mode of relatedness to the world. To begin with, they do not go to a course of lectures, even to the first one in a course, as tabulae rasae. They have thought beforehand about the problems the lectures will be dealing with and have in mind certain questions and problems of their own. They have been occupied with the topic and it interests them.   Instead of being passive receptacles of words and ideas, they listen, they hear, and most important, they receive and they respond in an active, productive way. What they listen to stimulates their own thinking processes. New questions, new ideas, new perspectives arise in their minds. Their listening is an alive process. They listen with interest, hear what the lecturer says, and spontaneously come to life in response to what they hear. They do not simply acquire knowledge that they can take home and memorise.   Each student has been affected and has changed: each is different after the lecture than he or she was before it. Of course, this mode of learning can prevail only if the lecture offers stimulating material.   Empty talk cannot be responded to in the being mode, and in such circumstances, students in the being mode find it best not to listen at all, but to concentrate on their own thought processes.   Having and Being in Daily Experience   Because the society we live in is devoted to acquiring property and making a profit, we rarely see any evidence of the being mode of existence, and most people see the having mode as the most natural mode of existence, even the only acceptable way of life.   All of which makes it especially difficult for people to comprehend the nature of the being mode, and even to understand that having is only one possible orientation.   Nevertheless, these two concepts are rooted in human experience. Neither one should be, or can be, examined in an abstract, purely cerebral way; both are reflected in our daily life and must be dealt with concretely.       Identity (8 Slides)   Slide 1 Identity (1) What is identity? give examples of how this concept is used ……….. identity ……….. Identity

	What is the difference between `social’ identity and `personal’ or `self’-identity?
	Consider the cases of Vic and Robyn in Nice Work

The `I’, the `Me’ and the `Generalised Other’

`I’ – the active, unique element of individual consciousness that `knows’ the world

`Me’ – the `I’s knowledge of what it identifies as `self’, constructed out of the `generalised other’

`Generalised Other’ – the `I’s knowledge of what others know about the world, including the `self’. Taking on the role/meanings of the other.

Slide 3

	When Robyn is ushered into Vic’s office for the first time, she expects to meet a man who fits her `Generalised Other’ concept of Managing Director (`grand and gross with plump flushed cheeks)
	Vic turns out to be less imposing and remote
	This leads Robyn’s sense/concept of self (her `Me’) to be less threatened. Robyn (her `I’ )does some `fancy footwork’ to redefine the situation.

Slide 4

`In Mead’s theory, the `me’ is the identity – a social identity – of which the `I’ becomes conscious…We can agree with Mead that that infant begins to develop a self in response to the social context of its early experience’.

`But the I/Me relation is one internal to language, not one connecting the unsocialised part of the individual (the I) to the `social self’. `I’ is a linguistic shifter, which gets its meaning from the networks of terms whereby a discursive system of subjectivity is acquired’ (A. Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity, pp 52-3)

`…in the context of a post-traditional order, the self becomes a reflexive project…As academic disciplines, sociology and psychology are thus bound up in a direct way with the reflexivity of the self’ (A. Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity, pp 32-33)

Traditional order - Identity is ascribed (ritual)

Modern order - Identity is achieved (risk)

	How is identity formed / learned?
	How is identity reproduced/transformed?
	How do considerations of power, inequality and insecurity connect to processes of identity formation?
	What about `reflexivity’?

 

Slide 7

Reality Maintenance

` The most important vehicle of reality- maintenance is conversation’.

`One may view the individual’s everyday life in terms of the working away of a conversational apparatus that ongoingly maintains, modifies and reconstructs his/her subjective reality…’

`language realizes a world in the double sense of apprehending it and producing it’

P.Berger and T.Luckman, The Social Construction of Reality, pp. 172-3

 

Slide 8

Language, Power and Inequality

`S/he who has the bigger stick has the better chance of imposing his/her definition of reality’ (P. Berger and T. Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality, p. 127)

	Constructing/reproducing what passes for `normal’ and `commonsensical’ (hegemony)
	Subversions of the taken-for-granted
	Pluralism – competing world-views
	Discrediting of meta-narratives –e.g. religion, science, etc
	Absence of foundations

 

 

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