Peter
Brockelman, Time and Self
A.11:
experience of self to
that self
B.15:
problem of identity of self over time; problem of self-deception
B.16:
self-deception involves experience
of holding opposites such as conscious (calm) and unconscious
(anger)
C.71:
To be a self is narrative, temporal: “coreferentiality”: conscious
reflection of past, present, future in
the present.
C.72:
“attitudes towards life,” “life values,” “agency,” “openness,”
“possible being”
C.73:
The self is a temporal relation which
reflectively relates itself to itself. It is not merely that temporal
relation, then, but also a reflective relationship and attitude to
that.”
C.74:
The self is “tensed.” “the
very notion of self involves memory, decision, and anticipation”
C.75:
This involves the self as both subject and object, and to know
that one knows.
D.76:
The self involves seriality
or difference as well as continuity
or unity in its coreferentiality
E.78:
The anticipated sense of the future means that the self necessarily
includes a dimension of faith.
E.78:
“To exist as a self is possible only on the basis of faith.” “Getting
to know ‘me’ means getting to know that thematic vision of life, that
fundamental stance in my life which threads my actions together into a
temporal whole, ‘me’”
F.80:
Unity the self in the face of temporal difference: fact of
phenomenological existence: experience
F.82:
Identity, what makes “Jane” Jane and not Joyce, lies in “just this
particular autobiography, set of intentions, and fundamental attitude
toward life right now in relation to others, her own past, and future,
and reflectively herself. ‘Jane’ is not ‘Joyce’ precisely because each
of them is a different
story.”
F.82:
Deception is self-deception when the preconscious self, which always has a
certain continuity or unity, goes unrecognized or unacknowledged by
the consciously reflecting self.
F.83:
Attitude helps to define this story: “Stalin’s sense of will and
domination, we can imagine, is quite different than Thomas Merton’s
more ‘mystical’ attitude of not willing and letting go.”
Jerome
Bruner, “The ‘Remembered’ Self”
53:
In this work, Bruner describes the self (that one remembers) as a
“perpetually rewritten story.”
There
are two main aspects here: agency and “victimicy.” What he means by
this is: On the one hand, the self actively lives out the story by acting
out of subjective intent:
dreams, wishes, aspirations, effort. On the other, the self must make
adjustments on the basis of the objective
circumstances one finds oneself in, beyond one’s control, such
as physical, financial, and social conditions. The self, then, must
constantly negotiate the dream or story that it is trying
to live out, and the adaptations
required as circumstances unfold beyond control.
Michel
Foucault, “What is an Author”
Brockelman
argues for the unity of the self amidst difference; Bruner argues for
the continual revision of the “self” story, and perhaps by
implication, of its partial multiplicity: It is never quite what one
imagines it to be. Foucault calls into question the very primacy of
the “author” in a textual world; by implication, he calls into
question whether the self, the putative “author” of its life “story,”
really stands at the center of its life, whether it has any real
continuity or substantial identity, or whether it really is needed and
perhaps, even exists.
People
tend to think that being an author (of a best-selling novel, a
Billboard Hot 100 single, or a blocbuster screenplay) implies the
release of power and the possibility of imagination, but it is
otherwise. The author is a “limiting function” in the discourse of
text. Many texts, especially in the premodern period, had no
identifiable author. This includes religious texts, such as the Hebrew
Bible, or the Hindu Vedas; oral traditions of storytelling; epics and
poems. By naming an author, its range is limited; it becomes a human
creation, it becomes related to a specific personality or
socio-economic grouping.
102:
Writing has always had an intimate relation with death, for it confers
immortality, sometimes on the author, and sometimes on the protagonist
of the work (such as a Greek epic, in which the hero dies young, and
whose life is exalted), and sometimes as the author who dies. This can
also be said of the self and can be seen in such cases as John F.
Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Gandhi, or James Dean and
Marilyn Monroe. Their lives became even more exalted and immortalized
because of untimely (early) or tragic death.
But,
while alive, each self authors its own story of immortality, sometimes
“religious” or “atheist” but in either case having implications of
immortality, even in the form of denying any life after death.
116:
Specifically, “one defines a proposition’s theoretical validity in
relation to the work of the founders” in the case of such “authors” or
“selves” as Freud or Marx, Luther or Maimonides. For example, is it
“orthodox” or “heterodox”?
118:
Yet, this doesn’t mean the “author” or “self” controls its story. It
becomes a cog or a part of a larger system of relationships that
regulate the production of the story-self. We see this, for example,
when a pop star/songwriter becomes the victim of
their own story. Their story is limited by the “branding” of
their “authorship”; they becoming restricted in terms of what kind of
songs they can write, what kind of story or self they can live, where
they can go, and what they can do. Nevertheless, the “author function”
can play key roles through its limiting characteristic, in for
example, giving birth to new fields, new industries, lifestyles, and
regulating them. The “author” then begins to take on an “ideological”
function as helping to define the terms of these areas.
112:
Different “authors,” different “selves.” The author of any particular
text, discourse, or “life” can thus help to define, limit, and mine
the possibilities of that field of discourse. In
one moment, “professor,” in another “husband,” “son,”
“entrepreneur,” and so on. In that sense, the author becomes
a kind of node in a net of interrelationships that define webs of
power, imagination, reality.