Context Report

Thoughts On How To Manage the Self

Context Report 2010

By Robert Allen

Thoughts On How To Manage the Self

Introduction

1

Naïve & Representational realism

PERCEPTION

2

Humans as Cognitive Misers

SCHEMATA

4

Experiences and Achievements

SOCIAL REALITY

6

Freedom & Restriction

SELF & FREEDOM

8

Sartre on Self-Deception

BAD FAITH

9

Foucault on Governing by Choice

GOVERNMENTALITY

10

Identity

SELF UNDER CAPITALISM

13

Debord’s Society of the Spectacle

INAUTHENTICITY

15

Self-Actualization

SELF IMPROVEMENT

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Practicle Examples

PLACEBO

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HYPNOTISM

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AUTOSUGGESTION

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PSYCHO-WALKMAN

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Design Potential

ONKAR KULAR

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DASH MACDONALD

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Experiments

PAPER POOR

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MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA

31

Moving Forward

CONCLUSION

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References

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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“Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself.”

Jean-Paul Sartre

Existentialism Is A Humanism. Public Lecture, 1946

“Often we don’t even realize who we’re meant to be because we’re so busy trying to live out someone else’s ideas. But other people and their opinions hold no power in defining our destiny.”

Oprah Winfrey

O Magazine, November 2009

Introduction

Much of design is concerned with fulfilling Maslow’s lower order needs. Shelter and security and increasingly friendship and community through the advent of the social media. However, Designs involvement in esteem, the step necessary before actualisation, seems largely sidestepped. This project looks to investigate designs potential in esteem and confidence.

Self-help guides advertise they can solve many issues, becoming hugely popular with entire sections of bookshops now dedicated to the genre. However, much is viewed cynically or dismissed as ineffective or even counter-productive.

In this essay, I wish to ask the questions: is it possible to affect the self. Can systems be created to allow individuals to manipulate the self for self-improvement/self-help? My aims are to investigate and elaborate upon my research about what influences there are on the self and the agency one can consciously exert in self.

I began this project investigating positive feedback systems – systems where a small change incurs feedback, increasing exponentially. A similar property underlines self-fulfilling prophecies, as real ‘results’ manifest from what were incorrect or false origins.

From this, I began by asking whether it would be possible to affect a person’s self-concept in the same way.

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Naïve & Representational realism

Firstly, I shall discuss how the self is formed internally, investigating perceptions role in creating our reality and self-view. Then move into an exploration of external influences, such as social construction and self-view – who are we as individuals and what do we perceive?

Perception is an ancient philosophical preoccupation. Naïve realism is the belief that what we can see or feel reality directly, as it is – however, this bypasses the sensory processing (e.g. from retina to brain) known to occur, and incurs problems in phenomena, for example, hallucinations under the ‘argument from illusion’.

Their exists a fundamental paradox to naïve realism, one that Bertrand Russell explains well here; “The observer, when he seems to himself to be observing a stone, is really, if physics is to be believed, observing the effects of the stone upon himself…Naive realism leads to physics, and physics, if true, shows that naive realism is false. Therefore naive realism, if true, is false; therefore it is false.”

Russell, B. 1940, 15 A contrasting approach, representational realism, states our perception of the external world occurs indirectly, only a representation of itself. We are only directly aware of internal representations of the objects we sense, creating a so called “veil of perception” between our mental reality and the external world.

If a veiled reality is our only source of the external world then our experiences in it and inferences from it on our ‘self’s’ becomes inherently ‘victim’ to continual misperceptions.

Our perception then has the ability to manipulate the ‘real’ world, insomuch as it has the ability to manipulate the reality we create and importantly, the beliefs we hold about ourselves.

Douglas Hofstadter argues that perception is integral in the creation of our consciousness; “In any strange loop that gives rise to human self-hood... the level-shifting acts of perception, abstraction and categorisation are central, indispensable elements. It is the upward leap from ‘raw stimuli’ to ‘symbols’ that imbues the loop with “strangeness”” Hofstadter, D. 2007, 187

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Ladder of Inference

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Humans as Cogntive Misers

Since our accomplishments and failures occur in the external world they are subject to perceptual distortion, just as a person might view a stick when it is plunged into a water tank as bent. As we grow, and our self-concept builds through our experiences, our ‘self’, just as much as the ‘reality’ we create, becomes subject to misinterpretation and error.

