Life Writing

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Self, Time and Narrative: Re-thinking the

Contribution of G. H. Mead

Stevi Jackson

To cite this article: Stevi Jackson (2010) Self, Time and Narrative: Re-thinking the Contribution of
G. H. Mead, Life Writing, 7:2, 123-136, DOI: 10.1080/14484520903445255

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Life Writing VOLUME 7 NUMBER 2 (AUGUST 2010)

Self, Time and Narrative:

Re-thinking the Contribution
of G. H. Mead

Stevi Jackson

The idea of the self has re-emerged in recent sociological writing through the
idea of the late modern project of the self and through Foucault’s conceptualisa-
tion of technologies of self. Here, however I advocate a return to an older
tradition of theorising on the self, deriving from the pragmatist thought of
George Herbert Mead. In reading Mead’s theorisation of the self in conjunction
with his work on time I highlight the temporality, reflexivity and sociality of the
self. Mead’s approach, I argue, has a number of advantages for analysing the self
and narrative constructions of self. It allows for human agency while insisting on
the sociality of the self; it bridges the conceptual divide between the self as self-
consciously fashioned and narrated and subjectivity as precarious and unstable;
it eschews any notion of a fixed or core self while avoiding an overly fragmented
and decentred view of the self; and, while conceptualising narratives of self as
symbolic constructions, it acknowledges the actuality of past events and
experience. Finally I suggest that this perspective could be particularly fruitful
for feminist analyses of gendered and sexual selves.

Keywords G. H. Mead; self; time; gender

Re-thinking the past of the self

Instead of the past determining the present, the present significantly reshapes
the past as we reconstruct our biographies to bring them into greater congruence
with our current identities, roles, situations and available vocabularies (Gagnon
and Simon 13).

The narrated and narratable self is temporally and socially located. The stories1
each of us tells about ourselves typically invoke a past (distant or recent),
implicitly or explicitly linked to a present and perhaps to a possible future. The
act of telling a story takes place within the flow of time and is situated within a
sequence of social interactions between narrator and audience. Both the
narration and the events recounted position the teller in a social landscape.

ISSN 1448-4528 print/1751-2964 online/10/020123-14

# 2010 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/14484520903445255
124 JACKSON

Someone telling a story about herself, moreover, demonstrates the reflexivity of

the self: as subject/narrator she tells of a past self, a self that is the object of
her own self-reflection. She is also revealed in the act of ongoing self-
construction, in self-making, through reconstructing her past in relation to the
situated context of self-telling. The idea that the present re-shapes the past is
thus fundamental to understanding the temporal, social and reflexive character
of the self and of narratives of self.
Herein I re-evaluate one of Gagnon and Simon’s sources of inspiration*/G. H.
Mead’s pragmatism (Gagnon). The early pragmatists and others associated with
them2 made significant contributions to the conceptualisation of a social self*/a
self that possessed agency, but was radically distinct from the Enlightenment
conception of a transcendent self standing outside the social (Holstein and
Gubrium). The pragmatist self was very much embedded in everyday sociality, a
product of relations with others: a view developed furthest in theoretical terms in
the work of Mead. Mead had been appointed to the philosophy department at the
University of Chicago in 18943 and found kindred spirits not only among his fellow
pragmatist philosophers, but also among the sociologists. There was a great deal
of interaction between the two departments*/notably in the involvement of
individuals such as Dewey and Mead from Philosophy and W. I. Thomas from
Sociology with the feminists at Hull House (Deegan, Seigfried; also Stanley, this
volume).4 As a philosopher, Mead’s thinking on the self was theoretical*/albeit
directed to social processes and everyday interaction*/rather than focused on
empirically grounded explorations of the self, as in the work of Thomas and
Znackieki.
Mead’s theorisation of the self, along with the form of grounded empirical
sociology practiced at Chicago, was later to influence the development of
symbolic interactionism. It is worth noting though, that relationship between
Mead’s pragmatism, Chicago Sociology and symbolic interactionism is contested.
Moreover, and more importantly, the filtering of Mead through Blumer’s (1969)
systematisation of symbolic interactionism and the subsequent distilling of his
ideas into innumerable introductory sociology text-books has resulted in the loss
of much of their subtlety and complexity. As a result, the versions of his ideas in
circulation today are often over-simplified and distorted.
It is possibly because of this that Mead’s theory is so often ignored or dismissed
in recent discussions of the self, which are more often framed in terms the late
modern ‘project of the self’ (Giddens), Foucault’s (1978) conceptualisation of
technologies of self or Ricoeur’s (1980) idea of self as narrative construction. In
this respect I am struck by how many recent feminist works on the self*/see, for
example, Lawler, Lupton, Skeggs*/use the concept without any reference to
Mead, pragmatism or interactionism. This reflects a more general collective
amnesia (Atkinson and Housley, Maines). Despite the close association between
pragmatism and feminism in early twentieth century America and Mead’s active
support for the feminist cause (Deegan, Aboulafia, Sigfried), his work has largely
been overlooked by contemporary feminists. Yet it potentially offers valuable
insights into the construction of gendered and sexual selves.
 SELF, TIME AND NARRATIVE 125

