ABSTRACT
Harré is describing here the balancing of personhood between a sense of self as autonomous, and the pervasive pull and push of social relations which create and maintain that sense. A more common way of experiencing this feeling may be in less black and white terms than Harré employs, but the ambivalence we often feel as to how much we are in control of our lives hinges on the polarity he describes. In his account, the individual self is a project wrought out of social difference. Social and normative ‘conversations’ constitute the ‘primary structure’ of human life, since society always exists before the individual, who is delivered into, and develops a sense of being out of, a relationship to the social. Nonetheless, individual, personal being is a real phenomenon, for persons operate within a society that requires them to act as individual selves. The self is then a ‘secondary’ but necessary structure generated by, but differentiated from, the ‘primary’ social structure. Social relations are reproduced because persons exist both as role-playing individual agents and, more fundamentally, as selves. They are created out of a language of individual biography, identity and capacity for action. This language creates the sense of being a self ‘behind’ the social roles that individuals perform, although, in Harré’s account, the ability to be ‘one’s self’ is intimately linked to, and generalised from, the ability to perform individual social roles.