“The (inevitably somewhat distorted) image that one forms, over a lifetime of one’s own character traits, of one’s level in all sorts of blurry social hierarchies, of one’s greatest accomplishments and failures, of one’s fulfilled and unfulfilled yearnings” Hofstadter, D. 2007, 185 Human beings have evolved to be flexible in what they perceive, allowing them to adapt quickly to changes in their environment. Humans are ‘cognitive misers’ (Elliot Aronson, The Social Animal), conserving cognitive energy, using it as efficiently as possible. Conserving strategies add to our information efficiency, but they can also lead to serious errors and biases.

“The fact that we are cognitive misers does not mean that we are doomed to distort. Indeed, once we know some of the limitations and common biases of the human mind, we can begin to think a little better and make smarter decisions.”

Aronson, E. 2003, 120 The British psychologist Sir Frederic Bartlett introduced the concept of schemata into psychology as a learning theory, proposing that knowledge is organised as an elaborate network of abstract mental structures – schema – which create one’s understanding of the world. A schema is “a pattern imposed on the complex reality of experience to assist in explaining it, mediate perception, or guide response” (The American Heritage Dictionary).

Structuring ones understandings in schemata granted us a greater ability to predict future scenarios; and created a level of information processing efficiency much greater than other ‘reactive’ organisms. This made humans better at survival, and in a modern application, this allows us to automatically process everyday situations, expending only minimal cognitive effort.

However, schema influence our attention, making us more likely to notice some things over others, thus heightening perceptual distortion. The awareness of perceptual cues, which act as a signal to the observer, depends upon the meaning the observer holds about such cues.

Hofstadter explains how human consciousness and meaning relate in Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, suggesting the structure of our consciousnesses (a complex ‘constellation of symbols’) act as a system of self-referencing symbols, which incur ‘meaning’ through the

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relationships between those symbols (sensed during perception) and those held in our minds (schema).

“In fact, the symbol for the self is probably the most complex of all the symbols in the brain. For this reason, I call it a subsystem, rather than a symbol. To be precise, by “subsystem,” I mean a constellation of symbols, each of which can be separately activated under the control of the subsystem itself...Thus, there is no strict level distinction between symbols and subsystems.”

Hofstadter, D. 1999, 3 This mental persuasion can create errors in the processing of new information or information that differs from currently held beliefs, giving rise to biased expectations and prejudices, as much about ourselves as about others. As a result, for example, stereotype threat might make someone who perceives themselves as a particular stereotype, to begin to act in a way that makes stereotypical expectations come true. Stereotype Threat has been investigated as a major reason for underachievement in black communities in USA.

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Experiences and Achievements

“It is men, who in developing their material inter-course, change, along with this their real existence, their thinking and the products of their thinking. Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life” Marx, K. 1998, 15.

The self-concept evolves from observing the ways that others behave toward us. The self develops by a reflected appraisal process whereby we learn what other people believe about us and take over their views. Through reaction formation, the individual attempts to preserve and insulate a positive self-concept.

The processes by which the self is formed and the actual content of the self-schema are composed of include self-assessments such as personality attributes, self-knowledge about one’s skills and abilities resulting from personal experiences, or by internalizing the judgments of others. Self-esteem reflects a persons overall evaluation or appraisal of their own worth judged on such schemata.

In the perception and verification of oneself, people create a “habitualizing” circle where one will tend to resist information that is contradictory to one’s self-schema, creating a propensity for perceiving things that are consistent with and add to our self-schema, be that positive or negative. This may create the tension between how we want to feel and how we actually feel.

Karl Marx’s Die Deutsche Ideologie (1846) argued that people’s ideologies, their social and political opinions, are rooted in the social and economic circumstances in which they live; more succinctly, man’s consciousness is determined by his social being.

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Social-Constructionism, theorises reality is socially constructed, with the self being a subjective creation of. Peter Berger goes on to elaborate this idea in The Social Construction of Reality describing the dialectic between individuals and society as cause for one’s objective reality. “the individual member of society, who simultaneously externalises his own being into the social world and internalises it as an objective reality. In other words, to be in society is to participate in its dialectic.”