As others have noted, the pragmatist/interactionist tradition is more

congruent with current sociological concerns than is often realised, particularly
in its emphasis on process, on negotiated, shifting meanings and its avoidance of
grand metanarratives (Atkinson and Housley, Maines, Plummer ‘Queers’). Here
there is some convergence with postmodern theorising, but interactionism
differs from postmodernism in conceptualising the self as process, but rooting
it in the lived actualities of everyday life. This is Mead’s interactionist legacy. It
provides a means of emphasising ‘becoming and emergence and change’ as social
processes while also considering how selves ‘become routinized, lodged,
committed and stabilized’ (Plummer ‘Queers’ 524/525).
In this respect Mead’s theorisation of self and time bears on a central problem
in narrative analysis*/how can we both acknowledge that stories of self are
always told from the perspective of the present, that they are inevitably
symbolic reconstructions, and also avoid the implication that they are only
constructions? Mead’s theorisation enables us to account for the existence of
‘real events’ in the past, which are consequential for the present and future,
while at the same time recognising the reconstructive work entailed in their
memorisation and narration. Like Thomas and Znaniecki, Mead sees the self as
always in the process of becoming, but his theory of time adds depth to our
understanding of this process as both a product of past experience and present
situation. Mead’s emphasis on the temporality of the self is thus highly pertinent
to narrative analysis. It enables us to think of the self both as narrative
construction and as lived and experienced through everyday life*/how, as
Holstein and Gubrium put it, we can each be a self and tell stories of the self.
Narratives of self entail reflection back on the narrator’s past, organise and
represent events in temporal sequences, are constructed from particular
temporal locations and are shaped by the situated occasion of their telling.
Here time and the self are intimately interrelated, as they are in Mead’s work.
Mead’s conceptualisation of the self, even if often misrepresented, is well
known; but his theory of time is less so. There has, however, been a recent, small
surge of interest (Flaherty and Fine, Järvinen, Maines)5, which has, in the work of
Maines and Järvinen, informed narrative analysis. For Mead, time, self and
sociality interconnect: the self is a social phenomenon and also a temporal one,
reflecting back on itself, in time, and forward from the present in anticipating
others’ responses and orienting future action in the world. It is always in the
process of becoming as well as being. Conversely, his theory of time, though
referring to historical and evolutionary as well as biographical time offers a
persuasive account of the self’s reflexive awareness (and unawareness) of its
temporal conditions of existence.
Revisiting Mead’s conceptualisations of self and time, then, can deepen our
understanding of narrative constructions of self, set current debates on self-
reflexivity on firmer conceptual foundations and provide an effective means of
locating the self in the actualities of everyday social life while also accounting
for variable processes of self construction. It is also helpful in explicating the
relationship between being a self and telling the self, with which I am concerned
126 JACKSON

here. In order to explain further, I will begin by locating Mead’s ideas in relation
to competing conceptualisations of subjectivity currently in circulation, before
outlining some of his key ideas and addressing some of the misunderstandings and
misrepresentations of his work.

