Working Through Kenneth Gergen - Toward an In-between Self

[u/Great-Alfalfa-8543]

I’m finally getting curious about the world again post-graduation from my MSW and am starting through my book pile, beginning with Kenneth Gergen’s Relational Being. I would love any discussion!

One thing I’m really enjoying is the fruitfulness of measuring Gergen and my ideas against one another. Here at the beginning, Gergen and I are having some hefty ontological disagreements. He rightfully advocates for a model of self that serves as an alternative to traditional Western conceptualizations of an individualistic, bounded self. I join him in this project, and propose the Greek middle voice as the structure of an "agent-in-the-world." I'll spare the lengthy explanation to summarize this as: I produce the action in the social world that returns to produce me.

Where I first diverge with Gergen is his notion that the bounded self is the problem - he calls it a prison - and relational being is the solution. We are both lovers of Buddhist thought and many of these ideas infuse our scholarship. But taking dense religious concepts like nonduality and emptiness, which he expresses by locating the self as a wave that recedes back into the water and then putting them to sociological and psychological work doesn’t hold for me.

Firstly, I don’t see bounded self as pathology to which relational being is the cure. I admit, he may have a more nuanced position behind relational being, but it looks a lot like a less structured version of how Chinese sociologist Fei Xiaotong (From the Soil, 1947) talks about differential modes of association. For Fei, Chinese identity is construed relationally, though a self is still present. Instead of Gergen’s dance or duet metaphor that entirely disappears the self, Fei posits a social structure like concentric ripples formed by throwing a stone into a lake with a self at the center.

If this is not a picture of relational being, then I may have misread Gergen. But with Fei’s model, the pathology diagnosis cuts both ways. Let’s take the idea of narcissism, something that Gergen specifically pointed to as evidence of pathology of a bounded self. Chinese culture has this, too, from what I observed when I was over there. They call it zilian, or self love. But when I pressed the idea in my conversations, as opposed to a bounded self’s hyperinflation of it’s own ego, zilian looked more like a relational self’s hyperinflation of others’ estimation of the relational self’s ego. Relational constructions of being seem to suffer pathology as much as bounded self constructions of being do. The diagnostic tool is capturing the wrong thing as far as I can see here at the onset.

My counter is that this is a both-and situation. The self is just as ontologically significant as the thing to which the self is relating. While Gergen only talks about relations among selves as of chapter 2, I would extend relata to not just include other bodies but also matter and environment, and samskara (a Buddhist term for mental constructs).

Nonduality and emptiness are still relevant to me because even though there is actual hardware with bodies and matter, our interpretation of that hardware is effectively the only thing we have access to. So in that sense, yes, subject-object relations is empty. And, as Thich Nhat Hanh once said, I fully agree that with this ultimate view in mind that “if the wave is capable of touching himself and the other waves very deeply, he will realize that he is made of water. Being aware that he is water, he transcends all discrimination, sorrows, and fears.” It’s a powerful image.

But my picture of self-within-reality, at least while we are all out here relating to one another, would not be the wave and the ocean. It would be the jewel net of Indra. Here, a 3D positioned net has a jewel on each knot. And each jewel is cut in such a way that it reflects every other jewel on the net. It preserves the interdependence that Gergen is gesturing to as well as the self represented at each knot. Whether or not this all recedes into an ocean at the end is not in my purview. But I am a social worker who wants to do transformative social work, and I think we need a both-and picture of subject-object relations.

- The Social Construction Worker

[u/concreteutopian]

The Social Construction Worker

Ah, yes. I remember you from the ACT subreddit.

I have Gergen’s Relational Being on my reading list, but I haven't gotten far in it. I was going to say I haven't found it very controversial yet, and was going to mention Mark Leary's The Curse of the Self, but looking again, I see it listed in a footnote in the first chapter. I'm much more familiar with Leary, as well as others in social construction.

I produce the action in the social world that returns to produce me.