Berger, P. 1966, 149 In the search for self-improvement, it is common for people to undertake a different social activity, to present to others their ‘new self’. The social construct of the activity and it’s meaning, allows the self to ‘possess’ what ever meaning the activity might contain. The self as constructed socially, is thus a product of the external activities that one does.

“Self, then, is something to be created with other people in joint activities… ‘Who am I?’ is perhaps a mistaken question: it should be, ‘who do I want to be ?’ It is not being but becoming that is the question…. When we try to find who we are, we often turn to some social activity to reveal that ‘hidden’ self. We try out different roles, jobs, education, hobbies, arts, or sporting activities, hoping to find ourselves in them. The search for self therefore involves what we do, the activity informing who we are through the talents and capacities it may develop”.

Burkitt, I. 2008, 4

Ones experiences and achievements create the self.

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Freedom & Restriction

“Freedom constitutes the very way in which we codify and experience ourselves, and the ways in which we divide ourselves from ... that in others.”

Rose, N. 1998, 193 Freedom is a necessary predeterminant for individual agency in manipulating the self. In this section I will discuss philosophical ideas of freedom in connection with the potential for selfimprovement, and theories about external influences and the distorting effect this has on the self. To start off – existentialism.

Friedrich Nietzsche’s proclamation of the “Death of God” (The Gay Science, 1882) came from a culture that feared humanity would suffer a ‘spiritual death’, brought on by the rise of such phenomena as Darwinism, materialism, alienation and dehumanising work practices of the industrial revolution. People might surrender and give up hope in the face of ‘the pointlessness of existence’.

Existentialism attempted to create reason and meaning in the absurdity of life. They wanted to empower individuals to reject external influence, and take responsibility in creating their own values and meaning for life. To live an authentic, rewarding and fulfilling existence, in Nietzsche’s view, was only possible through one’s own “will to power” (The Will to Power, 1901).

Nietzsche’s “will to power” (from Schopenhauer’s “will to live”) represents an individuals’ drive and motivation in life. He suggested that living ones own transcended “will to power” would bring supreme enjoyment and lasting happiness. Choosing to live how one wanted rather than forced by any externality, would relinquish individuals from the external ‘cultural hegemony’.

Nietzsche created the “Übermensch” (Supermen or Above-Men), who would cast off all established values, freeing him from all restraints, rules and codes of behaviour, and go to create his own values.

His ideas about the rejecting external influence on the self, which were aimed at the time towards Christianity, might have contemporary importance. Britain’s advanced capitalism parallels the influence Christianity had in Nietzsche’s time, perhaps with an even greater exertion of external pressure on the individual. A dominant mass media accelerates capitalism’s collectivising influence on the self, creating inauthentic commodity-mediated relationships.

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Sartre on Self-Deception

“The easiest thing of all is to deceive one’s self; for what a man wishes he generally believes to be true.”

Demosthenes (384 BC - 322 BC) Jean-Paul Sartre takes a more negative view of human agency, stating that although Man is “condemned to be free” (Being and Nothingness, 1943), most instead of being empowered, negate responsibility, and live a life of self-deception.

“Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does” Kaufmann, W. 1975, 353 The freedom that comes with being human is not something that we choose. Sartre saw not acknowledging one’s freedom as creating inauthenticity in one’s actions, something he termed “Bad Faith”.

“Bad-faith” … is nothing less than a betrayal of one’s self, a lie in which one deceives oneself about oneself” Solomon, R.C. 1988, 183 Sartre uses the example of a café waiter, whose movements and conversation are a little too “waiter-esque”. His exaggerated behaviour illustrates that he is play acting as a waiter, as an object in the world: an automaton whose essence is to be a waiter. But the acting as a waiter illustrates that he is aware that he is not a waiter and is consciously deceiving himself.

Sartre later stated existentialism “makes human life possible” (The Transcendence of the Ego: An Existentialist Theory of Consciousness). Here he attempts to rejuvenate peoples belief in their freedom, and their ability to guide their lives towards their own chosen goal or ‘project’, truly creating themselves.