Self and Subjectivity

The terms subjectivity and the self are sometimes used synonymously but are
more often distinguished from each other*/and the use of one concept rather
than the other can be indicative of an author’s theoretical orientation.
Subjectivity, conceived in post-structuralist, postmodern and psychoanalytic
terms, is decentred, fluid or fractured*/and not the product of conscious thought
or agency. The self, on the other hand is usually seen as a more coherent,
conscious, reflexively fashioned, ‘self-made self’. Throughout the late 1980s and
the 1990s, subjectivity featured prominently in feminist and critical theory, and
stood against humanist, modernist ideas of an essential unitary, fixed, rational
subject (see, for example, Flax, Weedon). The recent resurgence in theorising
the self, however, has emphasised the process of self making: the self as
‘project’ (Giddens) or as the object of ‘technologies of the self’ (Foucault
‘Technologies’). In many accounts this self is historically specific, a product of
the increasing individualism of the last few centuries. Self and subjectivity thus
seem to be rather different phenomena*/and sometimes an explicit distinction
is made between them. Beverley Skeggs (191n), for example, distinguishes
between the self as a ‘coherent unity’ and subjectivity ‘which is not coherent
and which we all live with in ways we do not often know’. In this kind of
formulation a consciously constructed self can be envisaged as co-existing with,
and cloaking, a fragmented subjectivity.
One of the strengths of Mead’s conceptualisation of self is that it encompasses
much of what is usually understood as subjectivity, bridging the gap between
reflexive self-construction and less coherent, more fluid subjective processes.
Mead provides a means of theorising both the condition of social being and how
we are able to construct a self. Mead’s self is envisaged more as process than as
structure6 and is neither unitary nor fixed. In this respect it is congruent with
some post-structuralist and postmodern formulations, but is more grounded in
social context and, by virtue of its reflexivity, less precarious and fragmented. On
the other hand it does not necessarily entail the heightened self consciousness
presupposed by the notion of self as project. Rather Mead’s notion of reflexivity
entails what it is to be social, to participate in the social. Reflexivity here
denotes the dialogic interplay between self and other, the capacity to see
ourselves as subject and object, to engage in conversations with ourselves. It
arises ‘in social experience’ (Mead Mind 140), exists only in relation to others
and, conversely, is the basis of all sociality. Without it, we would be unable to
situate ourselves in relation to others, to interact or co-operate with others; and
without sociality there would be no self. The reflexive self as Mead conceived it
 SELF, TIME AND NARRATIVE 127

does not, in and of itself, imply a well constructed narrative of self, or a the self
as project, but is instead a necessary condition for self stories and self projects.
The idea of ‘self-made self’, then, clearly presupposes reflexive processes of
the kind explored by Mead, as does the capacity to tell stories of the self. In some
cases the genealogy of these ideas can be traced back to Mead, as in Ken
Plummer’s work on stories of the self (Telling, Documents 2) and, more
problematically, in Giddens’ arguments on self and modernity. In other cases,
discussions of the self resonate with Mead’s but have developed without any
discernable debt to him, such as Ricoeur’s (Oneself) conceptualisation of self as a
narrative, temporal construction (Järvinen) and Foucault’s technologies of self,
which ‘permit individuals to effect . . . operations on their own bodies and souls,
thoughts, conduct, and way of being’ (‘Technologies’ 18). In Foucault’s
formulation reflexivity is presupposed, but left unanalysed, since he does not
concern himself with the self’s interior processes.
While Mead’s self is also, in many respects, perfectly congruent with the
poststructuralist idea of ‘subjectivity in process’ (Weedon 86), his conceptuali-
sation also provides an alternative to postmodern fragmentary, decentred
subjectivity, an alternative that is more fully social, but which allows for human
agency.7 While Mead emphasised the importance of interpretative processes in
guiding human actions, he also insisted that any act, even the most novel, has its
own conditions of emergence, that it arises in social context (see ‘The Nature’
346), as does the self. Unlike those who see subjectivity as an effect of language
and discourse conceived as independent of the local production of meaning and
of ‘people’s intentions to mean’ (Smith 89/99), Mead’s self is engaged in active,
intersubjective meaning-making and is capable of independent reflection and
action.
In cautioning against an overly fragmented postmodern conceptualisation of
the self, Jane Flax (218/219) argues that we could not function without a ‘basic
cohesion’ within ourselves, a cohesion that derives from a ‘core self’, which
provides ‘a sense of continuity or ‘‘going on being’’’. It is not necessary to accept
Flax’s psychoanalytically inflected notion of a ‘core self’ to see that the idea of
‘going on being’ is essential in order to recall and reconstruct narratives of our
past and envisage our future existence. Mead provides a means of thinking of
‘going on being’ without positing a core, ‘deep subjectivity’. For him,
remembering selves other than the situated self of the present social context
prevents dissociation from the self (Mead Mind 243/244). Remembering, as he
tells us elsewhere (‘The Nature’, The Philosophy), is always accomplished from
the perspective of the present. It is not some inner ‘core self’ that does the
remembering, but a socially situated self, a self engaged in the social activity of
the present moment, which is oriented towards both past and future.
As Mead says, ‘we normally organise our memories along the string of the self’
(Mind 135), and we strive to accomplish this, to create coherence, when
fragments of unsituated memory come back to us. Following from this I would
suggest an alternative metaphor for ‘going on being’. Rather than a ‘core self’, it
is better to think of a many stranded cord running through our lives, but one
128 JACKSON