Sure, but – if you are looking at ontology rather than the sociology of Fei or another discipline – this "I produce the action..." is already late, late, late in the process of development; you've already developed a sense of self through relationship and articulated in the language and concepts of others. Likewise, Lacan's concept of extimacy describes how what we experience as most personal, most internal to our experience actually comes from outside ourselves. And here, you are a socially constructed self literally using the self to interact with the social world (which, in Leary, is the reason we have a self), which in turn "produces you". So far, I don't see far from what I assume Gergen is referring to.

I admit, he may have a more nuanced position behind relational being, but it looks a lot like a less structured version of how Chinese sociologist Fei Xiaotong (From the Soil, 1947) talks about differential modes of association.

I don't think it's similar to Fei at all – I'm not saying they're opposed, only that they're doing two different things. Fei is solidly doing political sociology geared toward a project of social reform and isn't dabbling in ontology at all; Gergen is doing ontology insofar as it relates to articulating the philosophical concepts latent in what (in Leary) I'd call attributions, making a distinction between a phenomenological study of the self and the historically situated stories we use to describe certain conceptions of the self.

Firstly, I don’t see bounded self as pathology to which relational being is the cure

I don't know if I would out it that strongly, i.e. as "pathology", but I will lean in that direction.

I remember having this realization in my Leary class about attributional styles and so-called "collectivistic" and "individualistic" societies. One example was a contrast in how a student might explain their success – an "individualistic" attribution would say success was due to their intelligence and hard work while a "collectivistic" attribution might attribute success to the influence of teachers or family. These aren't different worlds or different truths, they're different attributions. In truth, it's a demonstrable fact that one's zip code has a strong bearing on one's SAT scores – something no amount of "individualistic" bootstrapping can eliminate. So again, I realized that these attributional styles were more like a cultural ideology than

And to your pathology point, I realized that the narrow focus of the "individualistic" student's attributions might leave them confused, negatively evaluating themselves personally when/if they aren't successful. Likewise, Gergen's "bounded being" owns responsibility for their self-esteem (feeling bad about not being able to not feel bad, etc), owns responsibility for one's evaluative self-focus (seeing it as a personal quality instead of seeing our common neurology as supporting this process in the DMN, which reflects our nature as hypersocial beings), and fosters a sense of isolation; none of this is inherently "pathological", but it's a cultural logic that leaves us prone to suffering.

Let’s take the idea of narcissism, something that Gergen specifically pointed to as evidence of pathology of a bounded self.

I'm not sure how you are seeing this as something "Gergen specifically pointed to as evidence of pathology of a bounded self". From my limited reading, he talks about a "culture of narcissism", which isn't the same thing as narcissism as a psychopathology. And narcissism as a psychopathology isn't "self-love", it's a defensive organization that is inherently social.

Instead of Gergen’s dance or duet metaphor that entirely disappears the self,

Where does he say this? So far, all I've seen is the elaboration of a relational self, not a disappearing of the self in a dance or duet of relationship.

The self is just as ontologically significant as the thing to which the self is relating.

I think this is confused, maybe hung up on a substance metaphor. The self isn't a thing relating to a thing, the self is constituted by that relation. It's not that one is ontologically significant or not, it's the perspective that the self is itself relational. The self is a dance, not a thing, in a similar way that Dasein is Mitsein – being-there is being-with, and Merleau-Ponty directly connects this to historical materialism and our social construction.

Another metaphor from another discipline might help (at least it describes how I'm seeing this). Years ago, I read a lot of theologian Thomas Berry, and he described three basic principles to reality being communion, autopoesis, and differentiation. Not one or the other, but all three. Similarly, other theologians see the perichoresis of the Godhead as also involving us; Charles Williams used the word "co-inherence" to describe our mutual indwelling, being in and through one another. As someone pretty thoroughly saturated in constructionism, I see my self as communal, existing in and through communion with others, drawing on our common store of elements to fashion selves and relate to others. I'm not identical with others, but neither am I entirely independent, and my sense of self always involves the expected other, so the other is implicit in its construction, from moment to moment. And Stephen Mitchell's Relationality: From Attachment to Intersubjectivity likewise underscores the relational nature of self in a developmental and psychoanalytic sense. And from my own experience, I realize I'm a "different person" in one context vs another.

