Subjects, Identities, Bodies and Selves

Humans as agents and as subjectsThe Embodied selves of those Humanshumans as agents and subjects in general and

the depictions of the human body and the selves of those bodies in particular

Scott Russell Sanders, Terrarium Ursula K. Le Guin's The Telling Wendell Berry A Place on Earth

Amy Thompson, The Color of DistanceC. K. Friedman, This Alien ShoreLinda Hogan, Solar Storms Brenda Peterson, Animal Heart Joan Slonzcewski, Brain Plague Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake

More Complex Representations

They distinguish between heroes' bodies,

the selves identified with those bodies and the subject positions and identities that develop for those embodied selves in the course of

their novels.

Subjectsstructured as subject of rather than as subject to.

As Louis Althusser notes, "That an individual is always-already a subject even before he is born, is nevertheless, the plain reality."

This Althusserian determination constitutes us as the subordinated subject.

. Spiders, bats, and snakes

Defining Ourselves

as SubjectsJudith Butler contends that we define ourselves as subjects from the point at which we can narrate events, which would require that we first enter into society through admission to a language community.

Not Just Language, ThoughAny form of semiotic exchange should qualifySuch as those we use not only with other humans

but also with companion species

Subject should not be synonymous with Master or Author or even intentionality

Nonvolitional utterances also cry out for recognition

Timo Maran

Estonian semiotician Timo Maran encourages us to believe that "We can understand that in every sensation, cognition or contemplation of nature, the subject (...) and the object (...) become indissolubly intertwined."

Material Intersubjectivity

Personal human construction is always and invariably proceeding by means of an intersubjectivity that is not only ideational and linguistic, but also corporeal and

ecological. Everywhere the subject is more than human and the human is more than the subject of his or her own narrative, and always responsive not only

to a human addressee but also to numerous others and anothers that require or request mutual recognition

and interaction.

IdentitiesIn order to claim the status of a subject or to be treated as such, an individual has to be able to generate or demonstrate an identity.

B. Traven famously represents this dilemma in his 1920s novel The Death Ship.

Identity not purely intrinsicRichard Ryan and Edward Deci have to admit that

"nearly every adult identity carries with it certain roles, responsibilities, or tasks that are not, in themselves, intrinsically motivated.“

Identity FormationIdentity formation, then, becomes a matter of the degree to which a person volitionally self-endorses the assumption of an identity that he or she may not have consciously or freely selected but to which he or she was subjected by the needs or pressures of circumstance, family, society, and political climate.

Butler: No Story of its Own

“The ‘I’ has not story of its own that is not also the story of a relation—or set of relations—to a set of norms.”

“The divergence is always between the uniersal and the particular, and its becomes the conditions for moral questioning.”

I-in-the-WorldI want to consider the "I" of identity not in terms of an autonomous I, or a unique I, or even an individually constructed one, so much as an I-in-the-world, in specific environments, in specific relationships, in location, in motion, in time. And this I-in-the-world is taking on a new complexity through the technology of social networking.

Prokaryotes and Eukaryotes Planetary life forms are divided into two basic categories:

eukaryotes and prokaryotes. Prokaryotes are limited to bacteria and archaea. All the rest: plants, animal, and fungi, are eukaryotes.

X Y X X X Y X X X Y XXY XYY

Identity as a Symbiote? Joan Slonzcewski’s bioethical science fiction novels, Brain Plague

and The Children's Star Karen Traviss’s militant environmental justice Wess'har Wars series.

Oneself as AnotherThe eminent philosopher Paul Ricoeur in Oneself

as Another discusses the concepts of both practice and character. Of the latter, he remarks that "Character . . . is the self under the appearances of sameness."

Non-identical IdentitiesSituated and Subject to Pressures and Engagements

We have non-identical identities as perceived by others whose interactions with us then influence the way in which we practice situational identities.

The concept of Character an attempt to freeze a moment of Personal Formation

The self-conception of character, or a core identity, is an aesthetic and philosophical maneuver to freeze or capture a particular moment, or repeated moments, of personal formation (or possibly authoritatively imputed personal characteristics) in opposition to the natural tendency to move through situated identities subject to environmental and circumstantial pressures and engagements.

Narrative and Identity Formation

Ricoeur observes that "The narrative constructs the identity of the character. . . . It is the identity of the story that makes the identity of the character.“

The core identity, then, would have to be considered an amalgamation of plots organized into a narrative that thematically unifies a variety of actions displayed by our situational identities in diverse environmental circumstances.

