THE HETEROGENEOUSLY DISTRIBUTED SELF

Abstract

Recent work in "distributed" and "situated" cognition has moved away from psychological structure as the primary explanation for human understanding. Instead, structures at various levels of explanation-at least the linguistic, social, cultural, interactional, and mental-together constitute successful cognition. Analogously, this article argues, the self is not primarily a psychological entity, but instead emerges from structures at various levels of explanation. The article focuses on the level of interactional positioning in conversation to illustrate how non-psychological structure can partly constitute the self. It focuses on the interactional positioning done by narrators as they tell stories about themselves and describes the interactional functions of autobiographical narrative discourse. Bakhtin's theory of language's interactional functions is drawn on and applied to one life story.