which does not necessarily stay the same since the threads that comprise it can
become frayed, broken or detached, spliced together, strengthened and
reinforced and are continually being intertwined with other threads, remade
over time. So, while we have a sense of our self as continuing, that self is never
unchanging and is simultaneously multiple and singular, constructed and
reconstructed from the perspective of successive presents. Without a self there
would be no past or future, and without the ability to imagine pasts and futures
there would be no self. Our ‘going on being’ thus derives from social experience,
constructed and reconstructed through everyday social practices.
Reflexivity, or ‘reflexiveness’ as Mead called it,8 is fundamental to our social
being, to our active participation in social life. This idea of a reflexive self, in
particular Mead’s distinction between the ‘I’ and the ‘me’ is frequently
misunderstood, largely because of repeated over-simplifications in social theory
textbooks. Thus the ‘I’ is frequently misrepresented as the individual part of
the self and the ‘me’ as the social part. Or, as Anthony Giddens would have, it
the ‘me’ is ‘the identity*/the social identity*/of which the ‘‘I’’ becomes
conscious in the course of psychological development’ and the ‘I’ is ‘the active,
primitive will of the individual’, its ‘unsocialised part’ (52). In either case the
‘I’ is located as pre-social. Such misunderstandings miss a central point of
Mead’s thesis on the self: that the self is process not structure (Crossley,
Jenkins, Williams).
In Mead’s work there is no assumption of a primitive pre-social ‘I’. Rather, the
‘I’ is only ever momentarily mobilised in dialogic, ongoing interplay with the
‘me’. As Crossly argues, the relationship between them is not a spatial one, two
separate parts of the whole, ‘but a temporal and reflexive self-relationship of an
agent who chases her own shadow’ (147). The ‘I’ is located in the being and doing
of the present (or ongoing successive presents) and self reflection always entails
retrospection:

The ‘I’ of this moment is present in the ‘me’ of the next moment. There again, I
can never turn around quick enough to catch myself . . . It is in memory that the
‘I’ is constantly present in experience . . . the ‘I’ in memory is there as the
spokesman [sic] of the self of the second, the minute or the day ago. As given, it
is a ‘me’, but it is a ‘me’ which was the ‘I’ at the earlier time. If you ask, then,
where directly in your own experience the ‘I’ comes in, the answer is that it
comes in as a historical figure. It is what you were a second ago that is the ‘I’ of
the ‘me’. It is another ‘me’ that has to take that role. You cannot get the
immediate response of the ‘I’ in the process. The ‘I’ is in a certain sense that with
which we do identify ourselves. The getting of it into experience constitutes one
of the problems of most of our conscious experience; it is not directly given in
experience. (Mead Mind 174/175)

