Isabela Salon 3 - lydgate/mindmeld GitHub Wiki

The social basis of our self-stories: Parents, peers, & online peeps

• Everything is Intersubjectivity: Even when we're not in front of a listener, we are thinking (and writing) with an "other" being referenced somehow. Ursula LaGuin:
  • Le Guin points out that all speech invariably presupposes a listener:
  • In human conversation, in live, actual communication between or among human beings, everything “transmitted” — everything said — is shaped as it is spoken by actual or anticipated response.
  • Live, face-to-face human communication is intersubjective. Intersubjectivity involves a great deal more than the machine-mediated type of stimulus-response currently called “interactive.” It is not stimulus-response at all, not a mechanical alternation of precoded sending and receiving. Intersubjectivity is mutual. It is a continuous interchange between two consciousnesses.

Reading list

• https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/10/21/telling-is-listening-ursula-k-le-guin-communication/
• A great analysis from film: How our own self narratives do and don't get reified, contradicted, and/or affirmed (if you're in a rush, go to 3:30 minutes) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHp639vhUJg&vl=en
• For once, reading the comments is the actual point of this recommendation! Kind Words is an interactive "game" that allows people to write identity narratives about life challenges and emotional struggles and to subsdquently receive support, feedback, and advice from "strangers". Check out the reviews for further explanations: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1070710/Kind_Words_lo_fi_chill_beats_to_write_to/
• Psychological Inquiry (Target article), with open access (if in a rush, focus on pages 206-209 on interpersonal processes that contribute to building a coherent narrative identity): https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.108/1047840X.2020.1820214

Salon summary

• Although most of us tend to think of our own identities -- and the narrative that holds those identities -- as personal and individual, this solitary frame is probably wrong. Psychological science, as well as evocative examples from literature, film, and poetry, suggest that identity development is fundamentally a social process. We all have a basic psychological (and biological) need to feel emotionally connected to others, to be accepted, and to belong to a group who shares our values.
• Our basic social needs can lead us to conform and adjust our self-presentations to fit in better, but they can also push us towards finding niches in which we can show up as our most authentic selves. In this way, our social partners help us co-author our identity narratives. From parents and friends, to lovers and internet strangers, we create, reify, edit, and altogether re-invent our self-stories in collaboration with others who challenge, listen, and validate these evolving narratives.
• In this salon, we will explore the social processes that give rise to our ever-evolving identities. We will consider what science and literature has to teach us about the ways we can be better collaborators and co-authors to our friends' identity narratives (hint: "Honesty matters. Vulnerability matters. Being open about who you were at a moment in time when you were in a difficult or an impossible place matters more than anything." - Neil Gaiman).
• We will also explore the important characteristics of co-authors we ask to help with our own self storybuilding. How important is it to have friends who are good listeners, attending to the intentions behind our behaviours rather than being seduced by our performative efforts? Do we ultimately require different friends to express the different aspects of our selves? Or is it possible to find one or few relationships in which the baffling multiplicity of our selves can be authentically expressed? These questions, and so many more that will surely be brought to the discussion by salon participants, will provide the scaffold for our evening together.

Discussion

Le Guin's argument seems to relate to the Private Language Argument.