Bad Faith

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Foucault on Governing by Choice

“They’re casting their problem on society. And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women… It’s our duty to look after ourselves” Margaret Thatcher, Women’s Own magazine, October 31 1987 Freedom as a resource for government is theorised by Michel Foucault, whose ‘Governmentality’ discusses the external influence governments can exert on free individuals’.

The neoliberal government of Blair’s / Brown’s ‘neo-Thatcherite’ Labour and its relationship with the individual voters entails a paradox. Liberalism enshrines the sovereignty of the free individual, yet governance of any level must impose some level of ‘regulation’ over individual behaviour.

Foucault’s Governmentality creates the rationalities in which individuals and social structures relate and how regulation and policing of individuals is done de facto through conventions on social norms of thought and behaviour, which are in line with political objectives.

According to Foucault, technologies of the self, (care of the self), are forms of knowledge and strategy that “permit individuals to effect by their own means [their] bodies, souls and thoughts, .... [to achieve] certain states of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality.”

Foucault, M. 1988, 18.

Governmentality proposes a series of “technologies of government” which enables a governing through people’s freedoms, rather than intrusive state bureaucracies, laws or religious decrees.

These structure the possible actions that exist for the individual, creating choices which entail they govern themselves.

Citizens are induced into becoming free, autonomous, enterprising individuals who govern themselves and thus require only limited direct governance by the state. Therefore, enforced through social memes, the exercise of individual freedom becomes structured, resulting in creating certain, politically desired behaviours.

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Inculcated with the desire for self-development, an individuals’ success in life depends on their continual exercise of freedom in acquiring the skills and making the choices necessary for actualisation. Foucault defined these as Responsibilisation, Healthism, Normalisation and Self-esteem. This creates the active, ambitious person who takes care of their bodies and who maximises their potential in planning and achieving personal goals.

Normalisation attempts to create the propensity for individuals to control their impulses in everyday conduct and habits, creating a normal ‘self’. Norms are enforced through the social administration of shame to nonconformists, creating an anxiety over our behaviour and appearance of the self.

Self-esteem as a technology of government, which seeks to create a sense of personal ‘empowerment’ for individuals in assessing and evaluating their self-worth. Consumption enables the individual to create a false achievement, through purchasing self-help books.

Self-esteem is the “evaluating and acting upon ourselves so that the police, the guards and the doctors do not have to do so” Cruikshank, B. 1996, 234.

The government provides ‘Nanny State’ legislation for health warnings on food packaging.

What else could they introduce in the name of good health?

Design for Government Sexometer ‘Making Your Healthy in Bed’

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The Amish have managed to evade capitalism’s invasion of the self.

But is the Amish religious influence any better?

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Identity

“We have need of lies in order to conquer this reality, this “truth,” that is, in order to live – that lies are necessary in order to live is itself a part of the terrifying and questionable character of existence.”

Nietzsche, F. 1968 An even more dominant distortion of the ‘self’ is capitalism’s influence. Identity is created through the use of markers such as language, dress and behaviour. In a capitalist society, consumption of goods and commodities that are imbued with particular meanings, reflect upon those who purchase it, functioning to illustrate who that person is, or who they want to be.

Since the late 19th century, psychologists such as Walter Dill Scott have used manipulation in advertising. Psychologists defined the consumer to be a non-rational, suggestible creature, who could easily be programmed to do as the advertiser wanted through suggestions delivered whilst under the hypnotic influence of the advert. “the basic unit of human though is the symbol. Many symbols (and remember that words are symbols) are designed to deceive as well as to inform. Symbols are the building blocks of reason and of memory.”

Berman, D.B. 1998, 65 We desire these things and thus act in a certain manner to achieve them, by working harder and earning more money or by employing technologies of the self to shape our lifestyle to the manner we desire.

Marketers use the knowledge of psychological characteristics in market segmentation, allowing them to appeal more effectively to the individual.

“We do things that we don’t want to, simply because the thought of it has been suggested to us, and we feel compelled to carry it out.”

