Narcissism and the Literary Libido. Marshall W. Alcorn Jr.
a coherent behavioral role acquired through repeated performances.
This idea of the self may be popular because it has flattering implications for teachers of rhetoric. In a recent article on ethos, for example, S. Michael Halloran supports the claim that “habituation” is the means by which both character and ethos develop. Because Aristotle’s theory of learning seems intuitively correct, Halloran urges teachers to give students training in “rhetorical action” and to encourage the interaction between rhetorical training and self-development. Students will develop character, Halloran argues, by becoming educated through rhetorical models:
If ethos is manifested in rhetorical action, and if ethos is formed by choosing ethical modes of action, it follows that educating a person in rhetorical action, schooling him [her] in proper rhetorical habits, is a means of forming his [her] character.4
This image of the self, common among rhetoricians, may be partly true, but it is an overly simple perspective distorting the complex relations existing between rhetoric and self-structures.
Poststructuralists see the self very differently from Halloran: The self is not a freely chosen social role, but a linguistic accident. Selves do not emerge as they choose to do things with rhetoric; rather, rhetoric continually does things to selves. Selves are not creative agents working within the inner core of the rhetorical process; instead, selves are the effects of rhetoric, a sort of epiphenomena constituted by an interplay of social, political, and linguistic forces. There is no inner entity, the self, that chooses its character. Instead, the self reflects the particular character of larger social forces that determine its nature and movement.
In addition, the self is not something that needs constancy or consistency over time. Different social situations trigger different self-structures ; it is a mistake to assume that there is an inner core to the self that somehow grounds the various roles assumed by the self. Paul Smith, a theorist describing the implications of certain Lacanian and Althusserian ideas, suggests that a person can be “conceived as a colligation of multifarious and multiform subject-positions situated along, but not united by, temporal experience.”5 Such a self is little more than a simple collector of random and diverse exposure to social interaction. Memory and “character” play no role in giving a characteristic “shape” to self experience.
Not all Aristotelian and poststructuralist perspectives on the self are as tenaciously reductive as I have described. But as these models are disseminated in a formulaic manner, they pose serious limitations to any coherent theory of ethos. Both models fail to recognize the rhetorical complexity of the human structures they seek to explain. The Aristotelian view envisions an overly strong self able to choose freely its own nature, able to become whatever model it can imagine. Such a notion is a pleasurable and at times useful fantasy, but it is unable to account for the limitations of human nature—those moments when humans encounter their lack of freedom, their inability to be and do what they imagine. The poststructuralist view emphasizes the self’s lack of freedom, but in doing so it imagines an overly weak self. A self composed entirely of collected social discourse is infinitely plastic. It conforms effortlessly to textual influence, changes easily and constantly, and offers no determined or “characteristic” resistance to the discourses that assault it. This view of the self helps us appreciate the social determination of selfhood, but it implies that the self, once formed, has no organized and enduring inner structure. The traditional and poststructuralist accounts of the self are useful for some purposes, but they are not particularly useful for a theory of ethos.
I describe ethos as a relationship existing between the discourse structures of selves and the discourse structure of “texts.” Before I develop my argument, however, I want to clarify my claims in relation to the theoretical problems I have just raised. Aspects of my argument rely on assumptions antithetical to both traditional and poststructuralist accounts of the self. Rather than simply revealing these assumptions in the course of the argument, I want to argue in advance for their validity. I want to challenge traditional assumptions by arguing that the self is not something universal, but something deeply crafted by history and changing social formations. Second, however, I want to make it clear that my own position is not that of a poststructuralist. I want to challenge poststructuralist assumptions by suggesting that whereas various forms of the self change over time, the particular selves formed within particular historical conditions have relatively stable self-structures.
Historical perspectives on the self are important because too often we consider the self a stable entity that does not change over time. This conditions us to assume that all different perspectives on the self reflect different ideas about one and the same thing. It may well be, however, that there are many distinctly different socially conditioned versions of the self. We often think of ethos as a concept defining a single stable relation between language and the self. But if the nature of both language and the self undergo historical change, then it must follow that ethos also undergoes historical change. The concept of ethos, thus, should not be imagined as some fixed reality approached by different perspectives, but as something assuming different shapes and structures over time.
Our interest in Aristotle’s concept of ethos should reflect not only an interest in his understanding of the concept, but an interest as well in the social and psychological context that made the concept meaningful for him. Numerous scholars have increased our awareness of the historical and social context of Aristotle’s ideas. Less has been done to describe the particular historical character of the ancient Greek self. Of course, it is impossible to recover a complete description of the historically situated Greek self. Nonetheless, we need to consider the information available, seeking to understand the differences between ancient Greek and modern selves. In an essay in The Identities of Persons, Amelie Rorty offers help by providing a broad overview of the kinds of concerns an historical consideration of ethos should engage.
Rorty traces the historical changes in four different literary concepts of the self. These literary concepts, Rorty argues, reflect not simply changes in the way we imagine selves, but changes in the phenomenon itself. She names these different entities the “character,” the “person,” the “self,” and the “individual.” In unreflective moments we describe all these differently structured entities as the self.
The early Greek world, Rorty suggests, imagined people as “characters.”6 Characters have a certain coherency at the level of behavior, but they have little psychological inwardness that takes responsibility for behavior. Characters
are the predictable and reliable manifestations of their dispositions; and it is by these dispositions that they are identified. Their natures form their responses to experiences, rather than being formed by them. Nor do characters have identity crises; they are not presumed to be strictly unified. Dispositional traits form an interlocking pattern, at best mutually supportive but sometimes tensed and conflicted. There is no presumption of a core that owns these dispositions.7
The concept “character” suggests a primitive structure of self-definition. Characters do not grow from experience; they are simply “manifestations” of “dispositions.” Rorty’s point is not simply that characters are primitive notions of selves, but that there is a reciprocal relation between what people really are and what other people imagine them to be. Cultures that imagine people as characters, because they have less demanding social expectations than other cultures, create different kinds of people. Characters have less “inner discipline.” Culture and society neither expect nor create the psychological structures that provide such discipline.
More complex cultures begin to define social roles in terms of the “person.”8 The person evolves primarily in a society with a more elaborate legal system. Because laws require stricter social roles, the person is given impetus to be more responsible than the character, to conform more painstakingly to publicly approved roles. Rorty explains:
The