The Language of Inquiry

The Person and Description

The Person and Description In the fall of 1988, Carla Harryman undertook to curate three evenings of discussion on “The Poetics of Everyday Life.” They took place in Berkeley at Small Press Distribution, and most of the papers that were given were subsequently published in Poetics Journal 9: “The Person” (1991). The discussion in which I was invited to participate was addressed to the person, seemingly a figure of everyday life and even, one might say, a figure that dominates it. It is at the level of the everyday that one can most easily speak of “my life.” It is at this level that one speaks most uneasily of it, as well. The individual is a figure that steadfastly, in Western culture, appears at the apex of hierarchical structures; it stakes its claims on them and establishes itself as their dominating figure. At the same time, the notion of “identity ”—the identity of the individual—is itself party to a hierarchical structure , one in which “identity” governs the question of who an individual might be. And yet, even as identity is a governing factor, it is a limiting factor too. And it is itself subject to hierarchy, in that different identities may get assigned different roles, even different values. These, being somewhat context199 dependent, may thus be somewhat fluid, but they are never completely so, and they are seldom so fluid as to allow a person to elude identity altogether. This was a problem that vexed Gertrude Stein, and increasingly so toward the end of her life (she was in her early sixties when she wrote The Geographical History of America, the work in which she most intensely investigates the problem of identity and its relation to human nature). Description, with its tendency to evaluate even as it pretends to objectify , is deeply implicated in the establishment of hierarchies—including those that structure and restrict identity. Indeed, to the extent that a description may also become a definition, it lays down strictures that can be nearly impossible to disrupt. But description is prevalent in writing, and not only in narrative modes of writing, and when writing my paper for Carla Harryman’s symposium I saw it as pivotal to the question of personhood and hence to living the everyday life. I hoped that by insisting on its contingent relation to both “art and reality, or intentionality and circumstance”— that is, by positioning description in and as the intermediary zone between them—I could open a space through which a person might step. In or out. The potential performative power of this entrance or exit was no doubt influenced by my reading of (and excitement over) Carla Harryman’s own work—just as my thinking on the question of hierarchical structures was certainly informed by her many and profound critiques of (and challenges to) power structures of all kinds. 1 A person, alone or in groups of persons, has accompanied art throughout its history; it is assumed that a work of art is, at the very least, a manifestation of his or her presence. But whose? It would seem initially that if one wanted to answer questions 200 / The Language of Inquiry concerning the who and what of a particular person, one would begin with a concept of personhood. But personhood isn’t generalizable or definitive in quite the way peachhood or goldhood or even childhood might be, since the personhood of each person is felt to be individualizing, different, unique. Personhood comes to one through living a life. To explain what it is, or what it is “like,” to be a person requires a long account. The uniqueness of the person is very different from his or her essential selfhood. Our individuality, in fact, is at odds with the concept of some core reality at the heart of our sense of being. The latter has tended to produce a banal description of the work of art as an expression uttered in the artist’s “own voice,” issuing from an inner, fundamental, sincere, essential, irreducible, consistent self, an undemonstrable but sensible entity on which each of us is somehow dependent, living off its truths, its heat, its energy. But is it, the self, a person? And is art—including literary art—the work of a self? And can this be, for example, a Russian question? The English word self has no real Russian equivalent, and thus the...