The reflexive self, then, is intrinsically temporal. Not only is self-reflection

temporal, but to be/have a self, is to have consciousness of self and self-
consciousness also requires a sense of time, a memory of the past and a capacity
to imagine possible futures.
 SELF, TIME AND NARRATIVE 129

Time and Self

The temporality of the self refers not only to the past, but also the future*/the
self’s reflexivity, thinking back, is what enables us to think forwards, to
anticipate, to plan (Flaherty and Fine). And stories do not only tell about the
past, but can function as guides for future action as part of the store of
knowledge we draw on in orienting ourselves within social situations. The past,
however, is not merely an imaginary realm constructed through stories and
memories. What we symbolically reconstruct as memories along the string of the
self, the tales we recount about the past can (and usually do) refer back to ‘real’
events. Moreover, the self is shaped not only by remembered past experience,
but also by past biography and social experience of which we might not always
consciously be aware. While Mead recognises the effects of the past in this sense,
however, he also emphasises that such effects are only knowable by us from the
standpoint of the present.
Central to Mead’s thinking is his reiterated conviction that reality is rooted in
the present, that the past exists in the present ‘in terms of representations of
various sorts, typically in memory images, which are themselves present’ (Mead
‘The Nature’ 345).
Mead talks constantly of the stream of social experience in terms of interplay
between the novel, or the emergent, and continuity. Without novelty there
would be mere continuity and no sense of the passage of time but, conversely,
without a sense of location in time, from the standpoint of the present, we would
be unable to make sense of the temporal flow of social life.

The past which we construct from the standpoint of the new problem of today is
based on continuities which we discover in that which has arisen, and it serves us
until the rising novelty of tomorrow necessitates a new history which interprets
the new future . . . Within our narrow presents our histories give us elbowroom
the cope with the ever-changing stream of reality (‘The Nature’ 353)

This is what Maines, in his exegesis of Mead’s essay on the nature of the past,
calls ‘the symbolically reconstructed past’*/and it is the aspect of Mead’s theory
that has received the most attention, especially in relation to narrative
constructions of the self. The past is inevitably a present-centred construction
for Mead since we cannot ‘get back’ the past self we once were:

When one recalls his boyhood (sic) days, he cannot get into them as he was,
without their relationship to what he has become; and if he could, that is if he
could reproduce the experience as it then took place, he could not use it, for this
would involve his not being in the present within which that use must take place
(The Philosophy 58).

But Mead does not consider the past to be only a symbolic reconstruction*/it also
provides the conditions for emergence of the present. This implies that the past
may affect the present in ways that may not necessarily be consciously
130 JACKSON

apprehended. New events or situations do not arise from nowhere, but are
conditioned (though not completely determined) by what has gone before:

That which is novel can emerge, but conditions of the emergence are there. It is
this conditioning which is the qualitative character of the past as distinguished
from mere passage. Mere passage signifies disappearance and is negative. The
conditioning, spatiotemporally considered, is the necessity of continuity of
relationship in space-time . . . (Mead The Nature 364)

This conditioning or structuring effect of the past, with its implication of

causality, is what Maines calls the ‘social structural past’. Linking this
‘conditioning’ or casual effect with the symbolically reconstructed past is what
Maines terms the ‘implied objective past’. Here we utilise some ‘very slight
material of memory’ to verify what ‘must have’ occurred ‘to be where we are
now’ (The Nature 348). Thus symbolically reconstructed memories can and do
refer back to actual events even though our present recollections are
reconstructions, possibly of half-remembered events. The self we are is made
possible by our (actual) pasts; the self we narrate, the self-conscious self, is a
reflexive reconstruction of that past.
Viewing the self as always already social yet also subject to change across time
and social contexts potentially enables us to locate individual subjectivities and
biographies within specific historical, social and cultural contexts. We can
therefore link the self to the actualities of social existence, taking account not
only of the different social conditions under which selves are made, but also of
the varied forms of reflexivity available for self-making in different times, places
and contexts.

