The Utopian Public Persona

Certain commentators have argued that the so-called private self is but the subjective echo of the public persona; that it is the natural outcome of the process of interiorization (or introjection) of significant others and the subsequent process of engaging in imagined rehearsals with those interiorized others. According to this view, the nascent private self starts out as an psychic avatar, a stand-in for the "real" social self in our inner social ruminations. This would be the extent of things, but for that fact that purely hypothetical ornamentations of the self become possible as soon as we begin to experiment (virtually) with alternatives strategies of comportment - and to gratify ourselves with various forms of wish-fulfillment fantasies. It may be, then, that the self is a utopian public persona. This would help make sense of the contemporary fantasy of the eventual actualization our "authentic inner self".

This contemporary social imaginary of a "true inner self" wanting to get out is somewhat disingenuous; our quotidian social personas are not exclusively oppressive or opportunistic in origin. They are frequently simply expeditious. Even within the most "functional" family, we tend to conceal certain of our mental states simply out of consideration for others, or because we consider them irrelevant, because transient. (e.g. we may conceal a passing irritation because it is not meaningful.) Paradoxically, we do not consider our momentary irritability to be characteristic of either our authentic inner self, or our projected social self. Who then, we may ask, is irritated. Must we hypothesize yet another self, less authentic, but (strangely) more private than the other two?

More notably, we all have a tendency to helpfully project an exaggerated continuity in our social persona (or rather personae) in order to facilitate the construction of expectations and understandings with others. This is a case of using our behavior as a part of a system of coded interactions; a commoditization of the self that permits the elaboration of social systems and networks that would not otherwise be possible. The persona emerges naturally from our recognition of our own social exteriority and our consequent recognition of that exteriority as a index subject to manipulation. One might even say that the persona only comes into being, as such, once we begin to use our projected self as a sign in a system of conventional social interactions. It is the social instrumentalization of our exteriority.

(Of course, in the developmental history of any individual , this realization is contemporaneous with an introduction to society's various representations and social imaginaries concerning the self, which interact to influence the structure and nature of the psychic complexes - which may be only symbolic complexes - of the person.)

In other words, the social persona is a positive, constructive, and collaborative human innovation, albeit one which we also occasionally find "dehumanizing". We should not make the mistake of supposing that just because it is dehumanizing, it was entirely imposed upon us from without.

At the same time, we should not suppose that our "authentic inner self" is any more real, simply because it is not being instrumentalized for engagement with the social machine. Whatever cynical, considerate, or simply expeditious accommodations that we make in the confection of our external social personae, they, at least, are exposed to a modicum of social plausibility testing by the very fact of their public deployment, while our "authentic inner selves", distorted by fantasy and wishful thinking, all too often evolve into grotesque creatures whose viability in any conceivable social universe is, quite simply, implausible. In which case, the organism in question might arguably be said to be authentic (in a purely passive sense), but it is questionable that it should be called a "self".

Grundian moral entrepreneurs might gleefully seize on this observation as evidence of the normative superiority of the social facade, but they would be grievously missing the point. Neither the public personae nor the "authentic inner self" are, I would suggest, worthy targets for serious psychic investment by any thoughtful contemporary reader. (Whether "serious psychic investment" is a useful undertaking under any circumstances is, naturally, a debatable proposition.) Legitimate "targets of investment" aside, it seems to me that, if there is indeed a locus of authenticity, it must reside in the field within which all of the various selves hitherto considered are confected, y compris the interstices of any of the elaborated selves. There is not reason that I can see to suppose that the horizon of authenticity is coterminous with the horizon of any particular self.

It matters little whether we consider selfhood to be a grammatical, a social, or a psychic construct (if those distinctions have any utility), the same argument applies: what is included is not more "authentic" than what is excluded. And once we remove "authenticity" from the equation, selfhood ceases to pose the metaphorical problems of legitimacy and ownership that have traditionally been associated with it.

PSDS Market Analysis

I remarked earlier that I appear to have embarked on a project to "develop some sort of positive postmodern theory of political engagement." If this is indeed the case, it seems advisable to perform undertake some basic market research right up front in order to gauge the feasibility of such an undertaking.

For starters, we'll take a close look at a key product feature of Enlightenment Rationalism, the current market leader in the public sphere discursive substrate (PSDS) market, a feature that contributes significantly to the product's brand identity: ®eason. (We will examine other key product features, including Objectivity, Natural Law, and Natural Rights in future marketing briefs.) Recall that, for the purposes of this analysis, we are less concerned with the "epistemic validity" of ®eason, than with its usability and consumer appeal: in short, the contribution that specific product feature provides to Enlightenment's value proposition both to the individual consumer and to the society as a whole.

