Eakin’s passage begins with a Walt Whitman quote which is as dramatic as the content of his argument about the self.
Eakin offers conjecture coupled with ideas from noted neurobiological thinkers. The content is difficult to fully grasp as much of this chapter relies on work that we have to take his word for, as readers we would need to read the complete text of quoted works or already have a semblance of those works to fully be aware of this complex argument. For me “I” is a suggestion and a spotlight on the actual self making the person the actual focal point. I can be egotistical braggartism which lends to stories full of excitement or I can have more heartfelt emotional content melancholy and dark as in his illustration using Mary Karr’s “The Liars Club: A Memoir”. As for tolerating what is read in an autobiography, he suggest we are all gullible when reading one as autobiographers fabricate much of the content. We are told people “mis-speak”, people are judged to be in a traumatic state when recounting past events incorrectly.
If self happens before birth as suggested genetics and DNA shape our self long before we are born, offering the only true real self prior to contamination of social human influences. Damasio’s theory if founded would serve well as a defense to a serious crime where a disease such as PTSD or any other temporary emotional disorder is said to be the cause for the crime. We can see Damasio’s consciousness theory at play in today’s Reality TV programming and Social Media where individuals augment their persona’s to conspire to a more interesting self. Recently TV in operating rooms and surrounding patients in hospitals has been problematic where families have not been informed and therefore not agreed to the situation, but have complained that the care received by their loved ones has been reduced and undermined because the physician has been more interested in self promotion due to the access TV crews have been allowed.
http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2015/01/12/debate-over-cameras-crew-films-boston/we50wuQ6bUPAU6sFcXA17H/story.html
Links
- Alva Noë: "Why Is Consciousness So Baffling?"
- Antonio Damasio: "The Quest to Understand Consciousness"
- Big Think: "Antonio Damasio & Siri Hustvedt"
- Big Think: "Daniel Dennett"
- californica: portrait of the artist as an organism (Jason Tougaw's blog)
- Daniel Dennett: "Cute, Sexy, Sweet, Funny"
- Emily Singer: "The Measured Life"
- Extraordinary People: The Boy Who Could See Without Eyes
- Gail Hornstein's Bibliography of "First Person Narratives of Madness in English"
- Gail Horstein, "The Hearing Voices Network"
- Gary Wolf on "The Quantified Self"
- Hearing the Voice Project
- Interview with Alva Noë (Salon)
- Jesse Prinz: "Waiting for the Self"
- Jill Bolte Taylor: "My Stroke of Insight"
- Koestenbaum on Viegener
- Maud Casey
- Rufus May: "Living Mindfully with Voices"
- Siri Hustvedt
- Tarnation Trailer
- The Quantified Self
- V.S. Ramachandran: "3 Clues to Understanding Your Brain"
- We Live in Public Trailer
Categories
Eakin’s use of Whitman is interesting rhetorically. He uses Whitman’s outlandish claims to establish motive. He’s going to show that new research in both neuroscience and literary studies suggests that a version of Whitman’s big claim–you can become a poem–may be true in a way that Whitman probably couldn’t have anticipated.
A few random thoughts re: your reading response, speaking toward “narrative identity systems”:
Hustvedt mentioned in the start of her book how her father had discussed points with her from his deathbed in the weeks leading up to his passing, which she used in her eulogy for him, saying that he didn’t explicitly ask her to use them, but they were implied as such (relaying ways in which he’d like to be remembered or thought of)… this thought in relation to what you and Eakin are discussing about self-editing and/or presenting an edited self–and to Jeffrey’s anecdote from the news about Brian Williams (who was probably just fibbing, until he was called out? then realized the stretch didn’t actually fit other people’s accounts, but also as someone who’s “I” was probably bragging in a sense, as it may have been the closest he’s been to combat/action, in any case, etc.)–one person’s truth is another’s half truth, and vice versa, or perhaps one’s line between black and white is another’s shaded gray area, in an endless loop of the individual’s upbringing, experience, and accountabilities–what they get away with versus what they are held accountable for)… these are all examples of parts of the process that Eakin describes as “our lifelong participation in a narrative identity system”.
Reading your points about reality TV actors “choosing” an act that most fits an overarching idea of what they want to be seen as–retrofitting themselves to align with a way they’d like an audience to categorize them and admire or get riled up by them, so to speak–makes me think about how people “act” (meaning, put on an act) and create or “make” overall, and how these things usually spring from some type of self-editing. (Also, the saying, “fake it ’til you make it” comes to mind, which is supposed to inspire someone to get into the mindset of where they’d like their mind to be, before it’s actually there.) Whether it’s a little or a lot, there is editing at some point, no matter if it’s conscious or unconscious. The conscious part might be when we make an image or a painting or a song, as artists do, by conjuring things onto or toward a certain path, discarding parts of things that don’t serve the whole or slightly intended outcome we might have for a piece toward a body of work or spot in that body. The unconscious part would be someone creating a piece and accepting the outcome as in line with what ought to be… this happens when people use or don’t use drugs to free their inhibitions or release themselves from restraints (like the manic writer Hustvedt mentions in The Shaking Woman), respectively.
I’m thinking also of when someone has another person take photos of them, and they might prefer one photo over another and say: “This photo is more ‘me,’ I like it… that other photo doesn’t really look like ‘me,’ I don’t like it.” What is it about a photo that is more representative of someone in their eyes, than another? To make things more complicated, what about when the person who has been photographed is surrounded by people who might know them in varying degrees? When one person agrees, “Yes, that looks like you, you’re right! It’s ‘you’ exactly” or two others say, “that other photo is actually better… it’s definitely more ‘you.'” Who do you believe, and why? Aren’t all of their opinions prejudiced by what their idea of “you” is at any given moment and by way of any collation of events that make up their experience of who you are? As Eakin describes, Damasio’s account of self posits “our sense of identity is itself generated AS and IN a narrative dimension of consciousness”.