Draft. Do not quote. Published online as an Italian Academy of Advanced Studies at Columbia working paper.
Chapter 1
How I See Myself Seen
Peur de perdre les siens, mais aussi de se perdre lui-même,
de découvrir que derrière la façade sociale il n’était rien.
E. Carrère, L’Adversaire
He smiled understandingly, much more than
understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal
reassurance in it that you may come across four or five times in life. It
faced--or seemed to face--the whole external world for an instant, and then
concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood
you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would
like to believe in yourself
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
On January 9th, 1993, in his
house in the region of Gex, between Switzerland and Jura, Jean-Claude Romand
kills his wife, his five and seven-year-old children, his parents and their
dog. He then attempts to kill his mistress in the forest of Fontainebleau,
where he had brought her to have dinner at Bernard Kouchner’s house, whom he
does not know and who does not have a house in Fontainebleau. Lastly, he sets
his house on fire, takes a sleeping pill and falls asleep, hoping to never
awaken. He nonetheless wakes up from the coma provoked by the barbiturates and
burns. He is charged with having committed the most atrocious crimes and is
immediately convicted. According to the public prosecutor of the republic that
followed the case, “The motive of his crime was of the fear of the counterfeit doctor
of being exposed.”
How is it ever possible that confessing
a lie, even an outrageous lie, becomes more difficult than exterminating one’s
own entire family? How could his reputation have counted more to him than the
life of his children? This book tries to answer this question.
The somber story of Jean-Claude Romand
became famous due to Emanuel Carrère’s book, L’Adversaire[1]. The
author narrates the trajectory of a man who built himself a reputation as a
successful doctor, working at the World
Health Organization in Geneva, and friend of political men and internationally
renowned researchers. All this based on a lie. In fact, he never finished his
medical studies, and during ten years, instead of working, he had been spending
his days in his car in the parking lot of the WHO in Geneva or loitering in the
woods or in cafes until it was time to go home. He had thoroughly taken care of
his false identity down to the smallest detail, bringing home fliers and
brochures from the WHO every chance he could go to the library that was open to
the public on the ground floor of the organization’s headquarters. If he left
on “business trips,” trips he took to the pitiful hotel close to his house
where he would watch TV and read the guidebooks of whatever country he was
supposed to be visiting, he never forgot to call his family every day to tell
them what time it was in Tokyo or Brazil and he always returned from these trips
with credible gifts. He took care of his false existence, his fictitious
reputation, as if it were real: the endeavor led him to the point of destroying
his entire family because the façade began to collapse due to money problems.
Which was his real life? The one that his family thought he lived, full of
success, trips and international recognition, or the one that only he could
know, spent reading in his car, or in the crummy cafes of Bourg-en-Bresse, or
walking in the mountains of Jura? Basically, his second life only existed for
him: nobody else knew about it, it was only a way to maintain his dream life.
When his friends from the village realized that Jean-Claude’s entire life was a
lie, he ceased to exist for them, he was no longer Jean-Claude: “When they
talked about him, late at night, they could no longer call him Jean-Claude.
They didn’t call him Romand either. It was something outside of life, outside
of death, he no longer had a name”[2].
We have two egos, two identities that make up who we are and how we behave: our
subjectivity, made out of our proprioceptive experiences, our physical
sensations, embodied in our body, and our reputation,
the powerful reflective/retroactive system that constitutes our social identity
and that integrates into our self-awareness of how we see ourselves seen. At the beginning of the twentieth
century, the American sociologist Charles Horton Cooley[3]
called this second ego, the looking glass
self. The perception of our identity is woven into the thread of time,
incorporating what we think others think of us. In fact, this understanding of
ourselves is not created simply by reflection,
but by the refraction of our image
divided and multiplied in the eyes of others. The social self, who controls our
lives and leads us to extreme acts, does not belong to us: it is the part of us
that lives inside others. However, the feelings that it provokes – shame,
embarrassment, self-esteem, guilt, pride - are very real and well anchored in
our deepest emotions[4]. Biology
demonstrates that our body “treats” shame as a physical wound, releasing a
quantity of chemical substances that provoke inflammation and increase the
level of cortisol[5]. A slap does
more harm to our self-esteem than to our red burning cheek.