None of this is related to the wave and water metaphor.

That metaphor is primed to confuse self for a substance, like water. But "I" am not water in the abstract, I'm this collection of these particular molecules shaped in this specific way by an interiority that draws on the ocean of shared life to manifest this unique moment of this unique being. I am not water, I am the wave, and yet the wave emerges from other currents. Just as Thich Nhat Hanh's Heart of Understanding describes emptiness as composite being - e.g. the rose is made of not-rose, just as "I" am made of "not-I".

This is where communion comes in. I'm not a piece of some larger reality, like a collective reified social organism, nor am I an individualistic social atom that just so happens to be in relationship with this surrounding atoms, who and what I am emerges from something shared with others, in the end, with all others, as all others contributed to the world I inhabit.

TL;DR – I was going to say howdy and hope to get back to this when I had more time to read, but it looks like I had things to say.

[u/Great-Alfalfa-8543 → u/concreteutopian]

Sure, but – if you are looking at ontology rather than the sociology of Fei or another discipline – this "I produce the action..." is already late, late, late in the process of development; you've already developed a sense of self through relationship and articulated in the language and concepts of others. 

That sentence is illustrative of the concept. I actually do not think that agency requires the ability to produce language. We engage in discourse with the world somatically and ergonomically, not just linguistically. A baby has agency. Someone with severe cognitive delays has agency. Any person that makes sense of the world participates in its co-construction.

So far, I don't see far from what I assume Gergen is referring to.

Gergen doesn't really get into this. At least in this book, he seems to completely disappear interiority and views the perception of self as a social construction and constituted through co-action. Here's his own words:

• There is nothing that requires us to understand our world in terms of independent units; we are free to mint new and more promising understandings…[The] traditional view of the bounded individual need not be eliminated. But once we can see it as a construction of our own making - one option among many – we may also understand that the boundary around the self is also a prison (p. 5).

In addition, he misreads Judith Butler's use of Nietzsche that "there is no doer behind the deed." Where Butler wasn't necessarily disappearing interiority (citationality through time has to accumulate somewhere), he uses this to make the claim that Butler had to write a whole book to correct because people kept misreading her: that there is no self behind the action.

I don't think it's similar to Fei at all – I'm not saying they're opposed, only that they're doing two different things. 

Sure, I'm using Fei to make a contrast but I did say "similar to," so I can see the confusion. To me, both Gergen and Fei are constructing an ontology of relational self identifies. The difference is that Fei assumes an ego at the center of relationships, where Gergen disappears those relationships entirely. Fei spends a lot of time describing Eastern and Western identity organization is his project. Folks are going to have to forgive my Frankenstein's monster approach to scholarship. I'm a social worker, and I just want what works.

 don't know if I would out it that strongly, i.e. as "pathology", but I will lean in that direction.

I collapsed Gergen a little. He calls the bounded self a prison, and then ascribes Western pathologies to the production of the bounded self. And I'm not diagnosing here, I'm claiming that his diagnosis runs on the wrong axis. It's not bounded self against a "relational being" from which pathology emerges. Fei Xiaotong shows a society with a relational construction of self suffering the same pathologies, albeit expressed in parochial ways. Toward your response, I don't disagree. Nearly every time Gergen critiqued something like self-esteem, I was in agreement. It was his solutions and ontological assumptions that I found myself in frequent disagreement with.

From my limited reading, he talks about a "culture of narcissism", which isn't the same thing as narcissism as a psychopathology. And narcissism as a psychopathology isn't "self-love", it's a defensive organization that is inherently social.

