Positioning, Self and Other

At this point you might be asking, what exactly is the other? What is the self? How do they relate? For the purpose of relating this to my life, the other is everyone around me which allows me to be my 'self'. We are positioned and framed in various ways everyday throughout our lives by others. We need the other for us to create the self. What I mean is that I cannot be a performer without the audience, I cannot be a member of Our Last Night without Matt, Trev, Colin and Tim, we cannot be signed artists without Epitaph records. My identity relies upon others, for I cannot create meaning, aka music, without them. Sure I could play the bass solo but if I stood up in front of a crowd and played an Our Last Night song by myself the result would be confusion and not many would pick up on the song I was playing. I cannot create the song without them. The song is a metaphor for meaning in a conversation and represents our dependency upon others to create our sense of self. We need others in our lives to create the definition of our selves. The labels which we are given are directly related and dependent on others allowing us to be positioned that way. To bring it down a notch we can look at how we are framed in certain ways everyday. In school kids sit in a classroom and are 'taught' by teachers, they are positioned as traditional students where the teacher is seen as all knowing and the students as pods waiting for instruction as to the knowledge they will absorb. The teacher is not a teacher without the student, the teacher cannot teach without students. Therefore, by being in a classroom taking on the traditional western view of the student as calm, attentive, and seated we allow the teacher to become one. Why does it have to be this way? Couldn't it be true that different forms of 'teaching' might be beneficial depending on the student? If everyone of us is different then wouldn't it make sense to appeal to the different ways in which we all learn?
Relating back to my experience, when a fan asks a band member for a picture or an autograph the band member is positioned as a person of interest. I have often wondered what a kid's reaction would be if instead of getting an autograph from a person of interest they were asked by the person of interest for their own autograph. The person of interest would be framing the fan as a person of importance and breaking the traditional mold of fans asking for signatures. I look forward to experimenting with this next time I am put in the position as someone of importance.

"We carry the capacity to live in multiple worlds...One might say, then, that we are multi-beings, capable of being many persons." (Gergen, 112-113)

This quote from Kenneth Gergen's An Invitation to Social Construction reflects a previous point I made in choosing who we are and how we act in the world in each situation. Although some positions do not reflect positioning in conversation, such as becoming a parent through the birth of a child, they still reflect our relationship with the other. Knowing this we can now move on to understand that there are multiple realities and thus multiple roles in the world. For instance, I am a brother, a son, a bass player, a friend, a college student, a performer, and many more. Throughout our lives we take on many roles, so many roles that to consider us a single entity is naive in the ways in which we know the world. Our roles are ever changing and I feel that we leave behind some while moving on to embrace others. In high school I was a baseball player, a basketball player, a band member and a student. Some of those roles have been more prominent in my life to date (i.e. band member and student). For example I am no longer technically a baseball player because I no longer play the sport. I am not considered one through our society's understanding of a baseball player. However, I will always consider myself a baseball player through my relationships with those whom I played the game. My relationships with my fellow baseball players will always exist in my past experiences making up who I am. Just because I no longer engage in the activity which is baseball does not mean I don't carry past relationships with the sport and others as my personal experience. These experiences are my own, they are part of my social construction. They exist in my inner dialogue and through my personal narration of them. I feel as though in my mind I will always be a baseball player, a basketball player, a student and a band member because my relationships with others in the specific contexts will always be found in my personal construction of the self.

I am looking forward to my next post which will talk about the social construction of my performance in Our Last Night.