In his work on the culture of honor, the psychologist Richard Nisbett and his
collaborators measured the level of cortisol of participants before and after
an experience where they felt their honor had been “hurt.” The study went as
follows. A group of 83 students from the South and North of the United States
were invited to participate in a psychological study. Before the experiment,
the subjects were asked to fill out a form with their personal information and
to return it to an experimenter who was not in the room of the study, but at
the end of a hallway. It was only when they left the room to hand in their
forms that the “true” experiment began: an experimenter pretended to be an
employee of the university organizing files in a rolling file cabinet that was
placed in the middle of the hallway. To allow the student to pass, the fake
employee had to move the cabinet. Once the student reached the end of the
hallway, after turning in his form, the fake employee had to once again move
the cabinet to allow the student to pass by him. He did this while sighing,
aggravated, and murmuring, “asshole.” At the end of the experience, the levels
of cortisol in the Southern students, who felt that their reputation (and their
virility) had been damaged, were much higher[6]
than at the beginning of the experiment. Feeling that their reputation was hurt
provoked a real chemical transformation within them, a well-known hormonal
reaction that normally corresponds to a preparation to respond with physical
violence.
What
I think you think about me
More than a third of homicides in the
United States are attributable to trivial motives such as a particularly
aggressive verbal exchange, an insult, or a question of precedence in a parking
lot. Among the most convincing sociological explanations for crimes without
serious motives are honor, pride and reputation[7].
Many of these crimes are committed by people who do not have a psychopathic
psychological profile. Nevertheless, they are driven to the point of killing by
the stupid question of precedence. Everyone can have furious reactions during futile arguments: with the offensive
waiter, who abuses his little “power” over us, or with the woman in the car who
refuses to move five centimeters forward to let us turn left… These violent
reactions are very often caused by injuries that we imagine are inflicted by
what others “owe us”. They are true emotional injuries that we feel and that
are provoked by the feeling that we did not get the appropriate consideration,
that that was not the way that others should have treated us. How could this
imaginary, inexistent thought, that is nothing but a trace, a shadow[8]
of us in others, have such precisely determinable psychophysical effects? The
paradox of reputation resides in the apparent disproportionality between the
psychological and social value that we give it and its purely symbolic
existence: to have honor, reputation, to be honorable, is all only being thus
recognized by someone else. Why do give such value to this reflection of our
image, which resides within others, since we are the only ones obsessively
interested in our reputation- except for celebrities, whose reputation everyone
is interested in?
Mark Leary, a social psychologist at
Duke University, advanced the hypothesis that humans have a genuine sociometer, a psychological mechanism, a
motivational structure that works as an indicator of the “social temperature”
around us, a kind of internal thermometer that registers social acceptance or rejection,
using the degree of self esteem as a
unit of measurement[9]. Our social
emotions would thus be a way of tracing this part of us that passes through
others. Therefore, even if our reputation is only a reflection, the emotions
accompanying it have a physical and psychological reality that serves to
oversee this reflection.
The main problem of psychological
explanations of this kind is that they presuppose that the sociometer is
probably adjusted, that the emotions that it provokes within us and the external
social temperature co-vary in a coordinated fashion. But, unfortunately, as
George Elliot says, “the last thing we learn in life is our effect on others.”
We proceed by trials and errors, trying different selves, building façades that
are nothing but drafts. Then we see the effects that they have on others, we
adjust them until we are able to, and sometimes we surrender and leave the
image of ourselves that we have solicited in the eyes of others since we can’t
control it anymore.
The anguish that accompanies the loss
of reputation, the Proustian anxiety on the perennial uncertainty of our status and the profound ambivalence that
these feelings provoke are due to the lack of control that we have on our
image.
