The Origins of the Individualist Self

Autobiography and Self-Identity in England, 1591 - 1791

Michael Mascuch

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745667737
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: History

This book traces the emergence of the concept of self-identity in modern Western culture, as it was both reflected in and advanced by the development of autobiographical practice in early modern England. It offers a fresh and illuminating appraisal of the nature of autobiographical narrative in general and of the early modern forms of biography, diary and autobiography in particular. The result is a significant and original contribution to the history of individualism.

Michael Mascuch argues that the definitive characteristic of individualist self-identity is the personal capacity to produce a unified retrospective autobiographical narrative, and he stresses that this capacity was first demonstrated in England during the last decade of the eighteenth century. He examines the long-term process of innovation in written discourse leading up to this event, from the first use of blank almanacs and common place books by the pious in the late sixteenth century, through the popular criminal biographies of the late seventeenth century, to the printed-for-the-author scandalous memoirs of the mid-eighteenth century.

While offering a detailed account of a significant period in the rise of a modern literary genre, Origins of the Individualist Self also addresses topics which are central in the fields of literary and cultural theory and social and cultural history.

Part I

The First English Individualist

It is tempting, even if it is only an approximation, to compare the development of modern autobiography with the construction of the middle-class “subject.” Autobiography is a human right. Become the owner of your life! Everyone is invited to become the owner of the individual property of one’s life, to build a house of writing on one’s little plot of existence.

Philippe Lejeune, “Teaching People to Write Their Life Story”
(1988)

1

Narrative Subjects
Individualism,
Autobiography, Authority

Individual originally meant indivisible. That now sounds like a paradox. “Individual” stresses a distinction from others; “indivisible” a necessary connection. The development of the modern meaning from the original meaning is a record in language of an extraordinary social and political history.

Raymond Williams, “Individual,” in Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1983)

The autobiographical form gives each person the opportunity to believe that he is a complete and responsible subject…. [It] is undoubtedly not the instrument of the expression of a subject that preexists it, nor even a “role,” but rather that which determines the very existence of “subjects.”

Philippe Lejeune, “The Autobiography of Those Who Do Not Write” (1980)

The present age, if we consider chiefly the state of our own country, may be stiled with great propriety The Age of Authors; for, perhaps, there was never a time, in which men of all degrees of ability, of every kind of education, of every profession and employment, were posting with ardour so general to the press.

Samuel Johnson, Adventurer, No. 115 (1753)

What is an individualist self? This is a question of theory in many academic disciplines.

As a culture, “individualism” is a historical phenomenon, owing its existence to a specific combination of factors coalescing at a particular time in a particular place. To identify the precise historical “moment” of individualism would, however, require tracing the development of what the literary historian Ian Watt has correctly called a “vast complex of interdependent factors”¹ – a task too large for any single study. Individualism is a multidimensional phenomenon, an amalgam of practices and values with no discernible center. A variety of forces – social, economic, political, intellectual – contributed to its making, each one of which was paramount at some time or another, either separately or jointly with others.² Thus a single account of individualism cannot possibly represent its development, its contours, its functions. The most to be expected of any attempt to do so is the isolation for study of a particular facet of the colossus, by which means we might derive a synecdochic feel for its parameters.

In both the human and social sciences, individualism has come to be epitomized by an (incontestable) emphasis on the individuality of the person. In this view, the “person,” understood generically as the human agent in society, is charged with meaning as the “individual” – a person characterized by extreme egocentricity.³ As one account describes it, “individualism” is consonant with “the view that the individual human subject is a maker of the world we inhabit.”⁴ Another renders it as essentially the postulation of each person “as an end in himself, as his own telos.”⁵ Recent comparative social and cultural analysis has highlighted the relative eccentricity of this egocentric personal orientation. The anthropologist Clifford Geertz, for example, explains that the largely Western assumption of the “person as a bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgment, and action, organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively against other such wholes and against a social and natural background, is … a rather peculiar idea within the context of the world’s cultures.”⁶ Taking Geertz’s point about culture further, others stress the historical contingency of both the individual and the ideology congruent to the individual’s point of view. For some, the end of individualism in the West is signaled by the proclaimed death of “the bourgeois subject,” more commonly known as “the subject” – a term sometimes deployed as a synonym for the individual. The recent report of the subject’s fatality is predicated on the appropriate insight that all concepts of personal identity, individuality among them, are historically constituted in language and society rather than being given by nature.