Scott, W.D. 1985, 55 Self-esteem is degraded and undermined to create need for commodities that we don’t. As people judge themselves, the norms of ‘self’ are invasively manipulated by mass media projection of distorted and inauthentic representations. Individuals are oppressed into spiritually destructive conformity, eventually leading to ‘bad faith’ and oneself becoming inauthentic.

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Degeneration and Commodity Fetishment Gone Wild

“The spectacle is not a collection of images… rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images.”

Debord G.E. 1967

“I take my desires for reality because I believe in the reality of my desires.”

Anonymous graffiti, Paris 1968

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Debord’s Society of the Spectacle

“The decline of being into having, and having into merely appearing. All that once was directly lived has become mere representation” Debord G.E. 1967, 2-42.

Guy Debord drew from Karl Marx’s theories of alienation and commodity fetishism, by arguing that under capitalism, life is reduced to the accumulation of ‘spectacles’. Spectacles supplant genuine activity with passive representation, creating inauthentic, commodity mediated relationships between people. Spectacles, Debord argues, are capitalism’s attempts to hide the depletion it creates in the quality of life and the self.

The most glaring superficial manifestation of the spectacle is seen in marketing and mass media which Debord draws an equivalence to in the role religion had in society in the past.

The commercialized spread of enthusiasm through product launches, creates the “moments of fervent exaltation similar to the ecstasies of the convulsions and miracles of the old religious fetishism”.

Debord G.E. 1967, 67 Debord looks at the role of television, which is the predominant leisure activity of the proletariat, that ironically uses leisure time previous generations had fought for, to allow the continuation and dominance by the ruling class; stupefying and mystifying viewers with unobtainable bourgeois tastes. The celebrity (as a deity) is the personification of the spectacular.

Such a lack of authenticity depletes the quality of life and sense of self, whilst also affecting and altering our psychic and perceptual functions; degrading our mind and knowledge, hindering critical thought. Abilities that used to be able to question and analyse, now serve to assuage reality in the spectacular society.

Debord’s Situationist aims were “to wake up the spectator who has been drugged by spectacular images … through radical action in the form of the construction of situations”.

Debord G.E. 1967

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Self-Actualization

“Heaven help those who help themselves” Samuel, S. 1859, 1

“They are able who think they are able” Virgil (70 BC - 19 BC) The phenomenon of self-improvement, which today we most often see in the form of literary and visual publications, so called ‘self-help’ books, aims to enable people to achieve positive self-concepts. “the desire for self-fulfilment, … to become more and more what one is, to become everything that one is capable of becoming.”

A. H. Maslow, A Theory of Human Motivation, Psychological Review, 1943 The field of positive psychology has evolved in an effort to provide individuals techniques and evaluations to progress towards ‘happiness’ or more positive self-concepts. Achieving positive self-esteem utilises a variety of areas of positive psychology.

Wilhelm Wundt founded the study of mental wellness to counterbalance the study of mental illness in psychological study. The study brakes happiness down into several quantifiable aspects: positive emotion, engagement, and purpose/belonging; 1. Positive Emotion, a.k.a. Pleasant Life involves living through normal, healthy means. This can include our interactions with other people, actively pursuing our hobbies, entertainment, etc.

2. Engagement a.k.a. Good Life involves in your work activities and the correlation between your skills and strengths and your work or activities.

3. Purpose, a.k.a. Meaningful Life includes making a contribution to something bigger than the individual self e.g. volunteer work, philanthropy, social good.

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Martin Seligman is the father of Positive psychology, which aims to help individuals actively increase their well-being. By identifying strengths and virtues, Positive psychology looks at how positive experiences can enhance quality of life for individuals and communities.

Positive emotion leads to the pleasant life which involves fulfilling the norms set by society on health, active living. Flow is part of the ‘engaged’ life, and involves using one’s strengths in a challenging task. Deploying one’s strengths in the service of something larger than oneself can lead to the ‘meaningful life’.

“Clearly, it is not simply a matter of how capable one is, but of how capable one believes oneself to be.” Pajares. 2002 Psychologists agree that positive thinking and optimism are associated with better physical and mental health, performance and longevity. Belief in oneself (self-efficacy) refers to belief in one’s agentive capabilities. “a strong sense of self-efficacy is developed through repeated successes, occasional failures are unlikely to have much effect on judgments of one’s capabilities… Failures that are overcome by determined effort can instil robust precepts of self-efficacy through experience that one can eventually master even the most difficult obstacles.”

