"Rather, it is the idea that animates all these figures, the powerful, unobtrusive concept that gives the personal essay the appearance of ventriloquizing a singular and spontaneous subjectivity. Most essayists and scholars who write about the personal essay agree that its 'I' is, by necessity and choice, an artful construction...."
Writes Merve Emre in "The Illusion of the First Person/A historical survey of the personal essay shows it to be the purest expression of the lie that individual subjectivity exists prior to the social formations that gave rise to it" (NYRB).
Posts
36 comments:
So far, nobody has claimed 'I' as their pronoun.
I'm struggling. Is this piece saying that there is no individual consciousness? That if a baby were born and somehow survived alone on a desert island with no other humans to which she could contrast herself and therefore realize herself as an identity, she would never come to self-awareness?
I think modern psychology disagrees. Classical philosophy does too, if I'm understanding that at all.
There's a plot turn on "Little did he know," as an essay phrase, in Stranger than Fiction (2006)
Sounds overly artful. I wonder what social formations gave rise to it.
As Obama almost said, "You didn't write that."
Oh no, someone has found out that growing up in a society produces effects on individuals in that society! Our secret is out!
Well, whoever she is she's entitled to her opinion.
I used to devour the reviews and commentary in NYRB, and thought it essential reading. Perhaps it was, for me at the time.
But "I" would say that, wouldn't "I"?
This seems like the fallacy of assuming that people in the past were dumber than we are.
Merve: speak for yourself…
What are the entities of the imagination? Where do I begin and the entities of my imagination end?
link to Jordan Peterson conversation video
Could get past the first paragraph. My default assumption is that the whole thing is full of fake profundity, big words, and no information.
Not sure “I” buy this.
The hyper-conscious pose of this writer makes me wonder if the argument is an extension of the War Against Pronouns: we have been forced to reconsider “he and she, his and him and her” and now even poor old “Me, myself and I” are under attack?
No, it does not.
All that is implied. No one assumes the author arose in a vacuum.
Is that really a new idea? A writer crafts a persona, a voice that isn't necessarily his or her "true self," and who one is has a lot to do with one's circumstances.
At the same time, some things strike one as so definitely "oneself" that it's hard to view them either as something crafted or as the result of social conditions and context, and if one's background and preconceptions aren't entirely original or unique, what one makes of them on the page may be.
Nobody else was Leslie Stephen's youngest daughter, or Leonard Woolf's wife, or Vita Sackville-West's (let's say) intimate friend, so nobody else could be Virginia Woolf. Product of her environment or not, she owned that environment in a way that nobody else could.
Reminds me a bit of Niklas Luhman's system theory
is this Auteur writing to show separate from others or merge into others for acceptance
I'll read The New Yorker article on Jerry Lee Lewis. Pass on this one. There are names that cause the eyes to glaze over: Virginia Wolf Elizabeth Hardwick. Even the Hollywood version of Virginia Wolf was kind of dull. Should have featured nude lesbo scenes with Victoria Sackville West.
Siblings can come up with different opinions.
*I* don't exist without social affirmation.
Huh. Sure.
To quote Critical Drinker:
That's all I've got for today.
Go away, now.
Paywalled, so I am speculating a bit. From Comrade Merve's quotation of and repeated reference to Theodore Adorno in her first paragraphs, she is critiquing the personal essay in general, as propagating individualism, the false consciousness of the bourgeoisie. Only essays that discuss "the matter at hand," i.e., class (or now, identity group) struggles against the oppressive structures of the social order, are good.
Whether the personal essayist takes the tragic or comedic view of her unique consciousness of the human condition matters not to Madame Merve. Of course, as anyone knows from personal acquaintance with these hard Left materialists, they lack any sense of the logical contradictions of their own blank slate position, much less the humility that the best of personal essayists all share.
I read her Annotated Dalloway. I was not at all impressed with the depth of her explications. She is hot though.
We are not amused.
"She is hot though."
You think? Hot-ish IMO, like a lot of academic women. I spent my life on a big state u campus that was chock full of hot students and grad students, but the prize-winning faculty women tended to the meh.
I recall Shelby Foote's comment about serving on a book-prize jury with mostly academics. They hated the book he thought best because the author used "I" ten times on the first page (or something like that)--which was one of the things he liked best. I can't recall, though, the context of the remark. I interviewed him for a magazine once and it might have been during that.
I've had to attempt the Authoritative Anonymous tone and manner of writing, but to deny my "I"s is difficult.
we have been forced to reconsider “he and she, his and him and her” and now even poor old “Me, myself and I” are under attack?
This was my second hypothesis.
Maybe this is structuralism, or post-structuralism, this idea that we are all just the points at which various discourses intersect. It seems to have similarities to nominalism, the idea that universals and abstract ideas don't have real existence, but it applies that to human beings. The self is just a label we put on something far less coherent. It also has similarities to materialistic scientific reductionism, to the idea that we are all just atoms and molecules.