Conditions for Reflexivity and the Epistolary Self

Mead’s self is not the historically specific late modern self associated with a
hyper-reflexive self-concern*/what Matthew Adams calls ‘extended reflexivity’;
it does, however, allow for varying degrees of reflexivity in which elaborated
projects of the self can be seen as one end of the continuum. Mead did not
consider that we are continually self-reflexive: much human social action and
interaction becomes, through familiarity with convention, relatively habitual. He
suggests that differing degrees of self-consciousness are occasioned by different
circumstances, opening up the possibility of envisaging multiple layers of
reflexivity. Since Liz Stanley’s companion piece to this one is concerned with
letters as a social form, I will illustrate Mead’s insights on the variability of
reflexivity by taking letter-writing as a temporally and socially situated instance
of self-telling.
The reflexivity considered integral to self formation, process and change is a
basic social competence (Giddens), the ability to interact and cooperate with
others, and arises out of relations with others. The very act of writing a letter,
 SELF, TIME AND NARRATIVE 131

then, requires this basic reflexivity in which the writer situates herself in relation
to another. Letters, however, are variable in form and function and may call forth
further levels of self-reflexivity. They may entail, for example, engaging in self-
judgement or self-justification*/a self-conscious standing back from the self in
an effort to come to make claims about oneself or one’s actions and to tell a
more coherent story of the self. Whether one is writing to a bank manager to
explain one’s overdraft or to a friend to clear up a misunderstanding, this entails
an accounting for/of the self. These, though, are little stories, products of a
particular context and sequence of events (providing both the conditions of
emergence of the need for self-accounting and the occasion for narrative self-
reconstruction). They entail a higher degree of reflexivity than that required for
routine interaction, but may be only momentary, contingent, or strategic: a
telling of self required by immediate circumstances. A letter, however, may tell
a more complex story plotted through a broader vision of biographical past,
present and future, requiring more elaborated narratives of the self. In such
instances we may well draw on self-stories that have been reconstructed and
retold over time, whether to others or in internal conversations with ourselves.
Letters, moreover, often form part of an extended correspondence where
complex self-other relations come into play, calling forth further reflexive self-
narration, in which each writer responds to the other’s concerns or queries
combining basic reflexive competence (orienting to the other) with more
complex layers of reflexivity. The sequences of letters comprising ongoing
correspondence also, as Liz Stanley notes in relation to Thomas and Znaniecki,
show us becoming selves in interaction with others*/and each self and other in
writing letters is engaged in a reflection back on the events about which s/he
writes.
When we are confronted with novel situations, according to Mead, heightened
reflexivity comes into play linking past and future actions to the emergent
present. Thus reflexivity increases where there is more opportunity of meeting
novel situations*/the letters written by Thomas and Znanieki’s Polish peasants,
as Liz Stanley points out, reveal selves writing in the context of the social change
brought by migration, but also selves very much engaged with others and seeking
to maintain social connectedness. More recent accounts of social change in late
modernity, however, focus on individualisation, which entails the loosening of
bonds of social connection producing the ‘do-it-yourself biography’ (Beck and
Beck-Gernsheim) and individualised project of the self (Giddens). Here we have a
disjuncture between the self of Mead and Thomas and Znanieki, for whom the
self was inherently located in the social, and the allegedly individualised self.
Mead’s reflexive self cannot be other than social: ‘it is impossible to conceive of
a self arising outside of the social’, and we remain social even when we are alone
(Mead Mind 140). As Adams suggests, those emphasising individualisation under-
estimate the extent to which the discourse of individualism is itself social in
origin (Adams 229/230). Social change does not rip the self from its social
moorings, but rather produces particular ways of making sense of the self,9 which
remain socially located and oriented towards others. Thus the stories we (as
132 JACKSON

individuals and as social theorists) are able to tell, as Ken Plummer (Telling)
reminds us, are always historically and culturally situated, located in the wider
social context in which they are recounted and received. And this in turn depends
on the social contexts in which our selves are forged and the modes of reflexivity
available to us and deployed by us. This is as much the case for our gendered and
sexual selves as any other facet of the self.

