Cartography of the Becoming Self

The thesis, in one breath

The self is a cartography of relations. It is neither a fixed object concealed within the body nor a story freely chosen by an autonomous mind, but an evolving pattern of orientation formed through embodied sensation, memory, habit, social recognition, narrative, symbolic imagination, material environments, and acts of resistance.

The territory · abstract

This paper develops a relational account of personal identity. Its central claim is that the self is neither an essence concealed within a person nor a story freely composed by an autonomous mind, but a recursive composition: an evolving pattern of orientation that forms where a sensing body meets a material and social world, where repeated experience becomes habit, where habit becomes expectation, where expectation is confirmed or interrupted by others, and where memory is organized into narrative and attached to names, categories, institutions, and technologies. The argument draws together phenomenology, process philosophy, relational ontology, the psychology of habit and memory, social identity theory, theories of recognition and relational autonomy, and the aesthetics of attention.

It proceeds through nine linked theses: that relations are prior to objects; that resonance names a response conditioned by prior tuning; that analogy across domains illuminates organization without establishing identity; that complex forms emerge through thresholds and self-maintenance; that attention is ecological rather than private; that memory is a reconstructive practice rather than a vault; that habit is the unconscious architecture of identity; that recognition makes identity a relational achievement rather than an individual possession; and that the experiential and narrative registers of selfhood are distinct, mutually necessary, and unequally distributed.

The paper closes by arguing that a relational account of the self carries an ethical consequence: because environments participate in producing attention, and archives in producing memory, and categories in producing identity, the design of environments, archives, and categories is a moral matter. Claims of interdependence are defensible only when they refuse to confuse connection with sameness, or unity with the erasure of difference.

Place names on this map

Torkaman, H. R. (2026). Cartography of the Becoming Self: Relation, resonance, habit, and recognition in the constitution of personal identity [Working paper]. SSRN. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.7547360