An opposing point of view, emergentism, suggests that new, more complex systems evolve out of more fundamental ones. So chemistry grows out of physics, biology out of chemistry, and psychology out of biology. At each step new entities, relations, and laws develop. So you can think of Virginia Woolf not just as a mass of atoms or a web of social discourses, but as an individual.
I don't know if any of that is correct, and it's too many isms for a Sunday. Time to rest the brain.
Fundamental things like "time" or "individual identity" are notoriously hard to define; and none of our best definitions of them are immune to quibbles. An easy sophistic trick is to lend greatest weight to the quibbles, and thus nullify the definitions. By repeating this trick, the sophist then pretends to be licensed to say that the thing incapable of being defined doesn't exist.
The sub-head should be A historical survey of the personal essay "alleges" it to be the purest expression of the "alleged" lie. . .
Does Emre quote Gertrude Stein's "I am I because my little dog knows me"--? And offer a rebuttal? One that can be stated just as plainly? Or only in vaporous intellectual curlicues?
I used to read the NYRB regularly, but I dropped the subscription when I had to cut expenses, including the expense of time. This article is paywalled: we non-subscribers get just the epigraph and first two paragraphs. What book is Emre reviewing?
Maybe "I" is the result of social affirmation. But humans, and even their primate ancestors, are social animals. So it would see that "I" is nothing new.
Montaigne knew something about essays, since he invented the form. Reading a Montaigne essay is like having a very interesting person explain his thinking on a topic of mutual interest. Didion likewise.
I do not know why Emre writes "The private individual is not a proper name—not 'Virginia Woolf' or 'Elizabeth Hardwick,' not 'Joan Didion' or 'Zadie Smith' or whoever it is you consider your favorite personal essayist to be."
A proper name applies to an individual member of a group of things. There are many women, there is only one Joan Didion, just as there are many skyscrapers, but only one Empire State Building. It is without doubt that Emre arises each morning and is not surprised to find that he is a particular person, the same person he was the day before, and the same person he will be the following morning, regardless of any change in the mysterious, all powerful "social formations."
I couldn't help noticing that all four of the named essayists are female, like the author who names them. If a man wrote an essay about essay-writing and named four men and no women as examples of eminent essayists, how long would it take for him to be denounced as a sexist bigot? I'm guessing under 5 minutes on any website that allows comments. Does this one? No idea, and someone upthread says it's paywalled, but I doubt I'd follow the link even if it weren't.
We are the press secretary for the elephant according to those who believe the modern major mental malfunction numb nuts is the default mode network. The cure? Go Climb a Rock. I ain't fuckin chanting Sanskrit.
I think a lot of writers these days are forced to agree to all current shibboleths of the left or be cancelled. This is their experience; their soul is cancelled to keep their social position from being cancelled. And so this writer by conforming has risen to a position on a formerly great magazine formerly known for honoring free expression. She feels squeezed and nullified and she looks back at women who were really trampled marks in the road left by the boots of the patriarchy but who thought they were expressing themselves. She sneers in print. But does she sigh for lost horizons? Does she read these other women at night in hard cover copies purchased for cash at second-hand bookstores out in the country so she can read them often, secretly understanding them? I see no sign of intelligent life, just the common wriggling of the cancelling-fearing multitude. But then there would be no sign.
Bad analytical / academic ideas never die, they are just reborn by a new generation of sophists trying to gain attention for supposedly breaking new ground.
Go back to mid-20th-century behaviorism: rats and pigeons in cages were seen by some as good analogues for humans. The behaviorists said there was no consciousness, only simple cause-effect relationships. No internal mental states, just associations and learned behavior. Then the human data came in: yes, there was internal conscious mediation of cause-effect. People plan, people forecast, people hold expectations and are unique and distinct.
So, the present author reinvents a broken, simplistic ideology and one that was fully disproven through data and hard evidence by the 1960s. But data never stopped the stubborn blind willfulness of dreamy postmodernism.
This is 4-dimensional Kamala Harris! Wow!
Comments here offer much of interest. My general take-away on Emre’s attack on “me” (and on “us” —yes, fellow commenters, each of you is on her list to be liquidated virtually if not in fact) is that it is just another manifestation of Marxist millenarianism: there is a brave new world of peace, prosperity, harmony and happiness awaiting humanity if only we subordinate our fallen individual selves to the final struggle and rise up, re-made, under the leadership of great minds like hers. I’m no scholar (or fan) of this crap so maybe I don’t do it justice; but it’s my impression that the postmodern/structuralist/deconstructionist schools all rest on a vision something like that; a vision which, being unattainable, can be exploited endlessly to mobilize (and monetize) people’s discontent.
Diversity [dogma] (i.e. color judgment, class-based bigotry) denies individual dignity, individual conscience, intrinsic value, and normalizes color blocs (e.g. "people of color"), color quotas (e.g. too many Americans... Asian-Americans... uh, people of yellow [at]), and affirmative discrimination (e.g. allegations of "Jew privilege").
#BabyLivesMatter (BLM)
Shorter version of Owen's comment:
'Accept the Almighty State as your lord and savior.' As Owen points out, it's an empty promise which by its nature can be used over and over.
Post a Comment