A striking characteristic of ®eason as a PSDS feature is the way that it allows such a diverse variety of political players to represent their own positions as "legitimized by the discourse". ®eason may not provide a discursive "level playing field", but it does provide a discursive field whose fictitious level-ness has been consensually (albeit sometimes coercively) fabricated in such a way as to create a plausible discursive quorum: the so-called Public Sphere. It may be, as I suggest, that this once critical mass has become an uncritical mass, and that an opportunity for a revision of the political and rational rules of engagement is at hand, but if that is the case, any viable alternative to Enlightenment Rationalism is going to have to be value neutral across a significant chunk of the spectrum of contemporary politics, or it will never sell as a discursive substrate. Simply wheeling in yet another partisan epistemological Trojan horse isn't going to do the trick.

®eason is at once a metonymical shorthand for the umbrella product and the conventional name for the accepted rules governing entailment within the discursive system. These rules of entailment are naively experienced by participants as clearly, distinctly, and self-evidently natural and true. To doubt their intrinsic validity, it is sometimes suggested, will result in catastrophic psychological or social breakdown. In the narrowest sense, such a proposition may be defensible. (In any case, it is an excellent defensive strategy.) In point of fact, nobody is seriously suggesting a wholesale revision of the syllogistic rules of entailment. In the narrowest sense, ®eason is here to stay. To begin with, the rules of ®eason are seldom encountered in their pure form and there aren't many of them. We have all heard the syllogism concerning the mortality of Socrates and it sticks in our mind particularly because of its anomalous straightforwardness. What passes for "reason" in discourse is quite another animal. The "glue" that holds sentences together in the average political stump speech, criminal trial, lover's quarrel, or other political argument, is as frequently narrative as it is syllogistic. In any case, disagreements concerning the validity of specific logical arguments seldom hinge on disputes regarding their formal logic, so much as the legitimacy and applicability of the nominal categories employed and the assumed or implied underlying causalities of the events or facts in question.

®eason is far more than a handful of theorems and axioms of deductive logic. It includes a huge database of received wisdom concerning the ways of the world, human nature, as well as reified ontological categories and other assorted philosophical bric-a-brac. The category of the unreasonable, or irrational, includes not just fallacious reasoning, but improbable assumptions, irrelevant categories, improper metaphors, and a variety of narrative non sequiturs. ®eason is what strikes most people as reasonable. It is a social achievement beyond the control (though not the manipulation) of any individual or group. This aggregate quality gives it, at once, a certain robustness, a certain flexibility, and a certain fragility. (The distinction between '®eason'and '©ommon Sense', for example, shows the ease with which the protean system of Enlightenment Rationalism can be tweaked to accommodate the opposing forces of elitism and populism.)

So-called "post-modernism" has received a drubbing lately, on account of it's supposed embrace of unreason. It is worthwhile to consider the phenomenon in order to better understand what makes "reason" so resilient. One line of argument pursued by so-called "post-modernists" is the suggestion that the discourse of "dominant" or "privileged" groups is necessarily illegitimate precisely because of the social position of their proponents. It is hardly surprising that socially or materially privileged group will resist the suggestion that the categories and narrative scripts they employ to "reason" are anything less than natural, transparent, and disinterested. We may doubt their veracity, if not their sincerity, but it must be acknowledged that they do have a point. (Note the rhetorically constructed reasonableness of the preceeding sentence. Not the echoes of parental scolding in the verbal structure of the following one. These are among the mechanisms of rational discourse.) It is one thing to point out that one's interlocutor's opinions conveniently mesh with their own immediate self interest, it is quite another to suggest that their opinions are wholly and inescapably determined by them. The systemic resiliency of ®eason can be discerned in the fact that it is not clear whether the use of the Marxist theory of "ideology as epiphenomenon" as a strategy of public discourse should be objected to on grounds that it: 1) violates a "scientific" principle concerning circumstantial proofs 2) undermines the conditions of possibility of rational discourse 3) is an unproved (and dubious) socio-philosophical postulate or 4) is inconsistent with the liberal axiom of individual free will. For many of us, the correct answer would probably be "a little of each".

The point is that we don't necessarily know what ®eason is, nor, apparently, do we need to, as long as we "know it when we see it." What is really at issue is not so much the extent of the collaborative inter-subjectivity and historicity of the rules of entailment, so much as a dispute over the ease (and advisability) of revising them. Marxists have attempted to revise the rules of discourse to preemptively delegitimize the arguments of their opponents. That didn't matter so much when the name of the game was violent revolution and the overthrow of the existing power structure, but it presented serious problems for their participation as interlocutors in the public sphere. The Marxist theory of ideology doesn't "integrate" well into the conceptual corpus of Enlightenment Rationality and the corpus "reacts" in a systemic fashion, to eject it. This testifies to the robustness of ®eason as an intersubjective consensual achievement. The fact that the "post-modernism", rather than Marxism, has been misidentified as the culprit demonstrates its flexibility.

