Individual Self Research Articles

Authenticity as Performance and the Conventions of Companionship in Fanny Kemble's Poems

Authenticity as Performance and the Conventions of Companionship in Fanny Kemble's Poems Martin Brooks (bio) Mrs. Kemble's case would have been an exquisite one for a psychologist interested in studying the constitution of sincerity Henry James, "Frances Anne Kemble" This essay discusses how the actress and poet Frances Anne Kemble (1809–1893), best known as Fanny Kemble, worked to achieve authenticity in her collection of lyrics, Poems (1844). As it shows, Poems draws on Kemble's distinctive ideas about how a person's speech can be authentic, that is, can represent "the great deeps of life" within them.1 In letters and journals dating from her career as a famous Shakespearean actress, Kemble had developed a view that authenticity comes from how rather than why people speak. She disputed the expectation that speech only represents a person's subjectivity, their "self," when it is idiosyncratic or original. Instead, she held that people can use preexisting literary, stage, and social conventions to represent themselves. Kemble generated much of this view from arguing that actors represent themselves by their choice and use of acting techniques for playing their characters. At the same time, though, she had found the same view in poetry, arguing that poets reveal themselves in the ways that they manipulate stock ideas. As this essay establishes, Kemble's view of authenticity runs throughout Poems. Not only does Poems demonstrate how her work as actress and her work as poet were fundamentally linked by her ideas about performance, but it also illustrates how her poetry frames received ideas as able to authenticate speech. Social conventions provide Poems most of its shape. Kemble published Poems during the collapse of her marriage to the American slaveholder Pierce Butler. Its poems draw on the nineteenth-century idea of companionship to depict the poet responding to lost love and rearranging her life.2 As Kemble [End Page 501] had written extolling the relationship to Butler, companionship was a kind of friendship which emphasized closeness, honesty, equality between two friends. Usually they were both women, and their companionship would occur in private or domestic settings. Poems draws on these conventions to establish that the poet's speech represents her core self, and to create a reference point which authenticates that her literary echoes and allusions represent it too. By reading Poems with a focus on companionship, this essay shows how the construction of the poet's voice exemplifies Kemble's theory that she could convey her selfhood by using received ideas. Authenticity in the Nineteenth-Century Theater Authenticity underwent major changes in the nineteenth century. People stopped using it to trace their words back to wider social structures and started to weigh if what they said could be traced back to their individual self. As Kerry Sinanan and Tim Milnes write, "the idea of the authentic harden[ed] around a core, internal self, and the social [was] increasingly experienced as 'other.' "3 Yet, a twentieth-century critical focus on the "core, internal self" has largely displaced critical accounts of the transitional views that people held during that change. In particular, it has minimized the attention paid to nineteenth-century views that popular techniques and tropes in a person's writing or speech can be an authentic representation of that self. This view of authenticity has received little comment. Moreover, several critics have suggested that it is fakery. Lionel Trilling, for instance, rejects as an "impersonation" "the personality whose whole being is attuned to catch the signals sent out by the consensus of his fellows and by the institutional agencies of his culture."4 Geoffrey Hartman, meanwhile, describes "'Hollywood' and its celebrity culture" as an unreal "parallel universe" where "[m]orality, as [Emmanuel] Levinas points out, becomes role playing."5 This critical approach rejects the possibility that a culture might treat people's use of standard ideas as representative of their own selfhood. Certainly, some nineteenth-century writing offered just this type of rejection.6 However, that rejection was not ubiquitous. Kemble, especially, questioned it. Her inquiry led to her bridging between her careers on the stage and in poetry. Nineteenth-century theater critics often focused on how well Kemble used standard acting techniques...