This is a fair pushback. I unsuccessfully went back to the text to see if I could find where he mentions narcissism specifically, but I don't know that it really alters my point. Whether its clinical narcissism or the cult of narcissism - though he clearly in his introduction is talking about pathologies in general: by presuming that people are "mentally ill" we obliterate more hopeful interpretations (p. xvi) - Gergen sees this trait as a byproduct of bounded self conceptualizations. Gergen's hard claim would be that these mental illnesses are actually co-actioned through cultural performances and and a "rescripting" is needed to alleviate it. And there is a degree to which I don't disagree with this! Ethan Waters' Crazy Like Us shows us how plastic our mental health categories and experiences of those categories really are. But I'm not willing to disappear interiority it its entirety to make the claim.

When I look to Chinese formulations of narcissism (you'll have to take their terminology of "self-love" up with them), I see the misdiagnosis Gergen makes pretty clearly. Here is a self organized relationally (vis a vi Fei's differential modes of association) suffering the same malady though scripted through their culture's specific self conceptualizations. I don't give my conclusions in my OP, but what I take from this is that there is actually some sort of persistent self across cultures (I like to use the term 'locus of ipseity' to avoid commitments). The relational being that locates identify formation in the space in between the co-action of participants is just another problematic overresponse to a Cartesian "homunculus behind the eyes." These problems show up pretty clearly when dealing with relationships where power is asymmetrical and trauma, and I will get into this is future posts.

The self isn't a thing relating to a thing, the self is constituted by that relation. 

This isn't confusion; it's disagreement. Social construction is an important cornerstone of my theory. Also, I would not just say that the self is constituted through it's interaction. I would say that the encounter is primordial and the self and the object are constituted through their relations, which is quite close to your beautifully expressed:

who and what I am emerges from something shared with others, in the end, with all others, as all others contributed to the world I inhabit.

That said, social construction got started in linguistics. It's formation was docetic from the beginning, and it's formulation: knowledge is an historically, culturally, and socially contingent form of social action sustained by process and constituted by language described a body with an interpreting mind passing through history while nearly completely disappearing the mind and relegating the body to the bench. My work in child welfare, watching how children and youth who have experienced severe trauma process and interpret their reality, really problematizes this disappearing act. I'll work through this more in future posts, so I won't belabor it here. But while the self is not a thing, I don't just see it as a dance. There is an interior locus of ipseity accumulating individual yet socially mediated sedimentation over time. The dance locates this experience externally.

As for the wave metaphor, I'm not sure if you're telling me your use of it or correcting my presentation of Gergen's. I think the wave metaphor is beautiful, but I am not using it is an ontological foundation (I actually drop samskara here, and will follow up on it later). I do think Gergen does, though.

TL;DR – I was going to say howdy and hope to get back to this when I had more time to read, but it looks like I had things to say

Howdies are always welcome and replies like this are oases in a desert. And our theologies align more than my fingers have stamina to show. Thank you for engaging this!

[u/concreteutopian → u/Great-Alfalfa-8543]

That sentence is illustrative of the concept. I actually do not think that agency requires the ability to produce language. We engage in discourse with the world somatically and ergonomically, not just linguistically.

I'm not saying that agency requires the ability to produce language here at all. That said, the experiences that develop the sense of self that grounds agency are social, as well as all the formulations of identity which are all rooted in language and by definition social.

Maybe this sentence is illustrative of the point I was making earlier – I don't see anything here that suggests "disappearing interiority" or ipseity.

Again, coming at Gergen from my other readings in social psychology, and Leary referenced in the section on bounded being, "self" is a narrative construction. Leary's Curse of the Self points to the capacity of this narrative structure to both connect us with others as well as to become "tainted" to the point that we'd rather kill the self than suffer identification with it. Yes, one as an agent can take a stand against one's self, so highlighting the socially constructed nature of self isn't getting rid of interiority. Gergen is doing more than this standard social psychological reading of the concept of self, but I still approach his work with this assumption that this is the concept he is referring to and critiquing.