Bandura, A. 1985, 399 The Human Potential Movement of the 1960s advocated existentialism and humanistic beliefs to develop the ‘human potential’. They advocated hypnosis among other methods to create happiness, creativity and fulfilment.

Poverty and unemployment are increasingly blamed on the individuals’ failure to successfully attain a ‘normal’ work ethic, rather than as a systemic result of the failings of a capitalist system.

This reversal of blame, impacts on the unemployed persons esteem and self-concept.

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The Morons Guide to Self-Esteem building The US Self-Help industry grossed $3 billion dollars in 2008.

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As summarised before, the inculcation of the desire for self-improvement can occur through external influence on the self. However, there are mechanisms other than self-help manuals that are used to affect positive change in the self.

I shall explore three such mechanisms: Placebo, Hypnosis and Autosuggestion - all practice examples that function through social construction and perceptual distortion to affect the way we behave.

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Practicle Example

“Placebos are the ghosts that haunt our house of biomedical objectivity, the creatures that rise up from the dark and expose the paradoxes and fissures in our own self-created definitions of the real and active factors in treatment” Harrington, A. 1997, 1 Latin for “I Shall Please”, Placebo is a medication or treatment, of which there is no active constituent, but that results in the patient feeling better merely because the recipient believes it should work.

The relationship of authority between the doctor and patient, as well as the ‘medical’ environment in which the placebo is given has been suggested as possible reason for the positive healing effects. “to what degree patients are actually made well by being in the presence of modern healing symbols (white coats, diplomas, thick books, unusual sights, sounds, and smells, and other representations of medicine) and the non-ordinary state of consciousness associated with being ill and in a hospital. Why are symbols so important to the healing process? Where do the symbols come from? What do they mean?”

Achterberg, J. 1992, 148 The social symbols used in the healing process, such as the hospital, white coats, stethoscope etc could all exert ‘placebo like’ effects. Even just the patient’s perception of being given attention and subsequent positive thoughts may encourage people to feel better, ‘re-perceive’ their ailments.

“Placebos are a reminder of how little is known about mind-body interaction. The placebo effect may be one of the most versatile and underused therapeutic tools at the disposal of physicians.”

Margo CE. 1999

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Placebo Pill by Broadhong Design – ‘You are getting better day by day.’

‘Placebo Pills’ are designed for patients who are on a long course of medication. The size decreases, giving what they hope, a “psychological boost to the patients’morale. They will feel as if they are getting better. This psychological effect will actually improve their mental physical health.” [http://www.broadhong.com/9,16/01/10 ]

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  The Spinning Wheel

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Practicle Example

“The hypnotiser by word or sign suggests ideas to the subject, who accepts them unhesitatingly. His mind is concentrated on that which is suggested to him and, no matter how absurd it may be, it is accepted uncritically and suggests its corresponding actions.”

Scott, W.D. 1985, 52 Hypnosis (as considered in the state argument) is a mental state induced by hypnotic induction through which suggestions are delivered by a hypnotist. Uses include therapeutic purposes such as ‘hypnotherapy’, which Sigmund Freud used to speed up information extraction during psychoanalysis.

Dr. John Kappa’s founded the Hypnosis Motivation Institute and discovered three types of suggestibility: emotional, physical and intellectual. During hypnotism, beliefs are ‘input’ through subconscious manipulation of the self through suggestion. Requests, metaphors, rhetorical speech, mental imagery, voice tonality, and physical manipulation are all suggestion techniques.

Often derided as pseudo-science, it is finds common acceptance among certain demographics, especially in self-improvement and pain relief.

However, Hippolyte Bernheim, a leading psychologist in the late 19th century was first to reject hypnosis as a mental state, instead theorising the “none state theory”, proposing patients were merely heightened in suggestibility. Irving Kirsch hypnosis as a “non-deceptive mega-placebo”.

Theodore Sarbin elaborated upon this, creating the ‘social role-taking theory’ of hypnotism, which argued that responses given whilst under the ‘hypnotic state’ occur due to the subjects motivation and social constructs.