This claim, on which the critique of the subject is based, originated in the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s assertion that “the subject is not something given,” in either nature or metaphysics, but is instead “something added and invented and projected behind what there is” in everyday experience. In other words, contrary to the central and essential being attributed to the individual in the modern West, Nietzsche argued for its contingency, for the individual subject’s figurative rather than literal presence; as he put it, “The ‘subject’ is the fiction that many similar states in us are the effect of one substratum: but it is we who first created the ‘similarity’ of these states; our adjusting them and making them similar is the fact, not their similarity (– which ought rather to be denied –).”⁷ In other words, the “substratum,” that entity otherwise known as the self, which forms the basis of the concept of personal individuality, is not an object of nature. Rather, it is a product of social and cultural relations. In essence, according to Nietzsche, the self as integral unit is a “fiction,” an elaborate metaphor created to organize the process of actually being individuated in personal experience. Nietzsche’s critique implies that people deny or mistake their metaphors as facts of nature, thereby rendering the metaphor’s referent, the self, an irreducible object tautologically “self-evident” in personal experience. The problem of the self-evident self is deeply rooted in Western experience, traceable back at least to Cartesian dualism if not to primitive Christianity.

Subsequent commentators have refined Nietzsche’s seminal insight about the metaphorical nature of subjectivity, enabling us to appreciate even better the individual’s cultural and historical contingency as a concept. Of paramount importance is the theory developed by the linguist Emile Benveniste, who followed Nietzsche in claiming that the basis of subjectivity is the exercise of language. For Benveniste, language use – what he calls “discourse” – functions as the medium of subjectivity. In discourse, the “I” upon which so much of our sense of self is based appears as a grammatical form rather than as an elementary phenomenological unit. According to Benveniste,

Language is … the possibility of subjectivity because it always contains the linguistic forms appropriate to the expression of subjectivity, and discourse provokes the emergence of subjectivity because it consists of discrete instances. In some way language puts forth “empty” forms which each speaker, in the exercise of discourse, appropriates to himself and which he relates to his “person,” at the same time defining himself as I and his partner as you. The instance of discourse is thus constitutive of all the coordinates that define the subject.⁸

Adding her own gloss on Benveniste, to highlight in particular the relational quality of discourse, the semiotician Kaja Silverman explains that subjectivity “only comes into play through the principle of difference, by the opposition of the ‘other’ or the ‘you’ to the ‘I.’ In other words, subjectivity is not an essence but a set of relationships.”⁹ Both Benveniste’s and Silverman’s accounts treat relations between interlocutors as the media of subjectivity. Speakers identify themselves principally through discursive interaction. Therefore discourse, broadly conceived to include all types of instances of signification (from conversations to watching television and having private thoughts), is the locus of the sense of individuality. And because instances of discourse are themselves discrete events, mediated by local circumstances, it follows that the concept of individuality is historically and culturally contingent. The prevailing cultural and historical conditions determine the limits of what is appropriate or possible to feel and state about personal identity in a given situation. Thus to feel, to think, and to speak as an individual is possible only at a certain time in a certain place, such as the modern West, where so many of the norms and practices governing discursive interaction are structured to privilege individualistic speakers with a firm grasp of their particular “I.”

In disciplines less grounded in semiotics such as the social sciences, the concept of the historical and cultural contingency of the individual and individualism – or at least the potential to develop such a concept – has been available to us for an equally long time. The idea that human individuality is in some way enabled or constrained by evolving systems of social, economic, and political organization stands tacitly behind various studies of such structures, back at least to the mid-nineteenth century, with the historian Jacob Burckhardt’s account of politologic in Renaissance Italy.¹⁰ But unlike Nietzsche, Burckhardt and his inheritors assumed that subjective individuality was a natural human essence wanting only the proper climate to develop, like a plant. Before the Italian Renaissance, they believed, this quality lay dormant, a seed awaiting the germination ultimately precipitated by the advent of new “political circumstances,” characterized in Burckhardt’s famous notion of the state as a “work of art.”¹¹ Others, such as Karl Marx, and later the social theorist Max Weber, prioritized social and economic climates over political ones. Marx described the period roughly between 1500 and 1700 as witnessing a revolution from feudalism to capitalism in Europe, which entailed a change in the status of the person in society, from being subject to the collective totality to being individually alienated from it. Among the structural circumstances emerging to cause the dilation of personal individuality at this time were: the invention of private property and the destruction of group ownership; the elimination of the household as the basic unit of production and consumption; the growth of a money economy; the rise of a class of independent wage-laborers; the growing dominance of the profit motive and the psychological drive toward endless accumulation; the rise of modern industrial production; the growth of large urban centers; the suppression of magic and the “irrational;” and the undermining of small, close-knit communities.¹² Perhaps inspired by Weber’s treatment of Protestantism as a major factor in the transition to capitalism, the anthropologist Louis Dumont locates the origins of individualism in the laws and rituals of the Western classical and Judeo-Christian heritage. According to Dumont, the transformation of the person from a universal being into the individual was largely complete with the institution of Calvin’s theocracy in the sixteenth century. Dumont describes the subjection of human will to providence dictated by Calvin as a “necessary condition for legitimating the decisive shift” to the individual, a transformation which was fully complete by the end of the eighteenth century, with the triumph of the concept of human “rights” over natural law.¹³ Still others emphasize the liberation of social space from communal forms of sociability for its contribution to “the triumph of individualism in daily life” in Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.¹⁴ And last, in a view which attempts to see all of the structural developments above as interdependent features of a single totalizing system, the historian and social theorist Norbert Elias identified what he called the “process of civilization” as a process of individualization, in which the rise of centralized and urbanized state societies caused the separation and encapsulation of persons in all of their relations to each other, giving rise to the concept of the human subject as the individual.¹⁵