Co-dentity and Eco-dentity

Identity might be better termed co-dentity, adding to the conception of identity the material world in which all of the social formations operate with, through, and on a person, and begin to include the category of the body, both the immediate, personal one, and the environmental one. Then even eco-dentity might serve us better than the ego oriented one that remains so prevalent.

BodiesCertainly, few people would disagree with the argument today that the body has become politically, philosophically, and environmentally contested terrain, resulting especially from the women's movement for reproductive rights, but also from the movement for environmental justice, and, most recently, biotechnological controversies.

Identity is frequently perceived as a sameness of character that avoids alteration due to the historical realities of our bodies' changes

Identity and the psychological traumas that identity formation engender have often been depicted as resulting from a struggle against the material conditions of our bodies' trajectory of growth, development, and decay,

instead of accepting a processional condition of variational interbeing.

Butler on LaPlanche"The infant must be open to the environment to adapt to its terms and secure the satisfaction of its most basic needs"

human infants are born precisely on time in terms of the requirements of genetic expression and the neurological developments that will form an individual human brain

Environmental Novels by Women Barbara Kingsolver Prodigal Summer Kimberly Kafka True North Susan Lang Small Rocks Rising Molly Gloss The Jump-off Creek Amy Thompson Storyteller

Tzvetan Todorov in Life in Common turns to Alfred Adler for the claim that "the first act of a new-born child . . . is co-operation"

"The human mind is thus a 'hybrid' product of biology and culture" that "cannot come into existence on its own. It is wedded to a collective process, and these very sources of its experiences are filtered through culture"

We continue to grow neurons throughout life and we continuously rewire the brain, extending its intraconnectivity through trillions of synapses 10 billion neurons 10,000 synapses each 10 trillion synapses

Role of Genetics and Epigenesis

"Evolutionary change is the result of interactions in which outcomes are codetermined, or co-constructed, by populations and environments with their own, often intricately interrelated, histories and characteristics"

Bodies as Change and Motion

Identifying a variety of interactants that give rise to a living organism within variable environments leads us to see both the benefits and the need for breaking with the desire to see bodies as fundamentally static, determined objects, moving through fixed stages, which has been used to justify seeing identities as fixed characters, and subjects as unitary and self-defined.

The body, then exists, not only as a process, but also as an ever changing part of larger processes that occur both within and without the membrane of our skin.

Selves Todorov:"The self is the product of others that it, in its turn,

produces" The self is construed as a dialogic dyad intraforming and

interforming, simultaneously agent and patient. Merlin Donald: "The brain takes on its self-identity in culture and

is deeply affected in its actions by culturally formulated notions of selfhood“

We do not by ourselves formulate our selves, nor do we do so without a strong contribution from our bodily reality both in terms of our attitudes toward this body and in terms of the attitudes of others.

The self, for Todorov, "is the result of our perceptions: that of ourselves, of our body, and of our actions, but especially the perception we have of the image others have of us" (Todorov 2001: 124).

Anchors A WeighWe need a concept of self as one anchoring point for

selection and evaluation of sensory and cognitive impressions,

a second anchoring point of a perception of the material world, including our own bodies,

a third anchoring point the durational evaluative component of memory, with all three combining to decide what is important, what needs to be known, what has to be understood, what constitutes part of our environment, and what entities constitute us as part of their environments.

Our selves are not ours by themselves

Selves cannot be construed as stable, unchanging or even unique aspects of being human, nor can a person be said to have only one or always at least one.

Rather, they exist as another process of interaction.

We cannot simply will our selves to be what we want to believe them to be, nor autonomously construct our selves anymore than we can autonomously maintain the lives of our bodies.

Conclusionto work from the outside in toward a self-understanding of a person-

in-place as a SIBS, i.e., as a subject-identified-bodily-selves

rather than an autonomous individual

Ecofeminist NovelistsStarhawk, The Fifth Sacred ThingMarge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of TimePat Murphy, The City Not Long AfterUrsula K. Le Guin, Always Coming Home

SIBS as Participants and as CoinhabitantsIf we can construct an image of persons and characters as sibs, subject-identified-bodily-selves, then maybe literature can help us to understand how to contribute to possible forms of planetary evolution that will continue to be able to include the human as participant.

Thank You