Evolution and Heterogeneity of Social Preferences

Why do individuals take different decisions when confronted with similar choices? This paper investigates whether the answer lies in an evolutionary process. Our analysis builds on recent work in evolutionary game theory showing the superiority of a given type of preferences, homo moralis, in fitness games with assortative matching. We adapt the classical definition of evolutionary stability to the case where individuals with distinct preferences coexist in a population. This approach allows us to establish the characteristics of an evolutionarily stable population. Then, introducing an assortment matrix for assortatively matched interactions, we prove the existence of a heterogeneous evolutionarily stable population in 2×2 symmetric fitness games under constant assortment, and we identify the conditions for its existence. Conversely to the classical setting, we find that the favored preferences in a heterogeneous evolutionarily stable population are context-dependent. As an illustration, we discuss when and how an evolutionarily stable population made of both selfish and moral individuals exists in a prisoner’s dilemma. These findings offer a theoretical foundation for the empirically observed diversity of preferences among individuals.

The Socio-Economics of Pandemics Policy

In response to the Covid-19 pandemic, governments around the world have provided a massive fiscal and monetary stimulus. While this policy is welcome in the short run, it does not address the underlying problem in the medium and long run. The reason is that the pandemic has not given rise to a generalized shortfall in aggregate demand. Rather, it has generated a Great Economic Mismatch, characterized by deficient demand for things requiring close physical interactions among people and deficient supply of things compatible with social distancing, where appropriate. Expansive macroeconomic policy can stimulate aggregate demand, but when social distancing is enforced, it will not stimulate production and consumption whenever this demand is satisfied through physically interactive activities. To overcome the Great Economic Mismatch, "readaptation policies" are called for. In the medium run, these policies promote a redirection of resources to activities compatible with social distancing; the long run, these policies make economies more resilient to unforeseen shocks that generate a Great Economic Mismatch. Once the pandemic is over, a more profound rethinking of decision making - in public policy, business and civil society - is called for. First, decision makers will need to supplement the current focus on economic efficiency by greater emphasis on economic resilience. Second, economic policies and business strategies will need to focus less on incentives for selfish individuals and more on the mobilization of people's prosocial motives. Finally, to encourage people around the world to cooperate globally in tackling global problems, policy makers at local, national and global levels will need to encourage people around the world to cooperate globally in tackling global problems, with the aid of two powerful tools that humans throughout history have used to coordinate their efforts: identity-shaping narratives and institutions of multi-level governance.

The Relationship Between Individual Innovation and Self Leadership in Teachers

Liderlik olgusunun temelinde birey (lider) olduğu gibi, inovasyon olgusunun temelinde de yine birey (girişimci) yer almaktadır. Liderlik kavramının tüm yönleriyle gerçekleşmesi için öncelikli olarak öz liderliğin gerçekleştirilmesi gerekir. Benzer şekilde inovasyon olgusunun beklenen mucizeyi gerçekleştirebilmesi için bireysel inovasyon gereklidir. Bu araştırmanın amacı öğretmenlerin bireysel inovasyon ve öz liderlik düzeyleri arasındaki ilişkisinin belirlenmesidir. Araştırma Ankara ili Yenimahalle ilçesi ortaöğretim kurumlarında 2018-2019 eğitim öğretim yılında görev yapan öğretmenlerden tabakalı örneklem alınarak uygulanmıştır. Örneklemde yer alan katılımcılara Öz Liderlik Ölçeği ve Bireysel İnovasyon Ölçeği uygulanarak veri toplanmıştır. Veri toplama sürecinde içerik ile uyumlu olarak inovasyon gerçekleştirilmiş, veri toplama aracı çevrimiçi ortamda uygulanmıştır. Çalışma sonucunda katılımcıların öz liderlik ve bireysel inovasyon düzeyleri yüksek olarak belirlenmiştir. Ayrıca bireysel inovasyon ile öz liderlik arasında pozitif yönlü, anlamlı ve yüksek bir ilişki tespit edilmiştir.

