Subjectivity

Donald E. Hall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134444885
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Explores the history of theories of selfhood, from the Classical era to the present, and demonstrates how those theories can be applied in literary and cultural criticism.Donald E. Hall:

* examines all of the major methodologies and theoretical emphases of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including psychoanalytic criticism, materialism, feminism and queer theory
* applies the theories discussed in detailed readings of literary and cultural texts, from novels and poetry to film and the visual arts
* offers a unique perspective on our current obsession with perfecting our selves
* looks to the future of selfhood given the new identity possibilities arising out of developing technologies.

Examining some of the most exciting issues confronting cultural critics and readers today, Subjectivity is the essential introduction to a fraught but crucial critical term and a challenge to the way we define our selves.

1
THE EARLY MODERN ERA
AND ENLIGHTENMENT

DESCARTES AND THE “I”

While the insights of what we term the “New Historicism” have thoroughly undermined the credibility of a neat and linear historical trajectory of progress and expansion of understanding (see Paul Hamilton’s Historicism [1996] for a full discussion), it is still important to recognize that change does occur over time, and that there have been dramatic shifts in socio-political context and consciousness that justify our self-aware use of historical periodization, as an attempt to understand our past, present, and possible futures. Of course, historical categories such as “Medieval” and “Renaissance” are always reductive and can be used overrigidly; they are backwards projections that cannot fully capture the ways that shifts in social organization and belief systems are gradual, halting, and experienced differently among classes, genders, and regions. Even so, it is quite clear that dramatically different ways of understanding the self and its relationship to the world were articulated and realized around AD 1500. Our explanations of this phenomenon will always be partial and tendentious, but exploring these shifts can still prove very useful as we lay the groundwork for eventually thinking about where we are today and where we would like to go in the new millennium that we have entered.

So much was happening in Western Europe and the British Isles around the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that we might say that the emergence of “the modern identity,” as Taylor refers to it, was overdetermined during this historical period. Critics and theorists use the term “overdetermination” when so many separate, as well as overlapping, forces and factors account for a single occurrence or manifestation that no one cause can be isolated as a simple explanation. Indeed, the many social changes occurring around the time of the Renaissance are far too numerous to list here. The Christian Church splintered into Catholicism and Protestantism, and that was soon followed by the self-interested bickering of a wide variety of factions within the latter movement. The invention of the printing press and moveable type in the fifteenth century abetted a steady increase in literacy rates and an ever-widening circulation of new ideas and different perspectives on the world. Copernicus and then Galileo helped inaugurate a scientific revolution that pointed out man’s lack of centrality in the universe, and demonstrated that science, rather than religion, could explain the world we see around us and also offer dramatic new means by which we might change that world. Indeed, by simply looking through Galileo’s telescope the reality of perception was undermined significantly even as such technology suggested that man now had new forms of power over the natural world. Urbanization, because of population growth and a myriad of changes in rural social organization, brought increasing numbers of people into contact with each other, and face to face with an ever more diverse array of lives and outlooks. Overseas travel and colonization further complicated people’s perspectives. Literature, art, science, and philosophy flourished as old definitions and social institutions were questioned and altered. One consequence of all of these developments and many more was a palpably increasing awareness of the self as something that was not divinely formed and statically placed, but rather changeable and possibly cultivatable through one’s own concerted activity.

While the origins and inherent biases of the term “humanism” are subject to considerable dispute, we can still use it to point to the Renaissance interest in such self-directed agency and the underlying “optimism about human possibilities and achievements” (Edgar and Sedgwick 1999: 180). Granted, as Tony Davies has noted, much of what we term Renaissance “humanism” is a backwards projection by nineteenth-century historians, who had their own reasons for lauding “Renaissance individualism” as it portended “the end of medieval society, with its supposedly inert aggregations of nameless, unselfconscious subjects” and the birth of “the modern nation state, populated and animated by individual citizens” (Davies 1997: 16–17). Yet when we look at a text such as Machiavelli’s The Prince (1513), we do find a remarkably different emphasis on successful, tactical self-creation when compared to the works and ideas we discussed earlier. Machiavelli’s theories of self-aware role-playing and artful manipulation were perhaps exactly what Martin Luther feared when he challenged church hierarchy and found a place (albeit a small one) for the self in the interpretation of morality. Both men were writing at precisely the same time and were part of the same challenge to traditional definitions and authorizing institutions, though in The Prince, the divine has no place at all. Only the classical notion of Fortune, not the Christian God, plays a role in man’s life, and a limited one at that: “I believe it is probably true that fortune is the arbiter of half the things we do, leaving the other half or so to be controlled by ourselves” (Machiavelli 1999: 79). Machiavelli’s purpose in The Prince is, of course, to detail what one should do with that half under one’s own control. To the politician determined to succeed, Machiavelli counsels following self-interest above all else:

A prince . . . need not necessarily have . . . good qualities . . . , but he should certainly appear to have them. . . . He should appear to be compassionate, faithful to his word, kind, guileless, and devout.
And indeed he should be so. But his disposition should be such that, if he needs to be the opposite, he knows how. You must realize this:
that a prince, and especially a new prince, cannot observe all those things which give men a reputation for virtue, because in order to maintain his state he is often forced to act in defiance of good faith, of charity, of kindness, of religion. And so he should have a flexible disposition, varying as fortune and circumstances dictate. As I said above, he should not deviate from what is good, if that is possible, but he should know how to do evil, if that is necessary.