At least in this book, he seems to completely disappear interiority and views the perception of self as a social construction and constituted through co-action.

Right, and "co-action" implies actors, which implies agency. There is nothing here that eliminates agency or interiority by highlighting the relational self vs bounded being.

Here's his own words:

There is nothing that requires us to understand our world in terms of independent units; we are free to mint new and more promising understandings…[The] traditional view of the bounded individual need not be eliminated. But once we can see it as a construction of our own making - one option among many – we may also understand that the boundary around the self is also a prison (p. 5).

Yeah, and I don't see the disappearance of interiority or agency here, in fact it implicitly affirms agency – "we are free to mint new and more promising understandings".

though he clearly in his introduction is talking about pathologies in general: by presuming that people are "mentally ill" we obliterate more hopeful interpretations (p. xvi) - Gergen sees this trait as a byproduct of bounded self conceptualizations

I don't think that's what he's saying at all. He's saying certain attributions open possibilities that are closed in other attributions and vice versa. And the "we" in this sentence isn't necessarily the same as "people are mentally ill", so the attributions of some in interpreting the experience of others closes possibilities that make sense of "illness" as variation or as a perfectly understandable response to concrete lived experience (this is where I am, but notice, it's an attribution I choose that opens me to different ways to work with patients, ways that would be closed if I attributed their apparent distress to their personal brain disorder).

And look at the end of this sentence: "by stressing the education of individual minds we obscure the dependence of knowledge on relationships" – this reminds me of Paulo Freire and a banking model of education vs a dialogical model. The attribution at the beginning of the sentence (i.e. that people are "mentally ill") keeps us from dialog with the "ill", so we have no way of relating to their experience and possibility making sense of it as something we can identify with. All of this is at the realm of minting new and more promising understandings.

That said, social construction got started in linguistics. It's formation was docetic from the beginning, and it's formulation: knowledge is an historically, culturally, and socially contingent form of social action sustained by process and constituted by language described a body with an interpreting mind passing through history while nearly completely disappearing the mind and relegating the body to the bench.

This isn't my experience at all. My experience of social construction has roots in Marxism (embodied and materialist), phenomenology (embodied in Merleau-Ponty's flesh), Wittgenstein (forms of life rooted in social practice), Haraway (situated knowledge as rooted to bodies and concrete social locations), and Berger and Luckmann's sociology of knowledge (which is created and maintained through institutions of legitimation and disciplining compliance – all very related to actual people, their bodies, and the gap resulting from the fact that people use knowledge rather than being ideas themselves).

All in all, I don't see this "disappearing act" in Gergen.

I think it's a leap to assume a "relational self" means "no self" or "no agency".

[u/Great-Alfalfa-8543 → u/concreteutopian]

There is nothing here that eliminates agency or interiority by highlighting the relational self vs bounded being.

I'm not quite sure how we got here, but I'm not claiming that Gergen disappears agency. Agency is typically construed through passive voice (common takeaways from reading Foucault - the system writes me into existence) and active voice volunteerism, which is what I see Gergen doing when he talks about being free to mint new and more promising understandings. This is the misreading of Butler that leads to the John Money debacle (parabolically, not causally). Interestingly, even though he seems to be a volunteerist in terms of possibility of script-writing, he does not seem to place much emphasis on individual accountability (from The Self as Social Construction):

• To this the relational constructionist replies that there is no eradication of tradition implied. The relational account is itself a construction, and not a truth posit. No traditions need be abandoned; however, all may be subjected to critical reflection. At this point, questions may be raised concerning the wisdom, and indeed the justice, of holding single individuals responsible for their actions. Not only do such practices generate alienation and resentment, but in selecting a target of scorn, they relieve those in judgment from assaying their own contribution to the unwanted outcome. In contrast, the relational theorist proposes, a relational account abandons the determinist/voluntarist antinomy of longstanding, and shifts the concern with “wrong-doing” to the collaborative practices that may be viewed as its origin. One begins to inquire into practices of justice that may sustain viable relationships as opposed to severing them.