Virages des visions de Patrick Modiano

This article focuses on some peculiarities in the writings of the French author Patrick Modiano, the Nobel Prize winner for literature in 2014, and deals with novels that have made him famous in the national and world art space. The article notes that P. Modiano’s novel mentality is characterized by the synthesis of such basic values as the development of a fabulous, external canvas and focusing on the internal structures of the individual self. The characters of his novels relay the psychological interior of a person imbued with values and consciousness of modern urban life. P. Modiano’s leading semantic plots depict the complex mentality of the sensitive person and the vicissitudes of his dramatic fate in the context of the Hypercity. The landscape of the Supercity or the Hypercity in P. Modiano’s novels is organically linked to understanding a life as a journey of obscurity. For self-narrators to live a full life means to wander through the drips of their memory, to travel the real and imaginary streets of their own prehistory, which turns out to be their main life story in the end. Prominent place in the novels of P. Modiano belongs to the development of the mythopoetics of Paris, which is interpreted as a purely “inner” city in the psychological interior of the self-narrators. The specificity of the novel depiction of Paris lies in the interpretation of this metropolis as a highly detailed toponymic mythologeme. The key point in the article is that each self-narrator is sooner or later confronted with an internal need to investigate his own story. That is why P. Modiano’s self-narrators always delve into complex, contradictory files of their individual self and become a kind of “detective for themselves”. This plot outline becomes the basis for unfolding a holistic ontological concept in P. Modiano’s novels that reveals its marker and matrix features in each of his works.

Schizophrenia, recovery and the individual-cultural considerations

The concept of recovery in mental health has been embraced by many services across the world. Placing the individual (self) at the core of service delivery constituted a profound shift from service-driven models of care. However, cultures described as individualistic or collectivist may hold very different views of individuality. In cultures with collectivist orientation, the notion of 'individualism' is integrated into the structure and dynamics of the family. The families in such cultures play a major and lifetime role in caring for its members, making decisions and acting in consideration of the welfare of all. The needs and priorities of individuals, especially women, may be superseded by those of their families. This commentary is on the effect of culture on the identity of self in the recovery process and its relevance to mental health care. In multicultural societies like Australia that include Indigenous people, the process of acculturation may be different. For the Indigenous people, the shift was from a collectivist culture to one that was predominantly individualistic. In the provision of recovery-oriented mental health care, there needs to be an awareness of the cultural variations in the relational dynamics of individualism.

Égoïste maintenant, ou altruiste (pour) demain ? Stratégies inter vs intragénérationnelles pour la conservation d’une ressource commune

La protection de l’environnement passe par la mise en œuvre d’actions coûteuses, au profit de personnes parfois inconnues et éloignées dans le temps. Ces actions pourraient sembler irrationnelles, sauf dans le cas où un individu chercherait à protéger le bien-être de proches, dans de futures générations. Nous comparons expérimentalement deux situations d’exploitation d’une ressource commune : les individus extracteurs sont membres de générations qui se suivent, sans lien dynastique (1) ; les individus des diverses générations sont membres de dynasties (2). Les individus qui savent que leur décision d’extraction va affecter les membres de leur dynastie appartenant à des générations futures font une extraction significativement moindre que les autres.

Indirectness in the Age of Globalization: A Social Network Analysis

Indirectness has traditionally been viewed as commensurate with politeness and attributed to the speaker’s wish to avoid imposition and/or otherwise strategically manipulate the addressee. Despite these theoretical predictions, a number of studies have documented the solidarity-building and identity-constituting functions of indirectness. Bringing these studies together, Terkourafi 2014 proposed an expanded view of the functions of indirect speech, which crucially emphasizes the role of the addressee and the importance of network ties. This article focuses on what happens when such network ties become loosened, as a result of processes of urbanization and globalization. Drawing on examples from African American English and Chinese, it is argued that these processes produce a need for increased explicitness, which drives speakers (and listeners) away from indirectness. This claim is further supported diachronically, by changes in British English politeness that coincide with the rise of the individual Self. These empirical findings have implications for im/politeness theorizing and theory-building more generally, calling attention to how the socio-historical context of our research necessarily influences the theories we end up building.

