The notion of a personal self took centuries to evolve, reaching the pinnacle of autonomy with Descartes’ ‘I think, therefore I am’ in the 17th century. This ‘personalisation’ of identity thrived for another hundred years before it began to be questioned, subject to the emergence of broader, more inclusive forms of agency. Simulated Selves: The Undoing Personal Identity in the Modern World addresses the ‘constructed’ notion of personal identity in the West and how it has been eclipsed by the development of new technological, social, art historical and psychological infrastructures over the last two centuries.

While the provisional nature of the self-sense has been increasingly accepted in recent years, Simulated Selves addresses it in a new way - not by challenging it directly, but by observing changes to the environments and cultural conventions that have traditionally supported it. By narrating both its dismantling and its incapacitation in this way, it records its undoing.

Like The Invention of the Self: Personal Identity in the Age of Art (to which it forms a companion volume), Simulated Selves straddles cultural history and philosophy. Firstly, it identifies hitherto neglected forces that inform the course of cultural history. Secondly, it highlights how the self is not the self-authenticating abstraction, only accessible to introspection, that it seems to be; it is also a cultural and historical phenomenon. Arguing that it is by engaging in cultural conventions that we subscribe to the process of identity-formation, the book also suggests that it is in these conventions that we see our self-sense - and its transience - best reflected.

By examining the traces that the trajectory of the self-sense has left in its environment, Simulated Selves offers a radically new approach to the question of personal identity, asking not only ‘how and why is it under threat?’ but also ‘given that we understand the self-sense to be a constructed phenomenon, why do we cling to it?’.

‘Astonishingly brilliant and well-informed. While the concept of the self lends itself amply to philosophical and psychological analysis, through logic and introspection, this is not the approach taken here. Simulated Selves identifies the self-sense from the traces it has left in the historical environment and this is central to the book’s originality.’ * Charles Lemert, John E. Andrus Professor of Social Theory and University Professor Emeritus, Wesleyan University, USA *
Erudite, elegant and wide-ranging: a fascinating history of the modern undoing of the self by and through art * Sacha Golob, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, King’s College London, UK *
A sweeping and suggestive account of how the 'self-sense' of modern subjects came to be undermined by the cultural forces that earlier fostered its construction. Spira's dialectical vision and lucid writing style make this a compelling read. * Patrick Coleman, Research Professor, University of California, Los Angeles, USA *

Andrew Spira is Course Leader, Christie's Education London, UK and a curator. He is author of Avant-Garde Icon: Russian Avant-garde Art and the Icon Painting Tradition (2008).