Abstract
This paper argues that subjectivity needs to be understood as a geography. The “psychotopical” analysis that is necessary in order to understand subjectivity requires that more emphasis be placed on arts of experiment drawn from the battery of performing arts that exist on the borderline between the humanities and the social sciences. Some examples are given.
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Notes
We are, it is clear, a long way now from any thought of rational economic man, or indeed many other variants on this model of being human; it is commonplace nowadays that persons are not discrete islands of consciousness and agency. But, as the years go by, we are getting even further away from this depiction, as it becomes clear that this model and its variants do not even begin to describe human beings or human decision-making. In the past, I have used Libet's experiments, which showed that we are aware of intentions to act only after the brain area responsible for initiating acting has already been activated. But, as Roessner and Eilan (2003, p. 1) argue, this is actually a conservative finding, given what we now know about the illusion of conscious control; “for the suggestion underpinning Libet's claims is that unless the initiation of the action is something we are aware of, the action itself is not under the kind of control we think we have as agents, the kind of control in virtue of which we speak of freedom of will”. In fact, the implied link between agency and self-awareness which still haunts Libet's work is difficult to articulate or to defend. We can now be fairly sure that what awareness a person has is immersed self-awareness – awareness engrossed or absorbed in some temporally extended activity – in which the self figures only implicitly. Perceptual attention in action is typically focused on the objects acted upon rather than the actor's own body: oneself is the doing. Insofar as a sense of personal ownership can be attributed to actions, it results from the spatial content of the movement specifications of actions: “the self enters the representational scene as the origin of the egocentric frame of reference utilized in movement specifications” (Roessner and Eilan 2003, p 44). In other words, a sense of self comes from the geography of concernful involvement in the world. That is an important finding for it suggests that personhood is bound up with objects, not separated out and projected on to them. Persons are maps of concern, constantly forming and breaking up. It also comes from the cognitive feeds that a person can access. Many of these will be in the form of systems of distributed cognition, very broadly specified to include codes like writing, addresses, and systems of numbers as well as all manner of everyday objects. In turn, such findings have considerable implications for what we regard as a person.
Of course, as Lloyd (2007) points out, there was no fixed Greek view of the subject.
As the boundaries between the psychological, the social, and the natural become increasingly open to question, so the study of subjectivity becomes an enterprise that will routinely refuse these disciplinary categories, whose end will, in any case, be hastened by the advent of machines of mass survey, information, and community like the internet which lay bare the soul in new ways that cannot be classified as sociological or psychological (Latour, 2007).
Here, I believe that the notion of character still has traction but reformulated in antihumanist ways.
Understanding actors in a Latourian way as the “cosmos” of unruly entities that can impinge on any particular situation.
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Thrift, N. I Just Don't Know What Got into Me: Where is the Subject?. Subjectivity 22, 82–89 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2008.1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2008.1