Subjects are usually involved voluntarily, in therapy or on stage, and as such are inclined to desire ‘successful hypnosis’; or in the case of being in front of an audience – are under socialpressure to fulfil the socially-constructed role of ‘hypnotic subject’. Enacting the role may reach such a significance that the subject ‘feel’ such ‘mental states’ are occurring.

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Practicle Example

“Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better”.

Coué, E S. 1997 Autosuggestion or self-hypnosis is a process by which an individual trains the subconscious mind to believe something, or systematically schematizes the their own mental associations. Émile Coué, a French psychologist created a system for self-improvement based on optimistic autosuggestion. This later was named Couéism, and separated the use of the patient’s imagination over will.

Coué advised his patients to say at least twenty times a day “Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better”.

Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography includes his striving for “moral perfection” in which, he informally undertook autosuggestion asking himself each morning, “What good shall I do this day?” and “What good have I done today?” at night.

Franklin, B. 1793

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Practicle Example

Mind machines / psycho-walkmans are an example of mechanisms that can be employed to assist in creating the appropriate brain waves for self-hypnosis. They emit pulsing rhythmic sound and flashing light to alter the brainwave frequency of the user and induce mental state akin to being hypnotised.

Design for Psycho-Walkman

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Design Potential 1

Following are two case studies in which manipulation of the self is sought through the social constructed situations.

Designer Onkar Kular designs situations as a medium to engage with society on cultural issues such as domestic perfection and celebrity obsession.

His concept for ‘Elvis Was Here’ (2008) was to investigate the social construction of the Elvis persona. He wanted to reengineering this social construct through an impersonation contest. “‘Elvis Was Here’ was a workshop for primary schools throughout the UK with the purpose of addressing questions concerning the legal definition of impersonation and authenticity.

The workshops are conducted with the eventual aim of breaking the world record for the ‘most Elvis impersonators in one location’ (currently standing at 147) by training children up to a minimum standard of quality that would legally define them as impersonators. Working with legendary Elvis Tribute Artist Paul Richie, each class-based activity is designed around the structure of a ‘year four’ primary school curriculum and the three basic acts of impersonation: Act-a-like, Look-a-like and Sound-a-like.

The first ‘Elvis Was Here’ day took place at” [http://www.onkarkular.com/index.php?/project/elvis-wra/, accessed 16/01/10]

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‘Elvis Was Here’ by Onkar Kular St Saviour’s Church of England Primary School, Herne Hill, London – June 12th 2008

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Design Potential 2

Dash MacDonald’s work ‘Imagine Being a World Leader’ “attempts to publicly expose the reality of human venerability to situation inducement and the potency of existing social systems to control and shape our behaviour, creating social experiments in which objects serve as the catalyst.” [http://www.dashndem.com/world_leader.html, accessed 17/01/10] MacDonald created a stage and scaled podium for the simulated political event ‘Summit for World Change 2008’ in which the children performed role-play exercises to learn leadership and public speaking skills.

The situation helped energise the children into learning rule in rhetoric, body language and voice projection. After only two days of learning, the exercise served to challenge the myth of ‘the naturally speaker’, and also served to re-examine mechanisms of control used in the spoken word.

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‘Imagine Being a World Leader’ by Dash MacDonald Jubilee Primary School, Hackney, London – April 23rd 2008

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Experiment 1

Paper Poor was a video that reappropriate context and meaning to socially construct a tale of the demise of a man who has been made unemployed. The feedback circle comes back to undermine his relationship, as one thing leads to another.

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Experiment 2

Man With A Movie Camera tells the tale of the London Underground, the social context within its use, and the impact it has upon the self through accepted travel norms .

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Moving Forward

«If you turn on the light quickly enough you can see what the dark looks like» Proverb

Philosophers such as Douglas Hofstadter show the potential in perception to affect change in our cognitive structures; thinkers such as Foucault and Debord expose the way social constructs have influence on our day to day behaviour.

When I considered these two ideas in unison, we can utilise the hold social constructs have on us to a positive advantage - if personal perception can be impaired or promoted by given social contexts there therefore exists an equal ability for one to control personal agency through changing these contexts and constructs.