The Existential World of Kira Muratova

2019 is the year of the 85th anniversary of Kira Muratova (19342018), a filmmaker whose work occupies a special place in world cinema. Women with a particular psychoanalytic bent are rarely found among film directors for this reason, Muratovas twenty films, mostly known to a narrow circle of experts, are especially interesting as a research subject. Made during the Soviet and post-Soviet years, they have not become cinematographic annals of the age, playing quite a different role. Muratovas works are art films which interpret reality by creating a unique existential world. As an artist, Muratova was always interested in the human beings inner world, their individual selves: this established an affinity between her work and existential philosophy.
 The discussed topic is relevant to the present situation in which screen culture is becoming more and more mass-oriented, when cinema and TV films are turning into pure entertainment, into amusement rides. In this situation, Kira Muratovas works, which analyze spiritual dimensions and inner worlds of individuals, acquire particular importance, helping us to face the challenges of contemporary world.
 The existential world of Muratovas works is formed by individuals relationships with society and the world; her films strive to grasp the meaning of life and the goal of existence, the opposition between life and death. Muratovas creative universe is unique in her desire to center her psychological explorations on female protagonists, womens destiny, their inner loneliness, lack of communication and spiritual discord.
 In the year of Kira Muratovas anniversary, the relevance of her oeuvre is beyond doubt. Her films demonstrate that human beings, their existence and their moral world form the highest values of cinema.

Making sense of the self: an integrative framework for moral agency

AbstractThe self is conceptualized in a multitude of ways in different scholarly fields; at the same time moral agency appears to presuppose a unitary conception of the self. This paper explores this tension by introducing ‘moral senses’ which inform the normative evaluations of a person. The moral senses are featured as innate dispositions, but they inevitably recruit discursive categorizations in order to function. These senses forward both an ‘individual self’, by experiencing a unitary body, mind and character, and a ‘social self’, that is similarly experienced as a body, a mind, and a character. This social self is enabled by the capacity to internalize other people's feelings and intentions and the need to have otherworldly explanations for observable reality. This integrative framework of moral senses provides an understanding that helps to address the challenge of moral heterogeneity and plurality.

Gender Role in Kamala Markandaya’s Nectar in a Sieve

Women are being presented in Kamala Markandaya’s novels as the center of concern. She is a famous Indian novelist in the postcolonial era and she is very famous internationally for her masterpiece “Nectar in a Sieve”1954 .
 Markandaya treats women’s issues and problems in her novels in a very deep way. A woman quest for identity and redefining herself finds reflection and constituted an important motif of the female characters.
 What helps Markandaya in drain a realistic portrayal of a contemporary woman is that having a deep insight into women’s issues. Markandaya explores and interprets the emotional responses of women and their problems with much understanding.
 In her novels, female characters are the chief protagonists searching for meaning and value of life. Also She presents an existential struggle of a woman in some of her novels who refuses to submit her individual self and emerges undergoing much pain and suffering.
 In her writing, Markandaya traces a woman’s journey in order to know herself. This journey is from self-denial to self-assertion, from self-negation to self-affirmation, and from self-sacrifice to self-realization.

Experimental Acoustic Life Writing: Gerhard Rühm's Radio Plays

In this article I focus on a selection of radio plays by the Austrian author Gerhard Rühm and analyse them from the perspective of life writing, starting with Irene Kacandes' findings on the increased referential effect of experimental life writing (2012). I want to extend the notion of experimental life writing to the medium of the experimental radio play and investigate whether and how the experiments with spoken language, voice, and musicalisation of language contribute to an effect of realness and create an aural world infused with lived experientiality. I'm particularly interested in the relationship between individualised, figurative voices and sounds, as they are to be expected in (auto)biographical art, and the defiguration and deindividualisation in the experimental, synthetic manipulation of human language and voice. Situating the corpus in the history of the German Neues Hörspiel, my analysis hopes to prove that the reality effect of the experimental (auto)biographical radio play does not, or at least not only, refer to an individual biographical self. Instead, the complex constellation of text and paratext, of scripted and spoken language, and of voice and music opens up the referential level for a broader, more general human experientiality. Most importantly, the technical possibilities of the radiophonic medium allow an intricate play with the semantics of referential language, with masking and unmasking voices, and with the exploration of the pathos of speaking together.

