IV

CONCLUSION

What we have attempted here is to move behind the scenes of the human drama to discover how our role-playing is enacted, for if one thing is to be concluded from this study it is that human subjects develop (and inherit) the identity of a character in the gradually unfolding narrative that is lived time. This does not imply, however, that we act our parts with blind necessity, for the script is not entirely prewritten; only certain backdrops are preset. As in a first-person narration, we interrupt the ongoing drama with retrospective assessments and refigurations and are not, therefore, completely engulfed in our roles.¹ It is as such a narrator that we make sense of our lives, delineate the character(s) that we are and have been. But, as should now be clear, such seeming self-reflectivity is not that of a pregiven self simply musing over its past and future. Narration is not a gratuitous act as far as the self is concerned.

Self-narration, I have argued, is what first raises our temporal existence out of the closets of memorial traces and routine and unthematic activity, constituting thereby a self as its implied subject. This self is, then, the implied subject of a narrated history. Stated another way, in order to be we must be as something or someone, and this someone that we take ourselves to be is the character delineated in our personal narratives.² The unity of the self, where such a unity exists, is exhibited as an identity in difference, which is all a temporal character can be.

In his important texts on the literary work of art, Roman Ingarden speaks of what he calls the “idea” of a work, the more or less comprehensive unity we carry away with us when our reading has made us sufficiently familiar with the text.³ It is this “idea” which allows us to classify the work, as a whole, as of a certain type and as gravitating around a certain problematic and certain values. This notion of “idea” can be seen to apply equally well to the lives of persons, for no matter how diverse a life may be there tends always to exist, upon reflection, that unity of a Geschichte of which Husserl spoke in his Cartesian Meditations. Temporal existence is such that prior chapters of our life inform and determine, to a greater or lesser degree, later ones. Not that this “idea” fully determines the closure of a life, for we well know that a text has many possible endings, many changes of fortune. We are not dealing here with a metaphysical predestination but rather with a transtemporal kernel of meaning, what Merleau-Ponty termed “style,” which satisfies what appears to be our inherent need for understanding, coherence, and unity. As with a novel, this identity need never be settled and final, for the prenarrative out of which it arises need never have a definitive interpretation.⁴

This “idea” (or identity) has the attraction of answering to the perennial question we ask of our own identity, our own reality, and its power over us results in the sedimenting of our identity into a relatively unchanging self-conception. What seems truly unchanging, however, is not so much the content of this identity, for we often do not notice the significant changes time effects, but rather the need for and belief in such an identity, which is correlated to our desire to be. Psychologists have long attested to the fact that the mental health and sanity of the individual requires something more than mere existing and the satisfying of primary bodily needs, for beyond these is required the sense of being as someone that I mentioned above.

I have argued that behind the scenes we do not find some form of transcendental ego or omniscient narrator serving as stage director but rather a certain form of activity whereby selves make their appearance as characters. This activity is precisely language usage and expression, particularly the employment of personal pronouns and self-referential narrative structures. The self is thus not a prelinguistic given for whom language is just a tool but is an implicate of language usage. Again, language is not the instrument of an “inner self” (to which we might grant autonomy, free will, and the like) but is one of the body’s acquired habitualities, a behavior that becomes as spontaneous and ordered as, say, perceiving. However, language usage, unlike breathing or walking, is a highly social phenomenon, undergirding as it does the whole cultural sphere.

It is in this “intersubjective”—though perhaps one should say with Merleau-Ponty “intercorporeal”—social realm that language functions. Speech does not arise out of a particular ego’s intention to speak but is called forth by a social situation, much like many of our other social acts. Speech is similarly not prefigured in an interiority and then sent forth like the “winged words” of Homer, for even in interior monologue it is not “I” who speaks (except in a retrospective and derivative sense). When we are in the heat of conversation it is particularly evident that what “I” say is not at all prefigured in consciousness but is a spontaneous and bodily response to the speech situation. As Merleau-Ponty wrote, “Neither the word nor the meaning of the word is in fact constituted by consciousness.”⁵ Speech, which should not be seen in this respect as essentially different from other bodily acts, should thus be understood in its overall gestalt, which may or may not include what is commonly called “conscious intentions.”