(57)

Machiavelli makes no attempt to understand human “being” in any systematic way; he is no philosopher, he is a political theorist and an opportunist. However, he does contribute to a new philosophical outlook and burgeoning belief in self-actualization, of being responsible for creating one’s self in order to succeed in a changing world, and of altering that self as necessary as a context changes. In locating half of the responsibility for one’s success or failure in the world in one’s own ability to adapt one’s self to the times and to formulate appropriate strategies for securing and maintaining power, Machiavelli points toward a form of self-consciousness and self-reflexivity that is modern in the sense of its unabashed secular pragmatism and implicit amorality. Almost four hundred years before Nietzsche, Machiavelli theorized a self-conscious “will to power” that, in the words of Quentin Skinner, elicited first “a stunned silence . . . and then a howl of execration that has never finally died away” (Skinner 2000: 42).

Other religious and political thinkers of the period were not quite so boldly secular as Machiavelli and were still attempting to conjoin self-actualization and religious belief. Focusing on this fascination with the tension between freedom and constraint, self-creation and morally responsible limitation, is perhaps the best way of engaging with the work and worldview of René Descartes. Descartes, writing in the first half of the seventeenth century and subject to all of the changes mentioned above, based his philosophical explorations of existence and truth in a process of raising doubt about that which is known and believed. In his famous fourth “Discourse on Method” (1637), he writes:

[A]s I wanted to concentrate solely on the search for truth, I thought I ought to . . . reject as being absolutely false everything in which I could suppose the slightest reason for doubt, in order to see if there did not remain after that anything in my belief which was entirely indubitable.
. . . [Thus] I rejected as being false all the reasonings I had hitherto accepted as proofs. And . . . I resolved to pretend that nothing which had ever entered my mind was any more true than the illusions of my dreams. But immediately afterwards I became aware that, while I decided thus to think that everything was false, it followed necessarily that I who thought thus must be something; and observing that this truth: I think, therefore I am, was so certain and so evident that all the most extravagant suppositions of the skeptics were not capable of shaking it, I judged that I could accept it without scruple as the first principle of the philosophy I was seeking.

(Descartes 1968: 53–54)

While philosophers and scholars have subsequently debated whether or not Descartes’s cogito is, in fact, indubitable, certainly the reduction of all other certitudes to this one is significant. As Garrett Thomson has noted, “Self-conscious reflection upon the sources and standards of knowledge was one of the hall-marks of the modern period. This was mostly due to Descartes. . . . He saw the need to evaluate methodically and systematically all claims to knowledge, to think about how knowledge is possible, and to reconcile the conflict between the new science and the old religion” (Thomson 2000a: 9). In Descartes’s conception, thinking – really doubting – and struggling to know, in inevitably subjective ways, is the very basis of being. The self’s apartness and individuality are central to an understanding of human being.

This forthright break from a philosophy of existence based on obedience to social and religious institutions and divine law led the Catholic Church to put Descartes’s works on its list of banned books in 1663. Even though Descartes goes through a process of sketchy and tortured reasoning to prove God’s existence in his Meditations (1641), his reasoning from doubt is, as Thomson observes, “clearly non-authoritarian. It liberates the individual to seek for himself or herself. In this way, it carries the spirit of a new age and is powerful politically” (Thomson 2000a: 25). T. Z. Lavine argues that by introducing the category of the subjective into philosophical understanding, Descartes opens up an almost irreparable “chasm [between his] own mind and its thoughts” and the “existence of anything else,” because “subjective consciousness and its contents are separated from the physical world of nature and from the social world of human beings” (Lavine 1984: 99). Descartes’s is not a philosophy without a sense of ethics, however. In fact, he suggests a supremely controlled ethics of generosity and esteem, one in which the thinking subject creates a rational mode of engagement with the world.

In relating Descartes’s ideas to the mentality of the era, Taylor notes:

What one finds running through all the aspects of this constellation –the new philosophy, methods of administration and military organization, spirit of government, and methods of discipline – is the growing ideal of a human agent who is able to remake himself by methodical and disciplined action. What this calls for is the ability to take an instrumental stance to one’s given properties, desires, inclinations, tendencies, habits of thought and feeling, so that they can be worked on, doing away with some and strengthening others, until one meets the desired specifications. My suggestion is that Descartes’s picture of the disengaged subject articulates the understanding of agency which is most congenial to this whole movement, and that is part of the grounds for its impact in his century and beyond.