Our second ego is not the opinion of others,
but what we think those opinions are, or sometimes, what we would like others
to think of us. In the quote from Fitzergald that opens the chapter, Gatsby’s
smile reassures the young Nick Carraway since he is finally seen as he would
like to be seen, no less, no more. It is a feeling of emotional comfort that
allows us to let us go since we have finally been seen by someone as we would
like to be seen. The mysterious Gatsby with his sulfurous reputation is the
only one able to give Carraway the correct assessment of himself, to provide
him the profound satisfaction of being seen at last as he truly is. And he
gives him the rarest and most beautiful present: to feel for an instant his two
egos reunited. To feel at last the suspension of the eternal ambivalence
between the being and the seeming. Carraway is an accomplice of Gatsby’s since
he understands his profound need to build a dream self, a second self that is
not only a social façade, but that represents what he would like others to
think of him: “He invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen year
old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to
the end.” Nick Carraway also harbors his own other self when he says: “Each of
us imagines having at least one of the cardinal virtues, and her is mine: I am
one of those rare honest people I know.” And it is this cardinal virtue that
Gatsby recognizes by his smile.
Our social image is both familiar and a
stranger: it provokes in us reactions that we cannot control- like, for
example, blushing before an intimidating crowd- it makes us lose our means and
constitutes at the same time the part of us that is the most precious, that
which we take care of the most carefully. Failure to distinguish between these
two aspects of ourselves can make us lose a sense of our actions, to the point
of provoking in us states of extreme distress, in which we no longer understand
the reasons that moved us.
This books tries to understand the
logic of this double ego. Reputation is a mystery: its way of increasing or
decreasing under the gaze of others, of spreading or changing “valence”
suddenly, seems random. A good concept, in short, for the proverbs and
literature that contain so much knowledge and life experience, but that seem
destined to speak of that which cannot be explained by other means. One such
example is in Rochefoucauld’s maxim: “Self-esteem is more clever than the
cleverest man in the world”[10].
The reference to a double intentionality that guides actions is evident, but
only vaguely resonates in the ambiguity of the maxim… However, much of the
mystery that surrounds reputation comes from the fact that it is a notion
neglected by social sciences, for several reasons. Firstly, reputation is a concept
that has a bad reputation: it is considered a vestige of a pre-modern and
anti-individualistic society. The fama,
the prestige, and the fierce battle
to defend a position in the social hierarchy are part of a world of
aristocratic values that modernity does not cease to demolish and whose study
may have just a historico-cultural interest since there is no real object of
study in these phenomenon. They are symbols of an ancient world, not of a
phenomenon that has a psychic or social reality. It is as if someone undertook
a systematic study of the aura, of a
certain luminosity that surrounds
people, in particular supernatural beings - the nimbus of saints, which is part
of Christian and Muslim iconography, being a sign of the presence of this aura.
This phenomenon can be studied from a historic-cultural point of view, looking
for example at its evolution in the history of art, or in poetry- the aura is often described in verses of
poems of the Middle Ages and in religious literature - but to choose the aura
as a genuine phenomenon to scientifically investigate, describes more
paranormal than natural and social sciences. Reputation seems to have the same status:
it is something that can be studied from a historical perspective but, since it
does not exist as a social or psychological phenomenon, cannot be studied
systematically. To reify reputation, by giving it the status of an object of
study in the social sciences would mean to substantiate fantasies from the
world of castles of the olden times and of aristocratic balls…
In addition, reputation is a
psychological illusion: we react to
it as if it existed, as if it counted for us, but in reality we are wrong and
this mistake can be fatal (as in the tragic destiny of Jean-Claude Romand). If it
were studied psychologically, it should be classed among the cognitive biases that cloud our judgment. However
this erroneous representation that can have extreme consequences, even if it is
no more than an illusion, is anchored enough in our spirit to motivate a parallel action in our lives whose
objective is not explainable without it. Take the notorious case of Orlando
Figes, a rich and famous British historian who used to spend his nights on Amazon.co.uk harshly criticizing his
colleagues’ books and writing long eulogies about his own works… to end up incarcerated and completely
drained of the precious elixir he attempted to distill online: his reputation… [11]
The management of our image is not just
a matter of make up: it is a deep
strategic matter of social cognition.