Lifelines and End-of-life Decision-making: An Anthropological Analysis of Advance Care Directives in Cross-cultural Contexts

ABSTRACT This paper examines interrelated dichotomies in social anthropology and cross-cultural research on advance care directives (ACDs). It aims to recast the disjuncture between individual (Western) selves and collectivist (non-Western) Others that has impeded understandings of the cultural complexities of decision-making at the end of life. Based on research conducted with Chinese, Vietnamese and Indian communities living in Adelaide, South Australia, it explores how ACDs can obscure the vicissitudes of bodies and social life, decontextualising and detracting from our emplacement in relational worlds. Drawing on Ingold’s approach to living beings as a bundle of lines that join together, a ‘meshwork’ that carries on, I trace the continuities and points of tension, or ‘knots’, interwoven in movements and metaphors of writing up advance care directives, signing consent, opening doors and caring through touch.

Learned emergence in selfish collective motion.

To understand the collective motion of many individuals, we often rely on agent-based models with rules that may be computationally complex and involved. For biologically inspired systems in particular, this raises questions about whether the imposed rules are necessarily an accurate reflection of what is being followed. The basic premise of updating one's state according to some underlying motivation is well suited to the realm of reservoir computing; however, entire swarms of individuals are yet to be tasked with learning movement in this framework. This work focuses on the specific case of many selfish individuals simultaneously optimizing their domains in a manner conducive to reducing their personal risk of predation. Using an echo state network and data generated from the agent-based model, we show that, with an appropriate representation of input and output states, this selfish movement can be learned. This suggests that a more sophisticated neural network, such as a brain, could also learn this behavior and provides an avenue to further the search for realistic movement rules in systems of autonomous individuals.

Evolutionary Dynamics of Cooperation in the Public Goods Game with Individual Disguise and Peer Punishment

The phenomenon of individual disguise is ubiquitous in the real world. Recent evidences show that peer punishment is successful to stabilize cooperation among selfish individuals. However, it is unclear whether peer punishment is still able to stabilize cooperation when individual disguise for escaping being punished is considered. In this paper, we thus introduce individual disguise of defectors into the public goods game with peer punishment and aim to explore how peer punishment influences the evolutionary dynamics of cooperation, defection, and punishment in this scenario. We consider both cases of infinite and finite populations. In infinite populations, by using replicator equations, we find that although low disguise cost can hinder public cooperation, peer punishment still plays a positive role in promoting the evolution of cooperation, no matter whether second-order punishment is considered or not. We further demonstrate that the larger fine on defectors or the smaller the cost of punishment, the easier to establish a state of full punishment. In addition, in finite populations we reveal that the population spends most of the time in the region of defection for low disguise cost, and the population spends most of the time in the region of cooperation for high disguise. When second-order punishment is not considered, the punishment strategy does not have evolutionary advantage, whereas when second-order punishment is considered, the population can evolve toward regime of punishment and spends most of the time in the monomorphic states with widespread punishment or cooperation.

Music and gerotranscendence: A culturally responsive approach to ageing

Gerotranscendence is a theory of ageing which suggests that transpersonal growth and development is intrinsic to human development and plays a vital developmental role in the elder years. Mature gerotranscendence is experienced through a shift from identifying with an individual ego self to identifying with a transpersonal Self. This development can be enhanced or hindered by sociocultural and personal experiences, including one’s own worldview. Today’s older adults in America are diverse, and each faces a unique ageing experience to which music therapists must be sensitive. In addition to potentially living more years with chronic illness and possible financial concerns, those from cultures with a history of sociocultural discrimination face additional challenges in ageing. This leaves the possibility that many may experience increased existential questioning and personal insecurity than previous generations. Music is commonly used in working with older adults within elder care settings. Music has also traditionally been used to facilitate spiritual healing and transcendence. Because music can cross cultural lines, while also being an effective tool for meaning-making, I suggest that music can be a powerful and culturally-aware way of helping older adults experience mature gerotranscendence. This article is an opinion piece based on my experience as a music therapist with a transpersonal orientation. In this context, I highlight the unique psychosocial challenges faced by older Americans today and suggest the theory of gerotranscendence as a way of understanding their therapeutic needs. I then discuss ways of, and considerations for, using music to support the development of mature gerotranscendence.

