Title: Selfhood, Autobiography, and Interdisciplinary Inquiry: A Reply to George Butte
Abstract: Selfhood, Autobiography, and Interdisciplinary Inquiry:A Reply to George Butte Paul John Eakin (bio) In my essay "What Are We Reading When We Read Autobiography?" I investigate narrative identity, the idea that what we are could be said to be a story of some kind. Attracted by neurologist Antonio Damasio's belief that both self and narrative are deeply rooted in our lives in and as bodies, I explore the possibilities of a neurobiological approach to self-representation in autobiography. Integral to consciousness is reflexive awareness, the sense we have that we not only participate in but witness our experience. As Walt Whitman puts it in "Song of Myself," we are "both in and out of the game." We embody this doubleness of our first-person perspective in the I-narrators who tell the stories of our I-character selves. Yet neurologically speaking, the free-standing observer/teller figure that is so central a feature of both autobiographical discourse and the life it describes cannot be extrapolated from the general matrix of consciousness. There is no site-specific location for self in the brain, no phrenological bump, no homunculus to house the reality of our phenomenological experience of selfhood. To express this puzzle, the disjunction between the testimony of experience and the reality of its neurological underpinnings, Damasio likens the play of consciousness to a "movie-in-the-brain." While consciousness inevitably generates "the appearance of an owner and observer for the movie" unfolding in our heads, Damasio stresses that the owner-observer figure is located "within the movie" it seems to witness and not outside it (11). Damasio's movie metaphor suggests that the distinctions we draw [End Page 307] between subject and object to structure our experience simplify an extraordinarily complex and paradoxical reality. I, in turn, attempt to capture this puzzle of reflexive consciousness by speaking of the I-narrator of autobiographical discourse as a "teller-effect." Here's where George Butte enters the picture. He raises two issues about my essay: the first concerns the nature of selfhood, specifically its capacity for agency, and the second concerns interdisciplinary inquiry and how it should be conducted. First, the teller-effect and agency. Butte claims that Damasio and Eakin have deprived self of its capacity for action. This is clearly not the case. To set the record straight, let me review briefly what Damasio has to say about self and agency. Damasio writes that "the sense of self" is "the critical component of any notion of consciousness" (89), and he traces its "deep roots" (22) to the most basic level of our physiology. Underlying the reflexive awareness that he characterizes as "the movie-in-the-brain," Damasio posits a level of "core consciousness," which preexists language, conventional memory, and autobiographical identity. A reader concerned with self and agency would pay special attention to Damasio's account of core consciousness, which he defines as "the knowledge that materializes when you confront an object, construct a neural pattern for it, and discover automatically that the now-salient image of the object is formed in your perspective, belongs to you, and that you can even act on it" (126). In my essay I comment as follows: "Individual first-person perspective, ownership, agency—these primary attributes of core consciousness are also key features of the literary avatar of self, the 'I' of autobiographical discourse" (127). So why would Butte attribute a loss of agency to the model of selfhood proposed by Damasio and Eakin? Butte's error seems to be the result of a confusion of levels of analysis; how could a "teller-effect" be endowed with agency, he seems to ask. Whereas, neurologically speaking, the structures that support selfhood are distributed, from a phenomenological perspective, the experience of selfhood is indeed centered, and certainly the locus of conscious intentions; a neurological "effect" is nonetheless and simultaneously a profound experiential reality. The intensity of Butte's "resistance" to Damasio's—and Eakin's—position on self and agency is worth remarking. The denial of agency that he attributes to Eakin and Damasio quickly becomes a denial of selfhood altogether. Butte associates Eakin and Damasio with loss, with shadows, with absence, with poststructuralism...
Publication Year: 2005
Publication Date: 2005-10-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 11
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