Narcissism and the Literary Libido. Marshall W. Alcorn Jr.
[her] choices and his [her] capacities to act out his [her] personae in a total structure that is the unfolding of his drama. The person is the idea of a unified center of choice and action, the unit of legal and theological responsibility. Only when a legal system has abandoned clan or family responsibility, and individuals are seen as primary agents, does the class of persons coincide with the class of biological individual human beings.9
Persons are more complex entities than characters. They facilitate smoother social interaction because they are predictable; they are not chaotic or undisciplined eddies of emotion held together by virtue of one’s name.
In many respects Rorty’s person resembles Aristotle’s self. This self has coherence but not self-division (that is, it is defined neither by an experience of inner conflict nor by an awareness of plural inner voices—both defining features of the “modern self”). Also, when Aristotle says that “we believe good men more fully and more readily than others,” he seems to imagine ethos as some positive quality fully identified with the speaker’s character.10 Ethos achieves authority by virtue of acting out a particular role (a trusted “person”); ethos is not a complex and fully particularized experience produced by the distinctive self-structure of a fully individualized speaker. It is as if, for Aristotle, character does not itself trigger a distinctive emotional response in an audience. For Aristotle, in fact, the rhetor’s ability to manipulate an audience’s emotion is not considered as ethos (an expression of character) but as pathos, an argument consciously contrived in order to appeal to emotion. Consequently, in Aristotle there is a curiously sharp and unprofitable theoretical separation between a speaker’s real person and the emotions that speaker can use to move an audience. In Aristotle’s discussion of pathos human character does not reveal in a rhetorically effective manner the real emotion it “contains”; instead speakers, quite independently of their own feelings, consciously and purposefully direct words toward another’s emotion.
To appreciate further how Aristotle’s limited concept of the self restricts his understanding of ethos, we should consider Rorty’s other categories of selfhood. The person is the characteristic mode of self that thrives before the advent of capitalism and social mobility. Capitalism provides new conditions that change the rules in the game of social status. And in changing the rules of this game, it contributes to the change of the self. As the self gains status through the acquisition of money and property, the “person” gives way to the “self” per se.11”Selves” develop, Rorty says, as individuals identify with their ownership of property, not with their roles. The evolution of a self identified with property allows the “self” a certain freedom. Selves transcend the limitation of proper public roles and become able to assume various roles:
When a society has changed so that individuals acquire their rights by virtue of their powers, rather than having their powers defined by their rights, the concept of person has been transformed to a concept of self. At first, the primary possession is that of land, and a person of substance is one of the landed gentry. But when a man’s industry determines whether he is landed, the story of men’s lives are told by their achievements rather than by their descent. The story of fulfilled ambition is shaped by an individual’s capacity to amass goods, by the extent of his properties.12
Capitalism, by changing social and economic relationships, therefore changes the shape of selfhood. As a new culture evolves, people both expand their ability to play roles and grant socially legitimate entitlement to other people who can play a multitude of roles in culturally approved ways.
In time, new social and cultural forces encourage a different version of selfhood. The self of early capitalism gives way to the modern “individual”:
From the tensions in the definition of the alienable properties of selves, and from the corruptions in societies of selves—the divergence of practice from ideological commitments—comes the invention of individuality. It begins with conscience and ends with consciousness.
Individuals actively resist typing: they represent the universal mind of rational beings, or the unique private voice. Invented as a preserve of integrity, an autonomous ens, an individual transcends and resists what is binding and oppressive in society and does so from an original natural position. . . .
Because they are defined by their freedom, they no longer choose from their natures but choose their identities. But since such choice is itself ungrounded, they are simply the act of choosing.13
The last category of self, the individual, gives Rorty’s argument a strikingly evolutionary cast. The essay thus describes a self evolving by gaining greater ontological freedom from, and control of, various forms of experience.
Characters simply react to experience. They have a measure of freedom, because their lack of “self-discipline” enables them to respond “freely” to any event. But in merely reacting to experience they do not learn from it; they are forced to repeat themselves in all they do. Persons, in contrast, have self-structures that mediate between experience and personality. The social roles given to persons allow them to take “positions” in relation to experience; they are not determined by the immediate emotional power of the experience. Selves have more freedom than persons, and they can play various roles. Individuals, finally, seem to have the most freedom. They have no core being, and are free from all constraints to choose their own “inner” being.
We can imagine, from Rorty’s discussion, a kind of economy in the change or evolution of the self whereby desire, rhetoric, ideology, and social structure interact to produce the various real forms the self can take. These various agencies change as they adapt and respond to each other in their competition for power. And as they change in order to compete more successfully for power, they formulate social conditions that require evermore inventive changes and responses to change. Such a situation, perhaps, is most characteristic of contemporary life.
Rorty’s analysis of the self should not be taken as a definitive description of the evolution of the concept of the self. Many of her terms appear to be overly idealized abstractions. Clearly, more precise work needs to be done on the relationship between social reality and literary representation. The historical difference among these categories of selfhood may also be less important than Rorty suggests. One mode of self may be prominent in a certain historical period, but all modes might exist in any one period. We might imagine, also, that a culture’s discourse promotes complex relationships between rhetorical illusions that sustain conceptualizations of the self and real self-structures that are in part produced by rhetorical illusions.
Rorty’s work may be inaccurate, but it encourages us to acknowledge that different cultures not only imagine and define selves differently but also formulate social and cultural conditions that allow for the creation of disparate selves. These varied self-structures reflect distinct models of libidinal organization and utilize diversely structured self-components to organize and regulate desire. By providing for different organizations of self-components, cultures generate different strategies for structuring selves.
Social history plays a role in determining self-organization, but the individual history of a particular subjectivity also plays a powerful role in determining self-organization. While culture provides models for self-structure, selves also develop these models according to the particular workings of self-functions. Different self-structures, for example, are the consequence of particular selves responding to the cues of culture. Particular selves therefore internalize unique social ideals, unique self-images, and uniquely encountered particular role models. The individual self thus plays its own role in the development of self-structure at the same time that this role responds to the larger system of a particular culture. In all cases, the social rewards provided by a culture regulate those libidinal investments that contribute to a suitable self-structure and within each social context, there develops a reciprocal relation between the fictional self a culture imagines and the real shape of a particular lived