(Taylor 1989: 159–60)

Indeed, an important aspect of Descartes’s notion of agency – namely, if one thinks and works hard enough, one can make oneself into a better person – still underlies much of our thinking today about identity and our own responsibility for our selves. While we will discuss later the many qualifications of such idealized agency introduced in later centuries, especially the twentieth, even in Descartes’s day it was a contested idea. The church had obvious reasons for attempting to deny subjective (even if rational) agency in the making of meaning, and to reaffirm human dependence on divine and institutional mandate. But even in the secular literature of the Renaissance, we find a palpable skepticism regarding the fully self-controlled/controllable and an intense interest in that which impedes or resists our control.

This skepticism is a theme that resonates throughout the work of Shakespeare, for instance, whose major tragedies are powerful explorations of human will and degrees of self-consciousness, and were written just a few years before Descartes’s statements on those topics. Both writers were at once products of and participants in the same era of exploration regarding the question of the human ability to know and take responsibility for the self. Hamlet (1603) is perhaps Shakespeare’s most famous exploration of selfhood and any power the thinking self possesses to change its self. Its differences from and similarities to earlier works are revealing. Like Sophocles’ Antigone, written two thousand years earlier, the play dramatizes the tragedy caused by a self-serving ruler, Claudius, who follows his own interests and desires instead of law and tradition. But Claudius is ruthless, not simply mistaken and, taking Machiavelli’s advice, he lets nothing stand in the way of his political and personal ambition. As with the earlier drama, death, destruction, and political upheaval are the tragic and edifying results of such selfish activity. But certainly the path to the righting of Claudius’s wrongs is much more circuitous than was the swift response we saw to Creon’s errors of judgment.

Unlike Sophocles’ drama wherein the obedient Antigone is the instrument of divine retribution, Shakespeare’s tragedy comes out of an age of intense reflection on selfhood and self will. While Descartes may find in thinking the very means by which he defines human being, Shakespeare reveals the limitations and drawbacks of adopting a detached, meta-conscious perspective on selfhood. Hamlet, like Antigone, knows his duty in response to the clearly unethical activity of his uncle, yet he lacks Antigone’s ease of action and swift, almost mechanical, reaction. In ways unheard of during the classical era, Hamlet ponders whether the ghost of his father actually reveals the truth, he contemplates the possibility of suicide rather than forthright action, and he struggles to find motivation. To a certain extent, he is not unlike Ismene who knows but lacks the will to do her duty, but Hamlet is of course the hero of the play, whose struggles are at the center of its action. If there is an Antigone-like character in the play, it is Laertes, who moves swiftly and decisively to revenge his own father’s death, but who serves only as a foil, and whose desire to act immediately without reflection and investigation is, in fact, revealed to be rash, for it is easily co-opted into Claudius’s machinations.

Indeed, what makes Hamlet a hero on the cusp of the modern era is his highly self-conscious attempts to think his way into action, and to pinpoint and address deficiencies in his self. He muses, “What is a man/ If his chief good and market of his time/Be but to sleep and feed?” (Shakespeare 1992: 203). Like Descartes, Hamlet recognizes that “man” is defined by his ability to look “before and after” with “capability” and “godlike reason.” But given that, he still cannot answer the question “Why yet I live to say ‘This thing’s to do,’/Sith I have cause, and will, and strength, and mean/To do ’t” (203). Seeing many examples around him of what he should do, he nevertheless cannot work himself up to do anything other than think about what he should do. He even has a quasi-“self-help” philosophy that he expresses to his mother when he urges her to give up his uncle’s bed: “Refrain tonight,/And that shall lend a kind of easiness to the next abstinence, the next more easy;/For use almost can change the stamp of nature” (181). But if he believes that he can reflect upon and manipulate nature by choosing to train himself differently, his own failures certainly belie the theory. He only manages to take action against his uncle in the frenzy of the play’s final fight scene when he is mortally wounded, driven by emotion, not thought.

The play mocks, of course, the ease of Polonius’s facile advice to Laertes: “This above all: to thine own self be true” (45), for the truth of the thinking self is that it can be paralyzed by that which defines it, thought. Also, in an era in which the surety of religion is clearly crumbling (Claudius follows his own will without real fear of divine punishment), the thinking self is further paralyzed by thoughts of what might occur after death. While Antigone fulfills her duty knowing that she will “abide” in the world of the dead forever (119), Hamlet is trapped in doubt and an actual “dread of something after death,” or even worse, nothing after death. As he notes, “conscience does make cowards of us all” (129), by which he means a fearfulness deriving both from an awareness of selfhood (consciousness) and that selfhood’s responsibility and often inability to determine right and wrong (our modern notion of conscience). Thus as much as Descartes in his way sees the thinking self as exercising instrumental power over selfhood, Shakespeare certainly recognized the internal war that can be waged as that self grapples with its own existential isolation. Exhilarating freedom and debilitating fear cannot be separated. And this is the quandary that philosophy and theories of identity will continue to address.

LOCKE, KANT, AND THE “WE”

As traced earlier, a profound fear of moral lawlessness attended this burgeoning recognition of freedom from religious constraints on human behavior. Philosophers therefore sought specifically secular paths to rectify human failings, and turned to “reason” as the new check on selfishness and potential moral chaos. As Edgar and Sedgwick point out in Key Concepts in Cultural Theory, this was the def...