Some Gendered Implications

So what are the implications of this approach for thinking about gender and
sexuality?
Mead himself said little about gender10 and his examples are generally
masculine ones, though there is some evidence that he saw female and male
selves as being constituted through the same social processes (Aboulafia). The
level of generality at which Mead constructs his account is indicative of this
gender neutrality and can be seen as an advantage rather than a drawback.
As Stanley and Wise long ago pointed out, there is no need to assume, as does
psychoanalysis for example, that the processes of self-formation differ for boys
and girls.
According to Mead, the self begins to be formed early in life as a child learns to
distinguish between self and other, to ‘take the attitude of the other’, to locate
herself in relation to the others in her immediate circle and ultimately to social
others in general (the ‘generalised other’). Gendered selves emerge not because
girls and boys undergo a different process of self-formation, but because the
world of others with whom they interact is gendered and the child, in becoming
socially competent, must locate herself within these gendered social interac-
tions. This is quite a different view of the self-other relation from that posited by
postmodern and Lacanian psychoanalytic theories*/not only is the self active in
the process of co-ordinating action with others, but the other is not posited as
oppositional to the self (Stanley and Wise, Stanley ‘Rejecting’)11. The self is
relational in that it exists and adapts through the ability to locate oneself within
the social world of others. Because we acquire differently gendered selves
through participating in gendered social interaction, gendered self-hood emerges
as variable*/there is no single way of being a little boy or a little girl or later
a man or a woman.
Gender division per se, however, is fundamental to our entry into the social.
Most of those writing in the interactionist tradition or related perspectives, such
as ethnomethodology, stress the primacy of the social act of gender attribution
(Gagnon and Simon, Kessler and McKenna), in that is a form of social
categorisation to which a child is subject at (or before) birth and the first of
which she is likely to become aware. Awareness of ourselves as gendered
becomes part of ‘going on being’: a thread that runs through our lives linking past
present and future. Once the basic reflexive capacities of self-formation have
 SELF, TIME AND NARRATIVE 133

been set in motion, the self continues, throughout life, to evolve and change
through social interaction.
In growing from childhood to adulthood, sexuality is braided into our selves
and becomes closely entwined with gender*/not because this is essentially so,
but because gender and sexuality are socially constituted as interrelated. Thus
gender becomes a means by which young people make sense of the sexual.
Importantly, a great deal of retrospective reconstruction is likely to occur in this
context. This continues to occur as adults, when we remember so-called ‘sexual
games’ played as children. Whatever bodily sensations may have been evoked by
such activities at the time, we could not then have had the same sense-making
resources at hand that we have as adults. In telling stories of childhood sexual
selves, we would do well to remember Mead’s dictum that we cannot get into our
childhood days as we were then*/and that if we could, we could not make sense
of them as we do now.
For example, some adult gay men and a smaller proportion of lesbians tell a
story of self in which they ‘always knew’ they were lesbian or gay or that they
always were (without knowing it) but only later to ‘realise’ that this was the
case*/often on the basis of feeling ‘different’ as children and, particularly,
feeling they weren’t quite normally (normatively) gendered. These accounts are
not, as Vera Whisman (181) says, simply reflections of their experience but are a
means of retrospectively making sense of that experience within a coherent
‘story’12. Of course those who grow up to be heterosexual may also have felt
themselves just as ‘different’ as children, but from the standpoint of the present
this would not prompt the same kind of sexual story. Heterosexuals are not called
upon to account for their sexuality, to construct narratives explaining how they
‘became’ or ‘knew’ they were heterosexual’: it is simply taken for granted.
This is not to say that heterosexuality entails no reflexivity. Arguably, even for
heterosexuals, sexual self-hood is becoming more complex, with widening
options for sexual choices in lifestyles and relationships*/and especially so for
young women, for whom contemporary gendered and sexual expectations are
often contradictory. In western cultures, saturated with erotic imagery, older
goals of romance and marriage are jostling with aspirations towards sexual
autonomy and experimentation. The contemporary sexual landscape would seem
to require a high degree of self-reflexivity from young women as they attempt
to steer a course between not being sexual enough and being too sexual (e.g.
Holland et al., Tolman) and represent themselves as neither as prudish nor
promiscuous.
Gendered and sexual self-hood, then, illustrate the point that self-making,
while an active reflexive process, is always accomplished from a particular social
location, constrained and enabled by the cultural resources available to us. Our
selves are a product of both our past biographies*/our social structural past*/and
the selves we reflexively construct and symbolically reconstruct through
memory*/the selves that become the subject and object of narratives of self.
134 JACKSON

