Rave Culture: Individual And Collective Identity Theories

In this first chapter we will be covering a broader understanding of identity, moving temporarily away from the topic of musical identity by focusing on social psychological theories and ideas. These ideas will provide the foundation for an analysis of musical identity within collective groups that is covered in detail in chapter two. We will look at how individual identity forms and what this means by looking at various approaches to the self. Firstly we will outline pinnacle philosophical views that stemmed from the Age of Enlightenment in the mid-1600s with scholars such as Rene Descartes and David Hume. We will then discuss the very influential pragmatist movement in the early 20th century, which involved theorists such as William James and George Herbert Mead, who placed great emphasis on how the self presents itself in everyday life and social interaction. We will then examine the school of thought that derived from the American pragmatists - symbolic interactionism. This includes the work of Herbert Blumer and Manford Kuhn, who led two opposing schools of symbolic interactionist documentation. The discussion of these topics will help us understand musical identity by giving us the tools to decipher why certain people follow specific music cultures and the role that the individual self plays in this process.

From the mid-1600s to the mid-1700s the Age of Enlightenment gave birth to some of the most influential scholars in philosophical and scientific history, which led to revolutions in the major schools of academia, replacing the "medieval world-view" (Bristow, 2010). Husserl, who was heavily influenced by Descartes, termed the self "the transcendental Ego", whereby he placed enormous emphasis on the doctrine that it is not an object that can be experienced or seen. This "transcendental Ego" merely provides us with a gateway to perceiving the world "but which cannot itself be perceived" (Meacham, 2010). From this existential stand-point we might ask, how can we explain the self if it is not something that can be experienced? How do we know the self even exists? Descartes answered these questions with his simple phrase, "I think, therefore I am." This, now very well-known saying, derived from Descartes radical and solipsistic scepticism that anything in the world really exists, until he realised the absurdity of denying the existence of something that can think. Descartes` dualistic philosophy believed that the self transcended the universe and was "timeless, universal, and in each one of us around the globe and throughout history" (Solomon, 1988, P.4). On the contrary, Hume disregarded any kind of self, transcendental or Earthly, reducing personal identity to "nothing but a bundle... of different perceptions" (Hume, 1739-1740). His trail of thought derived from his rejection of causality, arguing that "the true causes of events are never known directly" (Brown, 1998, p.42). Hume believed that identity was indeed a fiction, explaining that "When my perceptions are removed from any time, as by sound sleep,... [I] may truly be said not to exist" (Hume, 1739-1740). He thus believed that our existence is simply the rapid flow of continuous perceptions, and without these we would cease to exist. Hume`s view of the self parallels the debate on the problem of personal identity, which attempts to solve the puzzle of whether the infinite perceptions and feelings we have form an identity. This debate traces back as far as Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, who distinguished between matter and form, proposing that the "essence of a person is not the person`s physical substance, but the person`s form" (Brown, 1998, p.40). The soul is a person`s identity, its form, and the body is matter that can change. The self in this era was a mixture of romanticised superiority to inconceivable nonsense, which differ to the mundane social psychological version that is displayed today. The transcendental self was criticised as being an obnoxious view of the self and the pragmatist movement brought it back down from its omnipresent pedestal into the social reality of everyday life.