Non-Cooperative and Cooperative Optimization of Scheduling With Vehicle-to-Grid Regulation Services

Due to the increasing popularity of electric vehicles (EVs) and technological advancements of EV electronics, the vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technique, which utilizes EVs to provide ancillary services for the power grid, stimulates new ideas in current smart grid research. Since EVs are selfish individuals owned by different parties, how to motivate them to provide ancillary services becomes an issue. In this paper, game theoretic approaches using non-cooperative and cooperative game are proposed to motivate EVs to provide frequency regulation services for the power grid. In a non-cooperative V2G system, the interaction between the EV aggregator and EVs is formulated as a non-cooperative Stackelberg game. The EV aggregator as the leader decides the electricity trading price, and EVs as the followers determine their charging/discharging strategies. In a cooperative V2G system, a potential game is formulated to achieve the optimal social welfare of the V2G system. The existence and uniqueness of the Nash equilibrium of these two games are validated. Our simulation results show that the proposed game theoretic approaches can motivate EVs to smooth out the power fluctuations from the grid while EVs schedule their charging/discharging activities to maximize their utilities. This demonstrates the effectiveness of the use of the V2G game in providing regulation services to the grid. Through cooperation and extra information exchange, the social welfare of EVs and the EV aggregator can be improved to the global optimum and the V2G regulation services can also achieve near-optimal performance.

Measurement, self-tracking and the history of science: An introduction.

This article introduces the papers contained in this special issue and explores a new field of interest in the history of science: that of measurement and self-making. In this special issue, we aim to show that a focus on self-tracking and individualized measurement provides insight into the ways technologies of quantification, when applied to individual bodies and selves, have introduced new notions of autonomy, responsibility, citizenship, and the possibility of self-improvement and life-course decisions. This introduction is an exploratory history of measurement and self-making, and it provides a discussion of self-tracking in the past as part of the genealogy of present-day digital self-tracking technologies. It concludes that a focus on measurement and self-making highlights the relationship between measurement and morality, the making of the ideal of an autonomous self, capable of improvement, and the relationship between autonomy and surveillance.

AGENCY AS IDEOLOGY: PRECARITY AND DISEMBEDDEDNESS IN THE 21ST CENTURY LIFE COURSE

The “individualization” thesis has gradually merged into the discussion of increasing heterogeneity of the life course as well as growing inequality over historical time. As individuals are “disembedded” from both cultural traditions and more recently social institutions, individual agency has drawn revived interest in outlining “choice biography” that is seen as paramount to personal outcomes and even containing overcoming force against structure. This practice mutes the consideration of the ongoing forces of social structure that by their very nature continue to constitute individual selves and possibilities. The uncritical treatment of individual agency makes it problematic for the study of precarity, mystifying and obscuring the analysis of inequality-generating mechanisms, reducing them to the individual-level. We analyze current uses of the concept of agency in the life course research, and particularly in the areas of transition research, e.g., transition to adulthood/retirement, where individual agency is assumed to be most active.

Selection into Experiments: Evidence from a Population of Students

This study investigates the selection into lab experiments among university students based on data from two cohorts of a university’s first-year students. The analysis combines two experiments: a classroom experiment in which we elicited measures for risk, time, social preferences, confidence, and cognitive skills using standard measures from the experimental literature; and a recruitment experiment that varied information provided in a typical e-mail recruitment procedure for lab participants. In the recruitment experiment, students were randomly assigned to four conditions that highlighted altruistic motives or financial incentives. We find significant treatment effects: mentioning financial incentives boosts the participation rate in lab experiments by 50 percent. In terms of selection, we find that more selfish individuals and individuals with higher cognitive reflection scores are more likely to participate in experiments, but we find little evidence for selection along risk preferences, time preferences, and overconfidence. Although the recruitment conditions affect participation rates, they do not alter the composition of the participant sample in terms of behavioral measures and cognitive skills.