I have also argued (“Signs of Derrida”) that there is a good case to be made for developing a theory of meaning and ideality that takes as its basis the material signifier and its iterability and eschews appeal to transcendental signifieds, or what has also been called in the history of philosophy “intelligible essences.” Though I cannot here work out the details, what must be addressed in such a position are the various ways in which meaning is generated in associative relations. Meaning is not only a matter of a signifier’s difference from other signifying units; it is especially a product of temporal and tropical relations and transformations, e.g., contiguity and juxtaposition, sequence, identity and difference, metonymy and synecdoche, metaphor, and so on. One problem we mistakenly introduce into the consideration of language (as in considering the ego) is to see it as somehow different from everything else, as outside “nature” and capable of reflecting it.

What obscures the above view is a persistent tendency to dematerialize language, to find in it a “spiritual essence” that must be present at its inception.⁶ As previously noted, one commonly insists on an “I” that speaks and on a meaning for which language is merely the vehicle. Such a position generates many of the problems that have plagued both philosophy of language and philosophy of mind for centuries. The pronoun I, I have argued, simply does not have the independent referential “object” or “substance” often attributed to it, be this soul, mind, or self. “I,” as Benveniste has said, designates the speaker of the utterance containing “I”; it designates the site of narration and, in the last resort, the person as an amalgam of self and body. I defined person as the result of ascribing selfhood (in an act of implicit or explicit predication) to the site of narration, the body. The person is thus (though this is not an exhaustive definition) an embodied self. In other words, the body must be seen as the enduring locus to which a life history accrues, and hence to which the character of that history is indissolubly associated.

It should be clear that the traditional mind-body problem receives a very specific treatment in what I have so far claimed. Put in its most striking form, there is no such thing or entity as mind (traditionally conceived; a res cogitans) and therefore no obvious problem concerning the relation of mind to body. But of course this answer is too cursory and requires some expansion and clarification.

What I have attempted to undermine in this work is the need for positing a self or mental substance as an underlying cause of our linguistic or other expressions. The self is essentially a meaning construct deriving from language and conversation generally, where language must be seen as essentially “material,” that is, as an extension of the sphere of activity of the human body. On the other hand, the human body is alive with expression, with signification. Such a body of gestures we call a person. It would be artificial (or at best hypothetical) to introduce into this unity a strict substantial division of body and mind, or body and self. Accordingly, I have defined subjectivity as the possibility of expression, but this is not to make of subjectivity some sort of res cogitans or thinking power. Subjectivity is nothing but an honorary appellation we give to a being that has the expressive-linguistic capabilities commonly found in persons. It is, in many cases, also predicated because we are able to think and feel without giving explicit external signs of these activities; we thus think of the inmost self as very personal and private, but this does not exempt the self from arising primarily within conversation.⁷

Aristotle argued in De Anima that the mind was the meaning of the body. Taken in the above way, this is a very appealing and insightful formulation. But as we saw in discussing Husserl and Derrida, we must not conceive of this meaning as independent of the material signifiers (expressions) that give rise to it. Thought, I have maintained, simply does not exist in the absence of language, and meaning is therefore rightly construed as primarily a property of language and not the property of an inner self or nonmaterial mental substance.

The body becomes, through expression, what is called (particularly in existentialism) a lived body, not just an animate organism. This body is in a sense me, is alive with me, both because it is the site of ascription for selfhood and because it is a semiotic body that through its gestures enables and maintains the social realm within which the “I” and “you” function. My investigations prompt me to contend that with a diminution in the semiotic potentiality of the body there will be a correlative diminution in what is called self-consciousness or self-presence.⁸ The “I,” in other words, requires for its existence the very saying of “I” that is predetermined by participation in the sociolinguistic network. But this is not the blind saying of a machine, a tape recorder, for example; it is rather a saying wherein this “I” becomes thematic in further narrative acts, becomes an object to itself.⁹

Speech, as Merleau-Ponty clearly saw, “brings about that concordance between me and myself, and between myself and others. . . .”¹⁰ The “I” appears to break with the body when the dependence of speech on the body (especially on the phonetic) is overlooked and the “I” takes on independent referential status; this is seen especially in the form of “I act.” This formulation sets up, for example, the motivating subject that we have already criticized. We have no more need of a motivating subject than a biologist would have of positing a plant soul to explain why plants turn toward the light.