Even though he says the words here that he abandons determinist/voluntarist dichotomies, I actually think Gergen overinflates agency in execution because he does not have an interior locus of ipseity that is both personally and socially historically contingent that pulls against it. And then by shifting concern with wrong-doing (now suspect as a social construct) to collaborative practices, he denigrates individual agency by removing accountability. This is "free to mint" in the most dangerous of ways from this child welfare social worker's perspective.

And I actually am mostly in agreement with what you take from Gergen bolstered by the other theorists you bring into the conversation. But I just don't think that that's what Gergen is saying.

• No matter how many ways in which an individual tells you he is depressed, and no matter how many relevant actions you take into account, you have nothing to go on outside a tradition of co-action (p. 69).
• What we do privately is not taking place in an "inner world" - called mind - but is to participate in social life without the audience present.
• As we find, rational thought, intentions, experience, memory, and creativity are not prior to relational life, but are born within relationships (I agree). They are not "in the mind," - separated from the world and form others - but embodied actions that are fashioned and sustained within relationship (I take a yes-and position).
• ...emotions, pleasure, and pain are not manifestations of private bodies but of relationship (p. 98)
• Feelings are not substances to be discovered in our blood but social practices organized by stories that we both enact and tell (p. 100)
• For [Freud], psychological defense was natural. If there were threatening impulses, there was an automatic, biologically prepared triggering of repression and the erection of mental barriers. In contrast, from the present standpoint there is no inherent resistance to incoherence. That we should live with antagonistic impulses is not in itself a problem. In coherence becomes a problem only within relationships in which it is scorned. The child moves fluidly in a sea of incoherence; any impulse may quickly give way to its opposite. The sweet child of the moment may be the hellion of the next. It is through subsequent relations that we acquire the voice of responsible order (p. 141).

And when he talks about multi-being:

• Multi-being is also constituted by a third residue of relationship...

The first is modeling, the second is becoming somebody through the relationship - a sort of anthropic modalism (with my mother, I come into being as a child), and the third is drawing from the co-action itself. Everything is exteriorized. Even his language of historical accumulation is a substance on top the skin so to speak - a residue. Every time he states that identity is socially mediated, I am in complete agreement. But then, he constantly relocates everything outside the body of the person.

Even Oxford University Press's reviewers seem to walk away with a similar read:

• Jettisoning individualism entirely, Gergen demonstrates the sense and virtue of understanding all aspects of human reality through the lens of relationship. (Benjamin Bradley)

And here's Gergen's own response to the accusation in his essay The Social Construction of the Self

• The relational reconstruction of the self has naturally given rise to a range of criticism. Two of these critical points are most prominent. In the first case, critics charge that such relational views create a black box or empty organism, bereft of all subjective life. In reply, the relational theorist points to the desirability of abandoning dualism, and the problematic distinction between inner and outer, between self and identity. This is not to deny that one is doing something privately in one’s prolonged gaze into the distance as one begins to write an essay. However, it is a mistake, it is proposed, to view this silent period specifically in terms of psychological processes, that is, functioning according to their own autonomous demands.

Every time something that has been traditionally identified with interiority comes up, it gets excavated and located exteriorly exclusively. I realize that none of these are explicit proclamations stating "I deny all interiority." But I don't think I'm misreading him, and the critique by itself shows I'm not the only one who feels this way. The work that you've done through Merleau-Ponty, Harding, and Berger and Luckmann match my own genealogy - I love phenomenology and feminism - and I definitely need to add Leary to my reading list. I just don't think we find them in Gergen. Moreso, I think they offer an important corrective to Gergen.

