Since the time of Descartes' cogito it seems that philosophical folk have often thought of subjectivity as the bedrock of our identity.  Thinking this way, it seems that one must reflect inwardly, that is introspect, in order to see or notice the self because the self is pure subjectivity, pure inward consciousness.

But I would like you to consider the important postmodern possibility that this introspective consciousness  is socially constructed.  This is an important argument because, if consciousness  is socially constructed then the way we experience our self is not merely a Cartesian given, but something we have the potential for modifying and making better -- a highly relevant idea for therapists.

Imagine that you are trying to find a phone number among your papers.  You are rummaging here and there.  Where have you left that number?  Ah, there it is.  Good.

In your picturing of this experience, did you see yourself as noticing an introspective self?  I think the introspective self tends to vanish in the act of searching for things.  When searching for things, I think consciousness typically feels like a consciousness of something "out there" and it contrasts dramatically with a Cartesian consciousness of inner subjectivity.  (This is a contrast between extrospective and introspective consciousness.)

But, there you are, back with your newly found phone number.  It is the number of your great uncle .  You haven't talked with him for a long, long time.  You sit back and dial the number.  He answers.  You know his voice.  He doesn't recognize yours.  Then suddenly he does, and he calls you by your childhood nickname.You talk a little, feeling as though you are back in the world of your youth.

Then, you hang up, look out the window, and think.  Now, your subjectivity, your Cartesian consciousness of self, has been constructed once again.  And inside your Cartesian consciousness you ponder the mysterious nature of your own life course.  You recall seeing your uncle when you were a child.  You look down at your adult hands and remember the little hand of your childhood.  How different your life feels now from the way it felt as a child!

This is the kind of consciousness that modernist Cartesians see as the bedrock of experience.  For Descartes, this consciousness was there the moment we became who are because it is  the foundation of who we are.  But was this sense of self always there? This sense that can wonder, "Who am I?"

Maybe not.  Imagine a three month old baby staring at a rattle in its hand?  Is the baby's consciousness introspective?  Or is an extrospective consciousness of the rattle?  A kind of fascination with the glitter and the sound of the rattle without self-consciousness or subjectivity?

On reflection, I am inclined to answer that a three month old baby, who has yet to experience a reflection of itself in the mirror, is likely to have no subjective consciousness of self at all.  To me, it is most reasonable to presume that the infant consciousness is of the rattle, not of the self.  And if this is so, then the Cartesian sense of self is hardly bedrock.  Rather, the subjectivity that modernism taught us was our "self" has grown out of another type of experience, one that extrospectively focusses on the rattles, the phone numbers, the menus, the rocks in our shoes, but not a reflective consciousness that tries to make sense of things and ponder questions like "Who am I?"

If the baby is born without a subjective sense of self, then,  the questions that interest me becomes:  What evokes the subjective consciousness?  What constructs its possibility?  How do we move from one mode to the other?  And once the possibility for introspective consciousness has dawned,  what makes it one way or another?  What constructs it as a feeling of shame or pride, love or hate, nostalgia or expectation?  If these feelings are not pure bedrock given, but emerge somehow from an extrospective and selfless fascination with the world around us, how can we construct our subjectivity better?  Or can we?

Why do I consider these reflections postmodern?  Because Descartes' Cartesian self is the foundation of our modernism, the foundation of our sense of individuality and subjective self whereas my reflections tend to deconstruct that modern sense of subjectivity as bedrock and facilitate the construction of another kind of consciousness, a postmodern consciousness, which I hope to write more about in days to come.

In the meantime, you might  read today's article on the construction of out-there-ness.
 

If the slave had more subjectivity in the presence of the master than the master had in the presence of the slave, it was because the slave felt observed by the master while the slave had some desire.

I tried to create this condition in a class I taught recently and I did it in the following way.  Maybe you can do it imaginatively.  I handed out little chocolate candies to half the class and asked them to look at them, and smell them until they could feel their desire to eat them.  Those that could were then faced with others who did not have the candies and would not get them and while the first students were studying their candies they were to be aware of any change in their desire for it while they were watched by the other students.

The students trying to desire the candy reported that they could not experience that desire while they were being closely observed.  Their embarrassment intruded and changed the desire.

This, I think, is an example of what Hegel meant by the "dialectic of desire."  Various situations, but expecially being observed, changes the experience of desire, and thus changes subjectivity.
 

In that text is a profound discussion of the phenomenology of the slave.  Remember, this was written in the era in which there were slaves and masters.  I believe this text laid the groundwork for modern phenomenology as well as existentialism, but the segment on the phenomenology of the slave is particularly relevant to our discussions of the social construction of subjectivity.

In that section, Hegel makes the point that the slave is self-conscious (and thus experiencing subjectivity) caring very much what the master thinks of him/her in the presence of the master, but the master, not caring what the slave thinks of him (her?) is oblivious to the slave.

I have attached a paraphrase of the classic text I am referring to here.  It is a fairly long read, but much shorter, of course, than the thick text on which it is based, and much more readable for the present-day English ear. If you haven't read The Phenomenology of Mind, and you're interested in the topic of subjectivity, I hope you take time to read this paraphrase.

Click here to access the paraphrase.
 

One of the problems with subjectivity study is that it has no scientific status.  One of the participants on this list is writing me complaining about subjectivity studies being not very rigorous.  It seems the idea is that subjectivity studies it can be done by everyone.  One just writes down what one thinks, with no possibility of verification or rigorous analysis.

Is subjectivity, then, a legitimate area of study?  If postmoderns are incredulous about the scientific metanarrative, especially as it exists within the human sciences, is a study of subjectivity more or less legitimate than human science studies that are designed to conform more to the rules of science?

Also, how does subjectivity study compare to discourse analysis (of people like Ian Parker) in which the author simply states the way in which institutions and social forces seem to have influenced the way we think of things.  Parker's work follows after the work of Foucault.  (For an example of Foucault's work, read the paraphrase of his classic book, Birth of the Clinic.)