We try to manipulate other people’s representations of ourselves from the
perspective of the idea we have of their representations. It’s an arm-race, an
escalation game of believing and make-believing, of manipulating other people’s
ideas and being manipulated by them. Everyone knows the triumph one feels when
he thinks he’s been appreciated at his right value. All previous humiliations
are canceled, the world recognizes us at last for what we knew we deserved. And
everyone knows, alas, the opposite feeling of surrender when we adopt the
others’ perspective and feel evaluated by them, accepting their own measure.
The shame that Vinteuil cannot hide about his homosexual daughter in Proust’s Remembrance is of this kind: “But when M. Vinteuil
regarded his daughter and himself from the point of view of the world, and of
their reputation, when he attempted to place himself by her side in the rank
which they occupied in the general estimation of their neighbours, then he was
bound to give judgment, to utter his own and her social condemnation in
precisely the terms which the inhabitant of Combray most hostile to him and his
daughter would have employed; he saw himself and her in ‘low,’ in the very
‘lowest water”.[12]
The results of the
management of our self-representation are highly uncertain, yet sometimes
spectacular: it is the uncertainty of the result that make the interest of the
reputation game. The words and the images we use for manage our reputation are
“like shells, nor less integral parts of nature than are the substance they
cover, but better addressed to the eye and more open to observation”, in the
words of George Santayana[13].
This second nature whose substance seems to be made for the sake of the
appearances, owes its reality to the social environment. It is the social and
distributed nature of our reputation, its refraction through the thoughts and
the words of others that I want to detail in the following pages.
The presentation of self
Like snails, who leave
behind a trail of slime while moving along, our social interactions leave an
informational trail that cannot be deleted anymore. This trail is indelible yet
fragile: we do not control it entirely, even if we cannot help leaving it
behind. How does it compose and recompose? How does it become stable and
public, which mediations and supports do make it diffuse and circulate?
The social contexts that
record this informational trail vary from face to face interactions to gossips
and rumors in the absence of the target person, and to the media and the Internet.
These various means of transfer of social information shape specific biases and
magnifying effects that have been studied from different disciplinary
perspectives.
Erwin Goffman is certainly the most notable expert of the
face to face dimension of our interactions. His impressive and detailed work on
the micro-sociology of everyday interaction laid the foundations of the
contemporary impression management techniques,
so dear to consulting firms and marketing divisions. In his fine-grained
analyses of how people care about their presentation in social interactions,
Goffman developed a sort of strategic
theory of everyday life. The
face to face interaction is the arena in which we negotiate our social image,
the place in which our double ego plays the role of the protagonist. The
staging of our self can be more or less cynical. We may wish others to think
highly of ourselves, no matter how real are the hidden qualities we advertize
on stage. We may more or less adhere to the character we are playing, become
the mask we wear, or keep a certain distance from the role we are playing. Yet,
in Goffman’s perspective, a part of identification with our own mask is
inevitable. It is not a case that, in Latin, the word persona means mask. The
shadow line that separates being and seeming is very difficult to draw. Goffman
takes this idea from Robert Ezra Park, one of the pioneers of American
sociology, who writes: “In a sense,
and insofar as this mask represents the conception we have formed of ourselves—the
role we are striving to live up to—this mask is our truer self , the self we
would like to be. In the end, our conception of our role becomes second nature
and an integral part of our personality. We come into the world as individuals,
achieve character, and become persons”[14]
We can find an
ideally suited example of the moral transformation suggested by Park in a 1959 Italian
movie directed by Roberto Rossellini, Il
generale della Rovere. It tells the story of a petty thief, Emanuele Bardone, who is hired by the Nazis to
impersonate an Italian resistance leader, General della Rovere, and infiltrate
a group of resistance prisoners in a Milan prison.
Once in prison, he gets acquainted with the other resistance heroes, and
appreciates the more and more the recognition and esteem that everybody have
for Della Rovere, the character he is impersonating. He becomes so attached to
his mask that, when the fascists decide to execute some of the resistance
leaders in prison in response to the killing of one of theirs, Bardone/Della
Rovere assumes his role until the end, and dies with his “comrades” on the cry
“Viva l’Italia, viva la libertà”.
