Rhetoric, Anxiety, and Character Armor: Burke's Interactional Rhetoric of Identity1

Although the question of identity is ancient, the modern notion of self-predicated upon a demarcation between inner experience and outer world-is but a few hundred years old (Gergen, 1991; Schrag, 2003; Taylor, 1989). However, as R. D. Laing argues, with the nineteenth and twentieth centuries emerged the realization that the "you" is an essential correlate of the "I." This "discovery," Laing contends, revolutionized modernist accounts of selfhood; since

social life is not made up of a myriad

Indeed, central to contemporary theorizing is this embedding of other perspectives within the self. One of the most influential such examples is George Herbert Mead's (1934) Mind, Self, and Society, which argues powerfully that the self is not given at birth, but arises as a result of social interaction. The self, for Mead, is created through symbolic exchange, as an individual becomes aware of herself as an object. As I take the other's perspective on myself, I learn who I am by internalizing the other's attitude (Mead, 1934, p. 171). However, the self is only fully formed when I can take the perspective of the "generalized other," the overall attitude of society, on my own actions (Mead, 1934, p. 155).