Unraveling the self: self-construction
Autocommunication
The internalization of identity and self-construction in immigrant communities takes place at the hand of pre-existing cultural categories. Inasmuch as they start to interact with their peers in their own culture they learn about their prevailing values, cultural codes, ways of life and so on. Through interpersonal communication in the native culture they unconsciously start to learn what does it mean to be a member of that culture. This process enhances the identity up to the moment in which one has to choose one or another type of identity.
By way of delving into the process of identity-generation on the individual level, I will illustrate that immigrants might identify themselves in the settling culture context through a complex processes that copes with 3 aspects of self-understanding: auto-communication, self-description and self-identification. The first process that is on the pathway to the self is called autocommunication. Consequently, I appeal to Roman Jakobson’s notions of two types of communication, the processes of dialoguing with the other, and dialoguing with the self. Jakobson (1956) considers communication as a transferring of information from one source to another, resulting an increase in the amount of information the addresser has. Lotman (1998) on the other hand, distinguished another type of communication in culture defining it as autocommunication, which is seen as the communicative situation where one person addresses to himself/herself: an “I-I” (in opposition to the typical communicative situation “I-You”). In this model the information carrier remains the same, but in the process of communication the message is reformulated acquiring new meaning by means of introducing an additional, second code. Thus, the original message starts to be recoded into traits of its structure, obtaining features of a new message (p. 44). This system of communication produces a reformulating in the person, although it doesn’t entirely cover the self since it is detonated by external codes that alter the context of the communicative situation, producing an increase in information, as well as its inherent transformation and reformulation. Classical autocommunication examples are in poetry for Lotman — Where a secondary poetical code is introduced into the text. By means of this code the message becomes a tool for reconstructing oneself. To cite an instance, Kati Lindström (2010) has provided a new approach to autocommunication, arguing that people, when inserting and contemplating landscapes, develop attachments to them through an autocommunicative process that is done by means of using perceptual markers, i.e., sensorial information, bodily movements, or rhythms. Thus, immigrants could also use a gamut of perceptual markers of landscape, as secondary codes in order to autocommunicate, because the difference of both native and new “host” landscapes might be salient in several aspects.
Self-descriptions
Lotman pointed out that in the core of the semiospheres, some sections aspiring to the self-description are prone to became rigid, to lose flexibility and to self-regulate. For him, the self-description stage is “a necessary response to the threat of too much diversity within the semiosphere” (Lotman 2001, p. 128). Self-descriptions are not only the most complex manifestation of culture’s organization, but are also based on autocommunication and the seeking for self-understanding. Human beings are also related with the same mechanisms, for determining their identities they need to describe themselves. The languages of description are closely related to the essence of culture. When we speak about self-descriptions, we can talk about cultural self-models. Then, we can choose among 3 types of self-models: 1) cultural self-models whose main aim is maximum similarity to the existing culture; 2) the creation of cultural self-models that differ from current cultural practices, and may even have been conceived for changing those practices. Here, both the culture’s unity and its models acquire an ideal status; 3) self-models that exist and function as an ideal cultural self-consciousness, but separately from culture itself and without being oriented towards it (Lotman 1998, p. 91). Lotman does not separate conflicts between culture and its self-models. Furthermore, the creation of one of another self-model represents the creativity of culture.
Self-identification
Self-identification is one of the most powerful semiotic resources throughout immigrant generate, and convey certain identities. These are grounded on commitment and feelings of belonging to a concrete ethnic group, but also on some other feelings whose main aim is distinguish himself/herself from the other members of the group. Self-identifying with one category or with another, with one ethnic group or with another, implies another instance of self-description and autocommunicative process. I deem self-identification as a continuous engagement with the self whose main consequence is the generation of multiple, personal and ethnic identities, as well as an intrinsic acknowledgement of the own. Individuals are inclined to perform several degrees of self-identification and concerning this issue. J. Berry has related the acculturation strategies (see below) with degrees of ethnic self-identification, claiming that when individuals show strong identification with both groups, there is integration, or even biculturalism[iv].