Bardone becomes his reputation and his end is somehow heroic, even if he is not
truly Della Rovere. This passage from a natural identity, to be taken at its
face value, to a constructed, artificial social identity is well taken in the Italian
expression: “Ci sei o ci fai?” which
can be translated as: “But are you so or do you
act so ?”
There is a moral principle in the sociology of everyday life that
organizes the social interaction and that explains why, in the end, even Bardone/Della
Rovere can be considered as a moral character. According to Goffman: “society is organized on the principle that any individual
who possesses certain social characteristics has a moral right to expect that
others will value and treat him in a correspondingly appropriate way »[15]
His 1956
book on the presentation of self in everyday life details the strategies that
“actors” put at work to monitor their social image and influence other people’s
perceptions in social settings. Goffman conceives social life as a stage in
which players strut and fret their hour in order to project a convincing image
of themselves. The first appearance of each actor determines immediately a
context in the eyes of the audience and solicits a series of expectations about
the subsequent moves. From then on, our behavior and appearance assume a social
significance: the way in which we dress, our accent, our physical aspect, our
age, the fact of finding ourselves on that situation at that very moment, all
speaks about ourselves and constraints the way in which we can construct our
image. This projection is governed by an implicit deal between the actor and
the audience, that is, the audience will accept and respect the image projected
by the actor and won’t try to make him lose his face. It is this implicit deal
that sustains our social interactions. We dose our presentation by taking into
account what others can and cannot accept. That is why first impressions are so
important and so difficult to revise. Because they project the social script to which we will conform in the
rest of the interaction. Of course, there are moments in which this projection
is weakened, even contradicted. In these cases, the actor feels the
embarrassment of the situation, but, given the implicit deal, he can count on
the fact that his audience won’t let him down. Still, the situation may break
down at some point: I ask for a loan to my bank, I present myself in an elegant
dress, with a frivolous and detached attitude that should convey an image of
myself as a wealthy lady who is always late in payments not because of lack of
funds but just because of distraction. Then, the banker starts to ask me more
precise questions about how I am thinking to reimburse the loan, and I reply
incoherently, start to sweat, my façade starts to break down and he doesn’t
feel committed anymore to my initial projection. He lets me down.
Many theater
plays and movies construct their dramatic narratives around a breakdown of a
social situation that turns sometimes into tragedy and sometimes into comedy.
The gaffe, the blunder, are exactly
the disruption of a social interaction whose projections were previously
accepted by all participants. The situation slowly deteriorates, the actors can
no longer play the roles they had negotiated at the beginning and someone
“loses his face”. The moral dimension
of reputation and the feelings it may cause of humiliation and shame depend on
this kind of disruption in the interaction management: we feel betrayed because
the others don’t respect anymore the initial deal of accepting the image we decided
to project. They let down our double, the best part of ourselves. The breaking
of the deal creates a feeling of resentment and humiliation, the indignation of
not having been treated as we expected to be, even if we knew that we were
staging an ego and that part of what we were projecting was a fake, it was just
an invented reputation.
Of course,
we cannot project whatever we want. Each social context forces us to project an
appropriate image, that is, the one that embodies the shared values of the
society to which the interaction belongs. As Cooley says, this is an essential
part of our social learning: we project an ameliorated image of ourselves that
embodies what we think the others expect from us: “By awaking social-self
feelings, other persons give life and power to certain sentiments of approval
and disapproval regarding our own actions. […] The self of a sensitive person
tends to become his interpretation of what the others think of him and is a
prime factor in determining the moral judgments of all of us”[16]
A way of becoming what the others think of us is to deceive them and project
the self that they would expect from us. It is a virtuous circle that makes us
act socially in a more appropriate way to fulfill expectations about the social
values we would like to exemplify. Yet, a virtuous circle may become a vicious
one insofar as it reinforces social
conformism. If our social self becomes too important for us, we risk of
becoming slaves of it and conform to other people’s imagined or actual expectations.
