The Semiotic Self

The two stories of the habitus/structure relation and the riddle of reflexivity: A meta‐theoretical reappraisal

“…Secondly, to avoid the charge that we are simply embracing Archer's approach, we want to point out that there are other productive ways of thinking about dialogue, self-reflection and habitual action which avoid the problems with Bourdieu's theorising. One influential approach to the dialogical self is offered by Norbert Wiley (1994Wiley ( , 2006aWiley ( , 2006bWiley ( , 2010) who intends to combine Mead's "I-me" formulation of the "inner speech" with Peirce's "I-you" formulation, by proposing an "I-you-me" triadic notion of reflexivity in contrast toand thus enhancing and complementingthe two dyads proposed by Mead and Peirce. Wiley attributes to the "me" component five partially heterogeneous contents; these are the "generalized other", "habits", "memory", "interface with body" and the "selfconcept".…”

“…For this triadic relationship to occur, the self should stand simultaneously both in the past ("me"), present ("I") and future ("you"). Wiley's active and imaginative "I" is missing from Bourdieu's thought, but the former's anti-reductionist analysis of the self (see, Wiley, 1994) shows that it is feasible and reasonable for authors to incorporate habitual action into the analysis of the discursive (re-)production of the self, without forcibly invoking a social unconscious.…”

Human Agency and the "Joints" of Social Experience: A Commentary on Wainryb, Brehl, and Matwin

“…In other work, Wainryb and her colleagues (e.g., Wainryb & Turiel, 1994) have explored perspectives from a broader societal or cultural standpoint involving power differentials between the traditional positions of men and women in Middle Eastern societies. Although Wainryb et al do not take the steps to further organize these different levels of perspective, they could be arranged hierarchically to reflect the degree in which social influences impact one over the other (for further discussion of such levels see Wiley, 1994). That is, insofar as victim-perpetrator perspectives map onto more primitive or basic causal categories like ''patient'' and ''agent,'' it could be argued that some perspectival positions resist de-stabilizing social forces more than others, or at least that they draw their stability from more or less ''reliable'' sources (e.g., natural positions in a dialogue vs. socially constructed roles in society).…”

The Caterpillar’s Question: Contesting Anti‐Humanism’s Contestations

“…Instead, it only ''decenters'' them by ontologically depleting selves of content. In the case of ethnomethodology (e.g., Blum and McHugh 1971;Coulter 1989) and Giddens's (1971;1981; structuration theory, the ontological depletion of the self takes the form that Wiley (1994b) refers to as ''upward reduction,'' a post-Wittgensteinian engulfment of the subject by social rules. In contrast, Parfit's (1984) ''downward'' dissolution of the subject leaves only the physical residue of reductive materialism.…”