We’ve reached a point in G.W.F. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit where the discussion of “consciousness” turns into talk of “self-consciousness”; where we began with a notion of “self-certainty,” the self seeming to be all we can be certain of, since the world of objects around us is uncertain and might be pure illusion, but where even this certainty of self is shown to be unfounded; where all we’re left with then is a notion of pure life, which could be the life of many selves, or none at all, and the only certain thing is that there exists this life and its “desire,” and even this can be said less to “exist” and more to “become,” to endlessly become since desire is transformed every time it achieves its goal, life adapting ceaselessly as the objects of desire are consumed, and themselves transformed, just as desire itself is transformed.
Hegel will resolve this ceaseless and chaotic movement of life and desire into the neat concept of “recognition,” where desiring selves each recognise the desire of the other, and acknowledgement of desire becomes secondary to or dependent upon the recognition of desire in another. But before we look at this next step in Hegel, let’s look a little bit more at life and desire and see where else these concepts might want to lead us.
A possible alternative to the Hegelian path is laid out by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in their A Thousand Plateaus, which begins by bringing into question the very notion of self and suggesting that what’s most important of all is not so much that we stop saying “self” and “I” and “subject,” but that we realise that it’s not important whether we use these terms or not, as long as we recognise that they are secondary to a more fundamental notion of the multiplicity of and differences within things, and that any notion of “self” is always an assemblage built up temporarily out of the various movements and tendencies present in whatever situation happens to be before us.
How you talk about “self” isn’t something purely academic, or a fun little game philosophers play to amuse themselves. Out of Hegel’s concept of self he built an edifice that seemed to justify the Western world he lived in as it already was – its rationalism, Christianity, imperialism – as well as to offer ways to confront that world on its own terms – which is the way Karl Marx made good use of Hegel. But what if it’s this very point in the Phenomenology that hints at an entirely different way of thinking, that rejects this edifice not on its own terms but in a more external and even hostile way, refusing even Hegel’s modest premises? At the time Hegel was writing perhaps it would have seemed impossible not to hurry back to a comfortable notion of “self,” but today? Still we surely want to talk like Hegel – as Deleuze and Guattari remind us, it’s “nice” to talk in familiar ways about things everyone pretends are settled and easy. But perhaps we need to take a more circuitous route back to the self in order to deepen our appreciation of the concept, and perhaps transform it altogether.
One way that it’s nice to talk about “selves” is when considering a piece of writing, for example a book. A book has an author, and that person will decide what goes in the book, and that’s where the matter of the book comes from. But anyone who has thought about what a book is will know that that’s not how it works. Deleuze and Guattari remind us that, in fact, a book is nothing but a multiplicity of “matters” which all intersect, and its out of these connections that the concept of the “author” of the book emerges. Who was the author at the time the book was written, beyond the name on the cover? Was the author of Ulysses the same as the author of Finnegans Wake? In one sense obviously yes, in another sense certainly not.
But it’s not just a matter of whether the James Joyce of 1922 is the same as the James Joyce of 1939. A book is not simply written at the point its designated author puts pen to paper. “There is no difference between what a book talks about and how it is made,” write Deleuze and Guattari. And what you’ll notice is that what a book talks about changes over time, continually, from the date of its first publication for as long as people read it. In 1922 Joyce published a book about the Dublin of his time, but as long as people read it and find it resonates with them then that book turns out to transcend its time, and to talk about much more than its author directly intended. Ulysses has been described as an “open book” that “offers redemptive glimpses of a future world.” This is because it deals with human interactions, human hopes, the notion of humanity itself in such depth that a reader can gain infinite insight from it, beyond finding out what life was like in Dublin in the early 20th century. But even where a book falls short of such grand hopes of infinite redemption, still it’s clear that a good book always talks about the future: How else could it be enjoyed after its publication date, if it were not able to talk about things after this date? About the things done by and done to human souls, the things of human life deep, important, and familiar to its readers? In short, a book always does far more than the one we call its “author” intended; any creative process is full of surprises and an artist can never tell in advance how a work will turn out.
And if what a book talks about changes over time, always finding new things to talk about as the world changes, then a book is something being continually made and never finished. A book then is like life, a process that continually changes and never ends. And the author is to a book what the “self” is to a life: something fixed for the moment, a manner of speaking for talking about a far more complex intersecting of matters. In the following weeks we’ll look at how matters intersect to create a notion of “life” that underlies and goes beyond any notion “self.”
(I’ve been reading Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, translated by Brian Massumi, and Declan Kiberd’s introduction to the 1992 Penguin edition of Ulysses.)