Hi Rob,

Nice to hear from you. I can’t say I think of myself as having any really well-developed theory of selfhood, so I’m glad you think there’s one at work here, and a worthwhile one to boot. My first thought about what you say here is that I certainly agree that selves are fractured, but I also think that mental processes are predicated on a lot more than discourse or intertextuality. I think there are major limits to things like Althusserian theories about interpellation, Foucauldian theories about the production of subjects through discourses of sexuality and truth, and semiotic theories of the self as a linguistic construct (I guess the locus classicus for this would be Benveniste’s 1958 paper on ‘subjectivity in language’). These kinds of theories can tell us a lot about social processes of classification and recognition, and certainly a lot of one’s sense of self is culturally structured and discursively emergent, but I don’t really think that these ultimately sociocentric or discourse-centric theories are adequate as psychological theories of what happens in human minds. I don’t pretend to know much about this, but there seems to be lots of research in psychoanalysis and cognitive science and affect theory that would at the very least seem to describe much richer and more autonomous levels of psychic processes than one can access by a purely textual or sociological analysis.

Actually this reminds me of a whole polemic I’ve been mulling over about the place of psychology in ethnographic research, so maybe I’ll stop here and just write a new post later today that will take this up in more detail… but anyway, your comment is much appreciated! I guess I just feel driven to quibble with theories that treat subjectivity as purely discursive.

good luck with anthro and cultural studies, it sounds fun. eli

Le Guin’s response doesn’t close out any post-structuralist epistemology. If we take a deconstructive line, in which narrative is always already fractured, and predicated on intertextuality, then the text truly does represent the author, who is also always a fractured entity, and, a subject of discourse.