Because, after all, we needed a scapegoat. The move to import the "Critique of (non-marxist) Ideology" into the corpus of Enlightenment Rationality may have failed, but there is enough truth in it, and it has enough (albeit half-hearted) supporters that it was inexpedient to allow it to die. A scapegoat needed to be found. What better choice than the French?

None of the forgoing remarks are intended as criticisms of any of the parties to the charade, Marxists included. (Some of my best friends are Marxists. For all I know, I may be one myself.) These are ordinary garden variety discursive political shenanigans. Any alternative discursive substrate hoping to compete with Enlightenment Rationalism will have to provide superior or at least equivalent functionality. Given the necessity of a straightforward (and communicable) upgrade strategy, as well as the requirement for ongoing near-seamless interoperability with the legacy system, it is unlikely that any strategy other than incremental improvement of existing product features is likely to gain significant market share.

Lost Tribes of the Left

There are three that I know of. These are all categories of "the elite". There are surely others in other socio-economic strata. (Assuming that there is still such a thing as the American left. Or do we have a country with a right, a new-right, and a center, but no left?)

1) Pluralists and relativists from the humanities and social sciences who embraced who embraced what they supposed was perspectivalism, all the while muttering sotto voce that the oppressed were "epistemologically privileged". Those that considered themselves oppressed, took this as a license to redress their grievances. The rest agreeably accepted the proposition on the basis of "noblesse oblige".

A fairly small group of academic activists from this group then proceeded to beat the postmodern toolset into swords and levied an army of Mrs. Grundies to police their colleagues for thought crimes. They took the oh-so-ironic term "politically correct" and transformed it into a neo-Stalinist farce. They implemented, at the institutional level, the same pre-emptive moralising interventionism that Bush is currently exercising at the international level.

Calling this bunch "postmodernists" is something of a misnomer. Most of them aren't even real moral relativists. If you want to see some serious moral relativism, try A.J.Ayer's "Language, Truth, and Logic". But notice that nobody is screaming about the Logical Positivists' moral relativism. The whole "post-modernism" debate isn't really about moral relativism, it's about the crypto-marxist assertion that oppression is the source of epistemic privilege and the challenge that such a claim presents to (a) the established social structure, and (b) "enlightenment values" (which really means the discursive conventions of reason, "natural rights", and "natural law".)

2) The old fashioned, rationalist, "enlightenment left" who found itself out-maneuvered and out-cudgeled by the first group. Eventually they managed to regroup and mount a major counter-offensive led by the likes of Sokal and Bricmont. This was simultaneously (a) a fight for political control of the campus and (b) a social vs. natural science turf war based on deeply flawed "philosophical" conceptions on either side. The enlightenment left was right about the need to re-establish a rational basis for meaningful political discourse, they were wrong about the nature of "Reason".

3) The yuppies and other "children of the sixties" who wandered out into a brave new world of investment banking, high tech, stock options, mountain bikes, "camp" pluralism, cilantro, and the internet bubble. Much nonsense has been written about this group, mostly by its own members. Allegedly, they were too stoned on growth to even notice that they'd "sold out". Most of them leaned vaguely towards the rational or the relativistic: or towards both at the same time: they were eclectic to the point of incoherence. They were "apolitical", they said, explaining that the old Left-Right political divisions were obsolete. They may not have been entirely mistaken about that, but they were too busy making money to notice that the new "post-historical" utopia wasn't all it was cracked up to be. It remains to be seen whether - now that it clearly matters - they can bring themselves to care.

Parthenocentrism

I suggested in an earlier post that the democratic process might be enhanced if ordinary citizens felt a greater degree of personal responsibility for their political opinions and positions. It seemed to me that many citizens were all too willing to hide behind the "limited liability" of representative democracy and that taking a public stand on politics might help to focus the mind and discourage the spineless American voter from succumbing to base impulses under the cover of anonymity.

I had occasion to reconsider this notion when I dined, a few nights ago, with some friends from the British diplomatic corps. I was struck by the degree to which their position on the current situation in Iraq had evolved over the last few months, and it occurred to me that the fluidity of political opinion owes something to the lack of an audit trail. Granted, politicians don't seem to be overly troubled by considerations of their own diachronic consistency: but it is interesting to note that they tend to triumphantly point out instances of their rivals mutability as evidence of irresolution or incompetence. And yet, I seldom find such "revelations" convincing.