The way in
which we represent and sometimes embody others’ expectations can be definitely awkward.
In Moliere’s The Bourgeois Gentleman, Monsieur Jourdain is a comic character
because of his perpetual gap between what he thinks about the “people of
quality” and what they actually are, and his clumsy attempts to conform to
their imagined manners. Madame Verdurin, an
ambitious Proustian character who is envious of the Parisian aristocratic grands salons which she is not admitted
to, convinces her friend, the Baron de Charlus, to organize a soirée at her house inviting all the
important aristocratic people she would love to meet. The Baron accepts, invites
everyone, but once at Madame Verdurin’s place, nobody even think of getting
acquainted to her: they treat her as she were transparent and her hope of
integrating at last the high society vanishes in the most bitter
disappointment. Also, our social codes may change as well as our thoughts about
other people’s expectations on us. In Balzac’s Lost illusions, the outfits of Madame De Bargeton, which appeared
to him the ultimate elegance once in Angoûleme, seem plain and unfashionable in
the new context of a Parisian theatrical performance.
It is clear
that the back and forth between our self and our social image, the progressive
adjustment between what we think others see of us and what we wish others
recognize of us is the essence of our social learning. And in this back and
forth we sometimes go beyond the imaginary demand of the social world and try
more hazardous presentations of our selves, thus creating spaces for social
innovation. Simone de Beauvoir says something very deep about the innovative
potential of the social self in her description of the way in which women deal
with fashion. Beyond social codes, each woman who dresses and makes up “doesn’t
present herself to the observation. As
a painting or a statue, or as an actor on the stage, she is an agent through
which someone who is not there is alluded to – the character she represents but
she is not”[17].
Goffman’s impression management is a fine-grained
analysis of face to face interactions that are structured in a front, - the frontal stage in which the
interaction takes place, articulated in appearance
(what is presented as inherent to the physical person) and manner, and a back-stage, that is, all that is to be set up in order to play the
scene. The impression management implies to hide some motivations and put
forward others and keep a certain coherence with different expressions of our
self. Goffman’s analysis reduces thus the face
to a property of the interaction and not of the individual. And the “live”
aspect of the face to face interaction excludes the cumulative effects of reputation, that is often constructed
and transmitted “off line”, that is, in absence of the actor. Yet, the social
emotions of shame, pride, glory, resentment, etc., are not generated only within
face to face interactions. Even if they are essentially relational and
comparative emotions, the social conditions that solicit them can be minimal.
Social psychology shows that the mere presence of an eye-icon on the screen of
a computer during the performance of a cognitive task changes the results of a performance[18]
that involves, at least indirectly, social approbation or disapproval. And, as
we have seen in the sad history of Jean-Claude Rolland, the interactions that
put our social ego under unsustainable pressure, are sometimes just imagined,
inexistent: children can break down under the imaginary pressures of their
parents about their achievements. Fear of deception is very often a fantasy. Actually,
most of the times, nobody cares whether we triumph or fail.
Thus, if
these emotions are the product of the interaction, they do not depend on actual interactions, but can be elicited
also by simple mental vestiges of these interactions, perhaps provoked by the
thousands of past social interactions that left a trail on our minds and bodies
and shaped our cognition.
How reputation comes to the mind
According to
the psychologist Philippe Rochat, reputation is what makes us human. What
distinguishes us most from other species is the interiorized gaze of others.
Instead of seeing the anxiety for reputation as a sociological trait of present
times, Rochat reconstructs its possible ontogenetic roots in the infant’s
minds. The anxiety of how I see myself
seen emerges very early in childhood. Hence, the hyper-attention to our
image is not the “mark of modernity” as some authors have argued[19],
but a perennial trait of our psychology. According to Rochat’s experimental
research, the two years old child has already a “co-consciousness” of himself,
which is related to the famous, or infamous, mirror stage, studied by many psycologists and psychoanalysts[20].
