new and different conceptions of self—especially given that it is the form that claims to be most interested in the self—then it inevitably will be discarded and replaced with modes of writing that can.
Perhaps more importantly, though, given the particular sociopolitical context within which we now work (with all of its attendant investments in argument), personal essay scholars’ rejection of a more fluid, complex, “postmodern” notion of self deprives the genre of its greatest (or at least most timely) potential: to enable the productive exchange and exploration of ideas and beliefs that have constituted a momentarily fixed self. That productive exchange and exploration can disrupt the fixed self, remake it, or at least remind it that it does not have to sit, squarely, in its socially-sanctioned sociopolitical space.
I will show that there is much that at least one thought historian’s “poststructuralist” theory provides in the way of a compelling and progressive study of subjectivity in essays. This is not to say that the other versions of subjectivity should be tossed out entirely. Rather, my goal (like Foucault’s) is “to make visible a bygone way of approaching the self and others which might suggest possibilities for the present” (Rabinow xxvii), a way which is described in Foucault’s work on the writers of Antiquity and their emphasis on the care of the self.
To make visible this other way of approaching subjectivity, in the third chapter, I turn to Foucault’s work on self writing and to Montaigne’s Essais in which I find a version of subjectivity that does not essentialize the subject. Instead, the subject is that which is constituted in the practices of the care of the self, including practices such as the truth test. Through these practices, the writer disciplines a self by enacting a relationship of oneself to oneself: the writer, the self-on-the-page, and the various practices of writing and reading all work in a complex of relations in which each subject is constituted in relation to the others. Via this conceptualization of the subject, I discover a mode of engagement that enables productive debate, a mode of engagement that isn’t about argument but is about exploring ideas, a mode of engagement in which writers take seriously the texts of others, of themselves, and are effected by their engagement with them.
To further explore what this different mode of engagement might look like, the fourth chapter takes one kind of meditative practice in self writing and examines it much more closely. Specifically, I argue that imitation is one kind of meditative practice in which the writer must attend closely to the texts of others, test the truths available in those texts, and ultimately be re-constituted in that negotiation. As many rhetoric and composition scholars have pointed out (e.g., Connors and Corbett), imitation may work in a variety of ways: paraphrase, translation, straight copying, etc. In this chapter, I focus on how the practices of imitation can be transformed and made productive according to the ethic of the care of the self: how they encourage attentiveness, make genuine response possible, enable change or transformation, etc. To do so, I examine the ways in which Seneca, Foucault, and Nietzsche make use of the same metaphor (the beehive), referencing each other’s use of the metaphor explicitly, but then constituting the metaphor differently within their own work and, thus, transforming the metaphor, their work, and the self-page relation. One of the most exciting implications of this examination of imitation as a practice in the care of the self is that, despite concerns about assimilation and homogeneity in imitation, the possibilities for the constituting of the subject and for self-transformation seem limited only by the variety and complexities of the truths and contexts that are available to writers for imitation.
That said, I anticipate that essay teachers might still be tempted to slip back into a belief about writers being capable of transcending the practices of the care of the self, of transcending the texts writers imitate and/or produce, of transcending even one’s own constituting. So, for the final chapter, I will share course assignments, student writings, and reflections for a course in self writing. After all, this belief in transcendence is pervasive. For many of us, it was part of our training. (“Teach students to see how they are made by societal norms, and they can refuse that making.”) In particular, I will provide writing assignments and readings which can help students negotiate in and among (often contentious) discourses. If students come to see this negotiation as one that occurs among discourses (instead of among distinct and essentialized individuals/communities), then that negotiation—with all of its attendant practices (e.g., analysis and revision)—will not be simply another instance of foundationalism. Rather, negotiation among discourses necessitates awareness that knowledge itself is constituted in those discourses, not prior to them, and that the subject that emerges in response to said negotiation is not some unique combination of the essential characteristics of particular cultures or of the writer’s mind or soul, but is, itself, constituted in those discourses and by that negotiation.
My hope is that essay teachers and scholars, as well as writing curriculum administrators, will begin to see the value, again, of the personal essay and that they will remember its rigorousness, when they see the genre’s potential as it is enabled through the practices of the care of the self. I hope that essayists and essay scholars and teachers will find themselves less afraid, if they were to begin with, of “theory” and that they will feel encouraged to further explore potential theories of the essay so that it can take its proper place in the academy as a rigorous and explorative form. Most importantly, I hope that essayists (student and professional) will hear my call to use the essay as a space for the cultivation of a very different kind of subject, one that is capable of producing, living in, and negotiating connections—across our disciplines, as well as across our communities and selves. We advocates of connection, we practitioners of it, will have to find ways of coming together, of working together, and the essay is one remarkable way of doing so.
Notes
1. In this emphasis on a different mode of engagement, we too, as academics, would be contributing to change (in the academy, in the world, in our students, in ourselves). Perhaps, then, we wouldn’t be complacent in what Patricia Bizzell calls “the anti-intellectualism of the American academic.” She explains this anti-intellectualism as “[the American academic’s] reluctance to emerge from our respective disciplines, to act as intellectuals in the larger community of the whole university and the whole society” (“Foundationalism and Anti-foundationalism” 220).
2. Of course, there are theories of the essay. In fact, I’ll refer to many of the works that theorize the essay in Chapter 1; however, my point is that there is no particular theory of the essay that essay scholars acknowledge as grounding the discourse.
3. Notably, the loudest complaint by essay scholars against “poststructuralism” is specifically directed at Derrida’s critique of the logocentric conception of presence—the assumption that words make present the thing to which they refer (for example, the words of an essay make present the essayist). Unfortunately, as a result, the baby has been tossed out with the bathwater, as the saying goes. In other words, the assumption seems to be that if Derrida’s “poststructuralist” theory defies the work that essays are supposed to do—e.g., to work within “the realm of ‘human evidence’” (Anderson 301)—then essay scholars shouldn’t take up poststructuralist theory at all in order to study essays and essay writing.
To offer another example of essay scholars’ resistance to poststructuralist theory, I point to Graham Good’s study of the essay, Observing the Self: Rediscovering the Essay. In it, he states:
Montaigne and Bacon would also undoubtedly have rejected Derrida’s textualism as scholastic, as privileging the order of words over the order of things. It was exactly against that mentality that the essay originally reacted. But academia, with its concern to organize discourse into disciplines, will always tend to give priority to ‘theory,’ to the structures of learning; the unstructured, or rather, personally and provisionally structured, world of the essay is all the more necessary as a counterweight. (182)
This is an explicit and typical example of the leap that is often made in essay scholarship, a leap from a resistance to Derrida’s work to a refusal of “theory” all together.
