Narcissism and the Literary Libido. Marshall W. Alcorn Jr.
entities,” Rorty argues, as we conceive ourselves in light of different concepts of the self “our powers of actions are different, our relations to one another, our properties and proprieties, our characteristic successes and defeats, our conceptions of society’s proper strictures and freedoms will vary with our conception of ourselves as characters, persons, selves, individuals.”14 Rhetoricians will readily see that Rorty’s remarks are not simply remarks about selves. They are remarks about the nature of ethos. They implicitly suggest that ethos, as a concept, should describe relationships between differing ideas of the self and differing abilities of selves to act rhetorically in a society.
When considering the self, we must examine the various historical determinations brought to the concept. Historical consideration of the self demonstrates how models of selfhood have enormous flexibility and fluidity as the self responds to changing social conditions. Too often, however, this useful perspective on the self suggests that a particular self formed by social conditions has the same fluidity and flexibility that self-structure itself shows over centuries of change. The self, as an abstract psychological structure, indeed has enormous fluidity, but a particular self does not have the same fluidity. As a result of its relatively constant and particular organization of components, a particular individual self is much more stable in structure than that same abstract entity “the self,” considered in terms of its historical permutations.
Scholars who take an historical or sociological perspective on the self see fluidity in self-structure as a result of self-structure changing from one generation to the next. This fluidity changing across generational lines is quite different from the fluidity within the self-structure of a particular self. History and social interaction give shape to selves, but these forces do not fully explain how particular and discrete self-structures interact with particular structures of language. To understand the rhetorical nature of a particular self, we must shift from an historical to a psychoanalytic perspective.
A particular self is not, as in poststructuralist terms, a simple, random, and constantly changing collection of texts shaped by historical forces. A particular self is not an infinitely changing collection of voices housed within a biological organism. It is a relatively stable organization of voices. Although we need not adopt the various models of the self-structure advocated by psychoanalysis, if we are sensitive to the nature of rhetoric we should acknowledge that the self has a relatively stable inner organization. Indeed, the idea of rhetoric requires a theory of a relatively stable self-structure.
The different modes of the self vary enormously according to time and place, but each self seems to have a distinctive character—a characteristic self-structure—that gives it a distinctive quality. Many poststructuralist theorists will find this claim about self-structure unsettling. New theories of language make it difficult to see the self in terms of stability, agency, or consistency—qualities we associate with self-structure. The self, thus considered, is a passive effect of language, something “subjected” to language use or a site where discourse collects. This emphasis on the self’s passivity has prompted some thinkers to argue that it is time to abandon the concept “self” altogether. Other theorists retain the concept but describe the self as “dissolved.” Jonathan Culler, paraphrasing claims made by Levi-Strauss, points out that whereas structuralist thought investigates the self, it also erases it: “As the self is broken down into component systems, deprived of its status as source and master of meaning, it comes to seem more and more like a construct: a result of systems of convention.”15 The new structuralist and poststructuralist ways of accounting for the self are useful, but they oversimplify the issues most important to rhetoric theory. They fail to grasp the self as an essentially rhetorical entity, a site of conflict in discourse organization.
Although it makes good sense to see the self as an entity composed of “component systems,” as Culler suggests, it is also important to see the self as a conflictual organization of such components. The idea of conflictually organized self-components explains how and why selves act rhetorically. It explains why selves sometimes “take in” or internalize discourse, but also sometimes resist and deflect the linguistic structures and social formations that surround them. Clearly, selves are not mere radio receptors for social discourse. They are not passive vehicles constantly animated in different patterns by the passing-through of ceaselessly changing social discourse. Selves do not become each and every socially constructed discourse formation they encounter; something within its own inner organization prompts the self to identify with certain social forms and to reject others.
In some ways the account of the self offered by Culler and others is compatible with the account of self-structure given by contemporary psychoanalytic thinkers. Theorists who maintain a lively interest in the self understand it, not in terms of some authoritatively unified and dominating ego, but (much like Culler) as poorly organized self-components that interact with variable consequences. These same theorists frequently maintain that the “voice” of the ego has no existence prior to the voice of others. The self is not some homunculus that stands outside and beyond all social interaction. Instead, the self gains “form” as it is “informed” by the speech of others. The self indeed is a function of self-components that participate in and reflect psychologically significant nodules of social discourse. But these components, although they change over time as a result of social interaction, nonetheless maintain relatively stable configurations within the self. The relative stability of these configurations allows the self to dialectically engage and resist—rather than passively submit to—social interaction.
Poststructuralist descriptions of the self and the accounts given by Kohut and Lacan, for example, differ in their emphasis on language. For most poststructuralists, the self is nothing but speech. For Kohut and Lacan, speech is central to self formation, but the human person is more than speech; it is a biological organism whose desires, goals, and ambitions are organized by linguistic structures that overlay and complicate more primordial biological and preverbal structures. The self is not just a “text”; it is an active and complex organization of libidinal investments. It is, as well, a process of disorganized organization, a moving, interacting effect of discordant self-components.
Rhetoric might be defined as a well-focused and carefully crafted strategy for changing self-organization. It seeks to participate in the modification of self-components in order to produce changes in human action or belief. As an activity, rhetoric requires discipline—strategy, organization, planning, complexity—because selves are not passive receptors of discourse. Selves do not simply adopt the discourse systems they encounter; they admire, resist, or reject discourse according to their own unique character. Selves are clearly organized by forces that are not fully disclosed in any purely linguistic analysis of the organization of language.
A properly complex understanding of the self is important for a theory of rhetoric. If the discipline of rhetoric is to have the coherency it aspires to, the self must be imagined as having a self-structure held in place by organizing principles that are responsive to the forces operating in rhetorical transactions.
Major concepts in rhetoric reflect the discipline’s longtime interest in relationships between self-structure and rhetorical structure. Style, for example, is an important rhetorical concept reflecting assumptions that rhetoricians hold in regard to the relative stability of self-structure. Style indicates a certain distinctiveness in the manner (as opposed to the content) of expression. At times this distinctiveness can refer to socially learned qualities, for example, when a writer is described as having a Romantic style. In this sense, style helps us to understand how human character is informed by social custom. Equally often, style posits a certain uniqueness of character itself. In this sense, style shows how each subject, although informed by social custom, also reformulates the patterns of social custom in distinctive ways. Ben Jonson, for example, insists that “this my style no living man shall touch.”16 In a similar fashion (but using a more theoretical vocabulary) Paul Valery argues, “Style signifies the manner in which a man [woman] expresses [her-] himself, regardless of what he [she] expresses, and it is held to reveal his [her] nature, quite apart from his [her] actual thought—for thought has no style.”