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    Week 7 - Hissey On Mead

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    Week 7 - Hissey On Mead

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    week 7_Hissey on Mead

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    Week 7 - Hissey On Mead

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    Yashika Yashika

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    © All Rights Reserved
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    of 9
    wv George Herbert Mead — 15. 4 [pee ey “Module One: Unit George Herbert Mead While most of the theorists we examine in the course are more or less contemporary, we begin with an American philosopher and social psychologist who lived from 1863 to 1931. There are several reasons for beginning with Mead. He was one of the first people to develop a communication perspective as a way of understanding ourselves and our world. Moreover, this work is still being explored, modified, and applied by communication theorists and others, and it lays the foundation for the more recent theorist we will look at in the next section, Erving Goffman. George Herbert Mead, who taught in the Philosophy Department of the University of Chicago for, most of his adult Tife (1894-1931), profoundly influenced critical social thought. Yet he wrote very little, Not a single book of Mead's was published during his lifetime, and at the time of his death his total published output was remarkably small. The work for which he is best-known. today, Mind, Self, and Society was not, jn a literal sense, even written by Mead himself; it is the product of some of Mead's students who, after bis death, compiled their notes from his classes and published them in book form, Mead's major concern was with the relationship between the individual and the social, as, the title of the book mentioned above implies. To address this concern Mead 16—Module One, Unit 1 turned to the process of communication. He proposed that society was prior to the individual and hivher mind. Tn fact, he said, the individual and mind are "social emergents"; that is, the individual and mind emerge out of the social. But this is not a one-way street: the individual and mind, onco created, react back onto the social and, in turn, create it, We will come back to this particular point later in our discussion. ‘The individual, then, emergos out of the social; the jndividual, in other words, is a social construct. How does this happen? Through the process “of communication, through interaction with others, says Mead. Consider this rough outline of Mead's model: (actor, subject) SEE YOU (action) SEEING ME (activity, response) J AND MY PERCEPTION OF HOW YOU SEE ME (actor) SEE YOU (action) ETC. What does all this mean? First of all, we should stress that for Mead, the "I" is not the full individual. Rather, it is the sensuous, feeling, jnstinctive being, The full individual, or solf, only emerges out of the process described here. Let us spend a few more minutes George Herbert Mead —17 on this point bofere returning to our model, We can find, in Mead, different. components of the self. These are: tive, sensuous ithe doer, the feeling, i | beinrg. ME: the receiver, the sense of what others perceive of what I do. MYSELF: consciousness, se/f-consciousness, awareness of self, the ability to imagine oneself in ? interaction. ‘The “self,” then, emerges from the combination of the “[" and the "Me" through the process of interaction with others. ©” : ‘This will become clearer if we return to our outline of Mead's model, above. ‘The "YOU" in the outline refors not to individuals, but rather to a collective. This collective "YOU" Mead calls the GENERALIZED OTHER. We have a sense, says Mead, of anticipating not just, what one person's reactions to us may be, but what: society's reaction will be. Simply put, the (GENERALIZED OTHER is our sense of what other people and sociéty in general expect of us. ‘This "generalized other" is the way socialization occurs. This does not happen in the same way that a specific person (such as a mother) directly socializes you by telling you precisely what you should and should not do. That is, Mead’s notion is not a simplistic stimulus/response theory which suggests that wo are taught directly and overtly that if you do this particular thing you will be rewarded/punished. Rather, this socialization, this “self” is the emerging product of interaction. And, of course, it is a characteristic of interaction that it is two-way, not unidirectional as in the simple t 13 — Module One, Unit 1 stimulus/response model. So in the "I SEE YOU SEEING ME", the "YOU" becomes the generalized you, tie generalized other. ‘This brings us to the final lines of our model. 1 know that, as {the generalized other, you have certain expectations of how 1 ‘am to behave. I incorporate my perception of those expectations jnto my interactions with youl I behave as I think you expect me to behave. +") Mead employs the phrase[‘become an object to yourself” to describe the process by which we come to view ourselves with a certain detachment, the technique of viewing ourselves ” as if we were someone els This process is crucial for the development of selve3) It also permits us to orient ourselves with regard to the past, present, and future, as you will see. %|"This process of “objectifying” Yourself allows you to distance yourself sufficiently from the past so you can interpret and reinterpret it to yourself and others as part of your actions in the present. It also allows you to develop an “imagination” about the future, where you can play out situations in your own, mind and see yourself simply as another actor in the picture. Having played out these situations in your mind you can then. direct your own actions in the present by anticipation. “Lhe past and future, then, come together in what Mead calls the “self-conscious acting present," which incorporates the "T'—the doer; the "Mo"—the receiver; and the “Myself"— the odhsciousness. Mead talked about all this as centred in interaction, in a kind of continuous, changing conversation in all aspects of your life. Another way to put this is to say that “selves” develop basically out of language. Let's see if we can elaborate on'this by using the three areas in the title of Mead's book: Mind, Self, Society. George Herbert Mead —-18 Society . Society is an onganization of many different perspectives. Human society is different from any animal society because

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