Concluding Thoughts: Writing Lives And Intellectual Genealogies

Life-writing is centrally concerned with selves and time, with temporally located
becoming selves, which are reflected upon from the standpoint of the present in
which the writing is accomplished. Mead’s work is of particular significance when
considering the process of writing about or telling the self and gives us analytic
purchase on the process of narrative self construction. I am not claiming that
Mead’s work provides a total theory of self or of narrative, merely that it
deserves more serious consideration*/as do may other forgotten and neglected
social thinkers*/and that it is worth returning to his original writings rather than
relying on later interpreters. I am concerned that in the pursuit of the new we
lose valuable conceptual tools with which to analyse the social contexts in which
and through which we each forge our sense of self.
Mead has bequeathed us a complex and nuanced conceptualisation of the self,
which enables us to understand how selves are made intelligible through
narrative reconstruction. His attention to the self’s temporality, both as process
and as located in time, is a major strength of his work and reinforces his
insistence on the self’s sociality. He highlights the active, interpretive, inter-
subjective processes through which we make sense of our selves and our
lives*/and his ideas continue to make sense today. We should, therefore, ensure
that Mead retains a place in contemporary reconstructions of sociology’s past and
that his work continues to inform sociological sense-making from the standpoint
of our present.

Notes

[1] For simplicity I am using the terms ‘story’ and ‘narrative’ interchangeably to denote
the product of narration, but ‘narrative’ also refers to a process or form in which
events are linked consequentially and episodically.
[2] Others included W. I. Thomas (see Stanley, this volume).
[3] Mead moved with John Dewey from the University of Michigan when the latter was
appointed to a professor in the new department of philosophy at Chicago.
[4] The pragmatists’ emphasis on practical knowledge in the world, on human actors as
creators of reality, resonated with Chicago sociology’s focus on detailed ethno-
graphic research on everyday life. Both also shared an interest in social reform.
[5] The republication of The Philosophy of the Present in 2002 may also reflect*/or
produce*/a revisiting of this work.
[6] It is true that Mead often does refer to the self as a structure as well as a
process*/but it is a very fluid structure, constantly in motion and comprises a
multiplicity of selves.
[7] For a critique of postmodernism’s failure adequately to address agency, see McNay.
[8] Mead actually uses the words ‘reflexive’ and ‘reflexiveness’ only occasionally, but
‘the turning back of the experience of the individual upon himself (sic)’ (Mind 134),
along with the idea that the self is both subject and object to itself is fundamental
to his conception of mind, self and society.
[9] In this respect the alternative, Foucauldian, version of contemporary pre-
occupations with self-fashioning gives more weight to the social. The rise of a
 SELF, TIME AND NARRATIVE 135

confessional culture (Foucault The History), the influence of the ‘psy’ professions
(Rose) and the development of new technologies of self (Foucault ‘Technologies’)
are seen as offering culturally prescribed (rather than individual) modes of self-
knowledge and self managements with which to analyse our inner selves, seek self-
knowledge and pursue self-improvement.
[10] W. I. Thomas, however, did have much to say about gender in his Sex and Society
and, more significantly in The Unadjusted Girl, the most cited source of his
‘definition of the situation’.
[11] As Stanley (‘Rejecting’), argues, this idea of self in relation to others can also be
found in Simone de Beauvoir’s philosophical writings*/so here is another possible
connection betwwen Mead’s ideas and our feminist heritage.
[12] Whisman sees these as ‘conventionalised’ stories, which underplays the agency and
reflexivity such narratives entail. Even where we draw on conventional narratives in
constructing our own story, each of us actively constructs our own account of
becoming and by no means all elements in it will be merely conventional. Available
conventional narratives should not be thought of as determining the stories each
person tells, but as cultural resources that are drawn on reinterpreted and
re-shaped.

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