In the late 1800s, academic writing on the self shifted away from the transcendental to the social self, characterised by American pragmatist thought. Pragmatist work revolved heavily around the subject of truth, arguing that "truth is not the property of an idea or thing; rather, truth is a process of becoming: truth is made true" (Pascale, 2011, p.79). Philosopher and psychologist, William James, was a hugely influential theorist within American pragmatism, defining the pragmatist as someone who "clings to facts and concreteness... Truth, for him, becomes a class-name for all sorts of definite working-values in experience" (James, 2000, p.34). James believed that the self "emerges, grows, and is altered, within our daily affairs; it doesn`t transcend them" (Holstein and Gubrium, 2000, p.24), showing that his views stood at the opposite end of the spectrum to the transcendental self. His theory began by separating the self into "the self as knower (the "I") and the self as known (the "me")" (Davies and Gilbert, n.d). He then further divided the "me" part of the self into three parts: the material self, the social self and the spiritual self. The material self included tangible objects that we call ours, such as our family, possessions and hometowns. James believed we could determine what was part of the self by "examining our emotional investment in the entity" (Brown, 1998, p.22) and by the way we behave towards it, as "the parts of our wealth most intimately ours are those which are saturated with our labor" (James, 1890, p.293). The social self referred to how we are perceived by others and within this we have a multiplicity of selves - "a man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him and carry an image of him in their mind" (ibid., p.294). By this he meant that we display different selves in different social settings due to the certain expectations and behavioural commands relevant within that social role. The spiritual self referred to "a man`s inner or subjective being" (James, 1890, p.296) such as "emotions, interests, motives, opinions, traits, and wishes" (Brown, 1998, p.25). This part is "the very core and nucleus of our self" (James, 2001, p.48) and it is here where James placed identity. In contrast to Hume`s argument that we are nothing more than a string of feelings and perceptions, James believed that it is these continuous feelings and perceptions, "a stream of consciousness" (James, 1890), where we find the self. He believed that personal identity "is the sense of a sameness perceived by thought and predicated of things thought-about. These things are a present self and a self of yesterday" (ibid., p.332). By this he meant that we can recognise our identities through the sameness and patterns of our continuous thoughts. Alongside James`s definition of the self, he also discussed self-feelings. In this he put forth the term self-appreciation, which he divided into two polar opposites: self-complacency e.g. pride and self-dissatisfaction e.g. diffidence. He proposed that, although these feelings may be aroused by certain situational circumstances, such as a promotion at work or the loss of a job "there is a certain average tone of self-feeling which each one of us carries about with him" (James, 2001, p.49). For example, despite someone`s success, they may feel a great lack of confidence in their abilities due to a worthlessness they feel from being tormented as a child. This self-contempt is carried around within their self-feeling and cannot be eclipsed easily by the good that happens in the present. This self-feeling proposes that, although the self changes and evolves through social interaction, there is a certain level of self-feeling that remains throughout all of our social experiences and this self-feeling cannot be quickly altered.

Another leading figure in the American pragmatist movement, also considered the father of symbolic interactionism, was George Herbert Mead. His views differed to those of William James as he did not believe feelings were the gateway to finding the self. Rather he believed that "emphasis should be laid on the central position of thinking [as thought] provides the core and primary structure of the self" (Mead, 1934, p.155). Mead placed great emphasis on the social part of the self going as far to say that the self "arises in the process of social experience" (ibid., p.135); it does not exist prior to this. This is one reason why he rejected James`s centralisation on self-feeling, because it turned the self into something that is "only secondarily social" (Holstein and Gubrium, 2000, p.28). Mead theorised that, similar to how children take part in role-playing games, as our capacity is filled with the behaviours of different people, we internalise these behaviours, roles and responses. He believed that to be "truly socialised" we have to internalise the views of the society and culture we live in and see ourselves "through the eyes of an abstract, generalized other that represents the broader society" (Brown, 1998, p.85), and when we do this we learn to see ourselves how others do. This "generalised other" suggested that we are who we know and who we come into contact with. The actions and behaviours of others become inculcated into our own identity, creating a self that is formed from a combination of these persons, which links back to why Mead does not believe that the self exists prior to interaction within the social world. He believed that "We divide ourselves up in [to] all sorts of different selves with reference to our acquaintances" (Mead, 1934, p.142), which negates the existence of any self prior to interaction. Mead`s definition of the terms "I" and "me" were, the latter being the socialised self that contains the "generalised other" and the former being the unsocialised self that consists of our needs and desires (Elliott, 2013, p.33). The "I" in this context provides individuality of the self, as it separates the self from others, "inject[ing] something new, creative and innovative into the social process" (ibid). Despite the self being characterised by a multiplicity of other external selves, the innate needs and wants that stem from the biological and impulse-driven self makes every social response different. No person is made up of the same impulses and desires, so their reactions to every "me" can never be determined. Where James believed that self-feeling was the unique part of self, Mead believed innate needs were, reducing the self to nothing but an animalistic appetite.