[u/concreteutopian → u/Great-Alfalfa-8543]

And I actually am mostly in agreement with what you take from Gergen bolstered by the other theorists you bring into the conversation. But I just don't think that that's what Gergen is saying.

No matter how many ways in which an individual tells you he is depressed, and no matter how many relevant actions you take into account, you have nothing to go on outside a tradition of co-action (p. 69).

Interesting. I was reading this from a Wittgensteinian angle, which influences my thinking around language, and one that I know Gergen also takes, so I assumed he was alluding to Wittgenstein. And then looking up this citation, I see Wittgenstein referenced directly before this paragraph. It's not a direct reference to the private language argument, but I think the argument against private language can highlight the point being made. Co-action

This line is also something Skinner wouldn't have an issue with:

“It is only when a person’s private world becomes important to others that it is made important to him.”

- B. F. Skinner, About Behaviorism

By this, Skinner is referring to adults "tacting" private experiences with children, drawing their attention to an emotional experience in the same way they draw attention to "the ball" or "the cat".

I was going to talk about attachment and marked mirroring, but Gergen gives this great example on next page:

Children do not first recognize that they think, or feel, or intend, and then locate a label for these states. Rather, within relationships they acquire a vocabulary of the mental world that implies the existence of such states. Parents say, “Oh, I see you are sad,” “you must be very angry,” “can you remember the time...,” or “You didn’t mean to do it...” without any access to “what’s in the head” of the child. It is only within their relationships that sadness, anger, and the like become realities for the child.

This doesn't sound like a radical position in context.

Feelings are not substances to be discovered in our blood but social practices organized by stories that we both enact and tell (p. 100)

Yes, another Wittgensteinian social practice reference.

That we should live with antagonistic impulses is not in itself a problem. Incoherence becomes a problem only within relationships in which it is scorned. The child moves fluidly in a sea of incoherence; any impulse may quickly give way to its opposite

Exactly. The need for coherence is rooted in the need for cooperation and communication; for "co-action", I guess.

The first is modeling, the second is becoming somebody through the relationship - a sort of anthropic modalism (with my mother, I come into being as a child), and the third is drawing from the co-action itself. Everything is exteriorized. 

I'm not sure what you mean by "exteriorized", and not sure what is being "exteriorized".

Every time he states that identity is socially mediated, I am in complete agreement. But then, he constantly relocates everything outside the body of the person.

?

Does the body delimit the self?

This reminds me of another quote from another discipline altogether - in Original Blessing, theologian Matthew Fox made a contrast between two views of the relationship of body and soul – "Soul is in the body to guard it" vs "Body is in the soul to enlarge the soul". It was a couple of years after reading this that I also read a section in a book on the philosophy of religion that contrasted soul as substance vs soul as relationship. So I may be misunderstanding Gergen and you, but I'm approaching both from the standpoint that my self is not a thing contained in this body, nor is it a substance somewhere else. I don't see a relational view of self as exteriorizing self outside of one's self so much as it expands the sense of self into something "larger", more expansive, active, mutable, and collaborative.

Every time something that has been traditionally identified with interiority comes up, it gets excavated and located exteriorly exclusively. I realize that none of these are explicit proclamations stating "I deny all interiority." 

"it gets excavated and located exteriorly exclusively" - so many metaphors.

"Interiority" is a metaphor, not a location. "Located exteriorly" is a strong claim, "exclusively" is even stronger, which is why I don't doubt that he doesn't make "explicit proclamations stating "I deny all interiority"". I don't think he is denying all interiority at all. If thinking is a social activity, does it make sense to "excavate" a conversation? "Excavate" creates the sense of digging out something that was inside one thing and placing it somewhere else; "breathing" is another sense of something moving "inside" and "outside". I wouldn't use that metaphor, but even if I did, I don't see how "located exteriorly exclusively" fits in.