Text: Frosh, Stephen. “Social Experience and the Constructed Self.” Individualism Reconsidered, pp. 271-86.

In the last few decades, our culture has adopted postmodernism as the predominant model of thought, as opposed to the modernist philosophy previously held.  It is important that we understand both of these theories in order to fully understand the way that technology is shaping our thinking and our identities as individuals.  Stephen Frosh, in his article “Social Experience and the Constructed Self,” explains each of these philosophies in terms of their definitions of individualism in “a world like this” (273).

First Frosh uses Berman’s All that is Solid Melts into Air to explain modernist thinking.  Essentially, according to Berman, modernism, which was born in the European Enlightenment, is “the human and cultural response to modernization and the experience of modernity” (274).  It “celebrates the excitement of perpetual change and also attempts to find a way of living with continually dissolving realities and fluctuating boundaries” (274).  In other words, modernism aims to give people “the power to change the world that is changing them, to make their way through the maelstrom and make it their own” (Berman, qtd. in Frosh 275).

What are the tenets of this theory which acknowledges society’s impact on individualism yet sees individuals as empowered to make their own way?  At its heart is the belief that the “self” exists in an internal set of emotions, intentions, and beliefs.  This self is then expressed in our actions and discovered in our writing (275).

Modernism holds that people are “subjects as well as objects of modernization” (Berman, qtd. in Frosh 275).  People are subjects in that they have “a genuine capacity for production and elaboration of a personal self--a self which is a real expression of intentions and concerns” (275).  In other words, the “self” is self determined.  If one intends to succeed, he can do so because his actions express that intention.  However, the self is also an object of modernization, Berman asserts, in that it “develops in response to the economic and political contexts that surround it through a process of internalizing or appropriating the materials of culture and social relations in which the individual is embedded” (275).  Nonetheless, modernism holds that an individual is by no means necessarily the same as the culture, that “in each person there is something that can resist, something that can create, something that can appropriate the public sphere and make it home” (276).  Under the model of modernism, individuals are ultimately responsible for their successes and also their failures because everyone has the power to resist their social and cultural influences and make their own way.

Postmodernism has emerged recently as a critique of the modernist thinking.  At its center, postmodernism calls into question the central tenet of modernist theory and asks: “what if there is no reason for endurance, no real meaning underlying the modern kaleidoscope to be recovered and preserved?  What if the spectacular but empty surface is all that ‘really’ exists?” (277).  Postmodernism holds that the surface is all that really exists, that there are no “differentiations between the self and its expression” (280).  Frosh describes postmodernism using the metaphor of an image: “it is the image which is the most vibrant metaphor for modern reality: the image as on a television screen, with no substance behind it, creating, playing, disappearing, all in an instant gone” (282).

Frosh acknowledges that “postmodernism, by participating in the deconstruction of the self, can sometimes offer a fuller critique of oppression than does modernism” (277).  While modernism asserts personal capacity for resistance and therefore responsibility for failure, postmodernism “suggests, in contrast, that individuality is so permeated by sociality that there is no way of resisting on an individual level at all” (277).  What modernists would call individual problems, postmodernists call social problems because the self is created as the result of one’s background, experiences, and culture.

Perhaps these concepts can be better understood if applied to practical circumstances.  For example, how would modernists and postmodernists respond to the problem of bulimia?  Modernist thinking sees an individual as self determining: bulimics are in charge of the illness and must only will themselves to not throw up in order to solve the problem.  A postmodernist on the other hand looks to the bulimics’ culture and background and society as the cause of the problem.  Postmodernists may blame society for pressuring women to be thin.  Ultimately, they would call the problem a social problem and not an individual one.

Frosh believes that people construct their selves and challenges modernist thinking by asking “Who can tell what is ‘real’ in the human character, what pre-given, what invented?” (272).  There are no easy answers, and with the dawning of the Internet Age, as individuals have nearly unlimited access to all kinds of information and contact with so many other selves that they appropriate daily, defining the true “self” is only growing more difficult.