Mead`s theory of the interacting self was hugely influential, leading to the symbolic interactionist perspective termed by Herbert Blumer, a strong advocate of Mead`s work. Symbolic interactionism derived from the concepts of pragmatism and led to the work of numerous scholars developing theories of self and interaction (Pascale, 2011, p.79). This sociological perspective was centred around deciphering the relationship we have to society and the fact that we respond to the constructed meanings that we give to objects and gestures (Holstein and Gubrium, 2000, p.32). In contrast to the pragmatists who focused on formulating the idea of a social self, the symbolic interactionists revolved their work around "systematically documenting [the self`s] empirical manifestations" (ibid). There were two major schools within symbolic interactionsim: the University of Chicago, where Herbert Blumer taught and the Univesity of Iowa, taught by Manford Kuhn. The former was characterised by a qualitative, organic approach and the latter by a structured and quantitative. First we will look at the Chicago school and the work of Blumer, who devised three premises for social interaction. His first premise was "human beings act toward things on the basis of the meanings that the things have for them" (Blumer, 1969, p.2). For example, we act in a certain way depending on the meanings we hold for a particular object, situation or activity; these meanings are personal to us and the self e.g. phobias. His second premise was "the meaning of such things is derived from, or arises out of, the social interaction that one has with one`s fellows" (ibid). By this he means that through our observations and involvement with other people we can develop meanings for certain things, which determine the way we act towards those things e.g. observing that others are scared of spiders makes us scared of spiders too. Without social interaction these meanings cannot unfold, echoing Mead`s notions that the self cannot be separated from social interaction. His final premise was "meanings are handled in, and modified through, an interpretive process used by the person in dealing with the things he encounters" (ibid). This third premise suggests that we are constantly changing our meanings for objects and situations in the world and Blumer highlighted that this should be acknowledged. The meanings we hold are ever-changing and thus should not be documented "in lifeless analytic categories and statistical tables" (Holstein and Gubrium, 2000, p.33) e.g. we may overcome our fear of spiders by handling them and learning that they cannot harm us. This fluidity of meaning includes the meanings that also define the self (ibid), which rejects any reification of who or what the self is.

In contrast to Blumer`s qualitative approach, Kuhn and his academic followers brought the study of the self into a laboratory setting, ready for close, analytic dissection. They deemed it essential to place great emphasis on defining the self itself, because they believed a person behaved in a certain way depending on how they feel about themselves, reflecting James`s self-feeling. They proposed that this inner self and this self-feeling was separate to the social self, and determined how we behave socially. They believed human behaviour was organised and directed and if:

"the organisation and direction are supplied by the individual`s attitudes toward himself, it ought to be of crucial significance to social psychology to be able to identify and measure self-attitudes" (Kuhn and McPartland, 1954, p.68).

Kuhn and McPartland set out on an empirical investigation of this self-attitude where they devised the Twenty Statements Test (TST). Participants of the TST were asked to write down 20 different answers to the question `Who am I?`. The results showed that responses fell into two main categories: social roles or personality expressions (O`Brien, 2011, p.108), which implied that we view ourselves with reference to others, as a role or a characteristic (ibid). Results were looked at via content analysis where some researchers focused on the cause of self-attitudes reflected in the TST and some on what these attitudes led to in terms of behaviour and conduct (Holstein and Gubrium, 2000, p.34). For example, did the black, working class male who described himself as "bored" take part in delinquent behaviour due to the self-attitudes he feels through class and ethnic marginalisation? This empirical investigation allowed Kuhn and McPartland to conclude that our self-perception and self-feeling is determined heavily by the roles we play in society and by the way others perceive us, which aligns perfectly with the theories of social self we have looked at.

The transcendental self and the pragmatist movement were both very promising in their time with the latter being very successful in explaining the self. However, the postmodern era we currently sit in has initially obliterated any such existence of an internal self, replacing "the experiencing self with mere images of itself" due to our constant exposure to "endless sources of identity" (Holstein and Gubrium, 2000, p.17, p.9). As the digital age has grown it has introduced instant communication, highly advanced technology and the ability to access any information straight away, no matter where you are. Alongside the obvious advantages of such a fast-paced world, has the new age cost us our true identities, leaving us in a sea of lost souls, struggling to piece together the parts of us that are real? Postmodern identity revolves around the notion that any individual sense of who you are is bound up with what other people think of them and who they socialise with. Although this sounds similar to the theories we have discussed, with James`s multiplicity of social selves and Mead`s internalisation of the society we live in, what separates the postmodern self to these theories is that there is no grounded self underneath. What James called self-feeling and Mead called the unsocialised self no longer exists. Our internal me has become fluid and fragmented, leaving the self today as "fleeting, evanescent, a mere shadow of what it used to be" (Holstein and Gubrium, 2000, p.3). Using the theories outlined on individual identity and how the people we interact with heavily influence who we are, we will now move on to collective identity and how specific groups and musical subcultures are formed. The issues postmodernism has created for the analysis of these individual and collective identities will also be discussed in post-subcultural theory.