While it is possible that a increased sense of moral accountability for our political convictions might cause us to consider our positions more carefully at the outset, it is equally possible that this same sense might decrease our ability to clamber out of the various moral pitfalls that we will inevitably encounter along the way. We may be unwilling to abandon our entrenched moral positions out of pride, or an unwillingness to transgress the taboo against inconsistency.

Because there is a taboo, in our culture, against inconsistency, and nowhere stronger than among "intellectuals". Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that the cultural capital of the tweed collar worker lies in their perceived store of erudition, intelligence, and infallibility, that they are so disposed to cover the spoors of their own ignorance, incomprehension, and error.

In other words, values like erudition, intelligence, and infallibility, are nowhere near as straightforward as their proponents would have us believe. Their meaning is intimately intertwined with the sociological circumstances of their elaboration and moves to question of their dominance is all too often presented as an attack on reason: just as any proposed adjustments to the economic status quo are often portrayed by the "establishment" as portents of anarchy. This is a common strategy of the dominant player in any power relation in the face of contestation.

If we choose erudition as a value, we encourage ourselves (and others) to disguise the fact there was ever a moment before we read Freud, or Condillac, or Vico, or whoever. We also subtly suggest that a familiarity with these authors might be a prerequisite to holding a legitimate opinion on any subject whatsoever. The next thing we know, we find ourselves giving others the impression that we have a greater familiarity with certain authors than we in fact have. We spend more energy constructing the illusion of erudition than we spend thinking. (Can anyone who has sent any time in academia seriously question this assertion?) Similar processes occur with respect to the values of intelligence and infallibility.

It would appear to be a prerequisite to any pretension to intellectual respectability that we must embrace the myths of erudition, intelligence, and infallibility. The next thing we know, erudition has morphed into parthenogenetic self invention, intelligence and social standing are conflated into authority, and the laudable desire to avoid error has deteriorated into an eternal obsession with infallibility. Is there somewhere in the heart of all intellectuals, some vestigial original psychic monad that still retains a dim impression of its Ur-bozality? It is difficult to tell. (I sometimes despair.)

I am loath to contribute needlessly to the superabundance of neo-centrisms, so, as a shorthand, I will collectively ensconce this triumvirate of intellectual defensiveness under the neological umbrella of "partheno-centrism". (If the term catches on, it can later be consecrated by the process of sacral de-hyphenization as "parthenocentrism".)

In any case, as you have probably guessed by my use of the deprecatory postfix, I am not a fan of this sort of narcissistic perfectionism. It is a current that we should swim against. It is the intellectual dual of consumerism.

At risk of being branded an proponent of un-Reason, I will dare to say that I do not unquestioningly swallow the proposition that either we are with this particular brand of Reason, or we are with the tyrants and terrorists. Leftists who worry that they missed the boat back in the seventies and nattered on about post-modernism while the Right consolidated its grip on the center, may still discover upon rushing back into the public sphere to pick up their discarded "modern" terminology, that it has not aged well, and it is no longer feasible to pick up the battle where they left off. The armies have moved on. It may be necessary to invent a new angel. And that may require inventing new terminology and new rules of discourse, in fact, a new "Reason", that is adequate to the current age.

At risk of being labelled a phrophet of un-Reason, allow me to confess to a certain penchant for the process of learning over the state of erudition, for humility over intelligence, and for openness over correctness. Hence my pleasure at being able to point out the stupidity of my earlier post regarding the société à responsibilité limitée. There is much that is wrong and foolish in these pages. And while it is seldom deliberate, it is not entirely inadvertent either. I will not be so presumptuous as to ask you to read it with perfect contempt. I'll settle for amused indulgence - and promise in return an occasional admission of my fallibility. (I knew there was a reason I was missing all those typos!)

        I have brought the great ball of crystal
                          who can lift it?
        Can you enter the great acorn of light?
                 But the beauty is not the madness
        Tho' my errors and wrecks lie about me.
        And I am not a demigod,
        I cannot make it cohere.

Ezra Pound, from Canto 116

Alas, I am keenly aware of the circumstances surrounding the composition of the late Cantos. (Not to mention his obsession with erudition.) There is a connection here with my earlier post regarding postmodernism, anti-foundationalism, moral relativism, and political responsibility, though I can't quite articulate it. I appear to be trying to develop some sort of positive postmodern theory of political engagement. Pure presumption, no doubt. Not that we should abandon such projects, simply because they are doomed to failure...