Such direct vehicles for self-improvement outlined earlier, namely hypnosis, placebo and autosuggestion all confirm how manipulating our social constructs can determine how we act in given situations. It is this potential for a positive effect on the self from creating situational social constructions that interests me most and where my attention shall be focused. I hope to go on to develop a design intervention that uses social constructed situations to assist in self improvement.

As outlined earlier, self-concept is increasingly swayed by external influence, arguably the greatest impact comes from capitalism, which undermines our esteem, creating need for commodities that we don’t.

In a society engorged with celebrity deities and commoditised representations of faith, it is time to re-engage with the self; freeing oneself from the shackles of external influence and taking full responsibility for one’s freedom, one is energised to create one’s true self.

“It is one of the basic acts of human existence that we create an identity. Its not a genetic thing that’s given to us as an absolute, like the colour of our eyes, its something we are involved in creating as we live our lives by the choices we make. I am happy with who I am.”

Viggo Mortensen. Virgin Trains Hotline magazine, Jan 2010, 54

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References

Books Achterberg, J: Healing Images and Symbols in Nonordinary States of Consciousness (Helman, 1992) Aronson, E: The Social Animal (Worth Publishers, 2003) Bandura, A: Social Foundations of Thought and Action: A Social Cognitive Theory (Prentice Hall, 1985) Berger, P: The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (Penguin, 1966) Berman, D.B: Do Good Design: How Designers Can Save the World (Peachpit Press, 1998) Burkitt, I: Social Selves (Sage, 2008) Coué, E: Self-Mastery Through Conscious Autosuggestion (Kessinger, 1997) Cruikshank, B: Revolutions within: self-government and self-esteem (1996) Debord G.E :The Society of the Spectacle (1967) Foucault, M: Technologies of the Self (University of Massachusetts Press,1988) Franklin, B: Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (J. Parson’s, 1793) Harrington, A: The Placebo Effect: an interdisciplinary exploration (Harvard University Press, 1997) Hofstadter, D: I Am A Strange Loop (Basic Books, 2007) Hofstadter, D: Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (Basic Books, 1999) Horney, K: Self-Analysis (Norton, 1942) Kaufmann, W: Existentialism From Dostoevsky to Sartre (Penguin, 1975) Lasch, C: The Culture of Narcissism: American life in an age of diminishing expectations (Norton, 1979) Margo C.E: The Placebo Effect (Surv Ophthalm, 1999) Marx, K: The German Ideology (Prometheus Books, 1998) Maslow, A. H: A Theory of Human Motivation (Psychological Review, 1943) Nietzsche, F: The Will to Power (Random House, 1968) Rose, N. Inventing our selves: psychology, power, and personhood (Cambridge University

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Press, 1998) Russell, B: An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth (Allen and Unwin, 1940) Scott, W.D: The Theory of Advertising: A Simple Exposition of the Principles of Psychology (BiblioBazaar, 1985) Sartre, J.P: Being and Nothingness (Routledge, 1970) Searle, R. Mind: A Brief Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2004) Smiles, S: Self-Help (Kessinger Publishing, 1859) Solomon, R.C: Continental Philosophy Since 1750 (Oxford University Press, 1988)

Websites

Brenna Coleman, Subliminal Suggestion in Marketing Ads, [http://advertising-influence.suite101. com/article.cfm/subliminal_suggestion_in_marketing_ads], accessed Dec 2009 Pajares (2002), Overview of social cognitive theory and of self-efficacy. Retrieved Dec 2009, http://www.emory.edu/education/mfp/eff.html http://www.nimbinaustralia.com/zenwatt/condemnedtobefree.html http://www.dashndem.com/world_leader.html http://www.onkarkular.com/index.php?/project/elvis-wra/ http://www.broadhong.com/9 Images http://www.dashndem.com/images/WORLD_LEADER/1.jpg http://74.53.148.133/files/paul-eta-with-class.jpg http://www.broadhong.com/thumbnail/1/1244388458.w500-h591.resampled.jpg http://www.corbisimages.com/images/BE068837.jpg?size=67&uid=ef35e720-376b-4443-ac57

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