Each of these views, the semiotic critique and the positivist superstructural account, is by now well known to us. Despite their different assumptions about the nature of subjectivity, both approaches have rendered the notion of the cultural and historical contingency of the individual and individualism a commonplace, at least as a principle of humanistic and social-scientific research, and have thereby laid the foundation upon which my own study attempts to build. Taking the contingency of the individual for granted, then, I shall explore the way some persons reproduce the material conditions of individuality as subjects in their modes of discursive self-identification.

In what follows, I take as my premise that some version of subjectivity or consciousness of self is an indispensable feature of human existential reality, and that, whatever particular form it takes, self-consciousness is therefore a transcultural and transhistorical phenomenon, no matter how much impersonal factors of individuation actually differ in time and space. Thus I assume that in their capacity as persons all humans bear a particular concept of self or, more precisely, a “self-identity.” A personal self-identity is an effect of human activity in the landscape of society and culture. It is a tool for negotiation within the web of the world; an imaginary script conceived by each person to underwrite the dramatic interpersonal performances of self described by the sociologist Erving Goffman as an essential feature of everyday life.¹⁶ Although in his formulation Goffman referred to relations in modern Western society, his concept of identity performance applies to human existential reality in general.¹⁷ In its particularity each personal script, like each personal performance, depends heavily upon actual and imagined audience response, and so will be a unique product of the public situation of its bearer. The qualities of individual scripts may therefore vary extensively. However, it is possible also to speak of generic categories or epistemes of self-identity appropriate to epochal social and cultural contexts, in which certain basic types of scripts and interpersonal performances make sense.¹⁸ Epistemes of self-identity will therefore vary in time and place: “the subject” or individual addressed by Nietzsche and Burckhardt is but one generic type of self-identity, arising in the modern West; there are other epistemic possibilities beyond it.¹⁹

I am interested specifically in the way self-identities take shape in the modern West as objects of representation in “autobiography.” My concept of autobiography is not restricted to the conventional parameters of literary genres. Instead, I take it as a practice, which we might imagine as a cultural institution or, in the cultural theorist Pierre Bourdieu’s term, a “field” of significance, in which various discursive traditions prevail over time.²⁰ In the most liberal view, which leaves the graphe as open as the autos, and bios, “autobiography” designates a more generalized practice of self-representation which includes not only conventional “literary” texts, but other – possibly non-verbal as well as non-writerly – texts as well, such as films, photographs, collections of ephemera, wardrobes, gardens, and so forth. In this perspective there are as many potential forms of autobiography as there are conceivable self-identities. However, out of this universe of possibilities, my study is limited to instances of autobiography in written discourse, especially discourse written as narrative prose.

I emphasize the range of possible autobiographical traditions only to suggest the peculiarity of the narrative prose autobiography so familiar to modern readers. As Georges Gusdorf has noted in his seminal essay, “Conditions and Limits of Autobiography,” the tradition of first-person, self-reflexive, written narrative, sometimes called “classic” or “modern’ autobiography by scholars, is itself a historically contingent phenomenon.²¹ Though a handful of unusually precocious examples appeared in the distant history of the West – St Augustine’s Confessions comes immediately to mind, but there were others even before it – narrative prose autobiography began, at least at the popular level, quite recently, with the advent of the diary and related forms of recording first-person discourse in writing during the seventeenth century, culminating in the “autobiography proper,” the retrospective, totalized narrative of personal experience, sometime between the mid-eighteenth and the mid-nineteenth centuries.²² Precisely where and when modern autobiography emerged is a matter of considerable debate. The term “autobiography” and its synonym “self-biography” appeared in the late eighteenth century in a handful of isolated instances in England and Germany.²³ We should not attach too much significance to these neologisms, however; descriptive terminology usually lags behind practice. But the identification of the first instance of modern autobiographical practice is no simple task either. The usual suspects in the line-up of inaugural practitioners include, among others, St Augustine, St Teresa, Cellini, Cardano, Gibbon, Vico, and Rousseau. On the one hand, identifying the first autobiographer is a merely pedantic activity, a partisan exercise in canon formation which amounts to an ultimately insoluble problem. On the other, though, it is useful, not to say crucial, for an understanding of the present cultural order, to attempt to account for modern autobiography’s origins, however problematic making such a record might be. I believe, and I hope my study demonstrates, that our interests in doing so will be better served if we cease to focus on exceptional examples of technical brillianc...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• A Note on Texts and Conventions
• Prologue: Advertisements for Myself
• Part I: The First English Individualist
• Part II: Early Ancestors: The Sacred
• Part III: Immediate Precursors: The Profane
• Epilogue: “The Author … Our Hero”
• Notes
• References
• Index