Subjects

Humans are subjects in the modern sense of the term to the extent that they can be considered as conscious agents capable of conceiving, articulating and performing an awareness of themselves and other beings. This capacity to hold and to express intentional dispositions is sustained by means of symbolic technology (prototypically language). Inasmuch as this technology produces material available for unrestricted circulation through time and space, it alienates humans from their natural condition as animals and institutes the differential possibility of an unrealised future elsewhere. Though unpredictable in principle, in practice the actualisation of this possibility is always circumscribed by the hegemony of homogeny re-naturalising human history. The human animal is a subject of history in at least two distinct but related senses: as a thinking agent projecting itself through time and space by means of symbolic technology, it interferes with the natural order of things and makes history; as a being responsive to the naturalising power of the already-made, it is subject to history—including the history of the technology facilitating its production of unnatural difference. This inevitably unstable double dynamic produces its own denial in the formation of both individual and collective identity: ‘identity’ names the ideological accommodation of the undecidable tension between autonomy and heteronomy that constitutes individual and collective subjectivities. While subjectivity is arguably a defining and universal feature of the human species, individual humans and historically and culturally distinct human communities exercise and interrogate this subjectivity very differently. This chapter explores a number of contrast cases exemplifying this diversity, with specific attention to literature as a discourse monitoring, mediating and modifying different individual and collective subjectivities. Before the subject. Prior to its standard modern usage, the term ‘subject’ denoted someone subordinated to someone or something else. If the modern sense emphasises a potential for autonomous self-determination, the older sense denotes heteronomy and subservience. This semantic shift encapsulates the standard account of the emergence of enlightened modernity in the West: while the identity of the vast majority of individuals in pre-modern times was sufficiently determined (and rendered uninteresting) by whichever niche of society they happened to be born into, the modern subject (understood as any being gifted with the faculty of reason) is credited, and burdened, with the potential to determine itself. (Luhmann) Auerbach’s Mimesis is still one of the most inspiring, if contentious, accounts of the ways in which Western literature has attended this shift. Lacan, Althusser, Foucault & les autres lay bare the delusions of grandeur it generates. State of the subject. If all humans are autonomous subjects in the modern sense, power, privilege and property are in doubt. The codification of class addresses but fails to dispel the spectre of equality haunting the community formations of modernity. Hegel’s ideal State of universal altruism, a noble fantasy fed by Jesus’s delusions of justice, underestimates the self-loathing of the emerging middle class who can (barely) read him and fails to make this self-loathing productive. Wordsworth’s (and less so Coleridge’s) Lyrical Ballads document this self-loathing in amateur anthropological imaginations of “low and rustic life” consolidating the class divisions they propose to displace, while the Bildungsroman reluctantly registers the discontent of bourgeois resignation to the status quo of inevitable progress. The imagination of the nation (Anderson) so powerfully affecting modern public life since the 19th century is a massive reaction-formation to the modern subject’s discontent which the State should seek, but fails, to service. Lanark, Alasdair Gray’s 1981 Bildungsroman-cum-dystopic-State-fantasy, revisits the friction between subject and State for the late 20th century. Subject to gender. Though all humans are autonomous subjects, more than half of them are still female. The sex/gender-nexus recalls subjects to their bodies with the force of an imperative demanding submission but enabling defiance. Love lyrics and dramatic monologues explore the repercussions of this ambivalent imperative. D.H. Lawrence’s “Love on the Farm,” adding a further twist to Browning’s perverse “Porphyria’s Lover,” sounds the depths of gender submission and defiance. Empire of subjects. All humans are autonomous subjects—which leaves the brutes. Chinua Achebe’s seminal dismissal of Joseph Conrad’s racist brutalisation of African humans misses the point with critical accuracy, identifying but misreading the point of literal and banal unreadability (or downright un-understanding) the entire text of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness gravitates towards. Achebe’s productive misreading remains a landmark in the history of colonial and postcolonial encounters between other and Western subjects. (Spivak) Neurotypicals and the mind-blind. All humans are autonomous subjects—but some are more autistic than others. Current psychology suggests that the ability to entertain thick representations of other humans’ mental state—so-called “Theory of Mind”—is a typical and distinctive feature of the human subject. Humans with autism spectrum disorder are typically deficient in this respect, suffering in varying degrees from “mind-blindness.” As ASD is increasingly understood as a neurological or indeed biological condition, the question as to what makes a human subject needs to be reconsidered. (Hacking) A.L. Kennedy’s So I Am Glad offers one of many such reconsiderations in modern literature.

ISBN:9780748699254

Publication year:2016

Accessibility:Closed