The “I,” the self, is an effect of language, and the status and meaning of the self will thus depend on the particular “language game” in which it is invoked and in which it comes into play. But this does not make the self superfluous; it only problematizes it. Who or what the self (and ultimately the person) can be is a result of the semiotic and discursive practices and techniques within which the speaking subject functions. The place of the subject just one century ago differs considerably from that of the subject in the modern industrial and technological era. To take just one example: in the field of artificial intelligence it is no longer just a matter of mapping computational models onto thought and brain characteristics; what we are seeing is a situation in which the very language of computer modeling is gradually replacing the other ways of speaking about mind. Orwell’s insights in 1984 concerning language and thought are not just possibilities; they have been with us all along.

Freedom and autonomy are, on my account, not elements of a pregiven “human essence”; they are instead measures of the prevailing sociolinguistic system and its customs. Freedom relates to the possibilities for self-definition and expression allowed the individual within the system. Similarly, creativity is not so much the exercising of “freedom” as it is the exercising of the possibilities inherent in signifying networks. Because signifiers function in differential relations and not solely by a system of prefigured meanings, it is possible to generate new and often revealing significances by tropic transformations (metaphor, metonymy, and so on).

A repressive society is one in which this expressive potential is consistently restricted or treated as renegade and antisocial. What lies behind social norms and values is very often an image of humanity that appeals to a fixed essence, one in light of which individuals can be classified as either degenerate or healthy, sane or insane, sinful or virtuous. Foucault’s historical study of madness, for example, seeks to show how madness is not simply and not always a physical or medical “disorder,” but is a changing category (or definition) operative within a certain sociopolitical and economic system and serves that system by making outsiders of those who threaten its “rational” order and power structure.¹¹

The present study has not sought explicitly to examine and criticize the actual content of our self-definitions, though I have pointed to a few implications. I have, instead, restricted myself to a primarily descriptive examination of the framework within which such definitions arise, the language of self-narration.

From what has been something of a survey of contemporary, particularly European, thought regarding the scope and function of narrative language to the status of the human subject, a few broad conclusions may be drawn. Of first importance is the situating of the subject within the play of language and social structures. This move has the function of displacing the subject from center stage, even to the point of emphasizing certain discontinuities in the subject’s identity. While the subject is viewed from the perspective of the history in which it is implicated, working out the subject’s history is an interpretive enterprise that can no longer be seen as free from ideological and psychological distortions. The human subject is a self-interpreting animal that, via narration, is of necessity prey to its own “fictions.”

Contemporary trends also reveal a marked rejection of metaphysical thinking. Autonomy, freedom, and identity, for example, are not pregiven or a priori characteristics but must be redefined within the context of the person’s appearance within the sociolinguistic arena. I have not said much about religious presuppositions concerning the essence of man, but it should be clear that, from a postmodern perspective, religion is a semiotic system that presumes to articulate that which is beyond language and even beyond the given; here one must have faith or a particular belief in the possibility of transcendental signifieds. There is a tendency in contemporary thought, deriving from structuralism, to treat all such speculative, metaphysical, and utopian thought reductively in terms of the social matrix out of which it arises; this acts as a demystifying, if not deconstructive, enterprise. What still balances this latter tendency is a pragmatic strain that, in effect, gives countenance to what works for furthering human community and personal enrichment.

Having shifted the emphasis away from the self as an inner substantial core of personhood, one need not conclude that the human subject is an ephemera of little significance. The constitution of persons through acts of predication remains the most human of acts, one that is central to our Western thinking and general world view. The status of the subject is not necessarily demeaned because it is seen as the product of a creative act rather than as a pregiven entity to be simply recognized and respected.