In the standard psychoanalytic interpretation of the mirror stage, the child
has a jubilatory reaction to the recognition of his image reflected in the
mirror, a positive experience that depends on the feeling of reunification of
his bodily perception. Converesely, Rochat’s experiments show that children
associate this experience to a feeling of embarrassment, of being “caught” in
an attitude they were not aware of. The experience of the social self is at the
same time precocious and painful. By passing the mirror stage test[21],
children not only become self-conscious, but also co-conscious, that is, aware
of the fact that there exists a social gaze on them. The precocity of this
feeling could depend on the existence from the very early childhood of a
capacity of joint attention. The
child’s survival depends on his capacity to solicit the attention of his
caregivers. Monitoring other people’s attention is thus one of the most
precocious abilities children develop. Children do nonsensical things to
attract mothers’ attention while they are talking on the phone or are
distracted by a conversation in the street.
The social
aspect of our cognition could thus be very precocious. The infant comes to the
world “equipped” with cognitive mechanisms - like joint attention - that allow him to control the social
environment and predispose him to take care of the mirror image of himself, as
if the cocktail of consciousness and social cognition makes of us a species
that is particularly sensitive to social judgment. Thinking through others and
thinking with others predispose ourselves to think of what others think of us.
The
internalization of the social world is well shown by the difference between the
emotion of shame and guilt. Shame depends on the social gaze, true or interiorized,
whereas guilt can be developed in absence of any social interaction: in the
second case, the measure of other people’s judgment is so interiorized that we
can end up exposing ourselves to public contempt in order to save the morality
of our social self.
Even Cyrano
de Bergerac, the hero who fights against hypocrisy, against the appearances,
the romantic hero of “the being” against “the seeming”, goes to the heaven
without the laurel and the rose, but with something that is “free of hurt or
stain”: his panache[22].
[3]
Cooley
(1864-1929) is seen as one of the founders of social psychology. His idea was
to anchor the study of society in the mental processes of individuals.
According to him, the concept of the individual was an abstraction, empty
without that of society, but the concept of society was equally empty if the
mental states of the individuals that made it up were not taken into account.
The idea of the looking-glass self
was developed by Cooley (1902).
[4]
These
are the emotions that psychologists call “self-awarness,” reflexive emotions
that depend on social intereaction. See Elster (1999).
[5]
See
Lewis (2002); Gruenewald (2004)
[7]
See
Gould (2013).
[8]
I
will return to the chapter on the idea of reputation as a shadow: shadow of the past in classical game
theory, and the shadow of the future
in the evolutionist explanations of cooperation. See Miller (2012); Axelrod
(1984).
[9]
That
self esteem is directly linked to social approval is a controversial theory.
See Elster (2013), for example, who affirms that the concern of having a good
reputation is independent of social acceptance.
[10]
See
Rouchefoucauld (1678), maxim 4
[11]
On
the vicissitudes of Orlando Figes in 2010 see: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/booknews/7601662/Leading-academics-in-bitter-row-over-anonymous-poison-book-reviews.html
and my article: http://gloriaoriggi.blogspot.com/2012/01/reputazione-sirena-del-presente.html
[12] Cf. M. Proust, Remembrance of Things Past. Swann’s Way. Translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff, 1922.
[13]
Cf. G. Santayana, Soliloquies in England
and later soliloquies, New York, Scribner’s 1922, p. 131.
[14]
Cf. R.E. Park (1950) Race and Culture,
p. 250.
[15]
Cf. Goffman (1956), p. 6.
[16]
Cf. Cooley (1902), p. 355.
[17]
Cf. Simone de Beauvoir (1949).
[18]
Cf. Haley & Fessler (2006).
[19]
Cf. for example Charles Taylor, The
Making of the Self. Sources of Modern Identity, Cambridge University Press,
1989.
[20]
First studied by Henri Wallon (1934), the mirror stage has been discussed by
René Zazzo, Jacques Lacan, D.W. Winnicott, Françoise Dolto and others.
[21]
Cf. Amsterdam (1972); Gallup (1970).
[22]
Cf. The last lines of Edmond Rostand’s play Cyrano
de Bergerac.
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